Alexandra Waring (53 page)

“Why?” Langley said.

“I don’t know,” Jackson declared, whirling around and then doing a little soft shoe over to the bar. “How about some coffee there, Lang?” he said, shuffling in behind it.

“Yeah, sure, thanks,” Langley said, digging his hands into his pants pockets and walking over. “Listen, Jack, I came in to formally apologize for my behavior Saturday night.”

“Apology accepted,” Jackson said, picking up a mug, tossing it in the air and catching it in his other hand.

Langley looked at him.

“
No problema
,” Jackson said, pouring coffee into the mug.

Langley frowned. “Excuse me, Jack, but there is a problem. And, uh, I’ve got to make it up to Jessica somehow.”

Jack was whistling through his teeth, pouring some milk into the mug. “You make it up to her by never doing it again,” he told him, looking up and handing him the mug.

Langley nodded once, accepting the mug. “Yeah, right. Thanks.” He took a sip.

“And never do it again to any Darenbrook employee so long as you live,” Jackson added, still smiling, but his voice sharp.

Langley looked at him and nodded.

“And if you have needs that aren’t being met,” Jackson said, averting his eyes and lowering his voice, “remember that there are more discreet ways of getting them taken care of.” He moved away from the bar, adding, “So if that’s what’s happening, tell me and I’ll arrange something.”

And then Jackson went on to talk about other things, leaving Langley at first unsure that he had heard him correctly. Had Jackson just told him that, if he wanted to cheat on Belinda, he would arrange it? Langley was feeling vaguely sick again, the same way he had when Belinda told him about her scholarship fund.

“Lang?” Jack said, sitting in his easy chair again. “Did you hear what I said? Jessica’s going to try and stop drinking, so Cassy wants us to be very careful with her the next couple of weeks—”

“Jessica’s going to stop drinking?” Langley said. “Why? I mean, what…?”

“Look, I don’t know what Jessica’s problems are,” Jackson said, “but I do know that if she’s at Alexandra’s because she can’t be alone and tells Cassy she wants to try and stop drinking, then I’m just going to take her word for it that she should try and stop drinking. Or do you want our talk show lady tearing her clothes off in public every night?”

Langley felt his face get warm.

In a few minutes Adele knocked and poked her head in to say that Jessica had come in, and so Langley went over to her office in Darenbrook III. Cassy was there when he arrived, sitting at one of the chairs in front of Jessica’s desk. Jessica, looking fine, he thought, was sitting behind her desk with a bottle of Perrier in her hand. He sat down in the chair next to Cassy and stammered his way through an apology for his behavior Saturday night, saying that, as Jackson had said, the only real apology he could make would be to see that it never happened again. And then he said he would never dream of compromising Jessica

“Wait a minute, Mr. Mitchell,” Jessica said, stopping him by holding up her hand. She took a sip from the straw in the Perrier and then said, “Listen, I don’t remember much about what happened—and I don’t really want to know what happened.” She put the bottle down on the desk. “And it’ was probably my fault anyway.”

“No,” Langley said firmly, shaking his head.

Jessica looked at Cassy then, and there was an uncomfortable silence in the room. Cassy cleared her throat and turned to Langley. “Thank you for saying it, Langley. It’s important that you did.” She looked at Jessica. “And it’s important that you heard it.”

“But I was so smashed I—” Jessica started.

“So you accept responsibility for what you did,” Cassy said quickly, “and Langley is accepting responsibility for what he did. And that’s the way it should be.”

Again, there was an uncomfortable silence.

“And we were very, very lucky,” Cassy said. “As hard as it is, thank God you two are grown up enough to work through this so you can continue working well together. I don’t have to tell you it usually doesn’t happen that way.”

Jessica and Langley, both reddening slightly, glanced at each other.

“Oh, God,” Jessica groaned, lowering her head to her desk. “I don’t want to be a grownup.” She covered her head with her arms. “I want to go back to Tucson so I can blame everything on that rotten son of a bitch husband of mine and have everybody pretend to agree with me.”

“I know the feeling,” Langley said.

“So,” Cassy said after a moment, patting the arms of her chair once and standing up, “are you guys okay?”

Jessica sat up, sighed and nodded. “Yeah.”

Cassy turned to Langley.

“Yes,” he said. “Thanks a lot for coming. Um, I did want to talk to Jessica briefly about something else, so if you need to go
…
”

Cassy did need to go and Langley watched her leave the room. Then he turned back to Jessica, shifting uneasily in his seat. He did not want to ask her what he was about to, and yet he knew he had to. If he didn’t do it this morning—while he was feeling so awful—he knew he might never ask. And he had to. He had to. And it scared him.

“Um,” he said, voice unsure, eyes on her desk, “I wanted to ask you about something you said Saturday night.”

“Oh, no,” she groaned, falling back down on the desk. “Don’t tell me.”

Langley watched her for a moment and then said, “It was about Belinda, something you said.”

“Oh,” Jessica said, sitting up, looking surprised. “What was it?”

Langley took a breath. “You said something about Belinda having housewife’s disease—”

“Oh, that,” Jessica said. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t any of my business. I shouldn’t have—”

“But I want to know what you meant by that,” he said in a rush. “I want to know what it is.”

“It’s not a real disease,” Jessica said, gesturing with her hand, looking a little nervous.

“But what is it? Belinda’s had more goddam doctors and none of them have said anything about—I mean, I’ve never heard the phrase before. Any you said it right away, like you knew exactly what you were talking about.”

Jessica looked at him for a long moment. Her expression was very serious. Then she dropped her eyes, still not speaking.

“Jessica—”

“I’m not sure that I want to get involved in this,” she said, reaching for her Perrier. “I really don’t think I knew what—”

“You knew what you were saying,” Langley said firmly, leaning forward in his seat. “And I want you to tell me what you meant. I love my wife!” he blurted out. He pulled out his handkerchief and held it to his mouth for a second, falling back in his chair. Then his breathing slowed, and he lowered the handkerchief, swallowed and looked at Jessica. “Did you hear what happened when she was here?” he asked her. “When she was at West End that day? After your show?”

“I heard something,” Jessica admitted.

“Something,” Langley repeated to himself. He sighed. “There is something—there’s something. And I know you know something, Jessica. Because the way you said it—”

But I
don’t
know, Langley,” Jessica said, looking him straight in the eye. “That’s just the point. I don’t know. And I don’t want to cause any problems in your marriage that might not even be there. It’s just that I thought I might know something about your wife’s mood changes.”

“Mood changes!” Langley said, holding his handkerchief to his mouth again. Then he shook his head, took off his glasses, wiped his forehead and jammed his handkerchief back in his pocket. He stood up and turned away, putting his glasses back on, and then turned back to her, holding out his hand. “Just tell me what you would do, would you? Would you, please?” He dropped his hand. “If you were me, Jessica, and you were scared sick about your wife—about the person who means more to you than anyone has ever meant to you—what would you do?” He paused and then whispered, “Tell me, please, what would you do if you were me?”

Jessica blinked several times, looking at him. And then finally, quietly, she said, “I would ask the pharmacy for a complete record of the prescriptions they’ve filled for my family.” She sighed, looking away for a moment but then bringing her eyes back to meet his. “And then I’d start looking for pharmacies I didn’t know were filling prescriptions for my family.”

37
The Strange New Life of Jessica Wright

Jessica remembered asking Alexandra to throw out the rest of her beer early Sunday morning, but she certainly did not remember asking to be taken to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. But then, Sunday night, when Alexandra put her on the phone with Cassy and Cassy said, “Jessica, sweetheart, would you like to sign into a treatment center, or would you like to try an AA meeting tomorrow and see how you like it?” she didn’t know quite what to say. (Oh, yeah, she knew what she
wanted
to say—”Are you out of your fucking mind? I was
kidding
. It was a
joke
. I just said all that last night so Alexandra wouldn’t throw me out in the street!”) But then she heard herself tell Cassy that she would like to try an AA meeting to see what it was like.

AA?
was all Jessica could think. Had her life come to this? From Essex Fells to AA? Surely national talk show hosts did not go to AA. (“Do you think AA is the right place for someone like me?” she asked Alexandra. When the question provoked the faintest hint of amusement around Alexandra’s mouth—as much as to say, “Well, dolly, seems like you’ve got the credentials to me”—Jessica muttered, “Never mind.”)

Alexandra was very keen on this idea of her not drinking for a while. And since Jessica had never dreamed of not drinking something every night and therefore had never had something to drink every night (at least not willingly, not since her first night of college, except—let’s see—hospital stays, temperatures over 102, and the stomach flu [unless it was the kind of “flu” that magically disappeared with two drinks]). And so the idea of really not drinking—absolutely not even one glass of wine—even for one day,
voluntarily
, was something of a revolutionary, if not radical, idea for Jessica.

(It had always baffled Jessica how people who did not drink had lives. What did they use as a bribe to get all the things done they had to during the day? What did they have to look forward to all day? And if they didn’t drink at night, how and when did they turn the world off? The pressure? The work? The pace? The endless demands? And how the heck did they ever have sex?)

In any event, Jessica spent her very first night of voluntarily not drinking making chocolate chip cookies from scratch with Alexandra and watching a movie on her big television. “Waring,” Jessica yelled from the front hall, looking inside the Video Access bag that had just been delivered, “you’ve got to be kidding—I’m not watching this!” The movie was
Days of Wine and Roses
.

But she did watch it. And cried through a lot of it. And—oh, brother, yes, it was true—she really liked it. And the cookies were great and the couch was comfortable and the afghan was nice and Alexandra was too and Jessica even drank a glass of milk, for Pete’s sake, and it was all very—very
Kansas
, Jessica thought. And later, after she took a hot bath, after she put on a fresh flannel nightgown, after Alexandra tucked her in again, after Alexandra kissed her good night on the cheek, she said so.

“Very Kansas,” she sighed, curling up on her side, sleepy.

Monday was a very weird day. Jessica had felt very strange when she woke up—not bad, just strange. Dreamlike. Weird. But okay. Just not “with it.” Alexandra made her breakfast and it tasted very good. They had seedless purple grapes and strawberries and blueberries with plain yogurt poured over them, topped with Grape Nuts. Jessica also had a piece of toast. And two pieces of bacon. She was very hungry. She drank a lot of fresh orange juice mixed with seltzer too. She insisted on going to work and doing her show as usual. This morning was an extremely important interview for everybody, including the DBS News international syndication group—a closed—set hour interview with Clint Eastwood at ten-thirty.

Alexandra offered to sub for her.

Jessica told her she could take a flying fuck at the moon.

And so Jessica went to work and had a very bizarre conversation with Langley, who wanted to apologize for what she couldn’t remember from Saturday night, and then the conversation turned very scary when Langley asked her if she knew anything about his wife Belinda’s problems. It was a very difficult moment for Jessica. She had no desire to tell on Belinda, to say anything about her carrying around enough tranquilizers to render half the set gaga, but Langley was so upset and she knew that if Belinda Peterson was in trouble with pills it could be the kiss of death for her—and certainly she was well on her way if her reputation around West End as periodically insane was in fact connected. And Langley seemed completely oblivious to the possibility. And so she led him to the possibility by telling him if she were he, she would check her prescriptions.

Guilt, talk about guilt! Jessica came close to picking up the phone and calling Belinda Peterson to warn her. And then she thought,
But what if she’s going to die?
And then she thought
, But so what? If she wants to zonk out on pills, that’s her business. This is America… But she’s a mess, everybody thinks she’s crazy
—
well, maybe she is crazy. Oh, yeah, crazy like me, that’s why I liked her so much. Call her before he does something and gets her pills! LISTEN TO YOU. If she doesn’t have a problem, there won’t be a problem. Stay out of it, stay out of it. Oh, God, do I feel like a drink!

So this was the shape she was in when she went downstairs to meet Clint Eastwood. Ironically enough, her feeling too numb to set much of a pace for the interview resulted in one of the best shows she had ever done. As everybody declared afterward, her getting out of his way, letting him set his own pace, had done more to bring out Eastwood’s personality than anything else she could have done. (“No offense, Jess,” Denny said, “but when you have a personality like a freight train, getting it off the tracks sure has a way of bringing the sound up on everything else.” Jessica looked at him. “For seven years you tell me I’m great and the second day I’m trying to stop drinking you tell me I have a personality like a freight train? I must have been drunk to hire you.” “You were,” Denny cheerfully reminded her. “But I hired you.”)

Showing some of the tape to Alexandra in the late afternoon, Jessica shook her head and said, “While all the world thinks I was falling in love with Clint, you’ll know that I was detoxing.”

Detoxing. A new word in Jessica’s vocabulary. Ah, yes. After the taping session, a friend of Cassy’s, a handsome black guy named Sam, came to West End to take her away to an AA meeting. On the way over, Jessica—very scared but determined not to show it—told Sam that she thought she knew pretty much what AA was all about. So she really blew it when they went into a building near Lincoln Center and she peeked into a room and saw all of these good-looking young faces in it and commented to Sam that she never knew they had acting classes here and Sam told her it wasn’t an acting class, it was the AA meeting.

Oh.

It was very strange. There were about forty or fifty people in the room and no one looked like Jessica thought they were supposed to look. First of all, they were all so incredibly healthy-looking and attractive. In fact, many of them were downright knockouts. Sam said that, because of the part of town they were in, this meeting did tend to have a number of actors and performers in it. At this, Jessica’s eyes flew back across the room to stare at a woman across the way. “Oh-my-god,” she said, “then that really is her.”

Sam smiled and tapped the cover of the book he had given her. She looked down.
Alcoholics Anonymous
, it said, and Sam was tapping his finger on the word
“Anonymous.”
“Anonymity is the foundation of the program,” he said.

“What?” Jessica said.

“Anonymity. The program works because we leave our identities outside the door. Yours, hers, everybody’s. Okay? That’s the deal here.”

Oh. And then Jessica felt the tiniest bit better about the fact that no one seemed to be staring at her. (When Jessica was not stared at, Jessica tended to worry about her ratings.)

The meeting itself was nothing like she had imagined. She kept looking around at everyone, wondering if it could be true, that they all at one time couldn’t stop drinking either. But that’s what everybody was talking about, about their drinking, about how it had eaten into their lives, about how they had tried to control it, manage it, do anything with it except stop it because life without drinking had not been something they could ever imagine as being bearable, much less fun.

The company line around the room, it seemed to Jessica, was that until they came to AA they had not realized that alcohol had robbed them of the capacity to be happy.

Huh. She could identify with that.

Some were periodic drinkers, who only got loaded every once in a great while; some were nightly drinkers like Jessica; some were day and night drinkers; there were sneak drinkers, openly drunk drinkers, rich drinkers and poor drinkers, famous drinkers and drinkers who had not left their neighborhoods for years; straight drinkers, gay drinkers, or—according to one lady—sexually indifferent drinkers. There was a Jewish guy who wanted to know how he could be an alcoholic when everybody knew that Jews don’t drink (laughter); a woman said she was Irish Catholic and that statement alone sent a fifth of the room into laughter; a WASP commuter from Connecticut said that, where he lived, it didn’t matter if you rolled out of the train on your head, cracked up your car or slugged your wife in a blackout because everybody knew that alcoholics were people who didn’t have jobs (roars of laughter); and a young woman holding a baby in her lap said that she prayed that her getting sober had broken the family curse, and that her son wouldn’t have to grow up with what she had and her father had, and his father had
…

Jessica was fascinated.

And that one message kept getting across. That every single person in the room at one time had had a drinking problem they could not and did not want to—do anything about. And that every single one of them, once they had been able to stop, did not want to go back to it because life on this side had turned out to be so incredibly different than they had imagined.

Huh.

When the meeting was over, Sam walked her back to West End and they talked. Jessica said she loved the meeting but didn’t have the time to go to AA meetings. Sam asked her how many hours had she devoted to her drinking—she didn’t have to include the hours spent
recovering
from her drinking, just the time she allocated each evening to drinking itself? And so Jessica said, okay, so maybe she did have an hour free each day.

But then she said she couldn’t get way over to that meeting. It was inconvenient, she thought, the location of that meeting. And the time wasn’t good. Sam told her that she was in luck—there were eight hundred other meetings for her in Manhattan. Jessica swallowed. “Eight hundred?” “Uh-huh,” Sam said, “in Manhattan. There’s over two thousand in the New York area.” Jessica looked at him. Sam was smiling. “And if you like to travel,” he added, “there’re about seventy-eight thousand other meetings in well over a hundred countries.”)

Okay, okay.

But what if she ran into someone she knew at AA? she wanted to know. And what, Sam asked her, did she suppose that person would be doing there at an AA meeting? Wouldn’t they be there for the same reason she was?

Hmmm. (There had to be a loophole here somewhere.)

Jessica said she just didn’t know. She had never belonged to anything because she hated rules.

Sam laughed and said, “I’m afraid none of us are very big on rules either—that’s why there aren’t any in AA. There’s only one requirement for membership and that’s a desire to stop drinking. That’s it.”

Jessica gave up and promised she would meet Sam at that same meeting the next day.

“He’s such a wonderful guy,” Jessica said that night, lying in bed, all tucked in, Alexandra sitting on the edge of it, listening to her. (Jessica waited for Alexandra to get home from the studio before going to bed. She kind of liked this Kansas Care she was getting. “If it felt safe and cozy as a child,” Alexandra’s motto was, “then chances are it will feel the same as an adult. And maybe that’s what poor little Jessica needs to feel right now—safe and cozy.” Poor little Jessica? No one had ever called her poor little anything. A monster, maybe, l
unatic, screwball, tramp…
But poor little Jessica? It made her envision a shivering little match girl, huddled in the street, in the snow—which, come to think of it, was exactly what she had felt like for much of her life.)

“But I’m scared to ask him what he does for a living,” Jessica continued.

“Why?” Alexandra said.

“I think I’m scared he’s going to turn out to be someone looking for a job or something. He looks like he could be in TV.”

“I don’t think a friend of Cassy’s would be going to AA to find a job,” Alexandra said, laughing softly.

“No. But do you know what I mean, Alexandra Eyes? Why is he being so nice?”

“You mean is he going to make a pass at you.”

“No, I don’t get that feeling at all. I would have picked that up. I figure it’s got to be something about a job.” Jessica propped herself up on her elbows. “You’re in the same racket, sort of. When was the last time anyone did anything for you who didn’t want you to help them with their career,? Or give them money, or wanted you to sleep with them, you know? When was the last time anyone genuinely gave you anything, just because they wanted to give you something?”