Okay. Jane shrugged as Natalie dumped half the raw taro into her pudding. She stirred twice, then spooned it all down, licking her lips. “Yummy,” she said. “And not hot at all. You never developed much tolerance for heat, Jane, but you’re still a wonderful cook.”
Jane smiled, then watched as a frown crossed Natalie’s face. Natalie lifted a hand to her mouth. She blinked rapidly, and the tears began to stream. Her mouth opened and closed convulsively. Before Natalie could manage more than a howl, the phone rang.
“Excuse me,” said Jane, picking up the cordless phone and turning toward the door to the dining room. “I won’t be but a moment.”
She’d asked Max to call her about quarter of six, before he left the office, to see if she needed him to pick up anything on the way home. A roasted chicken. Deli food. The sort of thing they’d been subsisting on since Before.
“Hey!” she said, raising her voice a bit over Natalie’s wheezing and thumping. It was time to leave the kitchen now, much as she hated to. “Just a sec,” she said to Max as she walked into the dining room, reaching with one hand behind her to shove a dining chair beneath the doorknob. The other door out of the kitchen, she’d secured when Natalie arrived. She patted the key in her pocket, the key to the kitchen door’s dead bolt.
Locking the barn door too late—she knew that’s what Max thought every time she did it. Too late to keep out Bethany, too late for Frannie, but not this time. No, not this time.
“Guess what?” she said to Max. “I’m making Thai food. Yes! I know! Shrimp soup. Green curry. Tapioca pudding. Yes! No, no wine. But pick up some beer, okay? Yes, that’d be great. And I have something to tell you. You won’t believe who called. Stopped by. In fact, she’s in the kitchen right this minute. No, that’s okay. I have a minute. Go ahead and tell me.”
Jane made her way with the phone into the living room, where she settled onto a sofa. Out the window she could see the house where Natalie, her friend, her bosom buddy, had once lived. The sidewalk down which Frannie had taken her last run.
“Unh-huh,” she said to Max as the minutes ticked by. The sounds from the kitchen were fainter now. And then they stopped. Finally, she said to Max, “I’ll tell you about it later. Let me get back now. Yes. I love you too, sweetheart.”
But Jane didn’t hurry into the kitchen. She picked up a magazine from her coffee table, a copy of
Saveur
, and flipped through the pages, noting with a smile an article on peppers, turning down the corners of an interesting recipe or two. Then, finally, with a sigh, Jane rose. It was time to go back in the kitchen, to put away a few things, to wash the scarlet bowl, and to see how her old girlfriend was getting along.
Real Life
If there were a space more deadly than Room 1517, 100 Centre Street, New York, New York, Clare Meacham didn’t want to know about it.
She’d been sitting in the dreadful room for two hours, and her bones were overdone linguine. Her neck could barely support her curly head. The room had sucked off what energy she’d packed in with her—which had been precious little, God knows, on this steamy rotten morning. A month into the heat wave of the century, Manhattan had all the appeal of an overripe dinosaur carcass.
Besides which, since David dumped her, Clare had been mightily depressed and hadn’t been sleeping worth a damn. She yawned now, and Room 1517 seemed to open its jaws in answer around her. The giant municipal maw filled with long rows of dark blue cushioned armchairs. Cream-colored walls, splotched as an adolescent’s complexion. Cheap particle-board wainscoting. White acoustic ceiling tile mushed whispers into a slow steady hiss. On the floor, patched beige linoleum squares cheated at hopscotch.
Dust motes floated in the refrigerated air, recycled, no doubt, thought Clare, through the dead dinosaur’s respiratory system. Yes, the very air itself was dank and dangerously gelatinous. Teeming, one felt, with tuberculosis, cholera, hantavirus, Ebola. (Good. Maybe she’d contract one of those and die a spectacular lingering death, and then David would be sorry.) God knows, the fluorescent lighting, which cast a greenish pallor over the room’s captives, gave them the look of disease.
The two hundred and seventy-five prospective jurors slumped and lumped in the blue armchairs.
Oh, God, could it be borne, their faces asked, that this was only the first, the number one, the maidenhead of their ten endless days of jury duty? Ten, that is, if an actual trial didn’t glue them even longer into some angry crouch of deliberation.
Clare shifted in her seat, careful not to upset the notebook computer perched on her lap. Thirty-nine, a tall, languorously attractive brunette despite the dark circles of despair beneath her eyes, Clare wore brown woven leather loafers, a short khaki skirt, a red-and-white striped shirt, and gold hoop earrings. Her long, dark, curly hair was pulled back off her face with a tortoise barrette. She was as presentable as she could bring herself to be under the circumstances.
The circumstances being (a) a broken heart and (b) the fact that this little trip down the lane of civic responsibility was most certainly going to cost her her livelihood. Her inevitable financial ruin and bankruptcy proceedings could later be traced back to this precise and fetid A.M. Not only was she not in the mood, but Clare could not, goddammit, afford to be on jury duty.
Try telling that to Norman O. Goodman, New York county clerk of court. Or any of his stiff-necked minions. Did they care? Ho ho. That was a good one.
The freshly blondined woman in the appalling gold-braided fuchsia suit behind the desk in Room 105 or 106 or whatever it was downstairs, where Clare had gone two weeks earlier to beg for just one more reprieve from her civic responsibility, had said, “Forget it, Ms. Meacham. No more excuses, no more deferments. We, the puffed-up jealous, self-righteous, civilly employed we, hereby sentence you to jury duty. Or else.”
That had been the peroxided bitch’s final word. On the exact same day that Arnie, Clare’s producer, had called her in and said, “The ratings go up, Clare. Or else.”
It was the O. J. trial that had set in motion the avalanche of the viewer share of
Real Life
, the soap opera on which Clare was head writer.
“Court TV is a fucking vampire,” Arnie had said. “We’ve got to jazz
Real Life
way up, Clare. Pick up the pace. Add some sizzle. Give those sofa tuberettes some blood and guts along with their romance.
Real Life
’s gotta be more like real life. Grittier. Sexier. Meaner. Hotter.”
Then his terrible last words. “The whole story line has to be in overdrive in the next three weeks—even if you have to write ninety-six hours a day.” That had been two weeks ago, and Clare, bleak and blue, hadn’t written a word. Now, with one week left to save her ass, here she was locked in Room 1517. Squashed cheek-by-jowl with almost three hundred of her fellow Gothamites of every race, nationality, and socioeconomic category.
Earlier this morning, in the long line behind the security check, the sticky crowd had made nervous jokes about knives and guns and bombs, all the while sussing one another out with the quick once-over that is second nature to every New Yorker: assessing caste, class, tailoring, and degree of homicidal impulse in a millisecond. Then, after they’d received their guides to restaurants in neighboring Chinatown and Little Italy and had watched the video on the ins and outs of jury duty, they’d filed into Room 1517 and the sea of dark blue chairs.
But inevitably, the stew of strangers had settled into the reality of their task.
It was theirs to wait.
And wait.
And wait.
They’d looked around, then, okay, damn it, with a collective sigh they’d opened their briefcases, backpacks, purses, and bags and unearthed newspapers, magazines, books they’d been meaning to read, find-a-word puzzles, needlework, the paperwork that had long been shoved aside. They’d clamped on Walkmen. Clare spotted two other people, both Wall Street types, bent over laptop computers. A young Hispanic woman in the last row, next to the windows, fiddled with the antenna of a tiny television. Here and there, a couple of people talked quietly. And fully a third of the room lurched and listed and snored and snuffled through mid-morning naps.
Clare stared accusingly at her computer’s blank screen. Her brain was frozen. It was totally quiet in there. Except for a constant interior refrain. Nobody loves you. Never will again. That was the main melody.
Then, winding in around it, a wailing glissando: Why is it my job to turn the tide of thirty-odd years of sappy story lines about soggy romance, all slow as molasses? Why do I have to make the shift from slow-rising yeast to Pop Tarts? Horse-and-buggy to the Concorde? Whalebone corsets to Madonna and her jet-nose tits?
Because they said so, that’s why. Because they paid her the big bucks to swallow what “art” she might have once fancied herself possessed of, zip her lip, and deliver whatever crap they demanded. On time and in the flavor of the moment. No matter what her personal problems. Who gave a shit about them?
The cursor on the small green screen before her blinked. Write, Clare. Suck it up. Get your ass in gear. Take a deep breath. Push some oxygen in and out. Get the old gray matter moving.
Could she do that? Maybe.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t know these characters. These silly people, most of whom she’d inherited from her predecessor, who had, incidentally, hanged herself in the bathroom of her East Hampton beach house one fine morning two summers earlier. Just down the lane from Martha Stewart’s house. Her death had made the six o’clock local news. Clare wondered, would her suicide play as well?
But she digressed. Well, Christ, who wouldn’t? What the hell else was there to do with Dirk and Carol and Josh and Trish and Richard and Paula, the three main couples of
Real Life
? They were such stupid people with such stupid problems. Slow stupid problems. Problems that moved at the pace of a banana slug (or a soap) and were about as fascinating.
No, actually, a banana slug was a hell of a lot more interesting than the ailing marriage of Trish, played by a busty brunette with the voice of a mosquito, and Josh, the simpering nephew of Arnie the producer, who couldn’t act his way out of a damp Kleenex.
Clare couldn’t even think about Richard and Paula, her whiny preppie couple.
So she’d have to start with Carol and Dirk—C for Clare and D for David, get it? Ms. Clare Meacham Herself and her erstwhile lover, Dr. David Teller. Yes, Carol and Dirk were loosely based on her own pathetic life.
“Excuse me.”
Clare jumped. It was the woman to her left. An attractive middle-aged black woman in a navy business suit, good pumps, substantial gold jewelry. “Do you have change for a dollar? I need to call my office.”
Clare checked her wallet, handed the woman three quarters and two dimes. “I’ll have to owe you a nickel.”
The woman’s smile was warm. “Nope, I owe you.” And she headed off to the phone room.
She’d be a while. Clare had already checked it out: three machines vending poisonous substances, a water fountain, and more of those damned blue chairs in which to wait for the four phones. Four phones for nearly three hundred New Yorkers, and no cellulars allowed? You might as well have cut off their oxygen.
Clare stared back at the blank screen. Okay. Dirk and Carol, step up, please, front and center. In
Real Life
, they’d weathered many problems, such as the time when Dirk, who was a plastic surgeon, had been called away to Wisconsin for two months to reconstruct the faces of an entire family of protected witnesses (as had David) and had strayed with a Scandinavian scrub nurse (which Clare had suspected). Then there’d been Carol’s automobile accident and the coma and the long while after she’d come out of it when she thought Dirk was an extraterrestrial.
Now, lagging about six weeks behind Clare’s real life, Dirk had just leaned over a table in an Italian restaurant and told Carol he was calling off their engagement. Because, well, he was marrying someone else. Carol had burst into tears and bolted out of the restaurant. (As had Clare.) “What are you writing?”
Again, Clare started. This time, her interrogator was to her left, a very short man sitting two chairs over. About her age, late thirties, he was nicely turned out in fine fawn-colored trousers, a T-shirt in chocolate, a handsome blue, brown, and beige jacket. Armani probably. His dark, clean profile reminded her of David.
David. Clare’s stomach flip-flopped.
Meanwhile, the gorgeous little babe was waiting.
What was she writing?
Nothing. Not a word. She was simply staring at her screen. Listening to the computer’s tiny hum, much quieter than the terror gnawing at her intestines. The hideous, bright yellow fear that she couldn’t do it. Couldn’t, couldn’t, couldn’t revamp
Real Life
. They’d fire her ass, she’d be a bag lady within a year. Reeking of urine. Scratching at herself. Begging for alms, from real people, with real jobs, like she used to be. And then, for sure, no one would ever love her again. She’d die all alone, her grave in a potter’s field dug by inmates from Rikers Island.
“A script,” she finally said.
“A screenplay?” The dapper little man slipped one chair closer.
“No.” She shook her head.
What did this guy want? This was New York, for Christ’s sake, where strangers might ask you where you bought your shoes—and how much you paid for them. But your business? They stayed out of it.