Living Out Loud (20 page)

S
o I’m reading about Joan Collins, who got married last year in Las Vegas to a man fourteen years her junior whose only resume description was “former Swedish pop star.” And I’m reading about Sylvester Stallone, who married a woman usually photographed wearing no more than the equivalent of a bandanna, who introduced herself by sending a photograph to his hotel room after she had ditched her baby and her first husband in Denmark. (I mean, what are they feeding them in Scandinavia? Human blood?) And I see that these people are getting divorced.

Somehow I am no more surprised than I was to hear that people claiming to be Elvis’s love children are sprouting like soybeans all over the South. As the Everly Brothers once said so wisely, love is strange. Particularly when you live in Hollywood.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Predictable—I love them. I read
People
magazine every week, and
believe me, I don’t read it for those dumb Q and As about how stress can make you sick, or the pieces about the Johnsons, who run the biggest little pig farm in Iowa. I read it for Joan and Stallone and Farrah and Ryan and Tatum and Liz. I love the way these people live, because there’s such an incredible logic to it all: love children, the Betty Ford clinic, personal relationships with the spirit world. If you get married in Las Vegas and the groom wears white and carries a simple bouquet of premarital contracts, common sense tells you that a divorce will follow in very short order, and that someone will be represented by Marvin Mitchelson. You know what to expect from Liz Taylor’s life. First she shows up at something with a guy. Then she gets some large jewelry from the guy. Then she marries him. Then she divorces him.

Yes, these people lead lives with definition and norms. It’s the rest of us who have weird, off-the-wall ways. In my circle it is not totally uncommon for a man to come home one night after fourteen years of marriage, two children, two renovations, three attempts at the Scarsdale diet, a stint at Smokenders, and one midlife crisis, and say, without warning, on a day no better and no worse than thousands of others, “I don’t love you. I never loved you. I’m leaving.” And there you are, ditched by a person who is not even Scandinavian, with no jewelry, and no premarital contract, hit up side of the head.

In Hollywood, I am sure you would expect this. Your husband would open his mouth and before he got a word out you could just say, “I’m not stupid. I saw in the
Star
while I was in the supermarket line that Priscilla is having your love child.”

My husband is appalled—not by Joan’s ex-husband’s little passionflower or those wild accusations about Sly’s estranged wife and her secretary, but by the fact that I am interested in it all. He’s even threatened that if I abdicate my responsibilities and order too much Chinese takeout he’s going to tell the world that I can’t get going in the morning without a cup of
coffee and a gossip column. Let him. Where else am I going to get this stuff? Here at home? This is not a life that is going to wind up in the full-color tabloids, no matter how you cut it. “Quin and Christopher in Backyard Wading Pool—AS YOU’VE NEVER SEEN THEM BEFORE!” “Gerry: There Were Never Enough Clean Socks.” “Love on the Rocks: Bottled Salad Dressing the Last Straw.” Circulation plummets.

The appeal of these people is that they are not at all what I find at home. (For one thing, they decorate in all-white.) It’s a great combination—glamour and predictability. We’re not strong on either one of them around here. My kids might turn out to be architects, or heavy metal drummers (please, God, no), or farmers, or lawyers. They may be good or bad or good and bad. This is different from the kids of celebs, who are either very, very good (“LISA MARIE PRESLEY: ‘I’ll never be like my father.’ ”) or very, very bad (LISA MARIE: ‘She’s just like Elvis,’ says Priscilla.”).

My friends don’t have glamorous predictable lives, either; they have to make do with their relationships instead of figuring they’ll meet someone better on the set of their next film.

Maybe I’d be more tolerant of, say, the Princess of Wales’s problems if she was a friend of mine. She might call and say, “He’s too old, he’s never home, all he wants to do is garden and go to swamis, his mother thinks she runs the world.” And I would tell her, “Look, Diana, he’s a great father, he never embarrasses you in public, he wears nice clothes, and he keeps the garden looking great. Plus you have a terrific house and great jewelry, and anyhow, when was the last time I met Rod Stewart or Timothy Dalton?”

Whereas when I read about her in the tabloids (
DI DISGRUNTLED
,
DANCES AT DISCO
) I just think, “It’ll never last. And anyhow, what did she expect?” She should have known that there are standards in the public eye. I’ve learned them just by keeping tabs on the divorce courts and the columns.

Let’s say Sly calls me up and says, “I met this girl. She’s seventeen years younger than I am, six feet tall, and she’s usually sort of seminude and draped all over me. Her acting credits could fill a matchbook, but I’m going to put her in my next movie, and also marry her.” What could you say, except: Get a premarital agreement and insist on having
People
shoot you on your good side when the separation is announced.

T
he painters. Don’t the very words strike fear into your heart? We’ve all seen it happen. A colleague comes into the office. His hair is standing on end, his tie is awry, and there is a pale swipe of primer on the cuff of his pants leg. He collapses at his desk. “How about a drink?” he says hopefully. “It’s ten o’clock in the morning,” you reply, and suddenly you know.

The painters. There’s the Stephen King mega-seller that would scare the overalls off me.
Dropcloth
. Woo.

The painters are going into their fifth week at our house, which is right on schedule, according to painter time, because they said they would be done in two. “There was a lot more work than we expected,” said the lead man, his hair prematurely white from plaster dust and homeowners. Why don’t they just have that line printed on their business cards? That and “We’ll just sheetrock it over”? I, for one, would not hire a painter
who did not say at least once that they would just sheetrock it over. How much experience could he possibly have? Would he know to direct the entire team to leave their coffee containers and their Fritos bags on the floors to attract roaches? Would he know to paint the windows shut except for the window in the master bath, which must be painted open? Would he be the kind of guy who would get spackle in the sugar bowl? Would he charge enough, enough so that when I see a woman at the supermarket driving a Mercedes convertible and wearing a fun fur, I know without doubt that it is his wife?

Painters may think I am picking on them. I can only reply: it’s about time. Of course, they’re not alone. Think about the plumbers, for example, if it’s late afternoon and you can handle a major brainstorm. Perhaps we share the same one. He’s the guy who arrives and says “There’s nothing wrong with this furnace.” Except that it does not provide what we in the rank and file refer to as heat. “I can understand that that’s a problem for you, but there’s nothing wrong with this furnace.” The roofers are pretty terrific, too. I once had a roofer come down my fire escape and tell me he believed with all his heart that my roof was terminal. And I had an entire house, actually occupied by furniture, dependent on that roof. It makes you wonder why your place has a door. Why not just a huge yawning pit of a mouth, red, with teeth, that every once in a while bellows FEED ME MONEY!!

But somehow the painters are the worst. Maybe it’s because you remember them long after they are gone, when you can feel the grit of the plaster dust in your mouth and you’re actually grateful for it because you can’t afford groceries anyway. I once had painters I thought I could trust. It was in New York City, where I had an apartment the size of a luxury car. I hired painters to paint it, although by law my landlord was obliged to have it painted every millennium or so. This is a
funny joke in New York, a frequent subject of cocktail party conversation and topical cartoons, because if painting is handled by your landlord, this is how it works: the painters arrive. They mix three cupfuls of white paint with a bathtub full of water. Then they throw it at the wall. Anything that drips to the floor counts as painting the molding. Then they stand at the door and bid you adieu for an extremely long time, usually longer than they spent painting. Then you hire real painters.

The painters I hired were feminist painters. That was their angle. There were three of them and we had a cordial conversation about the politics of the color peach for a bedroom (was it a capitulation to traditional female sex roles? Did it indicate a lack of commitment? Would it wind up looking pink?) before they began to spackle up a storm. They were excellent plasterers and painters, and when they were finished they gave me a bill so large that recently, some ten years after the event, I hypothesized that their contribution alone may have played a major role in the lobbying effort against Justice Bork. Friends thought I was looking a gift painter in the can. “You had a white couch and you still have a white couch,” one said. “Do you have any idea how rare that is?”

I guess they broke me in. I am reconciled to painters now. I understand their language. “It will look great” means “you will learn to live with it.” “We’ve got a problem with this spot” means “there will be a large mound on the wall.” Recently I was on a business trip to a country roughly five thousand miles from my home, and when I called, my husband informed me that the stock market had crashed and the painters had nicked a plumbing pipe in the wall. “Listen to me,” I said slowly and distinctly. “This is very important. Did you personally witness a nicked pipe or did the painters tell you they nicked the pipe?”

“Why is that important?” my husband said.

“Because if the painters told you they nicked a pipe what
that means is that they ripped every inch of plumbing out of the house and threw the bathtubs out the windows onto the lawn.”

Long silence. “Why did we need the house painted?” said my husband, who will always go for the jugular.

“It is God’s way of cutting us down to size.”

“Aren’t you interested in the market,” he added.

“Did we lose any money?” I asked.

“No, but the painter did. He says he took a real bath on his blue chips and he won’t be able to finish the dining room.”

“How about a drink?” I asked my husband.

“It’s ten o’clock in the morning,” he said.

“Not where I am,” I replied, pouring the vodka and tossing my color chips into the trash.