Sugar Time Read online

  It was Jessie’s only brush with the law. As far as I knew, the only illegal drug in the house was my own small stash of pot, which I hid so cleverly after I smoked it that I couldn’t remember where it was the next time I wanted it. I’d never tried anything stronger than gin when the first man I slept with after Ted left offered me a joint: I don’t know if Stan was, in fact, the greatest lover I ever had, but he remains that way in my mind. The memories of our lovemaking, even twenty five years later, still make me wet—while some women conjure up fantasies of sex with mysterious strangers or even movie stars, my imagination must be lacking, because it’s Stan I feel inside me, his tongue, his fingers and long, skinny uncircumcised cock I imagine when I masturbate, which I do with the same regularity that I check my breasts, which is to say whenever I think of it, maybe once a month, and for similar reasons, which can be boiled down to use it or lose it.

  I had my first real, scream-at-the-top-of-your-lungs, no-doubt-about-it orgasm with Stan. It was as if I’d suddenly been let in on a secret I didn’t know was one; all those years with Ted and the few others before him, I thought I was getting steak, and it turned out it was only hamburger after all. How much of the ecstasy was due to Stan’s considerable talents in the bedroom and how much to the dope still isn’t clear, but sex never took me by surprise in quite the same way it did that first night in bed with him, and since pot is a lot easier to acquire these days than multiple orgasms, I’ve never entirely stopped using it.

  The last man who rented the studio wasn’t gay, and in time he became a lot more than a tenant, but not quite enough. John moved out a few months before I moved back to New York—the two situations weren’t unrelated—and by then I didn’t need the extra few hundred dollars a month, so I left it vacant. I store some clothes here I’d never wear in New York—for one thing, they’re not black—and whenever I’m in L.A. to make the rounds or see the kids I stay here. But this time Jessie needed me, so I whistled Tory out of both our reveries, put the sunroof down on the Beemer, and headed into the setting sun.

  By the time I arrived at Jessie’s, she was in full Poor Me mode. True, the last couple of months of pregnancy aren’t much fun—an alien being has taken over your body, your mind is all but gone and your moods are at the mercy of your hormones. But as I looked at my beautiful daughter in the full bloom of a much-desired pregnancy, being danced attendance upon by a husband she’d described to me even before I met him, as “every Jewish mother’s wet dream,” I felt more impatient than sympathetic.

  Still, I flipped into mother mode, cooking and cleaning and running up and down stairs, bringing her meals and magazines and videos, giving her sponge baths and debating the merits of names I fervently hoped would slip her mind when the baby arrived (although “Hosannah,” which I ridiculed when she first mentioned it, began to grow on me, which probably means I’ve already been in California too long).

  I have been single for twice as long as I was married—still, living with Jessie and Zach was like watching an old movie, one I’d not only seen but also co-starred in in another lifetime. Had I been as cranky, querulous and demanding as Jessie when I was pregnant? Had Ted ever been as patient and understanding as Zach? Were we that scared, that brave, that young? And how did we end up so far from where we started? I silently implored my daughter to be nicer to her husband than she was, and the couple of times he snapped back at her I absented myself, taking Tory for a walk or closeting myself in my room. It would be the nursery when the baby came, but they hadn’t gotten around to fixing it up yet; they were hoping to be out of the house by Jessie’s due date, but even though they’d spent the last three months looking, they hadn’t found anything they could afford.

  “Unless I go back to work right away,” Jessie told me. “Which I really don’t want to do until the baby’s at least two.”

  I knew this was my cue. I’d been generous with my kids—what was money for, if not to spend on the people you love?—and they had no reason to believe I wasn’t as flush as I’d once been. Ted had anted up his half of their college tuitions, even though he got off cheap with Paul, and he’d ponied up for the extra hundred people Jessie invited to her wedding, which was only fair since most of them were his clients, which made at least part of his contribution, unlike any of mine, deductible. But it wouldn’t occur to him to give Jessie and Zach the money for a down payment unless Jessie asked him directly, which Zach wouldn’t let her do. He doesn’t like Ted, and the feeling is mutual, which of course makes me love my son in law even more. Something happened between them soon after Ted’s second divorce a couple of years ago—I don’t know what it was, and neither Jessie or Zach has seen fit to enlighten me, despite my hinting around.

  Instead of taking Jessie’s bait about a house I volunteered to put up new wallpaper in the room—that was one of the few homemaking skills I’d learned at Frances’s knee, and once Jessie chose one of the sample rolls I brought home, I got to work.

  I’d forgotten what a smelly, backbreaking job it is, and by the time I finished I was exhausted. My back hurt, my arms felt like they weighed fifty pounds apiece, and it occurred to me that I probably ought to start taking the pills O’Neill had given me, except that I couldn’t find them and the druggist at the pharmacy in Westwood next to my old gym, which had in fact been torn down and replaced with a new restaurant, refused to fill a prescription written by an out of state doctor.

  On the way home from the drugstore, my cell phone rang.

  “Sugar? Just a minute for Sandro, please,” said Jeremy, his secretary, who kept me waiting for three red lights before putting Sandro through.

  “Congratulations, sweetheart—they loved the script, they’ve green lighted the pilot!”

  I was so delighted I let four cars cut into my lane ahead of me. “That’s great news, Sandro—I’m thrilled!”

  “They want a meeting tomorrow…can you make it? Sugar? You there?”

  I was, but I had a funny feeling in my chest—was that my old pal the octopus again? “Yeah, I’m here…what time?” I rummaged around in my purse, found the nitro tablets, and slipped one under my tongue. It was probably a muscle spasm, I should have hired somebody to paper the nursery, but just in case …and then the pressure eased up and went away.

  “Ten in the morning, in Burbank—they’ll leave a pass for you at the gate. You want to stop by here, we’ll go together?”

  “No, I’ll meet you there. And Sandro…thanks.”

  “Wait ‘till we get the deal signed. Then you can thank me. And Sugar…”

  “Yes?”

  “Behave yourself tomorrow. It’s not a done deal yet.”

  The surprise wasn’t what Nelly Campbell, the head of network programming, said about the pilot—“It’s perfect, we love it, it’s all there”—or even what the handful of suits and assistant suits clustered around her glass and steel desk added—“Although we do have a couple of notes on the script.” The surprise was walking into the meeting and finding Robin not only already there, but obviously very much at home.

  “I’m so glad you could make it…Robin has been telling me all about you,” said Nelly. She was one of those fit, nervous types common to the networks—body by Pilates, wardrobe by Stella McCartney, Botox and Restalyn by some Rumanian aesthetician on Melrose Avenue. “I had no idea you and she were partnering on the show.”

  “Neither did I,” I managed to get out, shooting Sandro a look that said, What goes? He shook his head very slightly—not now, it signaled.

  I’d been kicking the idea for the show around in my head for a while when I ran into Hedley Sturgis at a Ms. Foundation benefit. I’d known Hedley in L.A. when she was working with the Creative Coalition, which was just getting started then. She’d become a development exec in the network’s New York office, and she called a few days after the benefit and invited me to lunch at Michael’s. “What are you working on these days?” she asked over our Cobb salads, so I talked my idea up a little, and she expressed enough interest
for me to go home that afternoon and put the beginnings of a pitch down on paper. Robin and I had become friends by then, and I brainstormed with her over a couple of meals before I sat down and wrote a treatment, which Hedley was high enough on to send to Nelly, who commissioned the pilot. I hadn’t met Nelly before today, but since she was who I’d be dealing with, I’d come to the meeting prepared to make her my new best friend. Except that it looked like Robin had already beaten me to it.

  I hadn’t heard from Robin in a few days—actually, over a week, but I’d been so occupied with wallpapering the nursery and seeing to Jessie’s needs that I hadn’t noticed. “You know, I think I could eat something if you happen to be in the kitchen” had quickly become “Mom, I’ve been yelling for you for an hour, didn’t you hear me?” and I wasn’t sure what was going to give out first—my patience with my pregnant daughter or my walk-on in Echo Park as Mother Theresa.

  Nelly caught the look Sandro shot me and passed the ball to a tall kid with a ponytail wearing leather jeans and a black tee shirt accessorized with a Mickey Mouse tie slung around his neck like the Red Baron. He stood up from his perch next to Robin on the arm of a curved, creamy suede sofa beneath the floor to ceiling windows in Nelly’s light-filled corner office. “I think you know Kyle Ayrehart,” Nelly said.

  “Yeah, we met at that memorial thing for Jerry Orbach,” he offered, reminding me why he looked so familiar. I wrote an episode of Love, American Style that Jerry guested way back when and we’d stayed in touch over the years. The service was top-heavy with celebrities as well as every actor who’d ever played a dead body on Law and Order, all working the room. Robin had exchanged air kisses with this kid and introduced us: “Kyle and I are old friends from Brown,” she said, and after a tenth of a second of eye contact he looked over my head for someone more deserving of his attention. “He’s in business development at ICM,” she told me as he brushed past us; since that can mean anything from delivering the mail to doing deals, I didn’t pay much attention.

  As it turned out, I should have. “Kyle represents some talent we think might be right for the pilot,” said Nelly.

  “And Robin, of course,” Kyle added.

  She didn’t look me directly in the eyes when Kyle said that, but she didn’t seem embarrassed, either, just confident, like she owned the room, or at least had a second mortgage on it.

  I was completely caught off guard. Why did Robin need an agent, and when had she become my partner? The show was my idea, the pilot was my creation, and what I’d paid her to do on it was work for hire—very well paid work, as a matter of fact.

  “Yes, well, we’ll have to work that out, won’t we?” Sandro said to Kyle, and then, to Nelly, “I think this is great, just great, Sugar’s going to bring this one home for you just like she did with Going It Alone, we can iron out the details later, but the first thing is, she’ll take your notes and work them into the polish—what do you think, a week, ten days, Sugar? And we’re already looking at the casting, we’ve got some great ideas, love to talk to you about them, Kyle, always glad to see you.” And he hustled me out of Nelly’s office before l could get in another word, which was probably a good idea, since the ones I was holding back began with “mother fucking” and ended with “cunt,” which for my money is the worst thing you can call another woman, even if Vagina Monologues did give it a PC label.

  Robin and Kyle stayed behind in Nelly’s office while Sandro steered me down the hall and into the sunlight—I was disoriented, the way you are when you come out of the movies in the middle of the afternoon, surprised that it’s still daylight. “Remember the one block rule,” he warned, and even though I know better than to rehash a meeting or criticize a play or movie till you’re out of hearing distance, I fumed silently until we got to a coffee shop far enough away from the danger zone so no one could eavesdrop on our conversation—not that anyone in the business would be caught dead there, it wasn’t even a Starbuck’s.

  “What does Nelly mean, partnering with Robin? She’s my fucking researcher, for Christ’s sake! When did she acquire an agent? Doesn’t that kid work in the mailroom? And what kind of notes are these, anyway?” I tossed the pages Nelly’s assistant had handed me on my way out the door on the table after skimming the first couple of comments—the only thing that really registered were the neatly paired names on the oversized “From the desk of Nelly Campbell” Post-It slapped on the first one—“Kane/Westfield Script.”

  Maybe Robin had been more of my sounding board than my research assistant while I was writing the script and pulling together the show Bible—still, that was not only a long way from being my partner but so far from the truth I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I couldn’t believe she’d stabbed me in the back this way. That men can be sneaky and underhanded and craven isn’t exactly news, but when a woman betrays you, it’s different—it’s like terrorism. Nothing prepares you for it, especially when it’s someone you’ve done as much for as I’d done for her.

  Here’s the back story on Robin. Think willowy, blonde, porcelain-skinned, southern, and smart—Diane Sawyer, but younger and taller, with the same knack for hiding her keen intelligence behind her baby blues so it doesn’t put people off. She has pretty impressive credentials—an apple blossom princess and a mainstay of the Winchester Hunt, a Madeira deb who finished cum laude at Brown and topped that off with the Radcliffe publishing course.

  When I met her she was laboring for slave wages at Doubleday, which loaned her to me to do the fact checking, photo permissions, copyediting and interview transcribing for Love, Lexy—all the shit work of pulling together a celebrity bio. When the book was done, she quit the publishing house and pieced together a career doing the same kind of things for other writers, plus a couple of short-term projects at Conde Nast, which likes its young things not only quick and well-connected but also thin and fashionable enough to grace its stylish halls. I knew she’d been working on a novel, too; I’d wondered if it was one of those romans a clef that hangs all the author’s former employers’ dirty laundry out to dry in the public eye. “Do you think if she ever gets it published, there’ll be some grotesque caricature of me in it?” I asked Carrie.

  “Don’t worry, you’re not famous enough, and besides, she’s got bigger fish to fry,” Carrie replied. She’s never been a big fan of Robin’s, for reasons I put down to her working class origins which express themselves in her innate dislike of the privileged class; Robin, who spends summer weekends at her parents’ “cottage” in Amagansett and winters at their houses in Aspen and St. Bart’s, is a card-carrying member.

  I’d hired Robin to research the arcane details of how detective agencies actually work and pull together some stuff for me on art theft and forgery, which was what set the story in motion. She got a nice bonus out of the deal; she met a good looking cop on the art theft squad, a change from the masters of the universe she generally favors—the last I’ d heard, the romance was still going strong.

  I’d paid her twice the going rate for what she did for me—mostly editing and typing, although since Robin and Clea, the second lead in the show, are about the same age it was useful to have someone helping me out with Clea’s cultural references and style icons. Jessie’s that generation, too, and could probably fill me in on what they listen to and the labels they prize, but these days she’s more into Mozart for Mommies-to-Be and her style is mostly Belly Basics, so I made do with Robin.

  I’d also used a few of her ideas in the bible, which is the big book for a TV series. The bible has all the details on the setting, the characters and their histories; it’s what the writing team uses so they can get inside your head without you having to tell them everything. The bible is even more important than the script itself. The characters have to be distinct enough to register, but not so obviously cloned from life that the show won’t work if you don’t get exactly the talent you have in mind, so while Amelia’s description might fit Candice Bergen to a tee, it would also work for a lot of other ac
tresses her age (and God knows there are plenty to choose from). Along with the script and the bible, I’d outlined half a dozen episodes, but I didn’t expect to write them all. There were a couple of writers whose scripts for Arrested Development and Desperate Housewives had caught my eye, and along with Nelly’s notes there were some network-acceptables she’d suggested. Of course, no offers would be made until we were further along in the process. First I had to turn in a finished shooting script, then we’d cast the pilot, and then, if the network picked it up, we’d put together a writing team.

  Robin wasn’t ready for a place on the team yet, but she was clever and original, and one of her ideas for an episode was so good I’d planned to try her out on it, since according to Guild rules, you have to give one episode a season to a freelancer, even if you don’t use it—it’s a kind of union featherbedding, the throwaway, but sometimes you actually get something wonderful, and the writer may even make it onto the team. And even if it’s not right for your show, whoever does it ends up with a little money and a spec script they can use to pitch somewhere else.