Mary Ellen Courtney - Hannah Spring 01 - Wild Nights (7 page)

The phone rang almost instantly, my brother Eric.

“What did I do to deserve this family, Eric?”

“You’re asking me? The burial is on for Saturday at noon, you good with that?”

“That’s fine. You need me to do anything?”

“No, we’re set. Thanks for handling the poetry and glasses bullshit at the mortuary.”

“No problem. Binky put the blanket in too.”

“And you put in the bird and some paperwork, I heard. It’s a good thing she’d shrunk and left some room.”

“Did you put in something?”

“I didn’t have anything to add. I bought the headstone.”

“Did you keep anything of Dad’s?”

“His watch and logbooks. You still have the box and tee shirt?”

“You know about that?”

“Binky went through your room.”

“Christ, this family. What happened to his jacket?”

“They had to cut it off him.”

“I didn’t know that. What about Binky, did she keep anything?”

“You’ll have to ask her. Anna says hi. We can have lunch when we’re done.”

“Okay,” I said. “Bye.”

“Bye,” he said. “Thanks again.”

Etiquette breakthrough. Eric, Anna and I were the only ones attending the burial. No one wanted to drive all the way to Altadena to see Grandma stashed in the old family plot. Eric had arranged the burial; he wanted to be sure it was done right. I had to rush to get dressed by seven.

Steve let himself in and called hello while I rooted around looking for a pair of shoes. I dropped them by the front door and gave him a welcome kiss.

“Why don’t you pour us a glass of wine while we wait for my mother to call and tell me I’m a childless old maid?”

Steve knew that every foray behind the Orange Curtain, what we called the area south of Los Angeles where my family was holed up, triggered a flurry of phone calls and emails.

“I don’t know why you put up with that shit.” The emphasis was on shit while he pulled the cork.

“Oy, and this from a man with a Jewish mother. Weren’t you supposed to be the doctor I’m supposed to marry?”

“I’m not supposed to marry a Presbyterian, no matter what I do.”

“Ex-Presbyterian and we have a fallen Jew hidden a few generations away. Let’s sleep at your house tonight, your mother will never know.”

Steve was wrapping post-production on a picture on the Warner Brothers lot just down the hill from me. The driving logistics worked out great, a huge consideration in all matters Los Angeles. Relationships, like home values, can hinge on location location location. People can actually be considered geographically undesirable, GUD for short.

Diving into Steve world seemed like a good antidote to Stroud world. They couldn’t be more different. My mind tripped over to drug runner/investment banker. Truck driver/film editor? I smiled; it was worth a shot.

“What are you smiling about?” asked Steve.

“I have no idea. It hasn’t been a forty-eight hours to smile about. Sparky is two months out of warranty.”

I filled him in on all the details except, obviously, anything that involved hiking up my skirt and grinding in the blue jeaned lap of a guy in the boondocks. I got a jolt just thinking about that, but I took the fact that I was starting to make light of it as a good sign that it might not get added to my black box of shame.

We met Margaret and Ed at our favorite Chinese place on Beverly Blvd. I retold the dentures, dead bird, and 70s gigolo story. Ed and Steve were learning to play golf; they spoke their foreign language. Margaret pressed me to go to India with her. We did effortless work together. We communicated with minimum words, quick sketches, and rudimentary hand waving. The producer was a woman and first-rate, as was the director, who was Indian. It would be a long shoot; they expected to be in India for nine months. Steve’s shoot would only be four months in New Mexico; almost like not leaving home. Maintaining relationships in our business is a problem. Steve wanted me in New Mexico; it had been an ongoing discussion.

We got home to Steve’s hillside lair. The film business is divided into above-the-line and below-the-line people. In shorthand, the above-the-line people live in better neighborhoods, generally west of Laurel Canyon. Steve is above-the-line, so while I parked on the street, he had a garage. His house was hidden on a winding one-lane street. Thick courtyard walls were covered with ivy like mine, but his rustic and faded-turquoise gate was obvious, with big hammered nail details and a pierced metal lantern hanging under the arch. It opened onto a quiet courtyard. His gardener kept the native plantings right on the edge of chaos. A jar fountain burbled just enough to mask the street noise. It was a compact hillside house, like a New York loft in a warm and fuzzy Mediterranean shell.

We went through our brushing and flossing rituals and slid into bed naked. I had some residual Stroud heat and decided it was now or never. I took Steve’s face in my hands and kissed each eye, then guided his hand down between my legs while I watched his face. He was smiling with a mixture of surprise and curiosity. I showed his hand what I wanted. He didn’t get it exactly right, but he was game. The problem was, every time I let go of his hand it wandered off the mark.

Having to do all the thinking and all the work meant no buzz for me. He didn’t have a feel for it yet. I figured he needed to build a little body memory around it, but he had to stay put to do that. I didn’t want to discourage his effort; so after half a dozen tries at showing him precisely where he should be, I gave up. As my grandfather would say,
close but no cigar
. But just the fact that I’d gotten that far was a glimmer of hope for both of us.

He was totally turned on by the whole project so decided to try what he hadn’t nailed with his hand, with his tongue, a good idea in theory. It was like cruel shoes to discover that when his tongue hit the mark, the bridge of his nose hit another, very painful mark. I tried sliding up the bed while pushing down gently on the top of his head. He took it to mean bear down, which was exactly the wrong approach.

I humored him so things finished on a high note, at least for him. It’s just that, let’s face it, we all have a sweet spot. It might drift around a little depending on what our mind is playing around with, but at a certain point, things get real focused and want lots of attention. You have to be at the station and wait around to catch the train. That’s where hot chemistry works like a mind-altering drug. It takes care of the first fifteen minutes and expands the target area to things as far afield as your big toe. I only mention that because the night before with Stroud, my big toe had moaned and I still had all my clothes on. Steve got up a happy man. I’m a generous person at heart so that much was nice. Time would tell if I’d made headway or created a monster.

He dropped me at home with a little extra on his good-bye kiss. I changed clothes and ran downtown to meet Karin for our Monday morning breakfast at Café Café. I told her the story. When I got to the part about pushing down on his head and trying to escape through the headboard, she started laughing so hard green tea shot through her nose all over her granola. Nice.

“It’s not funny! I showed him where the clitoris is as instructed.” I dropped my voice for that last part.

She couldn’t stop, so I looked out the window and drank coffee to wait her out. She finally came around.

“Okay,” she said. “Baby steps.”

“Baby steps, my ass. It was like being impaled,” I said.

“Is that the first time he’s gone down on you?”

“Of course not. And he’s always been in the neighborhood so it’s been nice. It’s just the first time he’s been at the right house and now we discover his tongue and nose don’t fit in the overhead compartment.”

“I think it can be fixed,” she said.

“Oh really, by whom, that gyno-plastic surgeon on the Westside?”

“No. He’s just got to make his approach from a different angle.”

“I can’t believe we’re having this conversation. It sounds just like him when he’s talking about golf.”

“Well if you’d had it with him in the beginning you wouldn’t be trying to break a bunch of bad habits. Maybe a golf analogy will make it easier.”

I knew she was right. I wasn’t exactly a novice at the whole thing, or maybe I was. But I’d never run into anything like that. There’d been plenty of bores, but they were like driving a Prius, a matter of patient endurance, low fuel consumption, and ultimately regret.

My husband and I tried to generate something past boredom. We watched strange people on DVDs. All the women had French manicured claws; is that supposed to be hot? We never could make a connection. The fact that we hated each other probably didn’t help. I could mark my calendar at six-month intervals when he invariably said he wanted a divorce. I spent years getting shot through with that adrenalin, not taking jobs, not making a plan. I didn’t call his bluff until the end. Steve and I like each other. And I was impressed with his willingness to learn.

“This isn’t an old habit. I’m afraid it’s one of those quickly learned new ones,” I said. “I should have just said ouch.”

“Yeah, ouch comes in handy.”

We spent the day getting the sets up and running so the lighting guys could rig and run tests. Location shoots are a hassle. They had to keep cops at either end of the block to keep out the real drunks and homeless dogs, so they could run actor drunks and actor homeless dogs through the scenes. We ate lunch with the crew under a tent in the middle of a peed on downtown street. Film crews are like families; everyone talked about what they’d done on their hiatus. They thought dressing my dead grandmother sounded like a horror film. I said it was more Bergman meets Fellini.

“Who’s that?” asked the twenty-year-old assistant to the assistant of somebody or other. Oh Jesus.

“A couple of ancient directors,” I said.

Needless to say I didn’t give up the trucker story. Unlike a real family, they’re a non-judgmental bunch. They would have loved the Thelma and Louise visuals, if they knew who that was. But still. Karin and I wound down with cups of tea.

“So when are we going to meet Stroud?” she asked.

“I think that’s better left down there.”

“Have you heard from him?” she asked.

“Crickets, he doesn’t have my number.”

She thought I should call him. I said I was just getting around to acting like an adult with Steve. She didn’t think there should be so much thinking involved with good sex. And so the conversation went. Karin voting for playing with fire because life’s short, me hoping my fire playing days were behind me.

She couldn’t understand why I would turn my back on the wild animal; it might wander off and not come back. I reminded her that that particular wild animal wandered for a living. Besides, the logistics were difficult. Steve and I floated back and forth between each other’s houses; we both had keys and he frequently showed up to swim. No decision was made by the end of the day.

I swung by Nordstrom’s on the way home and sniffed through men’s aftershaves until I hit a bingo. I went home and swam laps. Steve had left a message saying he was going to New York on Friday to do more work with the sound guys. He wasn’t satisfied. I should have known that was coming. Nobody was that good without being a tad obsessive. He planned to spend the weekend with his family and come back Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on how much work they got done. He was on his way over with food.

My mother called and started right in.

“I’d just like to see you get married again. I’m afraid you’re going to miss out on having children.”

“I don’t want to have children with just anybody,” I said. “I’m not sure I want children. I never even liked dolls.”

“Every woman wants children. I wish you’d had them in your first marriage, then it would be done.”

“Done with a crazy person. I’d be tied to that whipping post for life.”

“He wasn’t that bad, Hannah.”

“Then you marry him. You didn’t even like him.”

“He grew on me.”

“Mom, stop. He just wore you down.”

“I never understood where he got all his rules is all.”

“Thin air. And they didn’t apply to him.”

She’d been to her mall-walking group, Silver Sneakers, and had met a man who invited her to an AA meeting; he’d been going for twelve years. She said he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would go to AA.

Half my friends go to AA or Alanon. I didn’t see any particular pattern, except that they might be more interesting. They were definitely faster on the uptake when it came to jokes, that is if they’d quit drinking before every cell was fried. I decided to not get into it with her.

“Anyway, I told him you think I drink too much,” she said. “And he invited me to go with him.”

“You told him you drink too much in the first hour?”

“Oh, Hannah, I told him you think I drink too much. I was just trying to find some common ground.”

“Are you going?”

“We have a date to go tomorrow. It’s his birthday.”

I kept my reaction down to a low roar. I didn’t want to sound too excited and scare her off. Years living with a knock down, and frequently drag out, alcoholic had been hard on all of us. Binky’s even worse; she’ll try to put a stop to it for sure. Mom was really going because she felt like there was some chemistry between them.

“I thought you just met him today, Mom.”

“I’m a good judge of these things, Hannie.”

“Well I think it’s great. Call me tomorrow night and let me know how it went.”

“Okay, sweetie. Well, I better get to bed. I want to run out in the morning and get him a birthday present.”

I told her to skip the birthday present until she knew him a little better. I figured she’d see what I really meant once she got there. I had a picture of her introducing herself: “Hi, my name is Jackie and one of my daughters thinks I drink too much.” They had their work cut out for them.

Steve came in with take-out. He jumped in the pool and I got out the new aftershave. I took it into the bathroom as he was getting out of the shower.

“I bought you a present.”