Chore Whore (7 page)

A clean-cut, blond-haired host breaks into my reverie.

“Ma'am, I'm sorry, but you can't sit here. It's reserved,” he informs me.

“It doesn't have a ‘reserved' sign on it.”

“That may be so,” he says curtly, “but it is still reserved.”

“What's your name?” I ask.

“Michael.”

“Michael. There was no sign on it, so I sat down. There are other seats with ‘reserved' signs.”

He clears his throat.

“Yes, ma'am, I know, I put those signs on there and was on my way to put a sign on this one when you came in and sat down. So, this one is reserved.”

“Well, Michael, I'm not a psychic, how would I have known?”

I gather my purse and sweater, get out of the seat and walk toward the door, wondering where Lucy and I are going to sit. Everyone in the tearoom watches as Michael sweeps the table off. I brush by Denzel Washington sitting with a few executive-looking, Creative Artist–agent types. Angelica Huston sits in a far corner enjoying crumpets with two other women.

I wait in the hotel's foyer and recall walking shyly into the third-grade classroom of my new elementary school in Visalia, late for my first day. As I slid into my assigned seat, the boy sitting behind me leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “Niggers don't belong here.”

A high-pitched shriek comes from behind me.

“Miss Corki Brown!” Lucy sweeps all seventy-two inches of her fat-free body through the crowded hotel entrance. She throws her arms around me and we hug each other tightly.

“Hi, darlin'! It's been forever!”

There it is again, the slight twang. I didn't notice it so much last night, but it has returned with a vengeance.

“Hi, Lucy. I have some bad news. I tried to get a table and was told the last one was reserved. I was kicked out by that guy over there.”

I point to Michael.

Lucy drags me, lovingly, by the arm back into the tearoom. “Don't be silly, Corki. I'm sure they can do something for us.”

Lucy walks in, commanding as much attention as a slim, pretty, six-foot-tall, blonde, double Academy Award–winning actress can. She waves the scarf in her hand at Michael, who suddenly smiles graciously. Lucy rolls on, full steam ahead.

“Hi, my friend here says she tried to get a table and there wasn't one. That can't possibly be true, can it? What's your name?”

“Michael,” I pipe in with disdain.

Lucy continues with her twinge of Tennessee coming in a bit stronger. “That can't be right, can it, Michael?”

“No, Miss Bennett, I'm sure there was a huge misunderstanding,” he backpedals ferociously.

Lucy pours it on as thick and sweetly as Memphis-style barbeque sauce. “Michael, I know we don't have a reservation, but I've never had a problem here before.”

Michael guides us back to the same table where I had sat before. “And Miss Bennett,” he oozes, matching her syrupy tone, “you certainly won't have any problems here today.”

He pulls out Lucy's chair for her. I pull out my own. As Lucy turns to say hello to a studio exec at the next table, I give Michael a cold stare and mouth the words “Ass kisser!”

Slightly embarrassed, he smirks, then says to Lucy, “I'll send your waiter over immediately.”

The moment he turns away, Lucy announces, “What an asshole!”

The people around us erupt in nervous laughter and Michael shoots them a look that could carve pumpkins. I wonder if he's going to spit in our teapot.

I wait quietly for ten minutes as Lucy makes her rounds to each table. While she's doing her kissy-kissy routine with all her “film friends,” I order food and tea for both of us. My watch reads 4:41
P.M.

Lucy comes back to our table and scoots her chair over until it touches mine. She lets out a huge sigh, as if all this networking exhausted her.

“So, Corki, first off, I want to tell you how much everyone enjoyed your dinner last night. Rave reviews from all.”

“Thank you,” I say, embarrassed but pleased.

“But that's not why I wanted to meet you here now. Let me get straight to the point. Cork, after my marriage to Roger broke up . . .”

She's not going to get straight to the point, that I can already see.

“. . . well, I went out with a couple of fellas.”

Fellas?

“I mean, you know, none of them were really for me. A woman knows these things. If I meet a new man, I just know whether it is meant to be or not. For instance, I knew Roger was meant to be.”

Roger, whose last name I could never pronounce because it's French and complicated and laden with so many vowels that I can't wrap my tongue around it. Roger, who I truly liked in the beginning because he remembered me on his trips to Paris and always brought me back chocolate-covered truffles even though Lucy told him she didn't want him contributing to my gaining an ounce . . .

“Corki, what's that look on your face?”

“I'm sorry. I'm here.”

“You weren't thinking Roger wasn't meant to be, were you?”

“Oh no, he was certainly meant to be with you. I was just remembering the truffles.”

The waiter brings tea with a silver three-tiered tray full of small, crustless sandwiches, crumpets, lemon curd, jam, a small scoop of Devonshire cream and teacakes. I serve us both. Lucy stares longingly out the window. It has begun to rain, hard. The windows are becoming streaked with sheets of water.

“He was meant to be with me. He had his demons, and even though it ended like it did, we had a marriage made in heaven.”

The “heaven” only lasted six weeks. When Roger lost it one night after drinking an entire bottle of Lafite Rothschild '82, he pushed Lucy so hard that her head snapped back and caused her to be bound in a neck brace for a month with acute muscle spasms. Roger refilled the wine bottle with his own urine that he said was “almost as good as the original contents” and proceeded to drink some and pour the rest on Lucy as she huddled in the corner holding her neck, crying hysterically. It wasn't heavenly when I was jarred from a deep sleep at three o'clock in the morning by Lucy, who called and begged me to come help her. I carried my crying child out into the cold night, packed him into Betty's backseat and drove to Beverly Hills to rescue her. I calmed Roger, calmed Blaise and simultaneously washed the urine out of Lucy's hair. Their relationship ended after I caught Lucy writing in bloodred lipstick on Roger's garage door, “Make Love, Not War.” Roger's gardeners tried scrubbing it off, but the waxy, oily lipstick had already sunken into the paint job. When I drive by his house today, I still see the faded note that no one bothered to paint over.

“So, Lucy, who's the new honey?”

She leans closer. “How could you tell there's a new man?”

I scrunch my nose and giggle. “Oh, an assistant just knows these things!”

“Corki, I'm going to tell you, but you need to take this to the grave,” she says, suddenly serious.

“Lucy, unless I'm hit by a car as I leave here, the news is going to leak out way before I make it to the grave.”

“Granted, but I want to keep it private and special as long as I can. I don't want the rags getting hold of it and making it out to be just a fling for front-page fodder. I'm convinced he's my soul mate. You know how long I've been waiting for him. He's arrived.”

I look around the room pretending he's walked in. Lucy pinches my arm.

“Not here, silly.”

“Lucy, how long have you known this guy?”

She has a reputation for “falling in love” within a week and for knowing he's “the one” within two.

Lucy stares at dark thunderclouds out the window. “Oh, five, ten thousand years.”

Oh God, here we go.

“We did a past-life regression with this guy Laura Dern knew of and we identified at least three lifetimes we shared before. The strongest one was in Atlantis, where I was a slave and he was the master. God, it was so tragic and so romantic.”

My watch reads 5:10
P.M
. “How long ago did you meet him in the present life?”

“About two weeks. We did Live with Regis and Kelly together . . . as separate guests but on the same show.”

Two weeks. One week longer than she knew Roger before they tied the knot in Vegas. And about one year less than I knew my husband, Basil, before he was gone.

I suddenly remember Daisy Colette suggesting that Lucy wait a year before she and Roger got married. After that, Daisy's calls went unreturned and she lost her confidante-of-the-week status. Only recently has Lucy begun speaking to her again. I should keep my mouth shut since I need the income she provides, but I can't help worrying about her.

“Lucy, you're gonna take this slowly, right? I mean, you went straight from Jock to Roger and never took time to heal in between. I don't want to see you get hurt again. You want to bounce back slowly.”

Lucy looks at me incredulously.

“Cornelia Wren Brown, how can you say that? It's been the most intense two weeks of my entire life. I'm trusting that the Universe has brought me my soul mate and I really need you to trust me and the Universe, too. You can do that, can't you? I need you to believe in me. My mama's worried, my dad has practically given up on me, and my friends are beside themselves. Please help me with this one, 'cause I'm telling you, Cork, this one is special. He's brilliant and beautiful and sexy all in one package.”

I look down, almost wanting to believe that he will be Lucy's knight in shining armor, but I've read Dr. Laura's books about all the stupid things women do to mess up their lives and I know it takes more than two weeks to tell if he's “the one.”

“So, Corki,” she says, “do I have your blessing?”

“Come on, does it really matter if I give my blessing or not?”

“Yes, it does. It does because I'm going to need your help.”

“I'll help you. I need the work. Daisy let me go and Jock's off to France for six months. I'll definitely help you. Just tell me who he is.”

“Do I have your blessing?”

I put my hand on her forehead and lightly push her head back.

“Child, you have my blessing.”

“It's Tommy Ray Woods,” Lucy whispers.

Oh no.

I try not to recoil too dramatically. Tommy Ray Woods has graced more tabloid pages than I can remember for his forays into womanizing, cheating, beating and feeling up women in public, some of whom he knew, some of whom he didn't. To date, I am aware of two court cases pending against him—one for sexual harassment and the other for unlawful bigamy. I scramble to try to act happy for her, but it ain't working for me.

“The Tommy Ray Woods?” It's dumb, but gives me some reaction time.

“The one and only,” Lucy says, placated.

“Lucy, I . . . I don't really know what to say except that his reputation precedes him.”

“Listen, Corki, I need you to be fine with this and I need your help. Tommy Ray and I are going on a road trip. He wants to take me to Memphis to meet his daddy, and he wants me to see Graceland. You know, his daddy is one of the last men in Tennessee who still uses a divining rod to find water on his property. How cool is that? And Cork, you'll be happy to know, Tommy wants to take it slow. He doesn't want to rush into marriage. He's a bit more traditional than all the Left Coast types, being from the South and all.”

Is getting married five times within a ten-year period “traditional”? He has five children ranging in age from six to twenty-six with four of his five wives—what tradition is that? Then, of course, there's the charge that he got married to wife number five while he was still legally married to wife number four.

“I told Tommy Ray that I really like picnics, so we're planning to stop on the first day and have one. I also told him that I really appreciate home-style cooking. So I need you to make us lunch for six. . . .”

“Six? I thought it was just the two of you.”

“Well, it was just gonna be the two of us, but Tommy Ray needs his office assistant, Dave, with him, and he promised the first assistant director from his last movie that he'd give him a ride back to Little Rock on the way home.”

“Okay, that's four.”

“Well, there are only four of us going, but Bubba, that's his first assistant director, eats for three. He'll take up the entire third row of the SUV we're going to rent.”

“Bubba? That's not his real name, is it? Bubba?”

“Well, if it isn't his real name, he's been called it for so many years he's not telling anybody anything different. So, I'd like a menu of fried chicken, potato salad, black-eyed peas, coleslaw and a buttermilk icebox pie. Also, get some other food to snack on. You know, road trip food. And maybe for me, on the side, a braised tofu with sesame seed kale . . . but don't pack that in the main cooler. I can just eat mine in private.”