Show Business Kills (41 page)

She looked at the clock and it was two forty-five, then out the back window and there in fact was Eddie, her cute hunk of
a pool man, just arriving, with that fucking boom box playing so loud that when she opened the window, the music made her
think her head would explode. What did he mean when he said that he told something to a lady who was sitting at her pool?

It wasn’t Constanza, the cleaning lady. She came in on Mondays and Fridays and she wouldn’t dream of sitting out at the pool.
Ellen shouted to Eddie, a yell to be heard over the music so she could get his attention. When he came to the window, she
asked him about the lady. But the only detail he remembered about her was a giant striped purse he nearly tripped over a few
times.

Why would anybody be sitting at her pool? That was impossible. Maybe Eddie had seen a lady at somebody else’s pool and confused
it with hers. A big striped purse?

Marly drove home from Jan’s trying to remember the books she’d read about children and divorce, because the same principles
of dealing with loss had to apply to Joey. Keep the dialogue going, acknowledge your own feelings of helplessness and fear.
No question is too silly, no fear is wrong. If you have trouble with an answer, it’s okay to tell them, “I’m not sure what
to say to that, but I’ll think about it.”

As she drove west on Sunset, Marly called Sabrina Kleier, a child psychologist she’d visited several times after Billy first
moved out. She was surprised when Sabrina herself
picked up instead of a service. When Marly told her what had happened, the young child psychologist told her, “Find any photographs
you have of Jan and go through them with Joey, talk about Jan’s life, their life together, and how much she loves him. If
you have photos of the adoption, take those out and show those to him. Maybe that will open some dialogue about how afraid
he was when he found her.”

When she opened her front door, the house was quiet. She walked from the door to the kitchen, trying to relive how it felt
only yesterday making that same walk with Billy. She looked wistfully at the banquette, remembering the heat of their lovemaking,
and then his tender words last night. He seemed to mean it all. But then he was a man who was paid millions to persuade America
that he was sweet and boyish every night of the week.

She could hear squeals of laughter from the swimming pool, and when she walked outside, she saw her housekeeper and Jan’s
housekeeper, poolside as lifeguards, while the twins and Joey played in the water. Jennifer hoisted herself out of the pool
and ran to Marly. “Is Joey going to be ours if Aunt Janny dies?” Jennifer asked.

Marly gave her a look that meant, “Don’t say that!” and Jennifer said, “Sorry, Mom.”

Joey waved from the water, where Sarah was pulling him around in a Donald Duck inner tube, and Marly went over to the pool
and lay on her stomach so her face hung over the edge. Sarah floated the inner tube close to the edge, and both she and Joey
gave Marly a tiny wet kiss on the cheek. She was relieved to see that he seemed to be having a good time.

“I’m going up to grab a shower and a few hours’ sleep,” she said. When she stood in the shower with the phone on
the floor next to it and the shower door open in case Rose called from the hospital, she was shaking. When she finally pulled
the curtains closed in her bedroom, got into bed and dozed off, she was awakened by Joey’s screams. “I want Mommmmeeeee. My
Mommmeeee.”

Jennifer burst into her room. “Mom, he’s doing it again. He’s been screaming like that all night and day. When we took him
in the water, he stopped for a little while, but he’s always screaming.” Marly put a robe on over her nightie and went downstairs,
where the helpless Maria held the red-faced, agonized little boy.

“Let’s talk about Mommy,” Marly said to him. “Let’s go get out the photo albums and talk about Joey’s Mommy.”

“Mommeee,” Joey wailed, and Marly’s heart ached for him.

The minute Ellen got back to the hospital to sit by Jan’s bed, Rose left for home. Molly was at her play date and Andy was
making rounds, and the house was silent. She was past sleep, so she walked into her messy office and tried to tidy up the
papers. To sort them out. After plowing through a few of the piles, she found herself sitting on the floor, unmoving, in that
daze that comes with the kind of broken sleep they’d all had last night. Her eyes scanned the photos on the cork board around
her desk. The one at Marly and Billy’s wedding where they were all laughing with their heads thrown back in joy!

When the phone jangled, she could feel it in her trembling body.

“Rosie.”

“Marty, it’s Saturday,” she said to her agent.

“I tried to get you last night, but your daughter said you were out, and I really have to talk some sense into you.”

“Why is that?” Rose asked. She was too numb to do her usual jokey exchange with him. Now she was looking at a picture of Molly
and Sarah and Jennifer and Roger, at a Mother’s Day picnic Ellen had thrown in her backyard. They were all in Ellen’s pool,
the little girls hanging on a grinning Roger, who was about seventeen at the time and still willing to come to parties with
his mother’s friends and their daughters.

“Because Howard Bergman told me you walked out of the meeting with him. Could that possibly be true?”

“It could possibly be,” Rose said.

“Rose,” Marty said, and she was so exhausted and so sure this was going to be something she didn’t want to hear that she lay
down on the floor and looked up at the ceiling of her office while he talked.

“Listen to me, Rose.
Faces
was a long time ago. You need a current credit. When I pitch you for assignments, people are starting to ask me, ‘Is she
still around?’ Let me sell that script to Howard Bergman, and you close your eyes and they’ll bring in someone else to do
the rewrite. That way I can tell people you have a project that’s happening. Then maybe you can sell that story about the
computer. Or that other thing about the women friends.”

“No,” she said.

“You’re nuts,” he told her. “But maybe you can afford to be nuts. You have a rich husband.”

“My husband has nothing to do with this decision,” she said. “Why don’t you get me some more meetings on the computer idea?”
she asked him.

“I tried, Rose. Everyone says the same thing. It’s not castable. Nobody’s going to buy a story that stars a middle-aged actress.
They don’t give a shit. And frankly, they’re not so hot for ideas from…”

“A middle-aged writer?” she said.

Marty didn’t answer. Instead she heard him say to somebody, “Tell him I’ll call him back,” then he got back on the line. “So
I have one more suggestion for you.”

“Which is…” she asked him, thinking she’d like to take a little nap right where she was, drifting, so tired, she just wanted
to get Marty off the phone. Instead, to keep herself awake, she sat up and moved from the floor to the desk chair, picked
up a pencil, and doodled while he talked, drawing cartoon eyes, which was what she always doodled when she was on the phone.
Marly would probably attribute some dark meaning to the doodles.

“I represent a young gal,” Marty said. Rose always hated that word. She made the eyes almond-shaped, and gave them long lashes.
“And she is very, very hip. She took some courses at AFI, she’s kind of punk-looking, pierced nose, that kind of deal, but
don’t be put off, because she’s very bright. In fact she graduated from Harvard a few years ago. So, I had lunch with her
yesterday and she said, ‘Marty, people all over town want to meet with me, but at the moment I don’t have any ideas’.”

Rose knew she should have put the phone down then, because she knew where Marty was going with this, but she stayed on the
line with the same bizarre fascination people have when they stand and watch the paramedics pull bodies out of cars after
an accident. Only this time it was her own body that was being pulled out of the car. He was telling her
that she should go into a meeting with this young woman as if the idea had come from the two of them, and work with her and
share the credit with her. It sounded horrifyingly familiar.

“Marty,” Rose said, “let me make this real clear, okay? I’ve been a member of the Writers’ Guild since nineteen sixty-eight.
That’s twenty-five years. More years than this girl has been alive. I have used more Blackwing 602 pencils down to their stubs
than the number of days she has been on this earth, and I’ll be damned if I will make like she’s my writing partner so I can
get into a meeting at a studio with some executive who will probably be the gal’s age and wonder why Granny is along for the
ride.

“May I also add that a writer is someone who does have ideas, so tell your client with the facial jewelry if she doesn’t have
any ideas, she isn’t one.” As she hung up, she thought with an ache about Manny Birnbaum. Then she looked at some notes on
her desk that she’d made a few weeks ago. The notes were for a movie idea that had once seemed terrific to her, only now the
idea didn’t seem so hot anymore. She crumpled the paper up. Then she turned in her chair and aimed the crumpled paper at the
wastebasket.

She remembered how Allan used to do that and say, “And the crowds cheered as he scored…,” get the paper in the basket, and
then say “two points!” She missed, so she went over to the wastebasket to pick the paper up and put it in. “Slam dunk,” she
said dejectedly as she kneeled next to the basket and righted the missed shot.

That was when she saw the pieces of a photograph in there and couldn’t imagine what photograph it could be. So she pulled
a few of the pieces out, and when she saw which one
it was, she wanted to cry. Why would anyone take that precious photo of the four friends and destroy it? Was Molly acting
out because she’d spent the last many hours at Jan’s bedside? That wasn’t like her at all. Rose cried quietly as she sat on
the floor trying to put the picture together piece by piece.

  
31
  

S
he was in the motel room, eating a Big Mac for break-fast and feeling fat and crummy and disappointed. Before she left home,
she’d figured that by this time she’d be calling to tell Polly, “Guess what, honey. I’m in Hollywood with a great job! And
you can tell your dad, and that bitch Sharon, too!” Polly. She ought to call her. At least she ought to call her own answering
machine to see if anyone was trying to get ahold of her
.

When she reached into her purse to pull out the remote she had to beep into the phone to retrieve her messages, she felt the
gun, and suddenly she was filled with fear that maybe the police would figure out the way they always did on TV that they
had the wrong person, and then they’d come looking for her
.

Nah, she told herself as she dialed her number at home. Police were only that smart on TV. After one ring she heard her machine
pick up and her own voice answer and say in a way that Lou used to call “phony bullshit,” but which she knew was theatrical,
“I’m sorry I’m not here to take your call right now, but I really want to talk to you, so please leave a message after the
beep
.”

Yeah, great voice. Ellen would be thrilled to have that voice add class to her office. She pushed the remote button, then
heard the garbled, squeaky sound of the tape rewinding, followed by her daughter’s voice. “Mom, I’ve been trying to find you
for the past two days, and you haven’t called me back. I know your car is gone, and I’m in a complete panic. Now it’s Saturday.
I’m calling to find out if you saw the news on TV, about your friend Jan? It’s so awful. Call me back.” Click
.

“
Yeah, this is Harvey over at the Floor Store, and I’m callin’ to make sure you’re comin’ in. I don’t care if you get germs
on the filing cabinet, I’ve got a month’s worth of bills I have to send out, and all kinds of other stuff, so you better be
here.” Click

“
Mom. It’s me. It’s Saturday night. Where are you? I stopped by the Floor Store looking for you, and Harvey was really bummed
because you didn’t show or call. I figure you must be really super depressed about Jan O’Malley. I know you two were close
and all. But the good news is I heard on TV that they think they got the guy who did it. So that’s something, right? Talk
t’ya later.” Click
.