Plus One (4 page)

Tonight, Huck said, was the fourth awards show in the last six weeks. “I don't mind this at all, but they're death for Kate.” They got to chatting about music, Alex happily discovering that Huck knew enough about early eighties punk to keep up with his gushing fanboy rant about the Germs, the Adolescents, and Black Flag. Even better, he seemed to know a fair amount about food—he had his own sous vide machine and raved for a solid ten minutes about the smoker he'd just bought. More impressive than Huck's gastronomical cred was how genuinely happy he seemed. He loved his lady. He loved her kids. He seemed to especially love all the helpers who did their chores, freeing him up for writing songs, kickboxing, and sucking lollipops.

“I'm telling you, dude,” he said. “The Plus One thing? It's the best.”

“The what?”

“You know—what you are. And me. And—” Huck arched an eyebrow toward their tablemates, slugging back the last of the house wine. “The hot mommies getting shitfaced while all the power-partner spouses work the room? We're the Plus Ones.”

Alex suddenly flashed again on the invite. He hadn't paid much attention to anything beyond the curlicue lettering. Now he plucked the card out of his coat pocket and inspected the small print at the bottom of the card. There it was, in small Helvetica type the same size as the instructions for parking: Plus One.

“You gotta claim that shit,” Huck said, leaning back. “I say it loud and proud to anyone and everyone—that way no one can ever use it against me. I don't ever forget. Look—today at two in the afternoon I was sipping mint-cucumber water at a spa on Robertson getting my whole business…” Huck waved generally at his midsection, “waxed. A brozilla, they call it. I've done the trimming and clipping and manscaping—but this is a whole new level. I'm cleaner than I've ever been in my whole sorry life.”

Alex choked on his lollipop. He knew women waxed, but he was opposed to such things on ideological grounds—as a scholarship undergrad at Hampshire, he'd even written a paper that concluded that the bare pubis “is for Barbie dolls and little girls, expressions of a pervy corporate patriarchy.” Discovering that guys, or at least guys like Huck, were now shaving their pubes scrambled his ideological radar. Was it a sign of progress, of gender parity? Was the shorn male groin evidence of post-feminist liberation?

Alex's theorizing ended with a horrifying mental picture of his own hairless wang, freed from its fuzzy, protective nest of reddish fur, the fleshy bits dangling alone and fully exposed. A shudder rocked through him as he looked back over at Huck, who was now chomping meaningfully on his lollipop. “I'm telling you,” Huck pronounced, “the second you lose sight of who you are, who you
really
are, you're dead. Wreckage on the roadside. Being a Plus One is like riding a motorcycle: crazy fun, but a ton of ways to die.”

“Dying? Who's dying?” Alex crossed his arms. “I don't follow.”

Huck motioned over Alex's shoulder. “Over there. Second table on the right? In that pathetic
fedora
?”

Alex turned and peered through the crowd. Standing behind a seat and brandishing a deck of playing cards was a guy in his early forties. Gray felt hat, tiny black eyes, micro-sculpted beard that extended across his jaw like a cut-here mark. “The magic guy?”

“That's Randall Watkins. He was some kind of radio producer—documentary stuff. Then his wife Sandra gets named VP of production at Fox. You know what they say, right? Behind every successful woman in Hollywood, there's a guy she's too resentful to fuck? That's Randall. Right after the wife hits it, he stops working, gets bored, takes a class in sleight of hand, cute, whatever—but then he starts dumping a ton of money into props and costumes, trying to get a whole stage show going. Just bleeding
cash. Wife goes around saying she's a magic widow, complaining that her husband is turning into Doug fucking Henning.”

Alex looked closer. Randall plucked a card from the floral centerpiece and handed it to one of the women at the table, who shrugged and handed it back apologetically. Wrong card. Alex winced. “How do you know all this?”

“Sandra has lunch at the Davies all the time,” he said. “I'm kind of the mayor over there. At least on weekdays from one to four.”

Alex had only seen pictures of the Davies, a members-only club atop a curvy glass office tower on the western edge of the Sunset Strip. It figured Huck was a regular—Alex had no trouble picturing him sprawled out on the low, modular seating with a mojito and a gang of screenwriters, producers, and other industry-associated loafers.

Huck motioned for Alex to come in close. “Poor fucker has no idea what's about to hit him.”

Alex bent in. “What? What's hitting him?”

“Petition for dissolution—all drawn up. Sandra's got another guy in the wings. Trading up. She's been lining up the notification requirement for months. No therapy, no arbitration, nothing. And get this: They're two months shy of the magic ten.”

Alex leaned back and nodded. He got the general sense of what Huck was saying—the studio lady was leaving the magician—but the stuff about the petition, the notification requirement…. “What,” he finally asked, “is the magic ten?”

Huck reared back. “How does a fucking concierge from Colorado know about the magic ten and you don't? California statutory law—split up before your tenth anniversary and you get alimony for half the length of the marriage. Past ten, you get alimony for life.
Life
, son.”

Alex took a swig of wine and tried to absorb this information. “So he's getting dumped because of… California statutory law?”

“That, and he's a shitty magician.”

Alex looked up at the underside of the tent roof, lights dancing across the vinyl in a kaleidoscopic swirl. He wasn't sure if it was the effects of the lollipop, or Huck's story, or just the weirdness of the night catching up with him, but he felt an intense sadness spread out inside his chest. He craned his head around the table, looking for Figgy in the crowd. Was she ready to leave?

“So,” Huck said after a long pause. “How long have you been married?”

Alex straightened up. “Last year was—eight? Nine? Yeah—ten is next March.”

Two

H
er foot was in his face again. At seven, Sylvie was far too old to be in their bed. But here she was, tangled up in the duvet between Alex and Figgy, a smug grin between her soft cheeks, one hammerlike heel lodged against Alex's throat.

It had been the same with Sam, who'd fall asleep in his own bed (after a long and ritualistic routine, the rigid complexities of which Alex never quite got right), only to appear at their bedside in the wee hours, pawing and pleading. Some nights Alex managed to turn the intruder away, but Figgy was a sucker, especially after production on the show began and she didn't get home until late. When she hadn't seen them all day, she was helpless against their dozy warm forms, their yeasty aroma, their sweet silence. It was true, about kids, or theirs anyway: they're most lovable when semi-conscious.

Sam mostly left Alex alone, wrapping himself like a kudzu around Figgy, until a moment of reckoning one day when she had
been putting him down for a nap and asked him to please remove his hand from her boob. The feel of it made his limbs go slack and his eyelids flutter with narcotic satisfaction. “Okay, deal,” he said drowsily. “Under the shirt, but over the bra.”

Alex was fuzzy on specifics from the dozen half-read parenting manuals on his bedside, but he felt pretty sure the experts agreed that co-sleeping had officially become inappropriate when a child could negotiate for tit time. Their son's banishment, however, coincided with the arrival of Sylvie. Normally the nightly brawl with his daughter left Alex feeling cranky come morning, like he'd spent the night being mauled by a koala.

Today, however, the morning after the big award night, Sylvie's foot in his face was okay. Reassuring, even. He scooched into it. It meant normalcy had returned. The events of the night before had come and gone. The special was over, and we now rejoin our regularly scheduled program.

Alex let out a grunt and stumbled to the toilet, where he came face to face with the trophy itself, which Figgy had (ha fucking ha) set on the tank, shoving aside a stack of Sudoku books and
Sunset
magazines. He gave it a long look. Its golden wings zigzagged in a backward diagonal, sharp as switchblades. Its bust thrust forward in a stance of regal confidence. He picked it up; Jesus, it was the weight of a bowling ball. He looked at it square in the face. The swirling ball of atoms held high above the figure's head—what was that about? A goddess with a monumental bust and lightning bolts for wings, holding aloft the basic particle of all matter? How was that the symbol for excellence in TV comedy? Alex stared at the blank face, its features flat and revealing nothing.
You don't scare me,
he thought.
Half the d-bags cruising Sunset Boulevard have one of these things—they give 'em out like Chiclets at the Tijuana border.
Winning one didn't change anything.

Alex was still smarting a little about last night—it was as if the moment Figgy had accepted the award, he'd gone into freefall,
as if everyone at the party had been staring out from the sides of a bottomless hole as he tumbled past. Or maybe that was just the lollipop? The business with the shoes—it wasn't as if Figgy had planned for them to fall apart, and it had worked out fine, but it still left a sting of resentment. Didn't he deserve better than a dead man's shoes? And then there'd been all that talk from Huck about the perils of Plus One-ness and the looming threat of the magic ten.

Stop it, he thought. He and Figgy were good. He shouldn't start doubting his whole marriage because of a single stoned conversation. Especially now, on the morning after Figgy's big win. She'd actually won! That was nothing but good. Of course it was.

“Daaaaad?” It was Sam, calling from down the hall. Alex followed the singsong down to the kids' room, where Sylvie's bottom bunk was empty and Sam was splayed on the floor in a pair of faded orange pajamas, shirt hiked up under his armpits, staring at a pile of Legos.

“Hey buddy.” Alex lowered down, crossed his legs and grabbed a handful. He knew the drill. If Alex wasn't around, Sam would lie there raking his hand through the pile, scattering the clinking bits across the carpet. But as soon as Alex showed up, Sam would get to work, concentration locked.

Sam murmured a greeting as Alex handed over a roof shingle. Sam showed no interest in the spaceships and vehicles that seemed to excite other nine-year-olds; he preferred to build houses and shops and stables, all of them vaguely medieval.

Over the course of an hour, the two kept quiet, the only sounds murmured bits of dialogue from Sam, who kept his head down close to the carpet to get the proper cinematic angle. Cross-legged beside his busy little boy, Alex felt a familiar rush of feeling wash over him, at once tender and panicked. The boy's slim shoulders, narrow wrists, wispy bangs—he was so delicate, so fragile. Alex flashed to a scene of his son on a basketball court,
their first and only attempt to get Sam involved in a team sport, his face tilted wistfully toward the silver glow from the frosted gymnasium windows—and then his head snapping sideways from the impact of a ball whose very existence apparently came as a total shock. They'd moved on to soccer (bad), judo (worse), and finally, fencing (tolerable—Sam liked the outfit).

So he wasn't a jock—Alex hadn't been, either. Alex's mother, Jane, never missed an opportunity to point out how similar they were. Same straw-colored hair, same pinkish skin tone, same dreamy green-gray eyes. And the similarities went so much deeper, she'd gush—Sam was so obviously an “old soul,” mindful and sensitive and fully conscious, just like his dad.

She meant it as a compliment, but it never failed to get a rise from Alex. Not only because the observation came dressed in the softheaded hippie prattle he'd grown up with in Ojai. No, what really bothered Alex was his mom pretending to have an actual recollection of who he'd been as a kid—his mom being almost entirely checked out for the first twenty-odd years of his life. She was better now, sober and in a committed relationship, but the fact remained that she'd been barely present in Alex's life for much of his childhood, her energies consumed by booze, brief, tragic romances, and epic bouts of self-actualization.