Sugar Time Page 6

  “Will you tell me what the hell went on in there?” I asked Sandro. “Who was that masked man, anyway? I thought he was a kid in the mailroom at ICM.”

  “Not anymore,” said Sandro. “He’s the hot new boy at UTA and he reps that girl on The L Word—the slutty one. From what Robin was saying before you came in, they think she’d be perfect for Clea.”

  “Who’s ‘they?’ And what the fuck was Robin doing there, anyway?”

  “According to Jeremy she’s been out here for a week, talking up the show like it’s her baby.” Jeremy is Sandro’s pipeline to the dish on the up and coming kids in the industry. “Apparently, she and Kyle slipped Nelly a few notes of their own, including making his client the lead. And they suggested a few other changes, too—here.”

  He handed me a blue UTA binder with “Kyle Ayrehart” in little gold letters in the lower left hand corner. Inside was a “Dear Nell” letter—“Here are some possibilities you might want to consider for the pilot,” with a list of names and a handful of headshots. Another page was titled “Some Things to Think About,” which began “With Clea as the lead, we reach the all-important 18–34 market…”

  I kept reading, dumbfounded. Amelia had been reduced to a ghostly presence—and not metaphorically, either. In Kyle’s notes she is dispatched violently at the end of the first episode and hangs around in future ones, giving her daughter motherly advice, like telling her to do something with her hair and warning her not to sleep with the suave, dashing thief, described as a young Bruce Willis—“Do I have to tell you who represents him?” Sandro asked.

  “Why do I feel like it’s the Twilight Zone and I’ve just turned into Margo Channing in a remake of All About Eve?” I replied. “Who does this little pisher think he is? Excuse me, these two pishers.”

  “Look, Sugar, if it were up to me, I’d tell that jerk to go fuck himself… all those jerks. But she got the first fuck in, your little pal Robin.”

  “You mean literally? She slept with that kid in the dirty T-shirt?”

  “I don’t know if she shtupped him or not. The thing is, she screwed you. Big time. Nelly’s nuts about her. ”

  “What can I do?”

  “Well, the contract calls for one rewrite and one polish. You know, it doesn’t matter who wrote the original script, even if that’s the one they green lighted, which it is in this case. But from here on, what matters is who writes the one they shoot. So you better get your ass in gear, that’s all I can say. Of course, if you use any of Robin’s ideas, we’ll have to give her a credit.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  He shrugged. “Let me feel Nelly out. If Kyle’s sold her on going younger, you may have to.”

  “I’m not killing Amelia off !” I said hotly.

  “Nobody said you should,” he said soothingly. “Look, Nelly knows what’s going on—she told me she had a long talk with Hedley before the meeting today. But she also said it might not be a bad idea for you to work with someone who’s tuned into what younger women are like these days, and since Robin’s already involved…”

  “I’m not working with that back-stabbing little bitch! I’d rather take the script somewhere else!”

  “You know we can’t do that, honey…Nelly owns the first draft. You polish up the pilot, and if it goes, then I’ll see what I can work out. But if it goes to series, I think you and Robin are going to have to kiss and make up.”

  Jessie and I were both due at the end of the month, and it was a race to see which of us finished first.

  She was as bored with bed rest as she was when she was six years old and had the measles, but I didn’t have the time or patience to entertain her the way I did then. I knew she was scared about the birth itself—what first-time mother isn’t?—and naturally I told her the Big Lie about forgetting how much it hurt once you hold your baby in your arms. So did her girlfriends, who came to visit with their babies and regaled her with minute by minute accounts of their own experience, from the first Braxton Hicks to the final triumphant push—apparently they’d all won the natural childbirth Olympics except one, who said with a wisdom beyond her years, “I expect I’ll suffer enough for the next eighteen years, why start at the beginning?” And they all toted thousands of dollars of mother and baby accessories—I’d drop the names, but do you really care about this season’s status pram? Jessie did, though, and the stuff she ordered every day on-line or sent me to pick up overflowed the nursery, which was beginning to look like the stock room at Babies R Us.

  When she wasn’t worrying about labor and delivery she obsessed about the most statistically improbable things that could already be wrong with the baby. “Has anyone in our family ever had coloboma?” she wanted to know.

  “I had an Argentinian once, but a Colombian, no I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Oh, Mother, I said coloboma. It’s what happens when the baby’s eyes don’t finish developing. ”

  “Don’t worry, Joey doesn’t have Colombia.” We didn’t know the baby’s gender, but we’d taken to calling him that after he jumped hard enough to upset the Scrabble board on Jessie’s stomach right after I used the “j” for a 30-point triple.

  She worried about anything she might have done to harm the baby, like the X-rays the dentist took before she knew she was pregnant and something the pharmacist in Cancun gave her for turista when they went there to celebrate after she found out. “Aren’t you jumping the gun a little?” I asked.” Mother guilt doesn’t come in until your milk does. Besides, I did everything you’re not supposed to do now—coffee, cigarettes, alcohol—and you turned out fine.”

  “So far,” she said darkly. “Some prenatal effects don’t show up for years.”

  “You should get rid of her copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” said Hallie. We were standing in the shallow end of her swimming pool, pushing her grandson Max around in his floatee, which looked like a little tugboat and had a striped awning to protect him from the sun. “I read it when Amanda was carrying Max. All the things that book warns you could happen, if you read it first, you’d never get pregnant…and then where would you be, my precious darling, huh? Where would Maxie be?” She whirled the baby around in a circle, which made him laugh with glee and reach his chubby little arms up to her. “You think you loved your kids unconditionally, but when you have one of these you realize you didn’t, not the way you love your grandchildren. They don’t have to do anything to get it, they just have to be…isn’t that right, Maxie? Just be? Do bee do bee do…whee! Just wait, you’ll see.”

  “Believe me, I’m more than ready,” I sighed.

  “What’s going on? You look a little ragged around the edges.”

  “I forgot how much work it is to get a show on the air. The last time I did it I was a lot younger.”

  Hallie nodded sympathetically. “At a certain point in life we’re too old for some things, like camping out on the ground or learning a foreign language.”

  “Or pulling all nighters. Even if my back could take it, my brain doesn’t function at three in the morning any more.”

  When the kids were growing up, I wrote mostly at night, loving the quiet that settled over the house when they were asleep and I knew I wouldn’t be interrupted in the middle of a thought or a sentence. I’d hear them stir in the morning and then I’d stop and do the mother thing—make breakfast and lunches and check their homework, brush the tangles out of Jessie’s hair and find Paul’s soccer shoes. I’d drive them to school or walk them to the bus stop, still in my old sweats, and then come home and collapse until it was time to pick them up. It was years since I’d done that, but every time I took out my laptop at Jessie’s and tried to work, she needed something, and by the time Zach came home I didn’t have the energy.

  I was still on the day shift in Echo Park. I’d arrive there before Zach left for the restaurant in the morning, and stay until he came home unless Jessie had company and didn’t need me. But I’d moved my toothbrush, dog and laptop back to Laurel Ca
nyon. When you’ve lived alone as long as I have, it’s hard to adjust to the rhythms of other people’s lives, and I’ve never really been able to write anywhere except in my own surroundings. But when even that didn’t get my creative juices flowing, I hung out with Hallie.

  We’ve known each other since our kids were in kindergarten together; she’s the friend I miss most when I’m not here and can’t wait to see again when I come back. We’re still on each other’s wavelength and speed dial, even though for the last few years we haven’t been in the same time zone very often.

  Hallie is a queen among the queen bees of L.A. real estate, a far cry from the Montana girl who came out here on the back of Peter Fonda’s Harley, or maybe it was one of the Bridges boys, back in the day when all those brilliant young actors hung around Livingston or Missoula shooting and screwing and drinking and drugging between movies until the ones who’d been nerds in high school, like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, replaced them with mechanical sharks and ray guns and ushered in the era of the blockbuster. Between then and now, Hallie’s stayed happily married to a short sweet shmata manufacturer whose idea of a hot time is two scotches before dinner with his sexy, statuesque, redheaded wife, who he calls his shiksa cowgirl.

  “So how are things with you?” I asked after we’d put Max down for a nap in the shade and stretched out on the lounge chairs with gin and tonics and cheese and crackers.

  “About the same, minus the details.” With really good friends, the ones whose hearts you can see into, the shorthand is enough. Better, the same, worse—you know what it means without asking, so you don’t. Instead you reach across the space between you and squeeze her hand, and she knows you know, and she’s glad she doesn’t have to explain it any better than that.

  Somehow, on the way to the perfect life we feel entitled to for our children—the life we secretly believe they owe us—Hallie’s daughter had picked up a heroin habit, which was why Hallie was playing with her grandson on a sunny weekday afternoon when she might otherwise have been showing a newly anointed studio head or expatriate Iranian currency trader a ten million dollar fixer-upper in the flats of Beverly or a ten thousand square foot Tudor in Holmbly Hills. Heroin is one of those words like “terminal” you can’t imagine hearing in connection with your kid—it’s not even on the list of things you worry about, especially when, like Amanda, they sail through high school and college and marry a sweet guy who gives them a nice home and a beautiful little boy.

  The sweet guy had divorced Amanda and won custody of Max—“I don’t blame him, if he were my son, I’d have told him to do the same thing,” Hallie said sadly. There wasn’t much she could do for Amanda except pay for another stint in rehab, but Max needed her, and his father was grateful for her help.

  About a week after I got out here Hallie had a dinner party for me… old friends, people we’d both known for years, through marriages, births, divorces, deaths, remarriages, cross-country moves—all the rituals of our lives. The conversation turned to our kids, the way it always does, and when it got around to Hallie she went on and on about Amanda’s sister, Sarah, who’d just finished a Ph.D. in environmental studies at Berkeley and won an NSF grant to study mushroom spores in Peru.

  “That’s what you do,” she said later, after everyone left and she gave me the real low-down—the producer whose kid who turned their cabin in Big Bear into a meth lab, the broker whose son was doing time for kiting checks, the plastic surgeon whose daughter’s boyfriend had put her in the hospital twice but still refused to leave him. “You talk about the one who’s doing fine, or you brag or you lie—sometimes both at the same time. Because telling the truth—that you’re scared or frightened or furious or frustrated about your kids, that you’re disappointed in how they turned out, is just too embarrassing. And you know the worst part, the dirtiest little secret? It’s how much you envy the ones whose kids are great, not even stars, not fabulously rich or accomplished, but just okay.” Her torrent of words slowed down. “Not you,” she said. “I’m glad yours are fine, I didn’t mean you, I meant people like Georgia, whose kid just made his fifth million, and Laurie, whose daughter wrote that best-seller.”

  “Tell you what, when one of mine wins a MacArthur or finds a cure for cancer, you can envy me to your heart’s content,” I said.

  “Deal,” she agreed, and we had another gin and tonic before I went back to my studio and tried to work.

  Every writer I know has a different set of rituals to get the creative juices flowing, a different combination of space, place and atmosphere. For a long time now mine have required a city where you can order in your life, from coffee and newspapers to new sweats from the Gap to replace the ones that would walk away by themselves if you ever took them off to wash them, which you don’t—I don’t, anyway—when you’re facing a deadline. I was used to being someplace where when you get tired of listening to yourself think but don’t really want to talk to anybody, you can take an elevator down to the street and be in a crowd of people who give you the feeing that you’re still part of the human race, or conduct small commercial transactions with familiar strangers, like the guy at the newsstand who knows you want Marlboro Lites as well as the new Time Out or the woman at the dry cleaner’s who doesn’t complain when you’ve lost your ticket. An errand like that, maybe a peek into Filene’s or Nine West—when you come back, sometimes the problem’s solved itself.

  Out here, though, you have to drive to get anywhere, and it’s a whole big megillah, so swimming would have to do. I don’t know where my mind goes when I swim laps, but sometimes afterward, when it comes back from wherever it’s been, it works better. I fiddled around with the script for a couple of unproductive hours before I packed it in and went next door to the Jameson’s pool; they’d given me a key to the gate years ago and told me to treat it like my own, and since they’re hardly ever home, I do. Maybe a few laps would wake up the right side of my brain.

  I was trying to build up Clea’s role without relegating Amelia to the occasional walk-on—like Stockard Channing on the West Wing—and create a love interest, because the one thing all the suits agreed on was that Discretion Advised was “lacking sexual tension.” Actually, that was the second thing—they hated that name, too. I wasn’t particularly attached to it either, but you can drain all the air out of a promising idea while you wait for the right handle, and I knew it would come to me in time…maybe even in the pool. A little pot might nudge things along, but I didn’t have any, because since 9-11 it’s a bad idea to travel with even one little joint tucked between your bra and the under side of your breast, the way I used to. They’re patting down all kinds of people in order to prove they’re not profiling certain ones—it would be just my luck to run into some TSA type who got his kicks from feeling up women old enough to be his mother. In New York I buy pot at a bodega a couple of blocks from my apartment, but I had no idea where to get it here any more.

  I hadn’t missed it in the weeks I’d been in California. Or cigarettes, either, except for the one at night, before I went to sleep—the smell made Jessie nauseous, and even second hand smoke was apparently worse than thalidomide for a fetus. I’d lost a little weight, too, a result of reacquainting myself with the kitchen and cooking meals for Jessie that had little to recommend them except what they didn’t have—sugar, salt, or fat. Sometimes Zach brought dessert home from the restaurant, and a couple of times I gave into a midnight craving for a Pink’s chili dog, but between the stairs in their house, the laps in the Jameson’s pool, and my daily walks with Tory when Jessie was resting, I was putting out more calories than I took in.

  Without really intending to—almost in spite of myself, which is pretty stupid when you think about it—I was taking better care of myself than I usually did. When I got back to New York, I’d impress O’Neill with the new, healthy me.

  Sandro called me almost every day. “Getting anywhere with the rewrite?”

  “Not so you’d notice it.”

  “Have yo
u heard from Robin?”

  “Not really.” She’d phoned twice, leaving an 818 number, but I hadn’t returned her calls.

  “You’ve got to get past this, Sugar. At least have lunch with her. See what she’s got to say for herself. Maybe you can find a way to work it out. Nelly’s very concerned.”

  If I’d been on a roll I wouldn’t have bothered, but unless I could manage to bring the pilot in by myself, which wasn’t happening, I had to. I needed her. Even more, I wanted—no, needed—an explanation for why she’d tried to fuck me over, just in case she had one. It’s like hoping a man will tell you a lie you can make yourself believe, even when a woman answers the phone in his hotel room or you find lipstick on his shorts.

  “I’ll talk to Kyle—we’ll do a little hondling, give her a credit, a little money, maybe put her on the writing team,” said Sandro. “The important thing is Nelly wants her, she thinks she’ll be good for the script, good to backstop you if it gets picked up.”

  “What do you mean, backstop me?”

  “I don’t have to tell you, being a show runner’s plenty tough, you want someone around to do the heavy lifting. But we’re not going to get to that stage, not if you don’t give Nelly what she wants, and….”

  “And what she wants is Robin, right?”

  “It wouldn’t hurt.”

  “I don’t think this relationship is working,” said Robin.

  “My sentiments exactly,” I replied.

  Sandro had set up the meeting because every time I picked up the phone to do it myself I got mad all over again. I still didn’t want to talk to her, but he’d made it clear that as far as Nelly was concerned, that wasn’t an option. “She’s not saying you have to bring her on as a co-writer,” he told me. “Just that she has some good ideas, and you ought to listen. So go and make nice and then we’ll figure out a way to buy her off.”