So 5 Minutes Ago (7 page)

It was the same way with Josh’s family: an easy fit because of the differences from my family. Even more so with the menorahs on the windowsills and the boxes of matzo on the kitchen counter. And Josh’s dad, a big surgeon at Bellevue, had this really direct way of talking, just lobbing questions like I was some fascinating new patient and not this accessory, which was how I usually felt growing up. It was flattering and intimidating all at once to have the attentions of this intense, intelligent man who was so different from my own head-in-the-clouds-feet-on-the-golf-course Dad, and when I started talking about
The New York Times
—how I couldn’t start my day without it, which wasn’t a lie and not even a ploy—Josh’s dad clapped me on the shoulder and let out a barky laugh, like I had passed or something. I looked over at Josh, who was pale and sort of damp but grinning wildly, and I decided, impulsively, to have another piece of cake. But then it’s easy to get sugar and love mixed up. Almost as easy to get running away from something mixed up with running toward something.

We started as friends. Met at NYU when he was still dating Beth, a milky-skinned education major from Rhode Island who was getting her master’s so she could teach preschool at some private academy. At least that’s what I gathered from all our late-night conversations at Coffee Shop in Union Square. All those anguished hours I sat there with Josh because he and Beth had had some stupid argument like whether Saturday or Sunday was the heart of the weekend and she’d flounced back to Little Compton or wherever she was from, until Josh called and apologized for being so culturally insensitive and would she please just come back to the city? It went on like this with me playing the interpreter of all things gentile until one night Josh reached across the table and put his hands on mine and said he’d broken up with Beth.

“You’re kidding?” I said, thinking of all the hours I’d put in talking him through the fights because he seemed so desperately in love. Now, he had broken up with her just like that?

“I can’t believe it,” I said, more pissed just then than sympathetic.

“It’s because I’ve met someone else.”

It took me a minute to realize Josh was referring to me. I’d never been friends with a guy before where it had turned into a real relationship, and my first reaction was that it seemed totally wrong. Like trying to envision having sex with your brother. If I’d had a brother.

“I’m going to need something stronger than coffee if we’re going to continue this conversation,” I was saying when Josh somehow suddenly had his mouth on mine with such force that I had to grip the edge of the table to keep from falling backward in the booth. I was just on the verge of pulling out of the kiss, of putting everything back where it had been, when Josh dropped his forehead on mine in a way that was actually endearing and said, quite quietly given the roar of the restaurant, “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.”

I can’t say I loved him. Maybe I just loved the
idea
of being with Josh. At the very least, that kiss seemed like an answer to a question I’d given up asking myself. But like I said, it’s easy to confuse running away from something with running toward something.

And being with Josh was
interesting,
and so different from the guys back at Brown, all those sun-streaked lacrosse players who were so big and taciturn and beer-filled that you never knew what they were thinking—at least off the lacrosse field—but it didn’t matter, not for the two or three months those relationships lasted, because they were just so pretty.

Josh wasn’t like that. He was talky and eager to tell me
exactly
what he was thinking and feeling and he wanted me to tell him everything I was thinking and feeling. Even when I really didn’t feel like doing that, Josh always wanted to know, and after a while it was sort of flattering and even a little addictive to be the center of so much attention. Only later did being with Josh start to seem like a bad episode of
Mad About You.
When the differences between us became unmistakable no matter how hard we tried.

Even Josh’s proposal was interesting—during our first and, as it turned out, only trip to Israel. The trip was ostensibly about introducing me to his old kibbutz buddies, guys like Josh who’d grown up in New York but who’d spent high school summers milking cows and picking grapes in Israel. But unlike Josh, his friends had moved back to Israel after graduation and were now teaching in Tel Aviv or studying in Jerusalem or shooting at Palestinians in the desert but mostly living off money their parents, comfortably back home in Westchester, sent them every month.

“Don’t try to figure it out,” Josh had said when I asked how American college graduates who could have been going to law school or med school or earning a bundle on Wall Street were living like refugees in a war zone. “Chalk it up to Zionism—or better yet, guilt,” he added, as we’d headed out from the King David to the Old City. It was only our second day in Israel and I was still getting used to the heat and the blazing desert light. After several minutes of walking down one alleyway and then the next, I started to feel dizzy. At first, I thought it was the jet lag or just the strangeness of the Old City, all the twisty cobbled streets with their deep, slashing shadows and the smells of smoke and blood—like that kid pushing a freshly severed cow’s head in a wheelbarrow—and the old men sucking on water pipes in the cafes. I thought I needed to sit down or maybe just head to the Christian quarter, when I turned to Josh and all but collapsed on his shoulder.

I was close to tears, when Josh steered me down an alley and leaned me against a wall and put his arms around me and whispered that we should get married. Maybe it was the shock or just too much Jerusalem but Josh took my sobbing as a yes. Only later, when we were having lunch at an outdoor cafe back in the new city, where thankfully U2 poured from the tinny little speakers and I downed about four glasses of iced tea and felt suddenly so much better, had I realized we’d mistaken dehydration for trembling passion. I was on the verge of telling Josh he could take it all back, that I felt like myself again and where was that cool shopping district he’d mentioned, when I looked over and saw him looking at me in a way that I had never seen and realized that however inadvertently, I was engaged. That what I had been playing at—what we both had been playing at—was for keeps.

Of course, my parents freaked. Or I should say Mom freaked—I’m not sure Dad even noticed except for the catering bill—but when she found out Josh’s dad was a big-deal doctor, she at least had a bone to throw to her friends at the club. Besides, it wasn’t like I had to convert or anything, even if the rabbi did perform part of the ceremony. Hardly anybody from my family came, which was fine by me, mostly just Josh’s family and our friends at NYU. In the end, I think Mom told everyone I’d eloped.

So we were husband and wife. Or at least for the next three years that we stuck it out. Until finally, one rainy autumn day, the kind of day that makes you wonder what you ever really saw in any of it, what exactly was the point of it—the apartment, the job, the man coming through the front door who used to make you smile and feel full of plans, but now only makes you feel tired, restless, like a bad Noel Coward production that should have closed out of town months ago—that day, for whatever reason, I just told him it was over. And he didn’t even act surprised. That was the worst of it. Or maybe it was actually for the best. I wasn’t fooling myself anymore. And apparently, I had never fooled him. “I was never playing at this,” he said, standing there in the darkened living room with his coat still on, still dripping with rain. “But I always knew you were. I just hoped you’d grow to love the role.”

“So do you think I did the right thing?” I say when Steven picks up the phone. He may have been my assistant but in Hollywood that means 24/7 availability. Besides, other than Rachel, he’s also my closest friend.

“About what?” he says mildly, or at least he’s keeping the irritation out of his voice.

“Divorcing Josh.”

“Divorcing Josh? The last time we talked you were worried about sleeping with Troy. And I thought
I
had guy problems.”

“I’m not joking,” I say with a sigh. “Maybe I should have stayed in New York with him. We’d have a really nice apartment by now. I wouldn’t be wondering what to do on the weekends and I wouldn’t be paid to take care of guys like Troy who can’t even remember when they’re being disgusting.”

“Don’t you have your old therapist on speed-dial for times like this?”

“That just shows you’ve
never
been to therapy.”

“Well, first we know
that’s
not true. And secondly, you haven’t been here that long. I’ve known people who’ve been out here for
years
and never had a serious relationship.”

“No, it’s not just Josh,” I say, and I can tell I’m starting to get worked up again. “I feel so much smaller here than in New York. So much less significant.”

“You just need bigger clients,” Steven says and I can tell he’s trying to be helpful. “The whole G thing has got you rattled.”

“No, it’s more than that. In New York, I felt like I counted, even in my own small way. I had my life, my job, my friends, Josh. I felt plugged in, like I knew my place in the scheme of things. Like I belonged.”

“Okay, but—”

“But out here, it’s the opposite,” I plow on, not caring if it’s late and I sound drunk or like Peter Finch in
Network.
“Even if you’re part of it, you still feel like you don’t really count, that you couldn’t possibly count, because the only people who count are on the covers of magazines and you helped put them there. Christ, even Clinton thought Hollywood was cooler than Washington and how twisted is that?”

I’m suddenly exhausted by my rant. “You work so hard to keep the celebrity flame burning, to make it the obsession of the world, and you wind up feeling worthless because you’re not the object of the obsession. And nobody told me that,” I say, and I realize my voice sounds very small and very, very whiny.

“Because you had to learn it for yourself.”

“Don’t quote
The Wizard of Oz
when I’m pissed off,” I say, although I feel not unlike Dorothy when she finally spies the real Wizard. I landed at DWP on a whim, a lark, an answer to a failed marriage. A
fuck you
to my parents and all their buttoned-down expectations and Amy, who couldn’t wait to fulfill them. Now, the whole thing has become much more than a temporary stop, an
entr’acte
in the larger drama of my life. “So how do I get back to Kansas? Call up Josh and beg him to take me back? Move to Maine and work with the indigent? Beg Charles to take me away from all this?”

“Look, most days it doesn’t bother me. It makes me laugh. It makes
you
laugh.”

“But you live your life with more irony than I do. Than I
want
to.”

“That’s only because I’m gay.”

“All I’m saying is I want some authenticity that doesn’t come saddled with celebrity. And I can’t find it out here.”

“If I was less ironic, I would say you’ve learned in three years what most people
never
learn in Hollywood. Or would never admit to learning. But since I’m not . . . ,” he says, sighing, and I can tell his patience for my metaphysical breakdown is wearing thin.

“You know, it’s fine,” I say. If there’s anything I can’t stand more than pity, it’s impatience with my fears. “It’s fine and let’s just forget it.”

“No,” he says, rallying now that the goal line is in sight. “We’ll talk more tomorrow, but why don’t you try and get some sleep now. You’ll have enough to deal with, with Scooby and Scrappy.”

I close my eyes and try to imagine who he’s talking about. “Scooby and Scrappy? Am I meeting with someone from the Cartoon Network this week?”

“You wish. No, their human counterparts.”

My eyes fly open. “No way!”

“Yes, Suzanne’s handing them off to you. Actually G’s handing them off to you. They’re unhappy with Buffy or Muffy or one of his Biggies and the word is G’s moving all his problem clients to DWP agents. Flush out the dead wood. I was going to tell you tomorrow but Suzanne said she’s already set up your first meeting with them for tomorrow afternoon.”

Suddenly I’m beyond exhausted. G has laid his cards on the table even before our first official staff meeting. He engineered the buyout of DWP and now he’s trying to kill it off. It’s kind of like the Time Warner–AOL merger, if you think about it. And my poison pill is to be Scooby and Scrappy, the gay couple of the moment. Actually, they
were
the gay couple of the moment, until they came out of the closet—so pious and so stupid—and now they’re pariahs, out of work and scorned. A publicist’s nightmare.

“I actually see this as a vote of confidence in your abilities,” Steven says, and I can tell he’s trying to soften the blow. “I mean, G’s trying to thin the ranks but Suzanne obviously thinks you can handle it.”

“Don’t try and make me feel better. I may hate my job, but at least I wasn’t in danger of losing it. Until now.”

I close my eyes again. I have to bring this to a close and start all over again tomorrow. Tomorrow when I’ll find the strength and clarity of mind to deal with G and Scooby and Troy and Val and sit in the office with my headset on and just make it all work.

But that’s tomorrow.

Besides, I hear another call coming in. “Hang on,” I say to Steven and warily click over.

“You’re home? You’re never home. I just thought I’d try and grab you before Mom does.”

Amy. Or
Amee,
as she called herself now. Better her than Mom. “Hey, I just walked in,” I say, starting out the way I usually do with Amy: with a lie. “Hang on, let me get off the other line.

“It’s Amy,” I say to Steven. “And we know she never calls unless it’s important. Like she got a new horse. Or Barkley scored a hole in one. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, and give me everything we have on Scooby first thing in the morning.

“I’m back,” I say, clicking over to Amy.

“I meant to call you earlier but I figured I would miss you then and I wanted to give you a heads-up.”