Til the Real Thing Comes Along (41 page)

The man in the white coat came into the room. “Dinner is served,” he said. Mrs. Spencer stood, so R.J. did too. Then the men
rose and the whole group walked into the dining room. The smell of the food was exquisite but R.J. knew she wouldn’t touch
a bite. David and his stepmother met them in the dining room.

Dinner was served by two women, and the man in the white coat came to each place and poured white wine in one glass and red
wine in another, and R.J. looked down at her left at the forks and remembered that for years, when she first started going
out to restaurants, she had thought that the reason the restaurant put all those forks next to your plate was to give you
a choice of which size you preferred to use. The elegance of the china and the crystal and the tablecloth and the dining room
itself was more than she’d ever seen in anyone’s home. And when she looked at David sitting across the table talking to Mrs.
Spencer, she tried to picture him when he was a child, in this house, eating meals at this table with his parents, or just
with his father. She remembered David telling her recently that until he went to prep school, he had never eaten a meal that
wasn’t served to him by a servant.

“Where are you from, dear?” Mrs. Malcolm asked her.

“I’m from Pittsburgh,” R.J. answered. Sometimes when people asked her that, since the Pirates and the Steelers were doing
so well, she’d add “City of Champions” when
she told people she was from Pittsburgh. But this time she didn’t because she didn’t think anyone would laugh.

“Well, surely you must know my dear friends,” Eleanor said, “the Mellons.”

The Mellons. R.J. heard David expel some air from his nose, as if he was trying to hold in a giggle but part of it had escaped
in spite of him.

“Um… I don’t. No,” she said. “I mean, I know of the family but…”

“Where did you go to school? In Pittsburgh?” Mrs. Malcolm asked her. R.J. couldn’t see her eyes because she wore glasses,
and the light of the chandelier above the table was reflected in them. All this time, she thought, I’ve been worrying about
the father. I forgot all about the stepmother.

“Carnegie Tech,” she answered.

“Well, I know all about that school, because it merged with the Mellon Institute and became—”

“Carnegie-Mellon.” R.J. nodded. “But that was after I graduated.”

“You graduated before 1967?” Eleanor Malcolm asked, though she already knew the answer. The part of her face that R.J.
could
see was her pinched mouth, which now looked as if she was trying not to smile the triumphant smile of someone who had caught
her prey. There was an uncomfortable pause until she said, “How old
are
you?”

R.J. didn’t even give herself the advantage of the truth, which was that she was thirty-seven. “I’ll be thirty-eight next
month,” she said.

“Ahh” was all Mrs. Malcolm said. No one said anything else to her until R.J. and David were leaving.

“Good talking to you, dear,” Rand Malcolm said, and shook her hand, then went back to talk to the Spencers.

“Yes,” was all Mis. Malcolm said.

David walked her out of the house to the car and she slid into the front seat of the Jaguar. The ride home was too quiet.
She needed David to say something, but there was nothing to say. My parents liked you? It would be a lie. At best his father
was indifferent to her, and those questions were just his way of being social. At worst Rand Malcolm would call his son tomorrow,
maybe even late tonight and tell him to stay away from her.

David. Why wasn’t he saying anything? She was filled with relief as he pulled the Jaguar into her driveway. Safety.
David looked very distracted and very pale. She loved him, and something was very wrong. He was obviously sorry he’d taken
her to be with his father. Maybe answering the questions, which she’d thought was the honest thing to do, was dumb. Maybe
David had wanted her to tell his father that the answers to those questions were none of his business. Whatever it was… something
was wrong.

“Coming in?” she asked. Keep it light, R.J., she thought

“No,” he said. “I’m going to get on home if you don’t mind.”

There was something about the way he said it that made her feel panicky. It was cold. Worried. Nothing loving or playful about
it.

“I love you,” she said.

“I know you do,” he said, with no intonation, and walked her to the door, leaving after a quick kiss.

He usually called her just before lunch, but today he didn’t, and then again at four o’clock he sometimes called to discuss
what time she’d get out of work, but he didn’t do that, and when he hadn’t called by seven she was feeling distracted and
jangled as if she’d had several cups of coffee. She had to go into a rewrite meeting and tell all the other writers how to
make the script funnier, and all she wanted to do was curl up by the phone and wait until he called, so she could hear his
voice—that voice—say, I miss you. The writers were all assembled at the table. R.J. stopped at the receptionist’s desk. It
was a new receptionist, as of this morning.

“Uh… if this person calls”—R.J. wrote David’s name on a piece of paper, stopped herself from drawing a heart around it, and
gave it to the girl—“could you, uh… come and get me?”

The receptionist, who never looked up from the makeup mirror and the lip liner she was using to outline her lips, answered
with an open mouth.

“Not me. I’m going home,” she said. “I was told by the producer that I didn’t have to stay any later than seven.”

“Right,” R.J. said. Then she peeked into the conference room and said, “Be right back,” to the writers, who were
gabbing away, then ran into her own office, where she closed the door and dialed David’s number.

“Please leave your name, telephone number, and a message,”

“Hi. I’m at the office ’til ten or eleven. But it’s okay to call me after that at home. Miss you. Bye,”

It was nearly impossible to concentrate in the meeting, but the writers were cheerful and funny and had lots of good ideas,
so they finished earlier than she expected and she dialed David’s number again just before she left the office at nine-fifteen.
Trying to sound calm on the tape.

“Me again. Going home early. Hope you’re okay. Love you.”

Luckily, the exhaustion from her day took over so she somehow managed to fall asleep, but at four o’clock in the morning she
was suddenly wide-awake. Terror. Where was he? How badly could she have behaved to make him stop calling her? Stop loving
her? Stop, R.J., please, she said to herself. Why does it have to be something
you
did? Maybe something’s really wrong. Maybe something’s happened to him that’s completely unrelated to you. Maybe he was electrocuted
by an electric razor in his apartment or beaten up in an alley someplace. It was pitch-dark in her room and R.J. sat up in
bed, heart pounding furiously, laughing at herself because she was rooting for the possibility that the man she loved desperately
and passionately had been electrocuted or mugged, rather than that he had ended the relationship with her. She dozed and woke
and dozed and woke until she dove for the phone when it rang at seven
A.M

“Mrs. Misner, this is Lefty. I’m sick, so don’t pick me up for car pool.”

“Okay, Lefty. Get better. Bye.”

Her stomach ached and her chest felt as if an elephant were sitting on it. No. What she was thinking was crazy. There had
to be some kind of an explanation. Before she left for work, she called his office. Something she’d never done.

“Rainbow Paper.”

“David Malcolm, please.”

“Thank you.”

“David Malcolm’s office.

“Is Mr. Malcolm in, please?”

“Who’s calling?”

“R.J. Misner.”

“I’m sorry, he’s not. May I take a message?”

Did that mean he was only not in to
her?
What if she’d lied and said it was someone else. Would he be in for… ?

“Can I reach him anywhere? It’s important,” she said.

“I should be hearing from him. May I tell him you called?” the secretary asked.

“Yes, please, and—”

“Will he know what it’s regarding?”

That I’m dying, she wanted to say. That I can’t get through a day without his face near mine, his kisses on my neck, the way
his freckles bounce up and down when I tell him a joke.

“Yes,” she answered.

“And does he have your number?”

He has my number and he has my heart and my soul. Please. You’re a woman. You must know how it feels to love a man so much
that your entire being sings when he walks into the room. Please, if you’ve ever loved anyone like that, make him call me.

“Yes” was what she said.

“Thank you.”

“Thank
you,”

That night at eleven-thirty she was certain she’d never fell asleep, so she called Dinah because she knew Dinah was an insomniac.

“Di,” she said, “don’t ask questions. Just talk to me. Okay? Say anything, but talk.”

“About what, R.J.? You okay?”

“Anything. It doesn’t matter.”

“Talk about anything,” Dinah said, thinking. “Okay, here goes. I was in Neiman-Marcus today and there was a woman at a counter
who didn’t have a nose. Buying eye makeup. I almost died. So after she walked away I said to Carmen the salesgirl: ‘What happened
to her?’ so Carmen tells me that the woman’s husband used to be a prizefighter, and he practiced on
her.
Isn’t that horrible?”

R.J. put her head on the pillow, not really listening to Dinah’s words, just the sound of her voice.

“And then Carmen said to me: ‘She’s my biggest customer, because she figures what she doesn’t have in a nose, shell make up
for with eyes.’ Can you imagine? We were
both plotting. Two holes in her face, above her lip. It gives her a serious disadvantage in a horse race.” Dinah laughed.
“And then after that I met the girls in the Valley at Jdna. Marcy bought the cutest white T-shirt with big green parrots on
it, and Marge got it in black, and…” By the time Dinah had finished describing all the clothes she and her daughters had bought
on their shopping spree, R.J. was asleep. When she awakened, this time at six, with the receiver in her hand, she wept. David,
she thought Not you. Before she left for work she called his apartment again and got the machine. Then the office.

“Is he out of town?” she asked, hoping the secretary wouldn’t hear the begging in her voice.

“I gave him your message” was the reply. “I’ll tell him that you called again.”

“So, Mom, did another one bite the dust?” Jeffie asked. He was still awake when she arrived home late from work.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” R.J. flared. Then she realized she was talking.to her son, someone who had been hurt more
than she had by her crazy, unruly life. She knew she couldn’t get away with telling him that David had been very busy lately
and hope that would be enough. She could see by his expression that he was deeply concerned.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I think our differences finally caught up with us. I think they became very apparent to David,
because he seems to have…” The next word seemed so dramatic she could hardly get herself to say it: “disappeared.”

“Forever?” Jeffie asked.

“It’s starting to look that way,” she said.

Jeffie thought about it, then sighed.

“I’m sony,” she said.

“Me too,” he said.

Every day there seemed to be a navy Jaguar not too far ahead of her at a traffic light, but with cars in between, so she couldn’t
see the driver or if the license plate was
RAINBOW.
Goddamn rainbow. That was the red herring that had made her think David would be different. The one. After she’d made fun
of Dinah for being of the “Someday My Prince Will Come” school of thought. Oh, God. There was a navy Jaguar now, pulling into
the parking lot at the network. Why would it be David at the network building? Well,
maybe
it could be. Maybe he was back from wherever
he’d gone and he was coming over to her office to see her to tell her why he’d stayed away. Instead of calling, he wanted
to tell her face to face. How did she look? She pulled the rearview mirror toward herself to check. Fine. Not enough sleep,
but fine. And he would get out of his car, and she would get out of her car, and they would walk toward one another and… She
put her foot on the gas, raced around the corner, and just missed colliding with a red Mercedes that was coming around the
other way.

“You asshole,” the blond woman who was driving the Mercedes hollered, and screeched out of the way, then kept driving. R.J.,
nerve ends screaming, put her hand up to cover her mouth. “David,” she said out loud. “Don’t do this,”

She could see the navy Jaguar in the distance. It had parked and now its driver emerged. It was Selma from program practices.
R.J. remembered now that Selma’s husband had bought her the car for Christmas.

It was tape day, and there were a few last-minute changes that had to be given to Patsy, so after R.J. put her purse in her
office and checked for messages, she went down to the stage to Patsy’s dressing room. The makeup man was taking a few last
passes at Patsy’s false black lashes with his mascara wand when she walked in. I’ll make this fast, R.J. thought. She wanted
to stay out of any conversations with Patsy except for the necessary ones about the show.

Patsy waved into the minor at R.J.

“Hiya, dariin’,” she said,

“Pats, we’re taking out the joke about Freddy’s mother, so when we come back from the commercial, instead of saying—”

“Oooh, honey,” Patsy interrupted, elbowing the makeup man out of the way and craning her neck to look back at R.J., “if I
was to guess, I’d have to say that Mister Loving-and-there-for-you might be given’ you a hard time. You look like garbage.”

“Thanks, Pats. Anyway, Freddy doesn’t like the joke about his mother, so if it’s all right with you—”

“Well, I guess I know what I’m talkin’ about after all. They’re all a buncha pig shit. Only the pig shit comes wrapped in
different packages. Cowboys. Good-lookin’ redheads. But they’re all the same.”