Sugar Time Read online

  That was a non-starter, even when I caught sight of myself in the mirror and wondered who that old lady in there was: It couldn’t be me—inside, I was still a girl. Frances used to say “After a certain age a woman should only look from the neck down, otherwise she’ll scare herself to death.” When I turned 45 she said I shouldn’t get on top anymore when I had sex with a man, so one night Hallie and I took the big gilt-framed mirror off her wall and set it on the coffee table. We looked down at our reflections and were horrified: “Oh shit,” said Hallie,“she’s right.” Knowing Frances always was when it came to things like that; I made an appointment with a plastic surgeon the next day.

  When I went for my physical for the insurance bond, I didn’t mention my “condition,” as Jessie insisted on calling it. Why bother—stress wasn’t just a by-product of the job, it was the job, and if the network or studio found out about the octopus, they’d cancel my contract. At least I didn’t have to wonder if the reason Alex was being so inattentive was that he didn’t want a woman who had a condition—since few men would, especially someone who could be the poster boy for Outside or Men’s Health, I hadn’t gotten around to telling him about it yet.

  If I could just get through the next few months, get the series running smoothly and picked up for a second season, I’d slow down and take care of myself, I promised the hag who lived in my bathroom mirror. Until then, I’d get pink bulbs for the light fixture.

  “What about making Robin the show runner?” Jessie suggested. I hadn’t noticed my daughter watching me from the top of the stairs as I struggled up them. We’d knocked off early that day, and I hadn’t seen Rosie since she started cutting teeth. “You can’t keep this up, Mom—it’s killing you.”

  “Robin’s good, but she’s not that good,” I said. “Besides, she’s much too young for the job.”

  “That’s ridiculous, she’s almost as old as you were when you did Going It Alone. And you said yourself she saved the pilot.”

  “She stood in for me on the shoot for ten days. That’s not the same thing as running a series.”

  “I stand corrected. The point is, you shouldn’t be working this hard.”

  “No, the point is, if she takes over, what do they need me for?”

  “Your ideas, your vision, your creativity. Why don’t you just write the show and let her run it?”

  Why not, indeed? It wasn’t unheard of—plenty of the credits you see on TV series, the ones that say “created by,” belong to the person who dreamed the show up, ran it for a season or two, and then went on to the next project. Sometimes they continued to write for their shows, even direct a few episodes, but once they tired of the daily grind they were happy to pocket a smaller piece of the action—which by anyone’s standards except Hollywood’s is still way above the poverty line—and do something else or retire to Palm Springs.

  “Not yet,” I said. “Maybe after the next show. Or the one after that.”

  Once a series is up and running a show runner’s like an air traffic controller. But before that it’s more like being a test pilot—if there’s a flaw in a part of a system or you’re not paying attention, you can crash and burn. And I wasn’t paying attention the way I should have been because Alex was taking up way too much room in my head.

  I hadn’t seen him in nearly two months—worse, even though he was calling more often these days, he never said he missed me or that he wanted to see me. And every time I thought about bringing it up, something stopped me—Frances’ conditioning, no doubt.

  “What is it you want?” asked Peggy.

  I leaned back in my Aeron chair and stretched my legs out on the desk. “I want to be with him,” I replied, louder than I realized until Robin, who was standing outside my office talking to one of the interns, craned her head in my direction to see who was in there with me. I waved her away and got up and closed the door.

  “Then either ask for it or don’t. Just don’t expect me to keep listening to you bitch and whine about it,” Peggy replied.

  “Is that the way you talk to all your patients?”

  “Damn straight. If I wanted to drown in their misery, I’d still be a therapist. But you’re not my patient; you’re my ridiculous girlfriend who still believes, deep down, that if she has to ask for something from a man, it’s not worth having. Which is horse pucky, especially when the man is Alex. So either take the risk of being rejected—which is pretty slim, in my opinion—or shut up about it,” she said, and hung up.

  That night I called Alex and told him I missed him and I wanted to see him.

  “I’m really glad to hear it,” he replied, sounding happy and relieved at the same time, which was exactly how I felt. “I’ve missed you like crazy.”

  “You might have mentioned it.”

  “You said you were working like a lesbian. I don’t know what that means, exactly—”

  “It means you have to work twice as hard to get half as far,” I said, “even in Hollywood where there are more gay women than anywhere in the country except maybe Northampton.”

  “I thought you didn’t need any distractions.”

  “You’re not a distraction,” I said. “Well, you are, but in a good way. How does next week work for you? The show is shooting in Vegas, they can do that without me—should I come up there?”

  “You sure you can get away?”

  “Robin can handle it. I’ll just tell them I’m taking some creative time—that’s what writers say when they’re doing anything else but putting words on paper. Getting grist for their mill.”

  “I’d be honored to be your grist. Or your grinder, even. How soon can you get here?”

  I put in a one-day appearance on set in Vegas and then I took a bunch of incomplete scripts and outlines from the writing team as if I actually planned to work on them and flew to Seattle the first Tuesday in August. Alex and I were like two kids playing hooky from school—he checked in at the office by phone every day, the way I did with Robin, but mostly we forgot about work. We did the things tourists do in Seattle on those glorious days in midsummer they think about when it’s snowing in Sheboygan or steaming in Orlando and they wonder why they don’t just pack up and move west. We picnicked in the arboretum and the Japanese gardens, we swam in the Lake, we went to a Bonnie Raitt concert on the grounds of the Ste. Michelle winery, we cruised the Sound at dusk on an old fashioned tall ship and poked around the public market, where we watched guys in long white aprons toss salmon back and forth among themselves and play to the crowds that clapped and cheered them on. “They’ve been doing this act for a long time, they even wrote a motivational book about it,” Alex said. “They made a presentation to us a couple of years ago for a team-building seminar they put on—they’re big in the corporate training market, they probably make more money doing that than selling fish.”

  “Would you hire them?”

  He snorted. “Not unless I owned a fish throwing team.”

  We went to the new public library I didn‘t get to see when I was in Seattle the last time because of the octopus and to a rock and roll museum that Frank Gehry designed for a software billionaire who spent a chunk of his fortune on his teenage obsessions—music, professional sports, rocket ships and science fiction. “He started Microsoft with Bill Gates,” Alex told me. “Then he was diagnosed with a terminal disease, and he walked away from the company. When they cured it, he didn’t want to go back. Instead, he did this, and a bunch of other crazy things.”

  “All his childhood fantasies come true,” I said. “Like the character Tom Hanks played in Big.”

  “Was that a movie?” asked Alex, reminding me once again of how different our frames of reference occasionally were. Except for news and sports, he rarely watched TV, and he hadn’t been to the movies in years. On the other hand, he read voraciously, books as well as newspapers, although he regularly threatened to cancel his subscription to the New York Times.

  “I never thought I could be with a Republican,” I said one morning
when he was fulminating over a Paul Krugman column excoriating the administration’s economic policy.

  “Might that be a deal-breaker?” he asked good-naturedly.

  “It would depend on the deal,” I said. “Are you finished with the book review yet?”

  One afternoon we went across the Sound to Port Townsend, where a couple from Texas who’d cashed in their options when Alex’s first successful start-up paid off were raising two adopted little Chinese girls and restoring a graceful old Victorian house overlooking the harbor. I met some of Alex’s other friends that week, too—the architect who’d designed his loft, a guy who hand-built custom kayaks and lived on a houseboat with a woman who restored old photographs and her teenaged son, the artist who’d done the Dalmatian coffee table. One day we had lunch with Kate, a lawyer Alex had mentioned a few times in that off-hand way that let me know there’d been something between them once. I could see why—she was quick, smart, and attractive, and they seemed to enjoy many of the same pursuits, like climbing and skiing and sea kayaking. She dropped a few references to places they’d done those things together but since she was getting married in September and invited me as well as Alex to the wedding, I liked her in spite of that. And when Alex offered his congratulations on her engagement, I couldn’t detect even a hint of regret in his voice.

  The only real disagreement we had that week was about my smoking. He was a terrible nag about it; once he said, “If I’d known when I met you that you were addicted to cigarettes, I’d never have—” but stopped before he finished the sentence. I didn’t blow smoke in his face, or even light up in his presence, but the more open he was about his displeasure, the more pissed off I got. One night when I got into bed he sniffed audibly and said, “You smell like an ashtray.”

  “Oh, please—I had two drags a half hour ago, out on the deck. And I just brushed my teeth.”

  “Well, I don’t want to sleep with you until you take a shower and wash your hair.”

  “Why don’t I just go to a hotel?” I replied hotly.

  “Suit yourself,” he said and turned over.

  I stared at his back for a while, and then went for a long walk, smoking every step of the way until I was dizzy and my throat was raw. When I went back to the loft, hoping to find Alex pacing the floor worrying about me, he was fast asleep, which made me even madder. I slept in the other bedroom; when I woke up the next morning, Alex was gone. He’d left a note in the kitchen next to the coffeemaker: “Had to go to the office to sign some papers—back before noon. Hope you slept well.”

  We didn’t talk about it again, and that night when he unwrapped the short silk kimono I wore to bed he had the good sense not to say anything about the nicotine patch on my right breast.

  Except for that, it was a wonderful few days, different from the island or even our time together in New York—more real, in a way. Seattle wasn’t New York, or even L.A., but it was easy to imagine living here, and being happy. Not now, but maybe some day.

  It was over a month before we got together again. He came to L.A. for a weekend, but it wasn’t until I picked him up at the Ontario airport that I realized he’d flown his own plane down.

  “Are you nuts? The weather’s awful—it’s been this way for days, nothing but wind and rain from here to there. Why didn’t you fly commercial?”

  “I’ve flown through a lot worse,” he said, more jauntily than he looked; his face was pale and he was moving more slowly than usual. “Besides,” he added, managing a grin, “what’s life without risk?”

  I steered us onto the freeway, enjoying the throaty hum of my new wheels, a sporty little red Lexus convertible the studio had leased for me. Alex dozed most of the way home: “Sorry,” he mumbled as I pulled into the driveway, “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  I showed him around the house, which had been smartened up a bit at Hallie’s urging: “You want to be ready to put it on the market by spring,” she said, and when I protested that I didn’t have time, she got the women who stage her real estate listings to do it all for me; I went on location with the show for a week, and when I came back, the place looked too nice for a tear-down. “It’s just paint, plants, window treatments and a couple of coats of Swedish finish on the floors,” she said. “Nobody who can afford it would actually live in it the way it is—no offense, but if they didn’t tear it all the way down they’d probably gut it. Don’t think of this as redecorating, just the first step in marketing.”

  It was still enough to invigorate my nascent nesting instinct. Before Alex came down I ordered a new mattress and spent an hour at Bed Bath and Beyond picking out new bed linens. The day of his arrival I got up early and marinated the lamb in olive oil, mustard, rosemary and garlic, made a leek and onion tart, peeled some little new potatoes and set the table. By the time we ate he looked better, but he only picked at the dinner, and a couple of times he excused himself to use the bathroom. “It must have been that burrito I ate coming down,” he said.

  The rain had stopped so we took Tory for a walk before we turned in. She was moving very slowly and she stumbled a lot: I told Alex about my conversation with her vet before I left New York. “He said her heart’s slowing down, that’s why she pants so much. And she’s pretty blind—see how cloudy her eyes are? Right now she doesn’t seem to be in any pain, but he said I needed to prepare myself for when I have to put her down.”

  My eyes filled with tears again the way they had in Dr. Rosen’s office. “How do you prepare yourself for that?” I asked Alex. “I’ve buried a couple of goldfish, a cat and a hamster, but I couldn’t stand losing Tory—she’s part of me.”

  “What if she couldn’t control her bodily functions? What if she didn’t even recognize or respond to you any more? Could you let her go then?”

  “As long as she wasn’t suffering, I’d keep her alive as long as I could. When you love someone as much as I love her, every day’s a gift,” I told him.

  The next morning Alex was feeling better and we christened the new bed properly, not once but twice. We went to a polo match at Will Rogers’ ranch in Santa Monica that afternoon—it was a benefit for one of Nelly’s pet causes and I’d been guilt-tripped into spending $500 for a pair of tickets, but I got to show Alex off, which made up for it. On Sunday we went to Jessie and Zach’s for brunch—Paul came, too, the first time I’d seen him in almost a month. There was a time when my kids didn’t like each other, or so it seemed to me then, but that ended a few years ago, which relieved me no end—as Frances used to say, and still does, “When I’m gone all you’ll have is each other,” which isn’t true: Jessie has Zach and one of these days Paul will find a nice girl and marry her, but when I point that out to my mother, she says it’s not the same thing: “If God forbid one of them needed a kidney, they couldn’t get it from a husband or wife, only a sister or brother.” Needless to say, my mother’s worst-case scenarios are bleaker than mine—that was one I’d never considered.

  Regardless, I was glad my children had grown to appreciate each other, and that they both seemed to like Alex. As we left the house in Echo Park, Jessie stage-whispered, “I think he’s a keeper, Mom,” and Paul said, “That goes for me, too.”

  That night Hallie had us over for dinner, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed until I realized it was nearly midnight and I had to work the next day. On the way home I sighed.

  “What was that about?” Alex asked.

  “Just the Sunday night dwindles. I wish you didn’t have to go home tomorrow and I didn’t have to go to work.”

  “Then don’t. Come with me.”

  “I wish I could, but there’s the little matter of this job I have. I won’t have another free day until forever—Christmas, at least. And then if we go to a full season, a week at the most before it starts all over again.”

  “Have you ever thought about chucking it?”

  “In the last couple of months? At least once a day.”

  “So why don’t you? Think of all the place
s you’ve never been! We could go to Africa for the migration on the Serengeti; I’ve always wanted to do that. Or get a house for a couple of months in Bali—they say it’s beautiful. And we could go to Paris in the spring—I said I’d take you there, didn’t I? Let’s do it!” His eyes danced with excitement—he was as enthusiastic as a boy.

  “And how would I fund this extravaganza, out of my unemployment check?”

  “I’ve got enough money for both of us,” he said carelessly. “It would be great…Sugar, say yes. Please. You won’t be sorry, I promise.”

  “Oh, Alex, you know I can’t. It would be wonderful, but there’s just no way, not now. Maybe Paris in the spring, though—I’d like that.”

  And that was where we left it. I lay awake after he fell asleep, thinking about what it would be like to wake up next to him every morning, spend weeks and months with him in all the places I’d always dreamed of seeing with someone I loved. And I did love Alex Carroll—if I hadn’t been certain before, I was now. But romance is all about timing, isn’t it? And right then, I had hardly any to spare.

  I was curled up in his arms when he fell asleep, and after a while Tory got up on the bed and stretched out her body next to me. Sandwiched between them, I fell asleep, my backside tucked into Alex’s and my fingers buried in her soft curls. Sometime just before dawn I woke up from a dream about Uncle Max. We were driving in his jaunty little roadster along a winding road down the side of a mountain, with a rice paddy on one side and the sea on the other. We pulled up alongside a wizened old man in black pajamas and a coolie hat, coaxing a flock of ducks across the road and into the paddy with a bamboo pole. We stopped and Uncle Max handed me a Polaroid camera like the one he gave me on my twelfth birthday. “It’s not the things you do you regret later, it’s the ones you don’t,” he said, and when I got out of the car he rolled up the windows and locked the doors. Then he drove away, straight into the ocean, while the ducks took to the air with a noisy thwack of their wings. It began to rain, a cold, drenching downpour, and I woke up to discover that Tory had peed all over the bed.