Some Kind of Miracle (2 page)

H
ere’s how it feels to massage Marty Melman: like making a pizza, Dahlia thought. His white, hairless body looked like pre-rolled-out pizza dough and felt like it, too. In fact, she had a recipe she’d cut out of
Los Angeles
magazine years ago, for Wolfgang Puck’s Pizza, and every time she took the homemade dough out from under the dish towel where it had been rising and moved it around between her floured hands, she thought about Marty Melman.

Massaging Helene Shephard was like massaging a Cornish hen. The old woman had bumpy skin and a body that was bony and fragile and felt eminently breakable in Dahlia’s strong hands. And the funny thing was that Helene was so ticklish that when Dahlia worked on her feet, she always let out a cackle that sounded like something right out of the barnyard.

Massaging Leroy Berk was like washing a car. He
was big and black and shiny and just as silent as a parked car, at least to Dahlia. He was always lying facedown on the table when she got there and never even acknowledged her arrival. The room in which she massaged the handsome basketball player was lined with awards and trophies Leroy had won over the years, and if Leroy happened to be asleep when she finished, Dahlia took the opportunity to look at them.

Helene always offered her a cup of tea afterward, and even when Dahlia had a lot of errands to do that day and knew if she said yes she’d have to hear the same stories repeated again and again, the hopeful look in Helene’s eyes when she asked made Dahlia agree to stay. To stop for a while in the kitchen where Helene, still in her robe, brewed what she called “a proper pot of tea” and put out a plate of home-baked cookies, one of which she would dip into the tea and munch as she complained about her adult children and how they never came to visit. Sometimes Dahlia worried that she was the only person the poor old woman talked to at all, so she had to stay.

Tonight she was working for Marty, that hunk of pizza dough, who invariably tried to do what he laughingly called “cop a feel.”

“Couple of extra bucks in it if you massage me under the towel,” he liked to say to Dahlia.

“I don’t do that, Marty. You can look in the Yellow Pages under ‘Hookers’ for that,” she said to him the last time.

“Tootsie, I don’t need the Yellow Pages.”

He was right. He didn’t. Marty’s white, doughy
body and obnoxious personality aside, his house was invariably populated with young, tall, skinny, bright-eyed girls, who answered the door, talked on the phone, gabbed on the tennis court. Usually there were at least two of them standing in the kitchen preparing dinner when Dahlia picked up her check from the houseman and left through the back door. Tonight Marty was in his bedroom, dressed in a white terry-cloth robe, sitting on the bed talking on the phone. The robe was hanging open, and Dahlia could see the flash of his bright yellow bikini underwear, most of which was covered with the roll of his white belly.

He waved her in, and she moved past him to the grand marble master bathroom, which was mirrored everywhere so she could see her tired self reflected on all sides. Above the sink, where she washed her hands with Dove soap from the crystal soap dish, she caught a closer look at her own exhausted face. Only one more today, she told herself. You can make it through one more. This was the sixth massage she’d given today. Her only break had been to sit in the van and wolf down a sandwich she packed herself that morning, and her back and shoulders ached.

Now she heard Marty say into the phone, “Gotta run. Gonna have a good-lookin’ woman beat me now. Check in with you later, babe.” Then he marched into the bathroom while Dahlia’s hands were still covered in soap, pulled off his yellow bikinis, kicked them across the marble floor so they slid to a stop near her, and then waddled to the toilet and peed. Dahlia rinsed her hands and, still carrying the towel, hurried out of the room to set up Marty’s massage table. She
could hear the water go on in Marty’s shower stall, which was bigger than her entire bathroom, as she struggled to pull the heavy massage table out of his huge bedroom storage closet. It was filled with Tumi luggage, and there was an exercise bike and a Stair-Master, too, both of which, from the shape of Marty, she knew he never used.

The table felt heavier than usual, and it seemed to be stuck between the gym equipment in such a way that no amount of Dahlia’s tugging could release it. The tears rose behind her eyes, and she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to hold them back. She couldn’t do this anymore. It was ruining her hands. There wasn’t one day when she was driving home from giving her last massage that they didn’t throb in pain. She really should be home at the piano working on her songs, not having some obnoxious Hollywood producer think it was okay to pee in front of her because she was less than human—just another servingperson who came in the back door.

Okay. No more complaining, she thought, taking a deep breath. Her mother would have told her she was lucky to have a talent to fall back on when nobody wanted to buy her songs. Besides, she had only one more hour to go, she repeated to herself, pulling again with no success as she tried to free Marty’s massage table from whatever was stopping it from moving. In one more hour she’d be out of here, and then she could go home. And do what? she asked herself. Sit and pay bills? Worry and panic over which ones she could avoid this month so she could pay the ones that were the most pressing? That was the story of her life these days.

She could hear Marty singing in the shower in a booming, off-key voice. That old Dean Martin song called “That’s Amore.” I can’t do this to myself anymore, she thought, clenching her aching hands and pulling harder on the table. When I get home, I swear I will work on my songs, she vowed just as her hardest tug at the table brought it crashing toward her. Hang in, she told herself. Just one more hour.

West Los Angeles was her territory, Beverly Hills, Westwood, and Brentwood—all fancy neighborhoods so she was able to charge seventy-five bucks each for these house calls, but Marty’s butler, Victor, always handed her a check for a hundred. The extra twenty-five was a tip, and nobody else tipped her. Marty was turning off the shower, and she rushed to get the table made up so that when he emerged, clean and glowing and talcumed like a baby, she’d be ready for him.

Marty marched into the bedroom wrapped in a huge bath sheet that he held at his shoulder like an actor in an amateur play wearing a bad toga. The table usually creaked, begging for mercy, when he climbed aboard, but tonight the creak was so loud that Dahlia was afraid this time it might really buckle while he wriggled into place. But soon he was lying still, facedown and ready for her as she sighed and poured oil into her left hand with the bottle in her right, rubbed her hands together, then placed them on Marty’s naked back. As she began to work, Marty let out a happy groan of pleasure.

“God, did I need this,” he said, his head down in the face cradle. “Insane week. One picture supposed to start next week. No cast. Another one in post. Sup
posed to open next month. Music got all fucked up. We’ve got no song for the credits. We’ve got no score. Three new projects in development—Ouch! Shit! That’s the spot that always kills me. What
is
that?”

“Muscle spasm,” Dahlia said, working the big knot with the heel of her right hand.

“Ouch. Oh, yeah. Dig in there,” Marty said. “What muscle is that?”

“Your trapezius.”

“Fucking trapezius always goes on the fritz,” Marty said.

“So what’s the name of the new picture?” Dahlia said, not really caring but making her usual friendly-masseuse small talk.

“Stay by My Side,”
Marty said.

“No kidding?” Dahlia said, laughing a genuinely surprised laugh. “
Stay by my side forever. Stay by my side, my friend
.” The tune was being played in her head now by what she called her inner DJ. That lyric was one she’d written at age twelve and set to Sunny’s tune. The girls wrote dozens of original songs together, and that was the title of one that had been the all-time favorite of each of them. Probably because it was about the two of them and their close friendship.

“That’s funny. When I was about twelve,” Dahlia said as her hands moved down to Marty’s chubby legs and she pressed hard against his calf with her thumbs, “my cousin and I wrote songs together, and one of them was called ‘Stay by My Side.’ It was good, too. I don’t know if I could find an old tape of it somewhere, but that’s a funny coincidence, isn’t it? That you need a song with that title and I wrote one?”

Dahlia dug deeper into Marty’s calves, and her mind searched her little house in Laurel Canyon, wondering what she could have done with the old tapes of the songs she wrote with Sunny twenty-five years ago. She hadn’t heard them since then, and they were probably dopey and immature, but they were worth a listen, if only she could find the damned things. “I mean, you know I’m really a songwriter. Right? That I only do this as a side business. Right?” Marty didn’t answer.

Those old tapes were probably crumbled and destroyed by now. “Well, you know what? I’m going to look for them tonight, and if I find that one, I’ll get it over to you. Is the best place to send it your office? It’s on Beverly Drive, right? I massaged you there one time after you got hurt playing tennis. I can bring it there.”

What a funny coincidence. Now as she worked on Marty, she tried to remember the exact tune of “Stay by My Side.” In those days Sunny never bothered to write down the tunes on music paper, and Dahlia never saved the little pieces of notebook paper with the lyrics scrawled on them. The two of them were the only ones who sang them, so why take the time? Every so often they recorded them in Sunny’s living room on Dahlia’s funny old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and maybe she could find some of the tapes. No doubt the song would sound laughably bad all these years later. But what if it held up and was good and Marty actually went for it? Having a song in a movie was a very big deal, so she wasn’t going to be shy.

After all, everyone knew the story of how Mariah
Carey had been a backup singer and then got herself invited to a party so she could push a demo of hers into the hands of Tommy Mottola. That story was a legend in the music business. After that night Tommy Mottola made Mariah Carey into a big star. Of course, Tommy Mottola also married Mariah Carey, and Dahlia could barely stand to look at Marty Melman…but never mind.

The lesson in the story was that it pays off big time to be aggressive. Mariah Carey went from being a backup singer to a star. Hey, maybe it was true that God moved in mysterious ways and that in the grand scheme of things Dahlia had become a masseuse because of this very moment. Maybe she’d become the masseuse to Marty Melman—referred to him by Cathy Slavin, a cousin of his—so someday she could sell him a song. Oh, God, she thought, if Marty Melman bought her song, wouldn’t she laugh about how it had been worth all the crude behavior she put up with from him all the time? The song was dancing through her brain, and she was remembering the way she and Sunny used to sing it in close harmony. The friends and relatives ate it up at parties.

“Stay by my side forever. Stay by my side, my friend,” Dahlia sang softly to Marty’s back. “Is it a kind of pop feel you’re looking for?” she asked hopefully, but there was no answer. “I mean, is the film a comedy? ’Cause if it’s a comedy, the song probably doesn’t have to be something real serious like one of those Céline Dion anthems or anything? Right?”

Marty’s reply was the low growl of a snore. He hadn’t heard one word she’d said about the song.
Well, so what? She’d go home tonight and find the tape and pray that the old song was as good as she remembered. Somewhere in the back of her storage bin, she probably still had that old tape player, too, so she could listen to it and then figure out how to transfer it to a CD, and then she would get in Marty’s face with it now, when he was desperate for a song with that title.

Somehow, after a while, she persuaded the sleeping Marty to turn over. She watched him shudder happily from somewhere deep in a dream when she rubbed the front of his thighs, and she hurried to finish at the bottom of his pudgy feet. Maybe, she thought, this day was a turning point for her. Maybe this was the day she’d look back on and remember as that low point in the trough period when she didn’t think things could get worse—and then her songwriting was rediscovered. One of these days she’d tell that story to Larry King and all the other talk-show hosts when she was a guest on their TV shows, and they’d shake their heads in amazement.

At the end of every massage session, Dahlia always did something she learned in massage school. It was one of those techniques she used not because she believed it worked but because it was the kind of touchy-feely, New Age–y thing some of her clients were convinced contained some magic. She would place her hands gently on the client’s face, her thumbs on their forehead and her fingers resting on their cheeks, and then slowly she would take in and release long breaths, as if she were summoning some divine spiritual energy into herself and then transmitting it to the client. People like Helene Shephard, lonely little
old women who believed in all that way-out stuff, ate it up.

Marty was still asleep, and his snore was coming out in little popping spurts, but she decided to do the face thing to him anyway. After all, if there was ever a time to transmit something to a client, this was it. Now she stood behind him and placed her thumbs on his forehead and her fingers on his pudgy cheeks that pulsated with each emerging snore. Then she closed her own eyes tightly and took a deep breath. Buy my song, she thought. Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please. Buy my goddamned song!

A song in a movie could turn her life around. She’d move out of that little house she had mistakenly bought and watched fall apart because she couldn’t afford to keep it up, and instead she’d find a condo with a new bathroom and windows that didn’t leak. Or maybe she’d completely redo the house, add a second floor and a music room. She still had big dreams, and the way to make them happen was definitely through her songs.