Filthy Rich (2 page)

“Marcy, there’s no time,” said Neil.

My eyes reopened, but I couldn’t seem to unfurl the fingers gripping my hair. It was as if they were permanently affixed. I was concentrating hard. But it wasn’t helping.

“Let’s see,” I said, endeavoring to rise above the steady pain emanating from one side of my scalp. “I know Donny and Marie are from a really big Mormon family. They sang, and dressed in hideous costumes. That’s no help. So did Sonny and Cher. Except they weren’t Mormons. And they didn’t have a big family. Only Chastity.”

If I keep rambling long enough, I strategized, maybe there’ll be Divine Intervention. But it better come quick. I’ve already shared the total sum of my knowledge, and time’s running out.

“We’re reaching thirty seconds,” Kingman reminded us.

“Marcy,” said Neil, with an unmistakable note of creeping desperation. “I really need your help on this.”

I took a deep breath and instantly felt the grip on my hair relax, a sign that my well-founded anxiety was giving way to resignation.

There was someone speaking now. It turned out to be me.

“I’d go with the
Donny and Marie
,” I heard myself say. “I just have a feeling.”

“A
feeling?
We’re talking nearly two million, Marcy. Don’t give me
feeling
. Are you sure?”

“Not sure really, Neil, but I think it’s a pretty good guess. It has to be one or the other.”

Less than a nanosecond later, my spotlight went dark. I sat down again next to my mother, and reached out to hold her
hand. The butterflies in my stomach were doing back flips, bouncing around like they had a bad case of attention deficit disorder and had forgotten their medication.

“Time’s up,” said Kingman. “We’ve reached that scary juncture: the Moment of Truth. And what a moment for you, Neil. Think over the question carefully one last time, and please give us your answer.”

There followed another convulsion of spotlights until it seemed every single one of them landed on Neil, whose face, already drained of color, had taken on the stricken look of a major-party presidential candidate just informed that the networks had changed their minds and were now projecting his opponent to win Florida. The
Filthy Rich!
hot seat never seemed hotter.

My heart, meanwhile, was pounding like one of Desi’s congas in the middle of his famous “Babaloo” number, leading to the frantic thought that it might burst right out of my chest, ruining my outfit and requiring Kingman to declare a short time-out to summon an ambulance. That might not be so bad, I reassured myself. The extra time might help Neil come up with the right answer. And I could always buy another outfit.

I’m not particularly big on religion, subscribing as I do to the belief that one bat mitzvah party at Chez Steinberg of Flatbush is joy enough for two or three hundred lifetimes. But with Neil about to cough up his answer, I decided it couldn’t hurt to try to enlist some quick help from God. To avoid appearing too craven, I opted against seeking the
Almighty’s intervention to make sure Neil won the money. Instead, I silently prayed for the whole thing to be over already. The suspense was inducing cardiac arrhythmia and I’d never gotten around to making out a will.

“If it’s your Divine Plan,” I told the Lord, “I’m prepared to die young and still unmarried. But please don’t make me die young, unmarried, and intestate.”

I was about to add that going through probate would be hell on my poor parents when the sound of Neil’s voice shut down this introspective round of celestial bargaining.

“Okay, Kingman,” Neil decided finally, “I’ll go with it. I’ll say
Donny and Marie
.”

“Your absolute answer?” Kingman fired back.

“Yes. I’m going with Marcy on this.
Donny and Marie
. She’d better be right.”

There was a long pause. At least it seemed long to me. Then came the loud buzzer noise, spelling doom.

“Sorry, Neil and Marcy,” Kingman said, sounding genuinely regretful, “the answer is
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour
. Too bad. But, Neil, you go home with our thanks for being a great contestant, and—”

Here Kingman broke off. Paying no heed to the genial host, Neil was walking with all deliberate speed in my direction, shouting as he went.

“You bitch. You said you were an expert on old TV shows,” he said, temper rising.

“Only classic comedy,” I responded, alarmed by Neil’s sudden hostility, and what it might portend. “It’s what I
watched as a kid, and it’s the only questions we practiced together for tonight. Classic comedy.”

I’d never seen Neil like this before. Then again, I’d never seen the big galoot lose $1.75 million.

Thoroughly caught up in this seamy melodrama, I totally forgot about the TV cameras, which kept rolling right along, capturing all the fast-breaking action. I grabbed my Kenneth Cole shoulder bag off the floor to have it handy for self-defense just in case Neil’s demented new agenda included transforming
Filthy Rich!
into
WrestleMania
.

“
Sonny and Cher
was a variety show, Neil,” I added firmly. “I know zilch about variety shows. After three years together, you should know that.”

“It’s a comedy show, goddamn it. Look at the title:
Comedy Hour, Comedy Hour, Comedy Hour
. Only you think it’s the
Sonny and Cher Variety Hour
. That’s because you never listen. I’m SOOO sick of it, you goddamn witch.”

My thoughts raced back to the fun Saturday afternoon when Neil had moved in with me two years ago. I recalled the cozy feeling of couplehood as we struggled to maneuver his prized “thinking chair” to a suitable resting place at the far end of the living room. This heavy monstrosity was actually the dental chair from Neil’s first office. He’d had it mounted on a round, stainless-steel pedestal and re-covered in rich, black Corinthian leather—a design decision you either thought was dorky, psychotic, or cute. I chose cute. As they say, love is blind.

“This isn’t just mine anymore,” I remembered Neil telling me as he stood back to admire the unique piece of
furniture in its brand-new habitat, his right arm affectionately draped over my shoulder. “It belongs to both of us,” he said. To prove he meant it, he then showed me how to adjust the big foam headrest and which button to press to tilt the thing back. Afterward, we took a break from moving chores and made love for the first time as its ostensible co-owners.

The chair was bulky and ugly, and clashed with my pastels. I didn’t even think it was that comfortable. But seeing it there every day made me feel secure. It told me I could stop worrying about a lonely middle age spent rummaging for Mr. Right in the crowd standing in line to get into the Ethical Culture Society singles mixer on alternate Friday nights. It said I could look forward to wedding bells, and, someday maybe, the patter of little feet.

Obviously, I had missed something.

“Some Life Coach,” Neil ranted. “Anyone who takes advice from you after this belongs in a goddamn loony bin. Thanks to your so-called coaching, I’ve just blown a million dollars. After taxes!”

Neil then moved on to his next victim, taking a gratuitous swipe at my silver-haired and petite sixty-six-year-old mother, in the process terminally alienating his biggest fan in my family, and sacrificing any audience sympathy he might have had left.

“And I can’t stand your busybody mother either,” Neil all but screamed at me. “Or her gross, fat-filled cooking. Her cement matzo balls could turn Elie Wiesel into an anti-Semite. Every time she cooks her greasy pot roast, it’s like
Tinkerbell: Somewhere a bypass surgeon gets a new Mercedes. If you want to give a heart doctor an expensive German car, why not just write a check? If I die before I’m fifty, Marcy, I’m blaming you.”

“That makes no sense, Neil, you’ll be dead,” I replied, injecting a note of logic I hoped would help calm him down. “You won’t be around to blame me.”

I was trying to lighten things up, but the truth is Neil’s pent-up anger came as a shocking and hurtful revelation. So did his expressed hatred of my mother’s cuisine, which he did a good job of suppressing for the three years we were together, perhaps because he was so busy shoveling in third and fourth helpings.

“Happy now, Marcy?” Neil resumed sarcastically. “You’ve ruined my one chance.”

“Forget him,” my mother shouted back, rising like a phoenix from her chair and seething with all the venom of a Jewish Mother scorned. “You were too good for him anyway.” She waved her fist and spit in his general direction.

“Thanks for the support, Mom,” I said, expecting her to sit back down. Instead, she was just getting started.

“Look me in the eye,” she challenged her former almost-son-in-law-to-be, glaring hard at him. “So this is what we get for treating you like a member of the Mallowitz family? Lies about greasy cooking? Defaming my grandmother’s favorite recipes, which her own mother, may she rest in peace, handed down to her back in the old country? You should only live so long to find a more perfect matzo ball, or
a cut of brisket to match my delicious pot roast—so lean even that fuddy-duddy stick-in-the-mud Dr. Pritikin would approve. Neil, you should be ashamed.”

I was proud of my mother’s ferocity, even if mildly perturbed that she’d worked up more steam defending her matzo balls and pot roast than defending her daughter. I hoped no one else would notice.

“
Comedy Hour, Comedy Hour, Comedy Hour
,” Neil repeated, leaning over the low railing that separated the stage from the audience and screaming like a maniac at the top of his lungs.

It’s strange what pops into your head at horrible moments like this. What popped into mine at this point was totally frivolous. It was a sweet memory from childhood: Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate Flavor Syrup. I wondered if U-Bet still came with a coupon you could mail in for a free pump. I could make Kingman an egg cream. I could make egg creams for the whole audience.

Snapping back to the present, I felt fury beginning to steam through my system. Couldn’t Neil have just taken me out to dinner and quietly told me it was over between us? I would have gotten the message. There was no need to trash me and my mother, not to mention my grandmother and great-grandmother by indirection. Nor was there any excuse to attack my professional honor in front of millions of my fellow Americans, including, it was fair to presume, all
of my clients, who were either watching the show or would somehow hear about the lively encounter soon afterward.

A Personal Life Coach must inspire confidence to be effective. In addition to hurting my feelings, getting dumped so publicly could not be good for business. As I tend to do when confronted with an unpleasant situation, I asked myself what Marcia Brady, the pretty and generally levelheaded oldest sister on
The Brady Bunch
, would do in a similar fix—a habit derived from repeated exposure at an impressionable age to all the lame
Brady
plots in after-school syndication.

Almost instantly, my inner
Brady
archive referred me to the famous episode where vulnerable teenage Marcia developed a crush on an older man—a tall, handsome dentist whose intentions she totally misread. She managed to get over it in slightly under thirty minutes, including the time for commercials. I know it’s fashionable to dismiss Marcia as an obnoxious Little Miss Perfect. But that quality is exactly what makes her a touchstone.

“My mother is right,” I blurted out. “I
am
too good for you.
Much
too good. You don’t like my answer, Neil? Why don’t you go to Hollywood and give this personally to Cher’s pal Teri Garr?”

In an uncharacteristically grand gesture, I ripped off the chintzy crystal friendship ring he’d given me as a “preengagement present” just before moving into my apartment, and threw it at him as hard as I could. Of course, if this were
The Jerry Springer Show
, probably no one would have noticed. But this was network prime time!

The audience was cheering me now. I think it was heartfelt, although the flashing applause signs made it hard to tell for sure.

At this point, Kingman ambled over from his usual place center stage to help members of the production staff who were frantically trying to pull Neil away before he hurled himself into the audience and succeeded in strangling me, my mother, or the two of us simultaneously, thereby achieving a grisly network first.

Amid this mayhem, the show went to commercial.

“That was great television,” the producer said cheerily when the whole thing was over. “Congratulations.” He also told me I could look forward to getting paid residuals every time the show aired in reruns.

Call me an ingrate, but under the circumstances, the promise of future residuals was not much consolation. I was no longer sure I had a future.

Okay, come out
and say it: Marcy Mallowitz must be a real nitwit to jeopardize a promising long-term relationship by signing on as Neil’s Lifeline. This disaster was entirely predictable.

Fair enough. But allow me to say two things in my defense.

1. I agreed to be his Lifeline only under duress. Neil said that if I helped him win the million, he would take it as a sign that we should get married. He further promised that we would honeymoon at an unnamed exotic locale, and, in a departure from all of our previous vacations together, the trip would not coincide in any way with the annual convention of the American Association of Orthodontists, the unrelievedly dreary professional organization to which Neil is totally devoted.

2. It never occurred to me that Neil would actually finagle his way into becoming a
Filthy Rich!
contestant. To be honest, it never occurred to me that Neil’s name and the
word “finagle” would ever appear together in the same sentence. I’m totally opposed to stereotypes. But it is well known that orthodontists are better flossers than finaglers. Also, I’m no mind reader. How could I know the show’s producers would toss him a dental-related question in the all-important “Fastest Finger of Fate” qualifying round that decides which of the ten candidates flown in from around the country gets a chance to go for the money? It was the show’s first dental-trivia question ever.

“Now, group,” Kingman said, “for a chance to compete for $1.75 million, rearrange the following well-known national brands of toothpaste in the order in which they were introduced, going from oldest to most recent.”

This was the list:

1. Tom’s of Maine
   
2. Colgate
   
3. Mentadent
   
4. Crest
   
5. Pepsodent
   *
   

Sitting there helpless in the audience, I knew I was doomed the moment I heard the question. I knew I’d get dragged into this somehow and I wouldn’t be able to deliver. I even turned to my mother and said so.

“I think I’m dead, Mom,” I said.

I don’t think she heard me. By then, Dear Mom was on her feet applauding Neil’s correct answer. That’s how quickly he put the toothpastes in order, leaving all of the other would-be contestants in the dust. They didn’t even bother to guess.

But, then, Neil had a distinct advantage over the others. Only Neil grew up entertaining his parents’ friends at parties by imitating the latest toothpaste commercials, and only he harbored a feverish ambition by the age of four to earn a living shoving his hands in other people’s mouths when he grew up. For fun, Neil would organize tongue-twister contests, challenging his school chums to quickly recite Crest’s seal of approval from the American Dental Association—“Crest is a decay-preventing dentifrice…” The one who made the fewest mistakes got First Prize.

Neil’s precocious interest in diagnosing, correcting, and preventing irregularities of the teeth and poor occlusion led him to develop the strange habit of turning almost every social conversation back to orthodontics. This offended many of my friends, especially one of my two best friends Norma Ruckenhaus, the famous professor of feminist history at New York University who nearly missed getting tenure due to her lengthy procrastination in completing her bestselling treatise
Why Women Don’t Achieve as Much as Men
.

“Marcy,” Norma said to me after meeting Neil for the first time, “you’ve got yourself a clunker.” The setting for this important debriefing was a small, sticky table in the rear of a crowded Starbucks around the corner from Norma’s apartment near Union Square, one of the pretentious java chain’s few grungy outposts.

Norma, who is nothing if not outspoken, took a sip from her tiny cup of espresso, and then made a prediction. “If you stay with him, one of two things will happen. You’ll end up going back to school to become his dental hygienist. Or, you’ll find out that the mysterious lipstick stains on the collar of his starched white dental shirt belong to some glamorous twenty-something chippy whose frequent appointments are not devoted exclusively to making adjustments to her night brace. You won’t have to call in Angela Lansbury to solve that caper.”

“Okay, Norma, what are you saying,” I said, putting down my pricey mug of rejuvenating ginseng orange blossom tea for emphasis, “he’s boring or he’s having an affair? There seems to be a contradiction.”

“I’m saying watch out, kid,” Norma said. “I don’t trust him.”

But, of course, when Norma said “watch out” she hadn’t been anticipating Neil’s nasty au revoir on network TV, so her qualifications to say “I told you so” are still a matter of debate.

Anyway, Norma’s distaste for Neil did not dampen my own enthusiasm. I kept coming up with excuses for his odd
behavior, rationalizing that you want the person attaching tortuous contraptions in your mouth to feel totally committed to his line of work. For the most part, I found Neil’s devotion to his profession to be endearing. It sounds absurd, I know, but I used to enjoy listening to Neil explain his special method of making sure his clients’ upper bicuspids aligned with their lower at the end of treatment. Or to hear him expound on any other orthodontic or dental topic, for that matter, in that soothing baritone of his. He sounded so caring, so knowledgeable and self-assured—and please refrain from laughing when I say this—so sexy. In Neil’s casual use of multisyllabic medical terms as he shared insights from the latest literature on overbites, I swear I sometimes heard Doug Ross, George Clooney’s dreamy pediatrician character on
ER
.

That is, of course, until our televised dustup shattered my illusions and turned me into the nation’s quasi-celebrity of the moment—a “better-bred Buttafuoco” Jay Leno called me the next night in his monologue. “Without the big hair.”

Thanks, Jay. And, most of all, thank you, Neil, you crud.