Sugar Time Page 9

  I came to Frances not for comfort—she wasn’t that kind of mother—but because she had a talent for men I would never possess; I’ve always known that. Effortlessly as breathing, she charmed them all—the butcher who gave her the best cuts of meat, the dry cleaner who pressed things at the last minute, the newspaper boy who went out of his way to place the Star Ledger on the Welcome mat at the front door instead of throwing it on the lawn. On Saturday night dances at the country club, all the men clamored to be her partner; at parties they lit her cigarettes and refilled her drinks, told her the latest gossip and jokes, while my father looked on proudly, as if it were all his doing.

  Unlike the other married women in Short Hills, my mother had men friends—not lovers, at least not as far as I knew, just men who liked her company. One was the rabbi at the Reform temple whose wife, rumors had it, had had a breakdown and was at Bloomingdale’s—the psychiatric hospital in White Plains, not the department store. Another was a slight man with a goatee who wore ascots and designed sets at the Paper Mill Playhouse. He and Frances were always re-doing one of the rooms in our house, and frequently they went off for the day to antique auctions in Pennsylvania or upstate New York. My father used to tease Frances about her fagelah, as he called him, but she said men like Donald were the only ones who really listened to women, because they actually liked them.

  Uncle Max was the most interesting of Frances’ men. He was distantly related to my father, a second or third cousin; he looked a little like Victor Mature, with those same bow-shaped lips and that wavy hair. In winter he wore a belted camelhair topcoat and a snap-brim fedora, and he drove a jaunty little dark green convertible. Uncle Max had been a captain in the Navy during the war, and later smuggled Jews from Cyprus to Palestine; according to Frances, he’d given the whole story of Exodus to Leon Uris, who never even mentioned him in the acknowledgments.

  My mother liked having company. People had a good time when they visited, not just for cocktails or card games or dinner parties, but just dropping by, the way Uncle Max did, especially Sunday mornings. He’d bring white fish and lox from Katz’s deli, and he and Frances argued over the crossword puzzle together while my father read the business and sports sections.

  I used to spy on my mother and Uncle Max. It wasn’t that I hoped to catch them in a compromising position, although that did occur to me after Mitzi Jacobson’s father bought her a new Mustang because she skipped school to go see the Beatles at the Ed Sullivan Theater and encountered Mr. Jacobson coming out of the Algonquin Hotel with their next door neighbor. I just wanted to know how Frances did it, how she managed to make men fall in love with her.

  Uncle Max was the first man I ever loved. When I was fourteen he committed suicide by intentionally driving his little sportscar at high speed into a stone wall. I mourned him not only deeply, but also dramatically—I threw myself on his grave at the funeral and had to be dragged away, wailing and carrying on and generally making a spectacle of myself. My parents sent me to a psychiatrist who told me I was suffering from a displaced Electra complex—the desire to replace my mother in my father’s affection. Uncle Max was just a stand-in for him, reflecting an unconscious incest taboo. But that didn’t make sense; since I grew out of diapers I’d known better than to compete with Frances for any man, especially my father, for whom no other woman but her ever existed.

  I couldn’t get Frances out of my head even after I got to the restaurant; as soon as the maitre d’ led me to the table and I saw Alex Carroll again, disjointed bits and pieces of her advice flitted through my mind the way they haven’t since the last time I met a guy and thought, this could be him.

  He’d already ordered by the time I arrived—“The kitchen was closing and you said you hadn’t eaten, so I just went ahead—steak is what they seem to do here, I hope you’re not a vegetarian,” he said.

  “Not even close,” I told him, “thank you, that was very thoughtful of you, I’m famished.”

  But it wasn’t until we’d worked our way through the first bottle of wine that I realized I’d forgotten my opening line; I was suddenly conscious of the sound of my own voice, and realized I’d been talking nonstop since I sat down.

  Even before the sommelier poured the wine, which had been waiting for my arrival, Alex asked all the questions. First he wanted to know how the baby was; I confessed I’d been too busy to check since she came home from the hospital: “A failure at my role already,” I said, only half-seriously, “even unto the next generation.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to make up for it,” he replied.

  I was going to ask him if he had grandchildren—or, more diplomatically, children, since men are even more sensitive about their age than women are—but he short-circuited it by asking how my meeting went and what it was about. In order to explain, I had to give him a brief synopsis of how TV shows get pitched, sold, made, and what would or could happen to mine between now and when it aired. He asked good questions, not to flatter or impress me or because he had a great idea for a television series—which is what civilians always say when they hear you’re in the business—but because he was really curious. He liked to know how things work.

  “Enough about me,” I said, “tell me about you.” (Finally, I heard Frances say in my head).

  His company had something to do with biotech data mining. “You’ve herd of the human genome project?” he asked, and I nodded. “Well, there’s a ton of genetic data out there, some of which might—probably does—hold the clue to everything from curing cancer to creating a supernutritious tomato. Storing the data is relatively straightforward, but extracting or interpreting from it is extremely difficult. What everyone’s looking for is a killer app to leverage the data into useful information.”

  “And you’ve got the killer app?”

  “Not quite. What we’ve got is a data warehouse that’s optimized for access of relationships….I’m losing you, aren’t I?”

  “Sort of,” I admitted.

  “It’s too boring to go into unless you’re a rocket scientist,” he said. “That’s who does all the heavy lifting, the rocket scientists. Quants, we call them. A lot of what I do is fly around the world trying to convince the really brilliant ones to come work for me. That, and poke around in labs and research centers where there’s new data being generated. So we’re attracting a lot of interest, especially from big pharmaceutical companies. I’m getting pressured by my board to at least listen to the offers. If the right one comes along, we’ll probably take it.”

  “And then what? Would you retire?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe I’ll do something entirely different.”

  “Raise llamas? Start a vineyard? Isn’t that what you Seattle people do after you cash in?”

  “Llamas are miserable creatures, they spit and bite, no thank you.” He held up his glass to the light, admiring the deep purplish hue of its contents. “If I thought I could make wine as good as this I’d start a vineyard, but that would take too long.”

  “A lot of good things do.”

  His eyes changed then, ever so slightly—I might have missed the light dim in them if I wasn’t looking, if I hadn’t been noticing at that very moment how pleasing his features were, how nicely they fit together.

  “Not all of them,” he said. And then, more lightly, “After all, you didn’t.”

  I laughed. “You mean I was too easy?”

  “That remains to be seen,” he said with a sweep of a nonexistent mustache and a leer that was meant to be comical.

  I’d already given him the life and times of Sugar Kane, the abridged version, and he reciprocated—born in Pennsylvania, went to Penn State, tried a couple of different careers before starting his first company in Texas, “which failed spectacularly,” he said. “Of course, that’s the way everything happens in Texas,” he added wryly.

  “What a disaster that must have been,” I said.

  “No,” he replied. “It was just a flop, like the one
after that. A plane crashes into buildings and people die—that’s a disaster.” He signaled the wine steward for another bottle. “When you work for yourself, you win some and you lose some. But at least you get to do it your way, right?”

  “Not usually. The meeting I just came from? Everyone there with the possible exception of the guy who delivered the Perrier has more of a say in how it gets done than I do. As was made glaringly clear, I’m hardly irreplaceable. There are plenty of people like me around.”

  “I doubt that,” he said.

  “You just haven’t been looking.” If you’re good at flirting, you can say something that lightly, without feeling embarrassed; if you’re not, but you’re Frances’ daughter, you say it anyway, hoping it doesn’t sound stagy and ridiculous.

  “Even if I had been, I could stop now,” he replied, and then I was embarrassed. That’s the kind of remark that I can never think of the right response to until the next day, after I’ve thought about all the things it could mean and dissected it with my girlfriends.

  He didn’t seem any more ready for dinner to end than I was. After we finished the wine we had brandy and coffee, and when the waiters began taking the cloths off the empty tables and giving us impatient looks, he walked me to the hotel entrance and waited while they brought around my car.

  “I know you’re going to be under the gun, but can we e-mail or talk on the phone until the show’s done and I can see you again?” he asked, tipping the valet and taking the keys from him.

  “I’d really like that,” I said, and he smiled again. Then he stroked my cheek gently and kissed me lightly on the other one. Opening my car door, he handed me the keys and then he leaned through the window and kissed me again, on the lips this time. It wasn’t a big production number, just a soft, promising kiss, but it was enough to send a “yes!” shooting down my spine like a bullet. When I drove away the heat spread all the way through me, and by the time I got home I was damp, exhilarated and exhausted, all at the same time.

  The weeks before we began shooting in Vancouver went by in a blur of meetings, choices, decisions, frustrations and setbacks. Casting was the biggest problem. We still hadn’t settled on the right Amelia; Candice was a regular at Boston Legal now and besides, the consensus was that we should go younger. That’s what they always say about actresses. “Don’t forget, high definition TV shows off every flaw in a woman’s face,” said our DP. “It shows off a man’s, too,” I replied, “and yet Kiefer Sutherland’s a star. Go figure.”

  Looking for our lead actress was exhausting. I spent hours reviewing reels and auditioning women who were somewhere between District Attorney and Driving Miss Daisy, as Jane Fonda once put it, even after she had all that work done for Ted. There was a brief flurry of excitement when we thought we could get Cybill; despite her reputation for being difficult to work with and the inevitable comparisons that would be made between Moonlighting and The Finders (the show’s working title, at least until they focus-grouped it), she had a big fan base, courtesy of two hit shows in television’s decade of women, when brains were more than a fashion accessory and so was a sense of humor. With Cybill playing Amelia, we were all but guaranteed a network pick-up and commitment for a season, but if I let myself dwell on that I’d never get through making the pilot.

  Cybill kept us hanging for a week before she backed out, but eventually we found our Amelia. Anne Tremont had had a promising film career, including an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for an indie movie in which she played the mother of a dying child, but since then her career had stalled. She’d had a handful of “wife of “ roles that were little more than walk-ons in forgettable blockbusters, but I’d seen her in a revival of a Mamet play in New York a couple of seasons ago and been struck by the supple intelligence and reined-in sensuality she brought to the role. I also liked her personally—she had a quick wit, a wonderfully dirty mouth, and warmth that seemed real rather than feigned.

  That was one of my good days; a bad one, two days before rehearsals were due to start, was when Kyle’s client, who’d been cast as Clea, announced that she was pregnant. She wouldn’t be showing for the shoot, but if we got picked up we’d have to go right into fulltime production, and we couldn’t shoot around her. You can get away with that in an existing series—although having Daphne obviously knocked up while she and Niles were courting wasn’t Frasier’s best season—but not in a new one. The lawyers were worried about possible exposure to a discrimination suit if we didn’t hire her anyway, since there’d been a verbal offer, but money took care of that, and we had a good alternative, an actress I’d wanted from the beginning. Chloe Padgett was the spunky younger sister in a family sitcom around ten years ago; she’d managed to avoid the usual fate of child stars, graduated with honors from Princeton, and made a couple of small, edgy films for which she’d received good notices. I was sure she was going to be fabulous, and so was Derek, our director.

  That Chloe happened to be a friend of Robin’s wasn’t entirely a coincidence—Robin mentioned her while I was mentally casting the show before Nelly bought it. She wasn’t a client of Kyle’s, which probably pissed him off, but Robin was too ambitious to let boyfriend problems interfere with her commitment to the show.

  Almost without my realizing it, Robin had become my second in command. People brought their problems to her—if she could solve them without involving me, she did, and if she couldn’t manage to contain their clashing egos, she sought my assistance. I didn’t give her the authority—she assumed it. But because it made my life so much easier I didn’t rein her in, either. Preproduction is all details and the devil lurks in every one; they weren’t my strong suit, but Robin was so organized I left a lot of them to her. We were cordial, even friendly; on the surface, at least, our relationship hadn’t changed. I still didn’t trust her, not the way I had, and with no one else to do it for me I had to watch my own back; the more indispensable she became, the easier it would be for her to fuck me over again.

  In addition to Robin, I had good producing partners; still, mistakes were made, as politicians (used to) grudgingly admit. Some were mine, some were other people’s, but ultimately I’d live or die by them—or, as Alex said in one of our conversations, “You mean live with them. You don’t die because a deal or a project goes south, there’s always another one, you learn, you get smarter.”

  “Or you don’t,” I said—it had not been one of my better days.

  “Aah, Sugar, you’ll bounce. From what you tell me, you always have.”

  We’d gotten to know each other surprisingly well in that quasiintimate way e-mail makes possible. And we’d fallen into the telephone habit almost immediately. One night he called while waiting out a weather delay at the airport in Pittsburgh. “I drove through my home town today,” he said. “Stopped in a bar I used to drag my old man out of. The same guy still owns it. I walked in and he said, hey, Alex, how’re they hanging, like it was just a few days since my last time in.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “The day I graduated from high school,” he replied. “Nothing’s changed. They’ve still got my old football jersey hanging from the light fixture. Guys I went to school with—they’re still there, too. Punching out of the mill and tanking up before they go home and take out their frustrations on their wives.”

  When he told me the first time we talked that he’d grown up in Pennsylvania, I didn’t picture a steel town near Pittsburgh. I thought he came from some genteel, Gentile exurb on the Main Line, where he’d been raised in a sprawling house with green lawns and dogs, maybe even horses. Everything about him, his manner and his manners spoke of that kind of confident, privileged upbringing.

  “Not by a long shot,” he said. “My old man and my brothers worked in the steel mill like almost everybody else in town. I always knew that wasn’t for me, and I was a pretty decent quarterback so football was my way out. I got a scholarship to Penn State and then I signed with the Oilers.”

  “You playe
d professional football? Get out!”

  “For three years, until my knee went out. Then I got a job with a medical products company in Houston. I majored in biology in college and always had an interest in science, so it seemed like a good fit. I wasn’t crazy about selling, but I liked working with doctors and scientists, understanding what they needed and figuring out what I could do to solve their problems.

  So when I got a chance to move into product management at a bigger company in the same field, I took it.”

  “And then?”

  “I met a couple of very smart researchers from UT who had a promising device that could potentially revolutionize the process of identifying genetic markers, so I raised a little capital and went into business. We had eight people on staff and our office was a garage in Austin.” He laughed shortly. “We were sheep to be slaughtered—we had no idea how to run a company. I was commuting to Houston every weekend I could get away, which wasn’t all that often.” He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “That was the first flop. And some time between that one and the one after that the marriage fell apart, too.”

  I knew his ex wife had custody of the dog—she’d also gotten the kids, two boys who were 8 and 13 when they split up. “That must have been hard on them,” I said.

  “We had a pretty good relationship until the divorce. After that, they were like strangers. Didn’t want to see me, didn’t want to talk to me…I don’t know what she told them, but it did the trick. I guess they thought they had to choose between us. Chris was always very close to his mom, plus he had that teenage boy thing going, and poor Evan, he was mostly confused. It was obvious they didn’t want to spend time with me so I didn’t push it.”