Plus One (31 page)

She smiled and tore off the paper in one move.

Alex hadn't been sure how she'd respond to the necklace—she'd liked the few pieces of jewelry he'd given her in the past, but he hadn't had much choice in this one. As she held it up and dangled it in the light, he felt his chest tighten.

“Oh, baby,” she said, holding it up to the light and dangling it from one end. “It's so pretty.”

Pretty? That wasn't a word she used in relation to things she approved of. “You like it?”

She swiveled around so he could close the clasp. “It's the awards necklace, right? From the Globes? Helen Bamper has one just like it.”

“Does she?” he said, panic welling up. “I got it from that place Daniel Frick—in Beverly Hills.”

“Don't tell me you paid retail,” she turned back to face him, one finger tracing the contour of the ruby's setting. “For the
awards
necklace?”

He made a quick mental calculation. What was worse, pretending to have paid full price or admitting that he'd gotten jewelry with a coupon? “Actually,” he said carefully, “it was free. Huck hooked me up with one of Les Price's gift bags.”

She took a moment and thought this through. “Thank God you didn't get taken by those fake-fancy English ponces. I just can't wear it around Helen, but that's fine. It's beautiful. Thank you.”

Alex kissed her cheek and smiled. She liked it—more so because it was a bargain. He pulled her in for a hug. “Happy birthday, baby. Now get back to work—that drywall ain't going to hang itself.”

He smacked her butt as she turned back to the scaffolding.

“Mr. A!” Clive called to him from the banquet table, where he was sitting in the shade, fanning himself with a straw fedora. Lunch was still a half hour away, but Clive had staked out a prime spot. He wore tortoise-shell sunglasses with green lenses and a linen, mandarin-collared shirt unbuttoned way down. The general impression was European Playboy at Moroccan Street Market. “The party—a triumph! What an absolute
gas
.”

“Glad you're enjoying,” Alex said, plopping down next to him.

“Saw you up on the roof there. Impressive.”

Alex shrugged. “I was just helping out—Jess is the real talent.”

“Don't lay that modesty on me, Alex. Roofer, dad, event planner—you, Mr. A, are a man of many talents. I see what you do. Pulling off what you did with the house, getting this together, doing all you do with the kids—you're an
orchestrator
. Like me—I've spent my whole career behind the scenes. I appreciate the groundwork—don't think it goes unnoticed.”

Alex shook his head and smiled. “Thank you Mr. C.”

Clive looked up and down the empty table and dropped his voice a little. “Which is why I want to talk to you about something.”

“Shoot.”

“You know this show I've been developing? I've been going back and forth with the networks and syndicators, and I really think this thing is a game changer.”

“The dog show?”

“Every year Americans spend $32 billion on
dogs
,” he said, falling into his pitch. “More than video games, music, and
way
more than books, no offense.
Top Dog
taps right into that—no one has approached the animal space like this. That's not from me—that's straight from the VP at the Nature Channel. He flipped. Bought it in the room.”

“That's great, Clive. So—you're starting when?”

“Depends,” he said. “Lot of details to work out. Decisions to make. The dad is still giving me grief—can you believe it? I seem to have found the only guy in L.A. who doesn't want to do TV. We've got this incredible storefront for the new facility, perfect location. But I just keep thinking, why give this thing away? Why make someone else rich? The old broadcast model—last legs. I've seen this before, and if I go with this deal, I'm just another schlub on the death march.”

Alex cupped his chin in his hand and leaned forward. He'd heard Clive talk shop a lot over the years—but this wasn't his usual name-droppy trip down memory lane. “What're you thinking?”

Clive scratched his beard and fixed Alex in a conspiratorial stare. “I ever tell you about Blake Ackerman?”

Alex shook his head.

“Blake Ackerman was a farm kid from Wyoming,” Clive said grandly, settling in. “Comes to L.A. in seventy-one, gets a job as a PA on the
Dinah Shore Show
. Delivers videotape for me—nice
kid. Three years in, he gets a promotion to cue card boy.
Cue card boy
. Fast track to nowhere. But he's got this idea for a show, keeps talking about it—
Laugh In
but with singing cowboys and dancing girls in cutoffs. I think he's full of it, but he gets money from his parents back home and shoots two episodes himself, after hours on the Shore set, gets some cowpoke singer drunk and sets him up on a hay bale, then shops this tape around to every podunk station from Sacramento to Saskatoon. You know what that show is called, Mr. A?”

“I do not.”

Clive cleared his throat and paused for effect.

“
Cornpone
. Ran twenty-three years on 167 stations. Now Blake Ackerman lives on a macadamia farm on the north coast of Maui.”

At the far end of the table, a burst of laughter erupted from a group of Figgy's work friends.

“So,” Alex said. “You're gonna do it like he did? DIY?”

“That's the idea. The Nature Channel went crazy for it—they offered to finance the presentation one hundred percent, make a deal with one of their production companies. But—if we do this ourselves, we own it outright. It's presold—guaranteed on the air, pickup of twenty-five in the first season! We just need the equity on the front end, get us out of the gate.”

Clive reached into a leather satchel at his feet, pulled out a manila envelope, and plopped it on the table. Alex gave it a curious poke.

“Here's the prospectus,” Clive said. “Give it a look. I got plenty of guys to take this to, but I'd much rather keep it in the family. I could take it to Figgy, but you know how much she's got on her plate right now—and anyway, I think this could be great for you. It's right in your strike zone.”

Alex pulled out a stack of bound, color-copied pages. The old man was working him, spinning him. But he couldn't help it; it
felt good, to be approached like this, pitched as if he had something valuable to offer. He scanned the packet, past the clip-art cartoon of a dog with a curly-cue show logo emblazoned across the top, into the scanned spreadsheets and production budgets, and finally landed on a box marked TOTAL.

“Two hundred thirty—thousand?”

“Bare bones, right? Run and gun. Not a huge upfront cost, and normally I'd cover it myself, but we're a little upside down on the mortgage right now. All we need is a little help securing a lease on this amazing space on La Cienega—primary location. For the new facility.”

“So you're shopping this around? Meeting with investors?”

“Investor,” Clive said. “Singular. You.”

Twelve

T
he night before his big procedure, Alex felt good, abnormally so, better than he had any right to. Figgy was staying late at work, or a work party, or just a party—who knew? She'd been out more nights than not lately—pulling all-nighters working on the first six episodes of
The Natashas
, doing panel discussions at the Writers Guild, meeting people for drinks at the Peninsula. Production represented a get-out-of-home-free card that could be cashed in at any time. Typically this meant Alex stayed home—because they would not be the kind of Hollywood family whose Salvadoran nanny fed the kids taquitos and let them watch TV all night while Mom and Dad gallivanted about.

Tonight, however, he was desperate for some gallivanting. After all, this was his last night as an unclipped, unsnipped, fully functional man. And it just so happened that tonight was Wild Boar, the pop-up dinner Miranda had been texting him about for the last week and a half. He hurried through baths, books, and
bed, grabbed three bottles of wine, and bolted out, leaving Rosa to babysit. Now he was heading down Sunset with the sunroof open and the brassy shriek of a gypsy-funk marching band rattling the coins of the minivan's change tray.

He'd been looking forward to tonight, for the menu and also, he knew, for Miranda. Their text exchange had remained innocent so far, but her messages always left him feeling unclean, hot-faced, and a little dry-mouthed. Her similes were ridiculous; the corned lengua at Menudo Bites, she wrote, was “as tasteless as a bucket of dicks.” Her own braised osso bucco, on the other hand, was “labial-fold tender.”

Wild Boar had previously been held in an underground parking garage and a dentist's office; tonight, it was at a gallery on the eastern edge of Chinatown, near the freeway. Alex found a parking spot at the far end of a two-block walk street, the pavement slick from an afternoon drizzle.

Halfway to the gallery, he stopped at a wishing well set back from the path. It was a familiar spot, more a fountain than a well, mounds of dripped faux lava circled by a moat and wreathed with strands of plastic ivy. Perched along the ridge of the fountain was a row of metal Buddhas and a dozen or so miniature wooden signs, each printed with a prize for whoever landed a coin in the copper bowl embedded in the concrete nearby: WISDOM. LOVE. LONG LIFE. And at the very top of the fountain, set inside a miniature grotto above a bowl the size of a bud vase, was a sign for VACATION.

He'd laughed at that as a teenager, a lifetime ago. He'd hung out here one night after a show, having wandered over with Dotti and a few guys from a hardcore band from the Valley. (The Corruptible? The Corrupted?) He remembered leaning up against the gate and sucking on a tinfoil pipe, blowing blue marijuana smoke through the chain link. He'd had a long, drifting discussion about the pathetic soul who'd placed the VACATION bowl in the highest,
most difficult-to-reach spot. “Fuck love!” he'd hooted, flinging nickels. “Fuck wisdom! I wanna a week at Disney World!”

Then he'd looked down an alley behind Wong Seafood and spotted, backlit by a yellow streetlight, three rangy coyotes scrounging beside a dumpster. He remembered tilting his head back and bellowing, then taking off up the alley, pulling out the sides of his Army surplus overcoat, like the sails of a pirate ship, the coyotes scattering as he approached, their tails whipping furiously as they skittered up the asphalt.

And then, just as quickly as it had formed, the memory broke apart. That
was
him, wasn't it? Or was it Lloyd the bassist who'd chased the coyotes? Could it have been Dotti? Had all that cheap Mexican ditchweed fried his memory completely?

He reached in his pocket and tossed a quarter. It dinged the edge of the WISDOM sign, ricocheted twice, and then rolled into a bowl marked ADVENTURE.

No, he was sure of it: He'd chased those coyotes.

• • •

Miranda waved from across the candlelit gallery when Alex came in. She was a whole different girl out of her chef's whites, her wavy whitish hair loose and shimmery, hanging down over skin so pale it seemed translucent. Alex headed toward her, but she signaled for him to hang back then ducked into the back office where the chef and his crew were scrambling, clearly in full crisis mode. Tupac thumped on the stereo overhead. Alex found a pair of empty seats beside a Cambodian girl from Pacoima and a pastry chef with two-inch plugs in his earlobes. After a quick mumbled introduction, the pair went back to surveying the room, their expressions screwed tight with hipster standoffishness. Alex opened one of his bottles and played with his phone, keeping one eye on the passageway to the kitchen. The soup arrived forty
minutes and an entire bottle of pinot later.

“Shit show back there,” Miranda said, at last pulling up a chair. “Gas line is clogged and they only just now got the burners going again. Is everyone starving?”

“We're primed,” Alex shrugged. “It's like a rock show—any band that starts on time is never any good.” He took a spoonful of oxtail soup. It had a deep mushroomy flavor, spiked with star anise. He let out a contented moan.

“Wait 'til you get up in the rib-eye,” she said. “Dry aged. Absolutely bonkers. It's been in lockup sixty-five days. I'm telling you, Donnie's an artist of rot—his stuff is like battery acid on the tongue. In a good way.”