In Love With Alice: A Thirtover Novel

by Alon Preiss

  She drank some brandy to help her sleep, and then she tossed back another, and then she mixed herself some scotch and milk, and then she had maybe a few more, and then she lost track.

  At 6 a.m. the next morning, a car from the studio pulled up in front of her house in the western edge of the Palisades. Carly was still asleep, so the driver unlocked her front door and let himself in, climbed the stairs to her bedroom, and shook her awake. She begged him for a few more minutes of sleep. Cracked open one eye, saw him holding a robe. “Cover yourself up and hop in the car,” he said, “or you’ll be late. You’re on probation, remember?”

  “I’ll tell the studio you’re rude,” she whispered.

  He leaned over the bed. “Carly,” he said. “Right now, I could get you fired.”

  Sitting in the back of the car in her bathrobe. The car phone rang. The driver answered, tossed it into the back seat.

  “It’s Serge.”

  “I watched you on television,” Sergio was whispering. “With that boy, the guest star, kissing you the whole show. And then fake sex. I thought to myself that it could have been me.”

  Carly was holding the phone to her ear, her face pushed up against the window, wide avenues and palm trees rushing by in a blur.

  Sergio whispered, “I will tell you a secret. I watched that scene, thinking that it could be me, the scene where you take your shirt off and it’s your bare back to the camera. Probably a lot of people in the TV audience thought it was a body double, but I recognized that dimple just below your shoulder blade. And thinking that it could have been me, doing fake nude sex in front of the camera for all those people in the room and for millions in America, I felt....”

  He laughed, and he stopped talking, as though embarrassed.

  “Yes?” Carly asked, and she felt her heart beating heavily, she heard it inside her head.

  His accent now thicker than usual. “I felt a wooden man. A boner. You know.”

  “You thought it was sexy?” she asked him. “You liked that scene? You thought it was sexy?”

  “Oh, Carly,” he said, stretching out the sentence, pain and excitement and longing in his voice.

  Suddenly frightened by Sergio’s display of (or attempt at) honest, naked emotion, Carly clicked off the telephone without another word. A minute later, the phone rang again, and she just let it ring and ring and ring. After a while, when it became clear that Sergio would not hang up until she answered, Carly turned off the ringer. She curled up into a tight little ball in the back seat of the limo and pretended to be asleep.

  The producer of the show was an old Jew with a big wrinkled nose who’d been making this kind of product for thirty years or so. Carly thought of him as a sort of grandfather figure, if your grandfather were the sort of guy who might, at a moment’s notice, write you out of his will and then never speak to you again. He strode onto the set at noon, all dandied up, beaming around at the cast as though he were a really big star making a cameo. A cigar hung out of his mouth. He wasn’t even puffing on it, and the other actors on her TV show always joked about the producer’s cigar. Maybe he didn’t even enjoy cigars, they would muse. Maybe he just put the cigar in his mouth because that made him look more like the sort of man that he believed himself to be. An old time TV producer, a tough guy with a lot of power. That was also why he still drove his 1975 Mercedes, and spent thousands of dollars every year making sure that it looked and drove exactly as it did back in 1975. He thought he was a 1975 cigar and Mercedes kind of guy.

  Carly heard people say this, and she never thought it was funny. A visual accessory, Carly believed, was supposed to make you look like the person whom, deep in your heart, you knew you really were. Carly’s own image at the moment, for example, revealed her to be a very sexy vegetarian who had experienced great pain in her life yet overcome it.

  The producer approached Carly, took her to one side, his hand resting lightly on her arm. She tried to smile, but she couldn’t. She tried to swallow, but her throat went dry, and she began to gag. Her body shook.

  “Carly, we have to talk about this situation.”

  She could see the other actors huddling around. The guy who played her little brother, standing there watching with a hopeful, optimistic look in his eyes, and the girl who played her best friend, leaning on the guy who played her brother, an almost identical look of cautious joy on her face.

  “This situation can’t go on like this, you know.”

  The best friend whispered something in the little brother’s ear, covering her mouth with her hands, and he listened for a while, then nodded. Carly thought of the picture they’d taken a few weeks ago for the cover of TV Guide, the whole cast standing in front of the ocean at Pointe Dume in shorts and tank tops, laughing and smiling and holding hands, and it made her angry.

  “How would you solve this problem, Carly? Put yourself in my position.”

  She knew it now. She was being fired. There was no other explanation. Sound technicians, gaffers, gophers, best boy, assistants to everybody. Maybe they already knew about this. Maybe they’d just been waiting for the producer to arrive.

  The producer tried to catch Carly’s gaze. He turned around and saw all the hushed interest on the set. In a very quiet voice that echoed and boomed over the sound stage, he said, “Take five, all right? Everyone get lost.” A moment later, Carly and the producer were completely alone.

  He had been scaring her, that was all. This show was the crown jewel of his empire right now. He thought he could survive without Carly Barrows, but he didn’t want to try it right now.

  “Everyone has these little crazy life things,” he told her, gesturing with his cigar in his left hand. “You’re stuck on the set fifteen hours a day. Who’s your friend? You don’t know. For a woman like you, it hits particularly hard. But we can’t let it get in the way.” He looked around, thought for a moment, took a breath. “I have a home in Holmby Hills,” he said. She nodded. When the show briefly hit number one, she’d been to a celebration party at his 45-room, 60,000 square foot, wing-shaped mansion, with a bowling alley, a movie theater, greenhouse, two swimming pools, and a helicopter landing pad up front. Without looking at her, he said, “For the remainder of the season, I am installing you in the west wing of my house.” Then, turning to her, he said, with exaggerated significance: “You know. The west wing.”

  She nodded again, even though she didn’t know what this meant. Was the west wing where he routinely banished troublesome actors? Was this something everyone knew? Carly wondered whether her knees were expected to go weak, whether she should collapse to the ground, as though he had casually announced that he were sending her to the gulag.

  “We will provide you with bodyguards who will make sure that you’re safe at all times. They will accompany you to the set each day and return home with you each evening. The house has all the amenities you could need, so you need never set foot off the estate when you’re not at work. The west wing has its own gymnasium, and your trainer will be coptered to keep your appointment.” He frowned at her. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I understand.”

  “We will take care of you. Make sure this gentleman doesn’t interfere with your life or your work.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We’re also posting guards at your home. We want nothing to happen to you.”

  That was all. He nodded at her. She tried to convince herself that she was just being guarded; that the studio took the threat to her life seriously. But she felt like a prisoner. And she knew the studio was protecting itself from the havoc everyone believed Carly Barrows could wreak.

  “Thank you,” she whispered again, her voice trembling.

  “Well,” he said gravely. “You’re welcome.”

  Once a story line could be developed, Carly mused, maybe they would toss her overboard, expel her from the west wing. Maybe a death was being prepared for sweeps week. She looked down at her feet. She felt so ashamed.

  Leavin
g the set, the producer crawled into the back seat of his Mercedes, and his driver immediately plowed into a terrible traffic jam. He popped an unlit cigar into his mouth, bit into the end, shifted it around until it settled into a comfortable position. He pulled out the car phone, made a couple of calls, barked out a few orders, stared at the back of his driver’s head as he listened to the details on a couple of prospective deals. He couldn’t stop thinking of Carly Barrows. He’d spoken to the cast, crew, directors, producers, and writers. They hated her, despised her. They would celebrate the downfall that, he knew, would soon arrive. But he took no joy in this, and not just for selfish reasons. He honestly wished that he could save her. All he could do was humor her. No one believed her hairless pretty boy was actually dangerous. He loved Carly for the career coattails she could offer him, and he wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize his modeling career. But whether or not the little prick was dangerous, Carly Barrows still claimed to be frightened of him. Sure, maybe she desperately wanted to be frightened of him — maybe, he mused, after the debilitating romantic failures she’d suffered since her fame, she needed to believe that her absence in a man’s life could drive him mad with anguished passion. But whatever the reason, so long as she wanted people to think she were frightened, filming could not continue as scheduled. So he’d spent a little money on the stupid cry-baby in order to save a lot in the long run.

  The producer sighed, as the car lurched forward a bit. Looking into Carly’s eyes on the set that afternoon, he’d desperately wished that life worked the way it did in any of the crappy TV shows he’d produced over the years, and that merely by offering words of fatherly advice he could solve her problems and set her on the right course. But he could not. He could only postpone her implosion. Back at his office, when no one was around, he would make one quick phone call to one discrete writer, who would secretly plot Tiffany’s death for the end of the season and for the following year’s opener. He remembered the excitement on this little girl’s face when he’d offered her the role that would make her famous. He remembered what she’d been like back then. How nice she’d been. How solid. He didn’t relish the ever ghastlier specter that Carly Barrows — his own creation — would become, two years or ten years from now.

  Maybe he would be lucky enough to die first. He leaned back in his seat, shut his eyes, and put a big, unsatisfying crunch into his cigar.

  Filming finished at midnight. When she left her dressing room, Carly was ushered out of the studio gates under heavy guard. She fell asleep in the back of the limo, and she didn’t wake up until the next morning, when a security agent shook her conscious in a lavishly decorated room, with fresh flowers on her bureau and antique furnishings. “Where am I?” she whispered, but then she remembered.

  The first scene to be shot that day was a pivotal dramatic piece of business. Tiffany had caused the breakup of one of the most solid marriages in the program’s eponymous neighborhood, between Winston Banks, a fortyish businessman and pillar of the community and his wife, the school librarian. Mr. Banks, whose flirtation with the precocious schoolgirl had shaken his own faith in himself, would be driving along the coastal highway, when he would spot Tiff walking along the beach, screech his car to the side of the road, hop out, chase her and confront her. Emotional fireworks, screaming and tears would ensue.

  Carly looked less like a schoolgirl than ever that morning. Makeup covered the shadows below her eyes, but there was something else that couldn’t be disguised, something inside of her. The director of the episode decided on long-shots, and some post-production touchups, youthifying computer effects that would cost some money but would save the show.

  Carly stood around in the bright mid-morning sunshine in her yellow one-piece, waiting for the shot to begin, when the head of studio security appeared at the edge of the sands. She watched through her Persol sunglasses as the man approached, pushing his way through crowds of teenage gawkers on summer break. He was a rather dapper man in a light summer suit, a young-looking old man with smooth, tanned skin.

  “It was some guy, climbing up to a second floor window,” he said.

  Carly felt almost relieved to see him and to hear his frightening news. Proof that she was right, that she was more than a self-dramatizing prima donna.

  “Did you catch him? Did you speak with him?”

  He shook his head.

  Two guards were patrolling during the night, circling Carly’s house in opposite directions. One spotted a man on the second floor ledge, some thirty feet up. The guard shined a flashlight, blinding the intruder in the glare. The young man threw an arm over his eyes, swaying and tottering. “Once my men shouted at him, he jumped,” the security guy said. “From a fairly impressive height. No one was expecting that, and he just vanished into the trees. They chased him, but they lost him. They never actually saw him after he dropped.”

  “It was Sergio,” Carly insisted.

  “Well, we don’t know that.”

  “It must have been Sergio.”

  “We sent police over to his apartment, but he hasn’t been seen since.”

  Disappointed, Carly wondered what he would have said had he been apprehended. Would it have been frightening, words full of wounded pride; or something heartbreakingly tender?

  During the next few weeks, Carly stayed incognito at the producer’s mansion, but Sergio never turned up again at her house in Pacific Palisades. Security was tight during filming, but Sergio never appeared again on the set. Carly often spun around, thinking she saw Sergio out of the corner of her eye, Sergio and his defining smirk. But he did not again try to approach her. Carly imagined what might happen if he were to sneak onto the set: he might remove a phony beard and mustache at a particularly appropriate moment, screaming wild declarations of love. A contingent of security personnel would grab him. Sergio would fight back, swinging his fists, knocking down a couple of guys. Sergio would have the advantage at first, but eventually more security would come by, and then more big brawny guys, poor Serge subdued in the middle of a big pile of bodies. For a while he would keep slugging, but as more and more weight piled down on him, he would eventually give up. All right, he would finally gasp. Okay. Uncle. Quickly, the police would arrive, cuff Sergio, read him his rights. His beautiful face battered and bleeding, Sergio would resist only slightly as the security agents pulled him off the set. At the last minute, he would turn, and his gaze would meet hers. She would stop breathing; the anger would melt off of his face. In quiet words that would somehow echo across the set, he would speak of sentiments and longings so beautiful and painful and awkwardly naked that they could not have been planned in advance. Then he would stop speaking; and for a moment, she and Sergio would just float there, alone and confused in the deafening enormity of his silence.

  Then one of the cops would say something like Awwright, come on pal or mac or buddy, or some sort of sarcastically friendly term, and a moment later, Sergio would be gone.

  But, instead, Carly never heard from Sergio again.

  Back at the mansion, lavish paintings on the walls, everything so clean, Carly lay in bed, wishing that she were home beneath her own sheets, just because that was where she used to sleep with Sergio. She didn’t care if it were dangerous to be there. Shutting her eyes, she saw a picture in her head, Sergio’s face, somewhere else, lying outside in the shade, eyes shut, a smile on his lips, not the usual smirk; and she felt breezes from all the places far away she’d traveled with him, and she called out to him, first in whispers, then in cries, almost loud enough to break through the thick walls of this little room, begging him to come kidnap her forever, to take her away from everything, then screaming so loudly she almost believed he might hear her, this picture in her head, this dream she’d known long before she’d ever met Sergio, but whom Sergio had come to resemble because he, too, was now denied her forever.

  Although Sergio caused no more trouble, still Carly remained locked in the west wing of the producer’s mansion. After a while, as the mont
hs passed, she began to wonder whether the shadowy figure outside her bedroom window were even Sergio at all, or some random burglar who stumbled onto her property on the worst possible evening.

  Alice slept until around 4 p.m. When she finally left Eden’s apartment — lightheaded, feeling drunk — she spent the afternoon in front of the television, then fell asleep around nine pm. She woke the next morning to the telephone, then Toby Duggins’ voice on the answering machine, practically screaming at her that he loved her book. She had to think for a moment, but then she remembered: she had dropped off her manuscript at Toby’s building during her brief period of delusion. She couldn’t recall exactly what one might love about her book, but something had obviously struck a chord with her agent. Toby was shouting about an auction, about what price he would set as the floor, about movie rights, and blah blah blah. Toby still yammering in her ear, Alice shut her eyes and fell asleep again until eleven, when she remembered her agent’s phone call as she might remember a rather pleasant but completely far-fetched dream, something one doesn’t really believe even when it’s going on. Still in bed, Alice called Eden and invited her out to Blake’s beach house for a few days, just until her husband returned from his business out West. “We can leave this afternoon,” she said. “I miss you.” Alice packed some summer clothes and two bathing suits, she got Blake’s car from the garage, drove downtown to the Indonesian restaurant, honked the horn a few times, and Eden came running out, slamming the door shut behind her, weighted down by a big backpack that hung behind her right shoulder.