Breach of Promise (16 page)

Maddie had a spell there where she had frequent nightmares. She’d wake up screaming. I’d jolt out of my sleep like someone getting a cattle prod in the back and run to her room to calm her down.

One time, when Paula was off shooting her movie, Maddie screamed for me around midnight. I ran into her room and she made me get in bed with her. She buried her head in my arm.

“He’s in the closet,” she said.
“Who?”
“The bad man.”
“What bad man? Was he in your dream?”
She nodded, keeping her head buried.
“Why is he in the closet?”
“He wants all our Cheerios,” Maddie said.
That made me crack up.
“It’s not funny,” Maddie insisted.
“Why does he want our Cheerios?”
“I don’t know. He wants to eat them all up.”
“Do you want me to get rid of him?”
Nod.
“Wait here,” I said. I slipped out of the bed. Maddie put the

pillow over her head as I went and opened her closet. A little part of me wondered if there really might be a Cheerio bandit inside. “You have to leave now,” I said to the little dresses. “And don’t ever come back again.”

“No, Daddy,” Maddie said in a muffled voice. “He’s in the
hall
closet.”
“Oh, sorry.”
I tromped out to the hall, opened the closet, and picked a mean-looking jacket. “You hear me? Get out! Don’t come back, ever!”
Maddie was out of the pillow when I got back.
“Was there really a man in there?” she asked.
“What do you think?”
She thought for a long moment. “If he wasn’t, who were you talking to?”
I cradled her in my arms. “I was showing you what I’d do if there ever really was a man who wanted our Cheerios. Or anybody else who tries to scare you. I’ll always protect you, okay?”
Her little head went up and down on my chest, happily. I loved that.
I was thinking about that moment eating my own bowl of Cheerios the next morning. Ron Reid called to tell me his new address. I wrote it down, though I still didn’t know what to do about this guy. He did not seem like my father, and I was sure he never would. That hole in me was going to stay.
After breakfast I walked to Samuel French to pick up a couple of fresh paperbacks of
Hamlet,
the scene I decided to do with Nikki. It was good to be in there, surrounded by plays. Made me feel like I was still an actor. Out of work, without pay. Still hurting from betrayal. But hey, I could still say lines. I could still act.
Around noon I got a call. From Lisa Hobbes.
“This is a surprise,” I said.
“You free to meet?”

“What are we doing in the back of a used bookstore?” “Looking for
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Being an Idiot,
”

Lisa said. “By Mark Gillen.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Lisa had asked me to meet her at Book Central in North Hollywood, a big used-book store that does a heavy trade. It was housed in a two-story building off Lankershim, near Blockbuster Video. Inside it was all wood and musty smell. So the meeting with Lisa seemed clandestine and mysterious, something out of a forties film noir.

I found her in the back corner of the first floor, actually wearing dark glasses.

The first thing she said when she saw me was, “You almost got me canned.”
“Nice to see you, too.”
“You hear what I’m saying?”
“What did I do?”
“Barbara saw you.”
“DiBova?”
“No, Bush. Of course DiBova.”
I slapped a shelf of books, hitting, I think, a volume of Victor Hugo. “I’m sorry. All I was looking for was a reason.”
“Yeah, with this big chip on your shoulder. So Barbara asks me what you wanted. More to the point, she asked me what I was doing out there talking to you.”
“What, did she think I was packing heat or something? Going in to shoot up the place?”
“You never know. You’re the actor. You’re one of the crazy people.”
“So what did you tell her?”
“I told her you’d left your SAG card with me and came to pick it up.”
“Why did you do that?”
Lisa put her hands on her hips. “To save your sorry butt, that’s why. You are on thin ice right now. You can’t afford to make things worse.”
“What do you mean
thin ice?”
“The whole Paula thing. You’re not exactly smelling like a rose.”
“Is that the reason they decided to stab me in the back? They were so afraid of bad publicity?”
“That’s part of it.”
“Excuse me. Didn’t Barbara DiBova do time at Betty Ford? That didn’t seem to hurt her any.”
“She’s a name. She’s a player. Drug rehab can be a career boost if you’ve got game. But who are you?”
“Thanks again.”
Lisa sighed. “Look, sorry. I’m blunt. You know me. I always have been. But I like you, Mark. Would I be here if I didn’t?”
“You said that was only part of it, the publicity. What else?”
Lisa ran her finger along the spines of some books. “Don’t say anything about this, okay? Don’t tell anybody, ever, we had this conversation.”
“This is starting to sound very
All the President’s Men.
“If this ever gets back to Barbara, I’m toast.”
“You’re really serious.”
“Yeah, genius, I am.”
“What’s wrong?”
An old man with a crooked, wooden cane and smelling of Old Spice and older wool, shuffled to the shelf next to us. He put his nose near the titles and started scanning. He was obviously going to be awhile.
Lisa motioned for me to follow her to the staircase at the back of the store. They creaked like a haunted house as we went up. We were in paperback fiction now, mysteries. Which seemed appropriate.
I was busting at the seams. “So what is going on?”
Lisa spoke in a low voice. “I hard-copy Barbara’s e-mails, the ones she marks. And then file them by date. Other ones she marks for trash. Usually, she trashes them herself. Sometimes not. It depends. I’m supposed to go through the trash at the end of the day and make sure nothing was put in that wasn’t marked for it. Doesn’t take long. Just a quick scan. Last Monday I did that and saw one in the trash with the subject line
Seven.
Which obviously meant
Number Seven.
”
“And?”
“I read it. Barbara has a special file for
Number Seven,
and I thought she’d put this in by mistake. Turns out this e-mail was about you.”
My throat started to close. “From who?”
“Leonard Remey.”
No way. Remey was a big-time agent at AEA, one of the top three agencies in town. Paula’s new agency, in fact. “Remey was talking about
me?
“I have to assume.”
“So what was in the message?”
“All it said was, ‘Re: our conversation. Yes, has to go. Nonnegotiable.’”
“How do you know that was about me?”
“Who else from
Number Seven
was let go?”
The sea of books around us actually started to undulate in my vision, like some old movie effect where a guy’s about to pass out. “But why? Why would Leonard Remey be sticking his nose in my life?”
“I have a theory.”
“Tell me.”
Lisa sighed. “You know who he represents?”
“Yeah, Paula and a lot of big names.”
“Including Antonio Troncatti.”
Boom. I felt like I’d been jabbed in the face by a heavyweight. “You think Troncatti is behind my getting axed?”
“Look at the way it’s worded,” Lisa said. “It sounds like DiBova checked with Remey on whether you really had to go.”
“And he said yes, nonnegotiable. And DiBova caved.” My voice slammed into the shelves.
“Of course she caved. It goes back to what I’ve been saying. In the pecking order, Remey is up here—” Lisa put her hand up high—“and Barbara is here.” She put her hand about shoulder level. Then she dropped it to her side. “And you’re here. Remey has a lot of people Barbara wants to work with, so she’s not going to fight him when it comes to an actor who has yet to break into the big time.”
Emotions flared around inside me, like random fireworks. If this was all true, and it sounded too smarmy not to be, it was Antonio Troncatti himself who had cut the legs out from my career. My head started to feel real tight.
“I had to tell you.” Lisa put her hand on my arm. “I think it stinks. But I wanted to tell you so you knew what you’re up against. If you want to keep acting, you need to walk away from this thing with Paula as quietly as you can.”

5

“Calm down,”
Alex said.
“Don’t I look calm to you?” I held two fists up in the air. “I want you to practice keeping that anger in check. You’re

going to be sitting in front of another evaluator and the judge, and

I don’t want you to come off as Genghis Khan on steroids.” “At least he had the satisfaction of killing his enemies.” “You don’t know for sure what happened.”
“It all makes sense.” Pacing up and down in front of her desk,

I felt like a panther or some other beast of prey—say, a Hollywood agent? I wanted some raw meat to tear apart.

“You got some secondhand report that is easily deniable,” Alex said. “It’s not going to do us any good.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying that! Troncatti calls up his agent and has the agent sabotage my career. What are we talking about here?”
“We’re talking about a very rotten deal, but one that the court is not going to consider.”
“How can that be?”
“Because unless you have some evidence to back it up, this will fall under the category of depraved vituperation.”
I just stared at her.
“What that means,” Alex explained, “is that so often in divorce proceedings one side accuses the other side of some big, nasty thing in order to gain the upper hand. Much of the time it’s just made up, and judges know that. They don’t want to sit up there and listen to accusations flying back and forth unless they can be backed up somehow.”
“What if Lisa testified?”
Alex shook her head. “She doesn’t want to lose her career, does she? Even if we force her on the stand, she might deny the whole thing. And even if she didn’t, you know what Bryce Jennings will do to her on cross?”
My mind conjured pictures of Lisa sobbing uncontrollably, in true TV-lawyer-show fashion.
“What I’ll do is shoot off a letter to Jennings,” Alex said, “that tells him in perfectly vague legalese that we know something’s been going on and it better stop. Yakkety yakkety yak. No threats, just a little wake-up reminder. And it’ll become part of the file. Meantime, you concentrate on being a model citizen and be ready to stay perfectly calm when you see Maddie on Tuesday, and the evaluator sometime next week.”
“It won’t be the same one, will it?”
“It might.”
“She looks like a teenager. How can I talk to her without thinking about zits?”
“Like the cool, calm, rational person I see before me now.” She looked at my hands. “Unclench your fists, please.”

I had to keep visions of my hands around Troncatti’s neck from consuming me. Once more, acting was my way out.

Nikki met me at the church, where we could rehearse in the little theater. She came in looking like she’d just had makeup put on by the staff at Max Factor. Beautiful.

“I was reading for a mascara commercial,” she explained. “Looks like you got the part.”
“We’ll see. You know how it goes.”
Did I ever.
We sat in the audience seats and I threw her a fresh copy of

Hamlet.
She smiled. “Boy, you are ambitious. Why Shakespeare?”
Because I fell in love with my wife talking Shakespeare.
“They don’t do much Bill Shakespeare around here anymore,”

I said.
“We do,” Nikki said. “We’re planning a production of
As You
Like It
for next season.”
“No way.”
“Way.” She laughed. “Why is that so astounding?” “It’s not. It’s just sort of a coincidence.” I didn’t explain that
that was the very play Paula and I talked about on our first date.
Some things are better left unsaid.
I flipped open my copy of the play. “I thought we could do the
‘Get thee to a nunnery’ scene.”
“Ah yes. So you think Hamlet’s insane?”
“The way I play him? Definitely yes. Typecasting.” Again she laughed and opened her book. “Where are we
starting?”
“I promise I won’t do ‘To be or not to be.’”
“What a silly question.”
“Right.
Page 35
. Start with ‘Soft you now! The fair Ophelia!
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.’”
And off we went, reading the scene. No acting, just the lines.
That’s always how you start. Let scene and character come to you
gradually.
All went well until I got to Hamlet’s line, “I say, we will have
no more marriages.” My face must have changed like a traffic light. “You doing okay?” Nikki asked.
“Yeah. No. Hanging in there.”
“You didn’t want the divorce?” She said it so simply I was not
at all offended. It did not seem like prying. It was more like a friend
asking me to talk it out. Actors tend to do that. Peel away the emotional layers to get at something real inside.
“No.” I shifted in my seat. “I wanted to stay married. I wanted
us to be a family and all that. I keep looking for something I may
have done, or not done, that ruined things. Honestly, I can’t. But
now it’s happening. I hate the whole thing.”
“You’re on the right side,” Nikki said. “God hates it, too.” “Excuse me?”
“Hates divorce.”
“So what does that mean? Does he hate me?”
“Of course not. Although some churches might make you feel
that way.”
I shrugged.
“Divorce is sometimes treated as the unforgivable sin. I’m a
preacher’s kid, remember? Though my dad didn’t do it, some
people over the years managed to elevate divorce to the level of
murder and child molesting.”
“Are you kidding?”
Nikki shook her head. “What was so sad about that is since
there is no-fault divorce law, a party can be perfectly innocent and
still get the scarlet letter—in this case a
D
—stitched on his shirt.” “Great. Get the tar and feathers ready.”
“You’re not that far off. Many Christians would actually say you
are just as guilty as your wife. That’s so stupid it’s not funny.” Her mind seemed crisp and alive, like she’d thought this all
through deeply and it meant something to her. “So you’re really a
preacher’s kid, huh?”
“Yep.”
“Know your Bible pretty well?”
“Oh yeah. You want me to tell you the names of the Bible
books, in order?”
“Some other time, maybe.” I paused, feeling like she and I
were together for a reason more than just doing a scene. “So what
would you, as a Christian, advise me to do now?”
Nikki paused for a long moment, treating the question seriously. Then she said, “Forgive.”
The word blasted out at me like mace spray. “Forgive? Paula?
For having an affair?”
“I know it sounds crazy.”
“Yeah, it does.”
“But God has a reason for it.”
“And that would be?”
She patted her chest. “To keep you from being eaten up
inside.”
I shook my head. “That does not make sense to me.” “Me neither,” Nikki said. “But I finally figured out it’s better
to obey God than wait until you’ve got it all straight in your mind.
Remember what Jesus did on the cross? He asked God to forgive
those who were executing him.”
“Let’s get back to the scene,” I said.