Selling Out (41 page)

JoyAnn picked up the script and started flipping through it, slapping back the pages as if they were bad children.

“They sound like they're wearing hoopskirts,” she said.

Perry could feel his pulse picking up.

“What gives you that idea?” he asked.

“This daughter—for Christ's sake, she leaves her job, forgets her career, dumps her man, to go play nursemaid to this grungy old fart?”

“That's her father,” Mona pointed out.

“Is that supposed to explain why she's such a wimp?” JoyAnn demanded.

“She's supposed to be a decent person,” Perry said. “Evidently you find that hard to identify with.”

“What Perry means,” Mona said, “is that we're trying to portray a young woman whose loyalty to her father makes her sacrifice some of her own desires of the moment.”

“If she wants to make it with him, we might have a story here. The last incest piece we did got a forty-three share.”

“Perhaps Perry and I can think this through again, with your notes in mind,” Mona said.

JoyAnn stood up.

“The bottom line is,” she said, “I just don't know where these people are coming from.”

She tossed the treatment back to Perry. It fell to the floor in front of him. He did not pick it up. He got to his feet, feeling at the same time a fierce anger and a wild sense of freedom.

His heart was beating wildly, even though he had not only taken his beta blocker before the meeting, he had also popped a Valium he'd borrowed from Ronnie just for good measure. He felt that his pounding heart was a good sign, a sign he was still alive, still human. He considered his pounding heart to be a triumph of nature over chemistry, even over Hollywood.

“I can tell you where
I
am coming from,” he said to JoyAnn Wales. “I am coming from Vermont. And I am finally going back. Now. In the nick of time.”

JoyAnn looked puzzled, and turned to Mona.

“I'm afraid he doesn't get the picture,” the sharp young executive said.

“Oh, I'm afraid he does,” said Mona, standing up herself now.

Perry placed his hands on JoyAnn's desk, leaned toward her, and said, with pleasure and fervor, a single word:

“
Ciao
.”

Outside the building, he hugged Mona.

“You can have what I wrote,” he said. “Free of charge. Maybe you can make something of it, somewhere else. Or here. Wherever. Let me know if I can do anything.”

Mona smiled.

“Don't worry,” she said. “Give my love to Vermont. And to Jane.”

He turned and started for his car and Mona called after him.

“Perry?”

“Yes?”

“God speed.”

He had never heard anyone say that before.

“Thank you,” he said.

Perry called American Airlines and booked a tourist-class seat on the next available flight to Boston.

“Do you wish to make a return reservation?” the ticket person asked.

“No. This is one-way,” he said. “No return.”

When he spoke the words he suddenly felt as if lead weights were lifted off him. He felt he could fly to Boston without even getting on the plane, just by walking out the door and taking the first step East.

Despite this new feeling of freedom, Perry did not yet have the courage to call Jane. It took all the chutzpah he could muster to call Al Cohen and ask if he could stay with him and Rachel for at least a night; on the floor, anywhere.

Perry felt guilty that Al wasn't even angry. In fact, Al wasn't even surprised, but he seemed very pleased.

The Cohens' living room looked to Perry like a longed-for safe harbor.

First he cried.

Then he launched into breast-beating tirades against his own phony behavior, his betrayal of their friendship. This eloquent self-flagellation was stifled only by Rachel's sticking a beer and a sandwich into his hands. Once Perry's mouth was full, Al shut him up with what he said was the final word on the subject, courtesy of Robert Frost:

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.”

“Home is also the place,” said Rachel, “where you have to listen to all the Robert Frost that is quoted without complaining to the management.”

Perry winced, remembering that night an eon or so ago before he went West, when after a wonderful dinner and too much brandy he yelled at Al for quoting something of Frost, bitching that the poet and his observations were out of fashion, or some such arrogant nonsense. It sounded to him now like something the Vees would have said.

“Will you forgive me?” he asked. “You have every reason to turn me out in the cold.”

“But to quote Mr. Frost yet again,” said Rachel, reaching out and giving Perry a tweak on the nose, “home is ‘something you somehow haven't to deserve.'”

“I love it,” Perry laughed. “The quote, and being here.”

He spent the first night on the Cohens' couch. The next morning he had coffee and juice and bacon and eggs and toast and then he walked alone to the woods that bordered the house where he once had lived.

In the woods he inhaled the smells of spring. He sank to his knees. There was a crocus just beginning to bud and he leaned to it, touched it, and knew, in a surge of comprehension that was almost like a blow:
this is the gold
.

He bowed his head. The day was fresh and warm, and sunlight lay across the hard ground. Perry had an urge to get closer to the earth. He remembered Lon Ridings, the actor, and how he had disrobed down to his jockey shorts and pressed his flesh to the dry dirt alongside Ned Gurney's patio. He knew how the man must have felt, how he must have wanted to burrow on down into his own grave. That was not what Perry felt now. He did not want to take off his clothes, he simply wanted to lie flat out on the earth and dig his fingers into the soil.

He could feel his heart beat. It was not pounding any more. It did not feel as if it might explode and burst right through his chest. It was making a lovely rhythm against the earth. He lay there a long time, and then raised up on his elbows. Slowly, he crawled to the edge of the woods and peered at his old house.

A woman walked out the door and looked toward him, but she didn't see him yet. He wanted to go to her. He wondered if that were possible. First he stood up. Then he put one foot in front of the other. He felt wobbly, like a colt. He took another step. Simple things. He was learning them all over. He was doing something miraculous. He was moving toward the woman he loved.

He was walking.

About the Author

Dan Wakefield (b. 1932) is the author of the bestselling novels
Going All the Way
and
Starting Over
, which were both adapted into feature films. His memoirs include
New York in the Fifties
, which was made into a documentary film of the same name, and
Returning
:
A Spiritual Journey
, praised by Bill Moyers as “one of the most important memoirs of the spirit I have ever read.” Wakefield created the NBC prime time series
James at 15
, and wrote the screenplay for
Going All the Way
, starring Ben Affleck. He edited and wrote the introduction for
Kurt Vonnegut Letters
as well as
If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Vonnegut's Advice to the Young.
Visit Wakefield online at
www.danwakefield.com
and
www.vonnegutsoldestlivingfriend.com
.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1985 by Dan Wakefield

Cover design by Andy Ross

ISBN: 978-1-4976-6588-0

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.openroadmedia.com

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