The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (42 page)

“Where’s Mike?” I asked when I reached her. An image of my father’s mistress, Brenda, meeting my plane after my mother’s death flickered across my mind’s eye.

“Something came up,” Mrs. Murphy said, averting her eyes. “He’ll meet you in the hotel room.”

“What came up? I thought he wasn’t filming today.” I asked, my Spidey sense tingling. Back when my father was still bothering to hide his infidelity from my mother, things “came up” a lot. Things that kept him on tour in exotic island locales for a few days past when he was supposed to leave, or things that kept him in the studio all night.

“I’m not sure,” Mrs. Murphy answered, still not meeting my eyes. “Let’s go gather your suitcase, shall we?”

Mike’s “hotel room,” as Mrs. Murphy called it, turned out to be a series of rooms housed within a space bigger than any apartment I had ever stayed in, including the two-bedroom one I had shared with Abigail in North Hollywood.

Mrs. Murphy let me in and left my suitcase in the enormous front room, which was done up in so much brocade and heavy curtainage that the
Gone With the Wind
theme music swelled inside my head as I searched for Mike in the five-thousand-square-foot (at least) space. He wasn’t in the living room, or the kitchen. And I didn’t find him in the master bedroom or in the large bathroom—though I did note the hot tub, and made a promise to myself to check it out with Mike later.

I dumped my suitcases in the bedroom, went back into the hallway and resorted to calling out, “Mike, are you here? If so, where are you?”

“I’m in here,” Mike called back from behind one of the heavy wooden doors at the far end of the hall.

I jogged to it and opened it with visions of crawling over the desk and attacking him with kisses. And I might have done it, too … if Rick T hadn’t been in the office with him.

He looked exactly as he had the last time I had seen him in person. Dressed in jeans, a simple T-shirt, Adidas, and a baseball cap. It was like walking into a room to meet my lover and finding a ghost instead. I froze in the doorway, trying to process what was going on.

Rick T stood up, his face a thundercloud of anger, and Mike, who had been sitting behind the desk, also stood up. He threw me an apologetic look and shook his head as if to say, “Stay calm, Thursday.”

“You think sliming me in public’s going to bring your mother back?” Rick T asked, waving around what I assumed to be the script I had written.

“You humiliated her, maybe it’s time for you to see how it feels,” I answered. Then I asked Mike, “What exactly is he doing here?”

“He said he couldn’t reason with you, so he asked me to come down here to try to talk some sense into you,” Rick T answered.

“That’s not what I said.” Mike shook his head again. “Rick is upset about the script, so we’re talking about it.”

“What is there to talk with him about?” I asked. “Didn’t you buy the rights to his story? You didn’t give him final script approval did you?”

“No, but I want him to be on board,” Mike said. “This is his story.”

“How do you expect me to be on board with this trash?” Rick T asked. He turned on me. “I don’t have any kind of retirement, because I sent you and your sister to the best schools, gave you everything that money could buy, and this is how you repay me?”

“First of all, do you really expect me to feel sorry for you because you didn’t manage to stay rich after Mom died?” My mother had been the one that, having grown up poor and never wanting to go back, kept Rick T’s money working for us. She had invested it wisely and from what I could tell had set up what little retirement that Rick T had. But being friends with Sharita, I knew that keeping money in your bank account was a job, even if
you were rich and especially if you were a musician. After Rick T married Brenda, according to Janine, they’d lived a fairly glamorous lifestyle, traveling, buying multiple properties, not paying attention to his financial portfolio even as his record sales dwindled.

“I’m so sorry that your mistress didn’t turn out to be as good of a financial manager as Mom was,” I sneered. “Second of all, it’s not trash, it’s not slime. It’s the truth. Sorry again, if you can’t handle the truth. Maybe think about not being such a dick next lifetime if you want super-nice scripts written about you.”

“First of all, you think your mother was just a victim in this? She came from the projects and she ended up better off than she ever could have dreamed because of
me
.” Rick T jabbed a thumb at himself. “Second of all, I was her prince. I saved her from that life. How about putting that in your smear campaign of a script?”

I had forgotten that my father also ordered his points, that I had, in fact, picked up the habit from him. A warm memory of us joking back and forth about my decision to attend Smith as opposed to his and my mother’s alma mater, Columbia, came up unbidden. First of all, second of all … all the way up to us arguing tenth of all, laughing so hard that we could barely get our points out. We had been so happy back then, I thought with a small punch of regret, so proud of each other for being who we each were, so willing to tease each other and not really mean what we were saying. But that had been back then …

I pointed to the script that he’d been waving in my face. “Tell me one thing in this script that didn’t happen.”

“I only got a few pages in, but I can already see quite a few things that you left out while you were trying to paint me as a monster of ego.” He ticked it off on his fingers. “First of all, you left out how I worked my ass off to get a record deal when your mama told me she was pregnant with you our senior year of college. You left out how I only stayed on the road so we could afford our mortgage and all the private schools we were sending you
and your sister to. I haven’t gotten to the part where your mother drives
herself
off a cliff yet. But judging from the rest of the script, I’m pretty sure you left out the seventeen stitches I had to get because you attacked me in my own home. And you left out how my ungrateful oldest daughter didn’t even invite me to her college graduation—for the education I paid for.” Like me, his voice grew colder the angrier he got. And also like me, the angrier he got, the meaner his words became. “You went to school to study screenwriting, and this crap is all you could come up with? Seriously, kid? I could be living on a tropical island right now if I hadn’t wasted so much money on you.”

“Rick, with all due respect—” Mike tried to intervene, to restore civil discourse to a situation that had exploded faster than he had probably thought it would with his actorly devotion to the power of positive thinking.

But I interrupted his bid for diplomacy with a raised hand. “You can’t stand it, can you? It’s just killing you that there’s now going to be more than one person out there who sees through your act to who you really are. The only reason you ever bothered to try to make up with me was because I was the first one to stop liking you. Your career went to crap after she died—that’s why you’re not living on a tropical island now—and you know and I know that you deserved everything you got after what you did to her.”

“I tried to make it right between us because you’re my blood and I love you,” he said. “And the only reason you didn’t respond is because you’re trying to punish me for your mother’s death.”

Tears of anger sprang to my eyes. “No, I’m punishing you for humiliating her. I’m telling the truth because you have millions of fans, and she only had me and Janine. While you were out on the road fucking your assistant and calling us once a day for maybe five minutes, if you had time, she was the best mother ever. And you treated her like she didn’t matter, like she was some burden. So fuck you, and fuck your fancy schools. I wish you had been the one who died, you selfish piece of shit. I am my mother’s daughter.
I stand righteous where you cut her down. I am the one person in this entire world that is on her side and not yours, and I will never forgive you.”

The air between Rick T and me visibly cooled. He pointed at me. “First of all, I am your father. Don’t call me out of my name. Second of all, don’t talk about my wife like she was some groupie. I fell in love with her, and it’s not her fault that I was already married. Third of all, your mother wasn’t a saint. Just like you, she could be mean, and no matter what I did, she was never satisfied. But I stayed with her for you and Janine. So give me some credit there. Fourth of all, what happened between your mother and me has nothing to do with you, little girl. That was an A-and-B conversation, and I don’t need your forgiveness for it, because it was none of your business.”

It should be noted again that I had been raised by a pacifist vegetarian to be a pacifist vegetarian. My mother had believed words to be the most powerful weapons on the face of the earth and they were the only weapons we had been allowed to ever use. She wouldn’t even allow us to kill bugs that we found in the house. I had lived in New York for three years while in grad school and had never even stomped on a roach because of the way my mother had raised me, but at that moment I clocked three things in the room that I could use to hurt this man.

I could stab him in the neck with the letter opener on Mike’s desk. I could take the painting of the French Quarter off the wall and slam it over his head. I could grab the decanter of brandy, sitting on top of the room’s small oak bar, and once again throw a piece of glass at Rick T’s head.

But I suppose that I really was my father’s daughter, because in the end I held myself still, despite the fury boiling within me, and said, “She was a human being, Rick. A sensitive and wonderful human being. I don’t care if she didn’t completely revolve around you the way Brenda does or if she nagged you more than you liked. She was a human being, and you didn’t treat her accordingly, and that is my business. I didn’t defend her back then, but I’m telling you right now, in the words of the project kids that my mom grew up with while you ate three square meals a day in Connecticut, don’t
you talk about my mama. Don’t you ever talk about my mama. Don’t you ever …”

My breath hitched and Mike must have come around the desk at some point, because he gathered me up in his arms, pressing my wet face against his chest.

“I know that you’re both looking at this like a scorched earth kind of conversation,” Mike said. “But by talking to each other about this for the first time, you’re making progress.”

“What?” I heard Rick T say behind us. “How is this progress? And are you two together?” Then before we could answer, “So that’s why you threw away the first draft of the script, because she got to you.”

I drew away from Mike, already seeing where my father was going with this, even though Mike could not. My father was the son of a preacher, a man who used to be able to convince millions of people at a time that the world view they’d grown up with was skewed, that privilege was bad, that their government didn’t care about them, that the black people, who only made up twelve percent of our nation, were the most intelligent, beautiful, and powerful force on earth. Of course, he thought he could convince Mike to go back to the original script.

“Mike,” he said. “I respect you. You’re not the first person who has asked for the rights to my story, but I sold them to you because you’re the first person I’ve respected enough to trust. I trusted you with my life, man. And I know that you don’t think this is a betrayal, but it is. There are two sides to every story, and notice that while your first screenwriter flew out with you to actually talk to me, my daughter didn’t even bother to call me and let me know she was working on a script. Thursday and I haven’t spoken to each other directly since her mother’s funeral. I’m not going to accuse her of using you to get to me, I just want you to consider that she might have an agenda.”

Mike rubbed his chin, considering Rick T’s words. And my father jumped on his moment of indecision, going in for the gentle kill. “Let’s
think about our two options. If you go with the original script, everybody’s happy except for Thursday, who obviously has some unresolved issues with me and only wants to show one side of the story. If you go with Thursday’s script, then I’m going to have to bring in my lawyers, and the press is going to be talking about how against this script I am. Thursday’s going to get dragged through the mud; you know how mean females can get when it comes to the women their favorite male stars are dating. And if it looks like you’re letting her run you, you’re going to lose fans, which would be a shame after coming back from your gambling addiction.”

Mike looked sideways at me, worry in his expression. Apparently, he did know how female fans could be. So far we had flown under the radar, because we didn’t frequent places with paparazzi and because I wasn’t famous, I was therefore not worth paying attention. At the only red carpet event we’d gone to, Mike’s publicist had pulled me aside and asked if it was okay if Mike walked the red carpet alone. “It keeps the level of scrutiny down,” she’d explained to me.

But living in L.A., Mike and I were both fully aware that the press could be snarky, creating a vicious feeding frenzy around any story if they sniffed blood. And now, my father was threatening to throw a bunch of bloody chum into the relatively peaceful shark tank we swam in.

“You’re right,” Mike said. “Thursday might have an agenda.”

I stared at him, hurt that he would cave so easily to my father, though a certain part of me did understand how hard Mike had worked to get his career back after his gambling addiction got out of control. In just three years, he had gone from
Choco-Cop 3
to getting nominated for an Oscar. In 2010, one industry mag had named his comeback one of the ten greatest of the decade. No way was he going to throw all of that away for one script that he’d pretty much had to force me to write in the first place.

“Thursday might have an agenda,” Mike said again. “But you wouldn’t know that because you haven’t read the script.”

My mouth fell open, and Rick T, not being used to people who weren’t his obstinate daughter daring to argue back at him, looked dumbstruck. “I don’t have to read the script to know—” he started.