Til the Real Thing Comes Along (56 page)

After she’d checked in and tipped the bellman—even though she had carried the bag to the room herself and he had simply opened
the door for her—she looked around the hotel room, thinking about the first day she’d arrived in Los Angeles from Pittsburgh,
fifteen years before. So wide-eyed. So young. She washed her face and dried it, then sat on the bed and picked up the phone,
and when the hotel operator answered, she asked to be connected with David’s room. He wouldn’t be there. He’d be at the hospital.
But maybe. It rang many times. She counted them. After eleven rings she
put the receiver down. Then she walked over and opened the glass doors, went out onto the balcony, and looked down at the
fountains below in the front of the hotel. Maybe she’d go downstairs and have something to eat before she delivered her package.

The lobby was empty and R.J. walked from the elevator to the front desk. She would leave a message for David, letting him
know she was here.

“May I help you?”

“David Malcolm,” she said. “I’d like to—”

“Oh, yes,” the desk clerk said. “He left something for you.”

That’s impossible, R.J. thought as the man handed her a note, which she opened. David couldn’t have any idea that she was
there. He couldn’t have… It was David’s handwriting.

C.

I wanted to tell you that last night was very special for me. It’s easy to see why I proposed to you. How lucky for the rest
of my life that you turned up in Houston. I’m breaking the news to my father this morning.

David.

Oh, God. R.J. closed her eyes. This note was meant for some other woman. A woman David proposed to. And the desk clerk had
assumed that if a woman was looking for Mr. Malcolm, he should give the note to her. Breaking the news to his father. Dear
God. Blurry with despair she made her way to the elevator. The ride to her floor seemed endless. She rushed down the hall
to her room, pushed the door open, let it slam closed behind her, and sat on the bed, wondering what to do next. God, what
a fool. The real reason he hadn’t called her.
Another woman
was the reason. Still holding the envelope containing the cassettes, she moved to the tiny desk near the bed, pulled a piece
of stationery from the hotel folder, and with a white plastic hotel pen, she began several times and tore up several versions
of what she wanted to say to him. Finally she finished one that said:

David,

I made the mistake of coming here and realized when it was too late how dumb that was. Enclosed
please find two cassettes. Norman Cousins writes about the healing power of laughter. I remembered your father saying how
much he loved a show called “Joey’s Place.” A writer I know worked on that show and had these tapes. If you can get a VCR
into your father’s room, maybe they would help him.

Another friend of mine is working on a television special for the anniversary of Hemisphere Studios. Through him I was able
to assemble some dips of highlights of Lily Daniels’s films. She was more wonderful than I remembered.

The man at the hotel desk gave me a note you left for someone else. I guess it was a truly lucky mistake. The worst part for
me was to find out that instead of being too tough all along, I just wasn’t tough enough.

R.J.M.

She reread it a few times. Fine. It was fine. Not too emotional. To the point. Reasonably polite—verging on the WASP, Dinah
would have told her. She felt nauseated and sad and stupid and angry, and thought for a minute that maybe she should go and
find the son of a bitch and slap him and kick him and scream every vile thing she could think of. But instead she called the
airlines. The next flight to Los Angeles wasn’t for a few hours. She would get out of this place and wait at the airport.
Back in the lobby she stopped at the desk. The man who had given her the note with someone on the telephone. R.J. walted until
he hung up and asked her. “What can I do to you?” She left the package of tapes and the note for David, explained to the registration
clerk that she’d had a change of plans, and she checked out The doonnan gestured for a waiting taxi, and R.J. dinted in. ‘Airport
ptease,’ she said, and the taxi pulled into the traffic of the hot Texas day.

David stood in the hospital room looking out the window at the taxis and cars passing below. The new drugs seemed to be having
a positive effect Where there’s life, there’s hope. Mal had been sitting up this morning, eating a
light breakfast when David gave him the news. Now he napped fitfully, but his face had more color in it than David had seen
in a long time.

“Knock knock, everybody,” came the sweet voice of Casey, who breezed into the room. She made an apologetic gesture when she
saw that Mal was asleep. Then she put an arm around David’s waist and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“Well?” she asked expectantly.

“I told him,” David said, grinning.

“And?” she asked.

“He blessed it,” David said. “I knew he would.”

Casey emitted a joyous sound and threw her arms around David in a hug. “I didn’t have a moment’s doubt either.” she said,
hugging him. “Oh, I stopped at the desk and there was a package there for you, so I took the liberty of bringing it over.”
From her tote bag she removed the large manila envelope. It had his name on it in what looked curiously like R.J.’s handwriting.
R.J. He had tried her twice at home this morning and no one was there. Then at her office, but her secretary said that she
hadn’t been there for a few days. The envelope was open now and David looked at the contents. Two video cassettes and a smaller
envelope.

“I can’t imagine,” David said, opening the envelope.
“I
wasn’t expecting anything and I…” He held the cassettes on his lap and read the accompanying note. When he finished, he stood,
and as he did, the videotapes clattered
from
his lap to the floor. “Casey,” he said, “I’m going to leave the hospital—just for a little while, but it has to be now, so
forgive me for rushing off.” He looked at his watch and was out the door. “I’ll explain it all when I get back,” he called
over his shoulder.

R.J. stood in line at the airport gift shop with a handful of magazines.
Cosmopolitan, Redbook, McCall’s, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue.
Patsy and Freddy were on the cover of
People,
so she didn’t buy that. She would look at the fashions, read the articles, recipes, horoscopes, fill the hours until her
flight left and she could be out of here. At the counter she added a box of raisins and a bag of cashews to the pile, in case
she got hungry.

David. A man in the front of the line had red hair and
freckles and she looked long at him, actually wishing for a moment that he would turn into David, see her in line, and say
to her… Stop!
Oy vey,
R.J., please stop, she told herself. Fairy tales. That’s where things like that happened. In fairy tales. How many people
have to die, have to disappoint you, to make you stop believing in fairy tales? Isn’t it enough of a fairy tale that you started
out in life not knowing which words were English and which were Yiddish, in a household where there weren’t two cents to rub
together, and now you have a remarkable son, and you’re living in a beautiful home, with someone to help you take care of
your life so that you can work? And you’re making a career in the most competitive business there is. Why do you beat yourself
over the head because you’ve met another man who can’t cut it? Can’t be what you want. A man who tells you how much he loves
you and a month later is about to marry another woman? Read. Read the magazines. Get lost in other people’s stories. Letters
to the Editor. A column called “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”

Finally at two-thirty they announced that her flight was boarding, and she stood with all the others and moved into the line
which began edging forward to the gate. Now there were three people ahead of her, then two, and…

“R.J.”

The strong hand on her arm. She looked at it first Pale. Freckled. Then into David’s eyes.

“Wait,” he said.

The milling airport travelers were a fast-moving colorful background behind him. His eyes were bloodshot and he looked washed-out
and tired. She loved him so much and hated herself for ever thinking that coming to Houston was the thing to do.

“Thank you for bringing those tapes,” he said. “I’ll try them tonight. It’s a wonderful idea, and I know you worked hard on
them. He seems better today, but they don’t give him too long. I mean, the tapes may be too late.”

She couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say. She loved him. She hated him. She loved him.

“R.J., listen to me. The note you got was meant for Casey Baylor. R.J., do you remember who Casey Baylor is? She’s the girl
I once told you about who rejected me at the age of eleven when I wrote her a passionate love letter.”

Yes. She remembered the story. About the beautiful girl
who had dazzled him and then humiliated him in front of the whole school. That’s who it was. And now, now that they were grown
up, she was back to claim him. The unattainable goddess. The light in the airport seemed to dim for a moment. Casey. R.J.
remembered the story about how much David had wanted her. She remembered that when he’d told her the story she’d felt jealous
that she wasn’t the one David had loved passionately when they were eleven, and when she told him that, they had laughed because
they realized that when R.J. was eleven, David was three. People were bumping them as they pushed by.

“Our parents have known one another for years. Our backgrounds are very similar. She’s as deeply involved in her family business
as I am in mine.”

And she’s the right age, R.J. thought, the right religion, the right social stratum.

“Well, last night when I had dinner with her, after just these few weeks of getting to know her really well, I decided to
ask her to—”

“Look,” R.J. said, pulling her arm away from him now. “Spare me the details. You could have saved yourself a trip all the
way out to the airport to say this. I’m sorry about your father, but at least you made him and yourself happy by having a
reunion with the perfect woman.
Mazeltov.
Nice of you to tell me that. I’m sure it makes you feel as if you’re handling things properly. Well you’re not. Because handling
things properly would have been to call me when all of this started and tell me the truth, but not you. You’re a leaver. A
quitter. Someone who runs away from feelings and the truth. And the truth is that you saw me at dinner at your father’s house
and said to yourself: ‘What in the hell have I done here? This broad is not gonna make it in my family. She doesn’t impress
my father.’”

David didn’t even blink. It was as if she hadn’t said a word. Instead, he picked up almost exactly where he’d left off. “So…
I decided to ask her to let me confide in her, and she said please do, and I said, ‘Casey, there is something I need to talk
about. And that is that I am so in love I can’t see straight, with a woman I met in Los Angeles several months ago. She’s
a crazy comedy writer who has a son and she’s eight years older than I am, and she’s as Jewish as I am Christian, and most
of the time she’s a raving maniac. And even though all I want to do is be with
her forever, I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say that there’s a part of me that’s afraid. Afraid because I know that no matter
what I say or do, no matter how I wish with every fiber of me that it could be otherwise, the truth is that I can’t make Eleanor
Benning be other than the cold bigot she is, or stop my father from wishing I was with someone who is more like me, the way
every parent does.’”

“Seven and a half years.” R.J. snapped.

“Forgive me,” David said back, then went on. “‘The people I’ve known all my life—some will understand, but somewhere without
a doubt somebody will say something about Jews being pushy and someone will make some comment about her age, and you can put
money on it that one of these sunny afternoons when I take him to play golf at the club, somebody will say something hurtful
to her son and for the sake of the two of them, because I care for them both so much, love them so deeply, I’ve spent the
last weeks worrying and thinking that maybe I should step out of their lives and not bring them into a world where I know
that insult and misunderstanding is not a possibility but a certainty.’” There were tears filling his blue eyes, and R.J.
ached with the effort to hold back her own as he went on.

“And Casey said, ‘David, you haven’t changed. You’re still a jerk who does dumb things. Everybody knows that love like you’re
talking about happens once in a lifetime. And if you don’t want to regret it ’til your dying day, you’d better grab that woman
before she gets away.’ But she was only telling me what I already knew. R.J., I love you, but I don’t want our differences
to destroy us.”

R.J.’s face was stinging with heat as a voice somewhere again announced the flight for Los Angeles.

“I told my father this morning that I want to marry you,” David said.

“And what did he say?” she heard herself ask in a voice that was choked with pain.

“Exactly what you’d expect,” David answered. “He said, ‘You have nothing in common.’”

“And what did you say to that?”

“I said, ‘Dad, you couldn’t be more wrong. We have everything in common. We each want desperately to be a part of a real family.
We both long to have the kind of love and passion with a mate that our parents had with one another. We both care about children.
Want to have one or
maybe even two in our future. We want to be able to find a haven in each other from the slings and arrows of the world outside.
I could go on for days about all that R.J. Misner and David Malcolm have in common.’”

Boy, could this man say the right things. R.J. felt as if she were breathing normally again for the first time in a month.

“So what did
he
say?” She was blinking very fast to hold back her tears.

“He blessed it, R.J. In his way. By not telling me I was making a mistake. By not telling me all of the reasons I shouldn’t
do it, but by telling me in his usual manner and with his usual five words or less.”