Plum & Jaggers (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Susan Richards Shreve

  He’d tell her about the fire, how worried he was for Julia.

  “It was stupid for me to allow that article to be done,” he’d say. “I’ve put my family at risk.”

  And she would understand what he meant, know its connection to Orvieto.

  “This is my latest script.” Sam would shrug, taking his script out of his inside pocket. “It isn’t at all funny.”

  Rebecca would shake her head, her face awash in sympathy.

  “You’re sure?” she’d ask.

  “I am.”

  “What is it, then, if not funny?” she would ask.

  Sam would toss the script into the wastebasket beside her desk.

  “I think it’s cruel.”

  “I’m sure it’s not, Sam,” she’d say.

  And then she’d get up from her chair, close the door, flip the small lock, kissing him full on the lips.

  “Comedy is mysterious, and I have the feeling I’ve lost hold of it,” he’d say. “I’m turning mean.”

  But she had put her hand over his lips to silence him, reaching down, unbuckling his belt.

  When the receptionist came back, Sam was already in his coat and scarf.

  “Ms. Frankel will be free to see you in about fifteen minutes, if you care to wait,” she said.

  “Never mind,” Sam said. “I’m late for another appointment. Give her my best,” and he punched the Down button on the elevator.

  The next showing of The Sweet Hereafter was at 5:15, and Sam sat in a café half a block down Broadway from the cinema and reread the script. He liked working in cafés, not bars, coffeehouses where conversations had the quality of intimacy, a din of voices whose definition was just beyond his hearing.

  He thought of calling NBC to apologize for missing the meeting, the first time in his career and all that, but he wasn’t apologetic and he didn’t call. The script was all wrong, so what use was a meeting? He’d tell them that tomorrow.

  As he was reading, he began to notice that he couldn’t pay attention to his own words, that he kept looking up, taking in the company. Usually he was captivated by his work. He’d laugh out loud. He’d read a page over and over, pleased with the dialogue. He could weep for his characters.

  He ordered a second cup of coffee, a bagel with cream cheese, and as he left for the movie, he tossed the script in the wastebasket at the entrance to the café.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JUST AFTER 8:30, Sam walked into the apartment, carrying groceries.

  “We called the police,” Oliver said without looking up from the newspaper he was reading.

  “The police?” Sam asked, unpacking the groceries.

  “The missing-persons bureau,” Oliver said. “They haven’t come yet.”

  “Well, you’d better call them back,” Sam said.

  “We were very worried, Sam.” Charlotte had been crying. “If we’d disappeared like that, you would have killed us.”

  By the time they had gotten back from the meeting Sam had missed at NBC to find that he wasn’t at the apartment—no note, no message on the answering machine—Oliver lost his temper.

  “We’re supposed to let Sam know every time we look out the window at the great outdoors and yet it’s okay for him to disappear without a word?” Oliver opened the fridge and took out a carton of milk.

  “This isn’t like Sam,” Charlotte had said. “Something’s happened.”

  “Nothing’s happened,” Oliver said. “He wanted to bolt, so he did.”

  Sam had left early, taping a note of reminders on the fridge with a postscript:

  When you leave the apartment (every time you leave), stand on the top step of the building and look around. You should be checking for someone who could have a watch on us.

  Charlotte turned Sam’s note facedown.

  “Something’s the matter with Sam,” she said quietly to Oliver, not wishing Julia to hear her.

  “Of course; he’s obsessed,” Oliver agreed. “But then, when hasn’t he been? At least now he has a reason to think someone is following us.” He picked up the note and tossed it in the trash.

  “Do you ever wonder if we’ll be living together like this when we’re seventy?”

  Oliver laughed. “Demand your own apartment.”

  Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Would you?”

  “Sure. ‘Moving out, Sam,’ I’ll say. ‘Got my own place, my own permanent girlfriend, my own dog, and maybe with a little luck, I’ve got my own brain back.’ ” Oliver faked a boxer’s punch to Charlotte’s chin. “I’ll send him a bassett hound called Faithful.”

  “Be serious, Oliver,” Charlotte said. “You’d never leave. None of us would.”

  “Sometime after Plum & Jaggers has a chance to make a go of it.” He checked his watch. “Maybe in a year or so, but now we’ve got ten minutes before we have to leave for the studio and I haven’t changed clothes.”

  Charlotte sat down on the couch beside Julia, lifting the comforter.

  “What are you doing under there?”

  “Reading Sam’s postcards from Rebecca Frankel,” Julia said from inside the tent of her comforter.

  “Those are personal messages,” Oliver called from the upstairs loft, where he had gone to change for the meeting.

  “They’re postcards,” Julia said. “If Rebecca intended for them to be personal, she should have sent letters.”

  “Read one to me,” Charlotte said.

  Julia sat up on the couch, wrapping the comforter around her.

  “Dear Sam,” she read aloud. “I saw The Last Thanksgiving. It’s wonderful. What I love about your writing is your ability to be darkly funny and also sweet. It’s a gift. Or legacy. Love, Rebecca.”

  “Read a newer one,” Charlotte said.

  “Here’s one from this Christmas after the show started on NBC,” Julia said.

  “Good. Read that.”

  “Read it loud enough for me to hear,” Oliver called down.

  “Dear S.,” Julia read. “They’re getting intimate. Dear S., love, R. Dear S.,” Julia went on. “I saw Plum & Jaggers last night. One false note in that episode. When Julia serves Plum’s pet parakeet for dinner. Too black. Have you ever considered writing personal essays? I’d be interested in such a book for Larkin Press. You’re looking thinner, or else that configuration is a trick of the screen. Eat! Love, R.”

  “That’s a love letter,” Charlotte said.

  “No, it’s not. They’ve never met,” Oliver said.

  “Listen to this,” Julia said.

  “Dear S., I’d like to call you Samuel. It’s a name I’m fond of. You remind me of Saul. Something about your gestures on the show, the way you cock your head, one hand in your pocket. But who knows? I may be inventing Saul, he’s been gone so long. That’s the sin of it. Forgetting. Love, R.”

  “I love it,” Charlotte said. “It’s delicious.”

  “Delicious?” Oliver pulled the comforter off Julia. “Let’s get out of here. We’re going to be late.”

  Charlotte put on a black cape, a long red Chinese scarf, and threw Julia a coat.

  “Put the postcards away so Sam won’t know you’ve violated federal regulations,” Oliver said, watching Julia replace the postcards in the top of Sam’s suitcase.

  Julia buttoned her winter coat, putting her collar up, a wool hat low on her forehead.

  “What do you really think about Rebecca Frankel?” she asked Oliver.

  “I don’t think about her,” Oliver said, pushing Julia gently out the door ahead of him. “She’s a figment of Sam’s imagination.”

  “But it does give us a different sense of Sam, doesn’t it?” Julia asked. “Kind of a romantic one.”

  “He’s a hopeless romantic,” Oliver agreed. “Who else would try to keep his family together by inventing a comedy sho
w?”

  Julia slipped her arm through Charlotte’s.

  “You seem bad-tempered,” she said.

  “I’m annoyed at Sam,” Charlotte replied. “I don’t understand why it isn’t possible for us to live in separate places and have a private life and still do the show.”

  “It’s not possible until this worry about the fire goes away,” Julia said.

  “There isn’t such a worry about the fire, Julia,” Charlotte said. “It couldn’t have been personal.”

  “You really think so?” Julia asked.

  “I hope,” Charlotte said, going down the steps of the building to the street. “Meanwhile, I dream of flying.”

  Oliver double-locked the door and was heading down the second set of steps, Charlotte and Julia on the landing in front of him, when he noticed the graffiti.

  On the third-floor wall, gray with accumulating soot and the greasy residue of cooking, there was a new drawing among the old graffiti, love messages and personal confessionals, a picture of two heads kissing. The new drawing was dim, maybe done in pencil or charcoal, but it seemed to represent a small stick figure of a woman, a line for her body, her arms, her legs, her head, two dots on either side of her head for eyes, two dots on either side of her torso for breasts, a squiggly line between her legs, and a mass of curly hair. He made a mental note of it. He would ask Charlotte later.

  Julia and Charlotte were standing at the top of the outside steps when Oliver got downstairs.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, stopping beside them.

  “Checking for suspicious people the way Sam said we should,” Julia said, looking up and down Varick.

  “Christ.” Oliver lumbered down the steps. “How would you know suspicious?”

  “If someone was interested in us and knew we lived here, they’d be standing, maybe across the street, or walking back and forth by the apartment,” Charlotte said patiently. “That’s my guess.”

  “But they wouldn’t be in a hurry,” Julia said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, everyone seems to be in a hurry today, so I guess we can go,” Julia said, taking the steps down two at a time.

  The weather was cold with the kind of dampness that slips through winter coats, the wind bearing down on them, and they walked with their chins against their chests, crowns forward, their arms wrapped around their bodies.

  In the subway, Oliver took a seat next to Charlotte. Julia stood by the door, holding the rail.

  “Did you see what was on the wall of our apartment building?” he asked.

  “I didn’t notice,” Charlotte said.

  “A nude stick figure with lots of curly hair. A woman. It’s very dim, maybe even drawn with pencil.”

  “I didn’t notice that,” Charlotte said. “You’re thinking it’s Julia?”

  “Well?”

  “Don’t get like Sam, Oliver,” Charlotte said as the train arrived. She led the way through the turnstile. “Graffiti is everywhere.”

  “I love that about New York,” Julia said, following Charlotte up into the shaft of sudden sunlight lighting the subway stairway. “See?” She pointed to an abstract of a dog painted black with his ears straight out. Sweet on you Beatriz. Signed. DDT. “It’s so personal.”

  And they wound their way, single file, against the crowds and blustery wind, to the studio.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHEN SAM arrived at NBC, people kept their distance. No one mentioned the fact that he’d missed the meeting on the previous day, and neither did he. The other writers on the script team were already in the conference room with coffee and sandwiches, the new script in front of them. He took off his jacket and scarf, tossed them on a chair in the corner, and took a seat at the round table.

  “We’ll forget this script,” he said, turning a copy of the new episode of Plum & Jaggers facedown.

  “What do you mean, forget it?” Jacob asked.

  “Just that,” Sam said.

  “But I love it, Sam,” Andy said. “It’s so odd and funny. That’s what NBC likes about us.”

  NBC had high hopes for the family comedy. “Cozy, edgy,” they called it. And the young writers who worked with him loved Sam, although he took no particular interest in them personally. A “genius,” they told Jacob Levy.

  “You ought to try to be nicer to the writers,” Charlotte said.

  “I don’t like to work with other people,” Sam said. “I never did.”

  “But they adore you,” Charlotte said.

  “I can’t imagine why they would,” Sam retorted.

  He had resisted NBC’s decision to hire a team of writers to work on his scripts.

  “I’ve always worked alone,” he told them. This is television, he was told, not live theater, and without further discussion the writers were hired. But during the script meetings Sam kept a chilly distance, always polite, but he showed no interest in pursuing a social relationship with any of them.

  Jacob Levy picked up a copy of the script.

  “What do you mean, forget it?” he asked. “The script is good.”

  “I liked Red Azalea,” Brill said. “She’s dynamite.”

  “It’s wild the way she paints her body with all those red flowers like Georgia O’Keeffe vaginas,” Andy added.

  “It’s second-rate,” Sam said without inflection. “I don’t know what’s gone sour with me the last two weeks, but something has.”

  A sense of doom. A growing dread, rising like water seeping into the corners of his brain. He was losing his sense of humor. He could actually feel it leaking, as though the stitches on a fresh wound had torn.

  Sam looked around the table. “I gave you some suggestions for new episodes, so let’s go over them instead.”

  “The ideas are good, don’t you think, Jacob?” Andy asked. “Eric and I agree.”

  “The ideas are great, but we’ve only got so many more shows before the network decides on next year and we’ve a couple of negative letters about the parakeet you strangled. The one you served with garlic mashed potatoes,” Jacob said.

  “What negative got said?” Sam asked.

  “People didn’t like it, so I was wondering what you thought about adding a new parakeet to the next episode?” Jacob asked. “Like the kids give Plum a baby parakeet for her birthday.”

  “I don’t like it.” Sam got up and opened a window enough to cause a draft. “Death is irrelevant in comedy.”

  Jacob paced the room, back and forth, tearing at his thick mop of black hair.

  “Nothing is irrelevant,” he said.

  “I like some of the next episodes, Jacob,” Brill said quickly. “You’re not going to get rid of anorexic Miriam with the cat-fetish problem, are you?”

  “I have no problem with her—but since we’re doing audience response, I’ve got a question about the fact that the character of Sam doesn’t talk,” Jacob said.

  “Sam’s mute,” Sam said. “That’s his character.”

  “It’s just that I had some letters about his being weird,” Jacob said, settling into his chair. “I guess that’s the point.”

  “Weird isn’t the point,” Sam said, putting on his coat.

  “I thought we could build up the episode when Plum disappears to go with Red Azalea to New Mexico,” Eric said cheerfully. “Maybe with telephone calls back home.”

  “My favorite idea is where Miriam dances to Frank Sinatra with the tomcat.”

  “But we’ll have to cut the cat’s erection, gang,” Jacob was saying as the rest of the McWilliams family arrived, taking their seats around the table.

  “We’re talking about viewer response to help you guys think about the direction for the next episodes,” Jacob said to the McWilliamses. “One of the other problems that’s come up is the static nature of the set. Every Saturday night,
the same dining room. Know what I mean?”

  “What would you suggest?” Oliver asked Jacob, closing the window, taking a seat next to his brother.

  “Maybe street scenes, you know. Maybe they go to Red Azalea’s house for dinner. Maybe a bar. What do you say, Sam?”

  “I don’t think very much of that,” Sam said.

  The group around the table was quiet.

  “As I see it in these final episodes, random incidents of terrorism have increased, violence is on the rise, no one seems to be in charge,” Sam said with a kind of exaggerated patience, looking wearily around the table. “Like everybody else in the City of Brotherly Love, the McWilliamses are afraid to go outside.”

  He got up from the table and, taking his bookbag and gloves, stood beside the closed door as if he were expecting to leave in a hurry.

  “The point all along with Plum & Jaggers has been one set. A dining-room table, six chairs, two of them empty, and an invisible bomb.”

  “But the country is doing fine. I mean, there’s violence and terrorism here and there, but hey,” Jacob said.

  “Plum & Jaggers isn’t a newspaper account,” Sam said, trying to maintain an even tone. “It’s an imagined story of a family and what could happen to them.”

  He opened the door to leave.

  “I’ll get coffee and meet the rest of you on the set.”

  But he didn’t get coffee. He went into the bathroom and locked the door, looking at his unfamiliar face in the mirror, sitting on the toilet with his head in his hands.

  Sometime in the middle of the meeting, he wasn’t sure when, he could feel a temper coming on like a sickness, as though he were ignited, waiting to detonate.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SAM WAITED for his family at a café on West Thirteenth Street where he often wrote. The café was a small, earnest, vegetarian lunch place with a variety of Asian teas and burning incense, and the customers were quiet. Sam usually worked at a table in the window, but this afternoon, recovering from the wave of anger, he wasn’t writing. He was thinking about his mother.