Til the Real Thing Comes Along (37 page)

Frank Sinatra. The same one he’d taken to Big Sur.

“You mean we’re not going to stop and dance?” she said when Sinatra sang. “The bloom must be off the rose.”

“I promise you we’ll trip the light fantastic when we get there.” That struck her funny. He was only twenty-nine years old
and his dialogue was sometimes straight out of a Fred Astaire musical. He asked her about Jeffie and her work and told her
this party was an annual one that a friend of his gave just to get an old gang of friends together. At Surfside, a beach club
near Trancas. She felt different with him now. Not only because she’d just found out that his mother had been one of her favorite
movie stars, but all the information Dinah had spewed out about his father and the money and the debutantes and clubs that
didn’t allow Jews—it was all racing through her brain. Not to mention the fact that David never offered any information about
himself. Did he assume she knew all those things from Dinah or Jason Flagg, or did he want to keep them from her?

“Two reasons you tell everything and he doesn’t,” Dinah had told her. “A) is because he doesn’t want to get deeply involved,
and B) is because he’s a WASP. We’re not used to people like that who don’t show their feelings. I dated this guy in college.
My parents were sick about it. His name was J. Pembroke Bently. Do you love it? Anyway, one Saturday night he didn’t show
up for our date. Well, you know me. When he came by on Sunday, I read him the riot act. And when I finished he told me very
calmly that the reason he hadn’t been there was because he had to go home to wherever in Connecticut and say goodbye to daddy.
So I said, ‘Oh, yeah? Where’d your dad go?’ And he said, ‘Oh, you know, he passed on.’ The guy’s father died, and he took
one day out and came back like nothing was
wrong. I mean, R.J., when my father died I threw myself down on the grave screaming ‘Take me with you.’ Of course at the time
I had twin baby girls and a cheating husband, and dying seemed like a better idea than another day with any of them, but…
My point is that WASPs are cold fish. They hold everything inside.”

It doesn’t matter, R.J. thought. Tonight I’ll dance in his arms and look up at that face, and make him laugh—which is what
she knew he liked best about her—and just enjoy everything about him and his friends and this beautiful beach club.

“Dave, boy!” Malco!” Lots of people greeted him. The women were all fair-haired and pretty and well-groomed and perfectly
coiffed and made up. The men in their tuxes were lean, tall, and handsome, apple-cheeked prep school boys grown up. David
introduced R.J. all around. She’d never known people had names like the ones she was hearing. Oh, some real ones, Janes or
Lindas, but then there was Buffy, Tookie, Bobo, Binky, and even one named Tee-Tee.

As they were walking toward the dance floor R.J. said quietly to David: “Sounds like a list of nicknames for genitals.”

He laughed an outraged laugh, then took her hand and led her onto the dance floor. The brief moment they’d danced above the
ocean in Big Sur hadn’t prepared her for this. Thank God, she thought, for all those high school parties where she’d learned
to follow. The funny old-fashioned band dressed in white tie played “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” and David moved against her
and with her and near her and made funny comments about the band and the other dancers in her ear. And he held her so close
that she could sense every move before he made it, so that after just a few minutes it felt as if they’d been dancing together
for years. And she was letting it happen. For the first time in years she wasn’t thinking
no.
She was feeling
yes.
And there was a joyous giggle in her throat that bubbled out from time to time. The band segued into “They All Laughed,”
and R.J. thought the words: “They laughed at me wanting you, said I was reaching for the moon. But oh, you came through. Now
they’ll have to change their tune.” Whirling, moving. David Malcolm, you are too delicious. Divine. Another segue into “Always.”

“This was my mother’s favorite song,” David said.

“My mother’s too,” R.J. said. Lily Daniels Malcolm and Rifke Kaminsky Rabinowitz had a favorite love song in common. For at
least a minute or two after the music ended, David kept holding her close. Then a few friends stopped to talk to him and R.J.
excused herself to go to the powder room and check to see if her makeup looked all right.

She couldn’t stop smiling. This felt good. All of it. She smiled at a busboy who was putting salads on the tables. She smiled
at a couple who had just walked in through the front door. She smiled at the black woman washroom attendant who sat reading
a magazine in the lounge, and she breezed by into the bathroom area and looked at herself in the mirror. Rosie Jane Misner,
she thought, taking her blusher out of her purse. You are having fun. You’re having the time of your life with this beautiful
man in this beautiful place, and boy, are you surprised. You’re learning to let go of all your wimpy neurotic fears and you’re
looking pretty goddamned good in Cindy’s dress, if I have to say so myself. And even though you’re unemployed, everything
will be okay because…

There were two women talking to each other from cubicle to cubicle, but R.J. was preoccupied with her own thoughts as she
added a tiny bit of blusher to her already flushed cheeks, put that away, and took out her lipstick.

“He could have any woman he wants. Why would he want her?”
That
she heard. Catty, she thought. She opened the tube and put on some lipstick. Maybe she would get her hair cut next week.
The bangs were beginning to droop.

“Oh, you know. For the shock value.”

She closed the tube, replaced it in her purse, and took out her little round hairbrush. Both women laughed.

“Besides, variety
is
the spice of life,” one of them said, and they laughed again.

“Did you catch the dress?”

“The worst”

“I heard the old man hasn’t been well. He was hospitalized for a while and they had to put in a pacemaker.”

“Maybe dating her is how his son is planning to finish him off.”

Laughter. A flush.

“It’s a good thing his ex-wife isn’t here to see this. She’d laugh her sides off.”

“I’ll say.”

The latch on one of the doors was jiggling. About to open.

“Oh, pooh. I snagged my darn stocking. I hate when that happens. What should I do?”

R.J. never heard the answer. She moved quickly out of the ladies’ room and into the crowd. She didn’t see David anywhere and
she didn’t know anyone else in the room. Shock value. Any woman he wants. When she realized she was walking frantically around
the big room, she stopped to catch her breath. Hey whatsa matter? she tried to ask herself. You forgot about Dr. Peale? R.J.,
listen, she said to herself, the way she always did when she was trying to calm herself down. Those women could have been
talking about any man in this room, not necessarily David. And the horrible woman they were laughing about didn’t necessarily
have to be her. David had never mentioned being married before. Surely he would have mentioned it.
They hold it all inside,
Dinah said.

And those women didn’t have to be talking about David’s father. Probably most of the men at this party had rich fathers who
would be picky about the women their sons dated. She was just paranoid because of all the things Dinah had told her.
With her dukes up
was how David described it. Certain that something bad had to happen. It was a lousy way to be.

Ah, she spotted David who was waving to catch her eye from where he stood with two other people. She hurried to him.

“Missed you,” he said when she got there.

“Missed you too,” she said, but she still felt shaken. He put an arm around her.

“R.J.,” he said, “I’d like you to meet Helen Ashton. Helen is my former sister-in-law. And this is Dt. Peter Acklin.” The
woman and the man both nodded and said, “Nice to meet you.” Former sister-in-law. Not the ex-wife of a brother—David was an
only child. Had to be the sister of…

“Peter is the doctor who installed my father’s pacemaker.”

“Nice meeting you,” R.J. said, and in the spots where Cindy Williams’s dress clung to her body, she felt decidedly sweaty.

“Missiz?”

R.J. heard Manuela’s voice at her bedroom door. It was just daylight, and she had been in that half-sleeping, half-awake place,
remembering last night. The way David had eased her out of the Surfside Club and into the car, and back into town to Trader
Vic’s for mai tais topped with floating gardenias, and it wasn’t clear which intoxicated her more, the drinks or the flowers
with their heady scent. And then the delicious dinner.

“We rushed things,” he said. “I did. That weekend. Going away was a mistake. Too fast. But now we’ll take our time. We have
lots of time.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, smiling, spinning from the mai tais,
“you
may have time, but I’m an ancient thirty-seven.”

“True,” he said. “You’re definitely on your last legs—which, by the way, despite their years, aren’t too bad.”

“Too bad?” She bristled. “Those are the best legs in Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, I happen to be in Los Angeles at the moment.”

He laughed and their eyes searched each other’s.

“You’re still not too sure,” he said. “You look like you’re about to make your speech again about how we can’t work.” Now
they were both very serious.

“You never told me you’d been married,” she said.

“Irrelevant,” he said. “It lasted only two months, for reasons too boring to tell you.”

“You’re a foreign quantity to me, David, and I don’t know how to behave. You might as well be from another planet. You’re
the man my grandmother and my parents told me not to date. Now I don’t have a grandmother or parents, and I’m scared. The
combination of things that you are—I don’t understand them:

“But from what you’ve told me, you haven’t done so well with the men who
do
fit the standard, so maybe breaking the mold is what you should be doing,” he said. Then he took her two hands in his.

“Missiz?” Manuela said again. R.J. sighed.

“Yes, Manuela?”

Manuela came softly into the room.

“What’s wrong?” R.J. asked.

Manuela began to cry, and somehow let R.J. know that her husband in El Salvador was in trouble and she had to go back and
help him. But she would need money. As much of her back wages as R.J. could provide.

R.J. sat up and held the trembling woman in her arms. She would take a loan, get cash some way immediately.

“I’ll get it right away,” she told Manuela. “I promise. You’ve been such a good friend.”

She got out of bed and dressed, and had breakfast waiting for Jeffie when he woke, and when it was nine-thirty and time for
the bank to open, she went out to the garage, got into her car, and it wouldn’t start: She called the auto dub and they sent
a truck to tow her to a service station, where she waited for two hours for the mechanic to tell her it would cost fifteen
hundred dollars to get the Mustang running, which was more than she’d paid for the car when she’d bought it used.

She told the mechanic she’d think about it, took a bus home, walked up the hill to her house, and just as she pushed the door
open she heard the phone ringing. She walked to the phone with a sigh. No more bad news.

“H’lo?”

“Is that you, R.J., honey?” a woman’s unmistakable voice asked. It was nobody if it wasn’t Patsy Dugan.

“Patsy?”

“Well, how you been, girl?” Patsy asked.

All the possible answers flew through R.J.’s mind so quickly that she didn’t know what to say. Patsy took her silence as an
opportunity to go on.

“You know, I’ve been thinkin’ about you for weeks, and finally this mornin’ I said to Freddy, ‘I have to call that girl up
and see how she is.’ Now I know you prob’ly think it’s strange that I’d be sayin’ anything to Freddy at all, except for maybe
fuck off,
but the truth of the matter is he’s been beggin’ me to git back together with him, and I been sayin
no way,
and finally what really kind of swayed me was the numbers.”

“What numbers, Pats?” R.J. said, knowing Patsy wanted her to ask.

“Them Nielsens. I mean, think of what a kick in the ass
my Nielsens are gonna get if me and Freddy go back together on TV.”

All those months of unretumed calls, and now here Patsy was, calling her as if nothing had happened. All gossipy and chatty.
This was a business call. Patsy Dugan was not calling to invite her for a cup of tea.

“R.J., honey. Are you there?”

“I’m here, Pats,” R.J. said.

“Whatcha been workin’ on?”

Working on? An unsellable pilot idea. Trying to get my life in order. “Oh, I just sold a short story to a magazine.”

“Well, ain’t that great?” Patsy said. “I cain’t wait to read it.”

Or to have someone read it to you, R.J. thought to herself, but said, “Well, it ought to be on the stands in a few months.”
Why didn’t Patsy just come out and say what she wanted?

“You know,” Patsy began. Here it comes R.J. thought. “When that little ass-wipe Harry Elfand fired you, I was mad as a snake.
But I was havin’ enough trouble with that lowlife son of a bitch so I couldn’t start fightin’ with him about the writin’ staff.
He was such a goddamn woman-hater anyhow, he probably couldn’t stand havin’ a funny gal like you around all the time. Anyhow,
that don’t matter anymore on accounts I just fired him. Fired ’em all. And I’m startin’ a whole new show. With Freddy again,
like the old days. From scratch this time. And I want you aboard, girl. What do you think?”

A job. A new show. Back with Freddy. Patsy was right. The ratings would go through the roof. And all of it sweetened with
a lie that it was Harry Elfand who had fired R.J. Or maybe
that
was the truth and Harry had lied. R.J. would never be sure. Going back to the insanity of a variety show. It was a horrible
thought. Chaos. All-consuming. A job. She would take it, and thank God.

“Have your business people call my agent, Stanley Hoffman,” R.J. said to Patsy.