The Gift Bag Chronicles (5 page)

Two hours before the cocktail party on Saturday night, I’m upstairs in my former bedroom sitting in the lotus position. Okay, half lotus, because nobody except yoga freaks can do the full lotus. Travel noise machine on; the “Woodland Brook” setting, even though it always makes me want to pee. I’m trying to envision myself back in my house in L.A. I’m just seeing myself in my own living room — far from my parents, far from Jack hitting balls in the backyard with Charles, from this party I can already hear the beginnings of downstairs, and really far from my last-minute, oh-so-rustic gift bags of first-crop-of-the-season organic Heritage apples and a wedge of artisanal goat cheese from the local farmers’ market tucked in a small brown paper bag tied up with a red-and-white-checked ribbon — when my cell rings. Shit. Without uncrossing my legs, I kind of hop-drag myself over to my bag and pull out the phone. Steven.

“I can’t talk now because I’m doing yoga.”

“You only do yoga when you’re trying to calm down.”

“You’re supposed to do yoga to calm down. Otherwise why would anyone do it?”

“My point exactly. Actually, why aren’t you having sex with Chuck to calm down?”

“Because Charles is out hitting balls in the backyard with Jack. Because Helen put him in the other guest room. Because, because, because,” I say, slumping against the bed. “Any other questions?”

It’s true. Ever since Jennifer’s call at God knows what hour yesterday, the whole weekend has been a blur. Or maybe I’m just a blur — an overworked, jet-lagged blur — and everything else is totally clear. Jack and Helen seem very clear, and God knows, Amy is never anything but clear. And don’t even get me started on Jennifer’s and Caitlin’s capacity for clarity. Even Charles seems annoyingly clear. Maybe I need to reconsider that macrobiotic diet. Or bring this up with my yoga teacher. Like it’s that simple. “No dairy, no sugar, stand on your head.” “Oh, now I get it!”

By the time I picked up Charles at the station Saturday morning, my jet-lagged blur had coalesced around suburban America circa 1950. The train doors opening, the passengers pouring out into the long-shadowed late-summer sun. I was even driving Jack’s old Volvo. For a second, I had a vision of what my life would have been like if I’d stayed in Philly. If I’d never gone to New York. Or L.A. It looked something like Julianne Moore in a twinset and a long-suffering smile.

“Hey,” Charles said, sliding in next to me with that slightly unreadable grin of his. “You in a Volvo,” he said. “Thought I’d never see the day.”

I wondered briefly if that was some kind of dig, if he really would prefer me in a twinset, barefoot and pregnant.

“So you like the whole Cheever country thing?” I said, leaning across the seat for a kiss. A really fast kiss, because here in my dutiful Julianne Moore mode I’m starting to chatter away mindlessly about my parents, Amy, the weekend, so that he can’t get a word in. Maybe it’s nerves. The fact that, after all this time, Charles is
finally meeting my parents. Or maybe it’s because we’re actually together so infrequently that I’m talking really really fast to get everything in. Before he leaves again.

“Hey,” he said, reaching across the seat to finger my hair. “It’ll be fine. I’ve met parents before. I was married once, remember?”

“Yeah, well, so was I, but it turns out my parents have outlasted any relationship I’ve ever had.”

He looked at me quizzically.

“Don’t look at me like that,” I said, shaking my hair free of his fingers. “You’ll see.”

Turns out, he didn’t see. Or actually he did. Charles and my parents saw each other across Jack’s freshly weeded and mown lawn and fell completely and totally in love. I mean, Charles Evers of Chevy Chase and Georgetown U. and the salt-and-pepper hair, blue blazer, and khakis was made, just
made
for lunch in Bryn Mawr with Jack and Helen Bradford, iced tea and cold chicken on blue willow plates. Merchant-Ivory could have filmed it.

“Charles is marvelous,” Helen said when she and I were back in the kitchen, stacking the lunch plates and getting out the lemon icebox cookies for dessert.

“Yes, he is,” I said from deep in my fog, where I was no longer Julianne Moore but Emma Thompson in an Empire waist gown and a chignon. A Jane Austen spinster with a BlackBerry and one last shot at true love.

“I had no idea such normal people worked in Hollywood,” Helen said, never lifting her eyes from the cookies she was painstakingly arranging on the blue and white china plate.

I was tempted to ask her what she meant by
normal
. But even in my Emma Thompson fog, I knew exactly what she meant. That she’s amazed,
stunned
to find in the moneygrubbing, back-stabbing, synagogue-worshiping tribe that is Hollywood in her mind, there’s a college-educated, Emily Post, paper-trained WASP. Like the prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box. If
anybody still eats Cracker Jacks. And what’s even more amazing: he’s with
me
. “Well, Charles handles a lot of our corporate clients, if that’s what you mean,” I said, treading carefully, because suddenly I was no longer the Emma Thompson lonely spinster but a slutty Britney Spears wannabe stuck in a Woody Allen fantasy sequence with my Rittenhouse Square lunch-at-the-club mother. A fantasy sequence with subtitles.

“Oh? Is that something you could get into, too?” Helen said casually.

Oh, does that mean you could stop thinking only of yourself and your silly career, leave that Sodom and Gomorrah you call Los Angeles, and move back with the righteous and live on Park Avenue like we always expected you would?

“Well, all the agency
presidents,”
I said, hitting the word hard, “have sort of specialized, and my specialty is event planning.”

Oh, for God’s sake, I’m a boss and probably make more money than Dad did at my age, so get off my back about moving back east
.

“So, does that mean you could change specialties and move back to New York?”

If you think you can outargue me, you are sorely mistaken
.

“Only if I really wanted to.”

I knew you were hocking me about New York!

Suddenly, I’m not Julianne, or Emma, or Britney, but a thirty-six-year-old president of a major Hollywood publicity firm who knows all there is to know about getting celebrities to walk the red carpet. I can land covers of
Vogue, GQ
, and
Entertainment Weekly
for a single star for the same movie. I can fly across three time zones and still run a meeting. I can drive a stick shift, run a party for seven hundred, do the eagle, the pigeon, and a full back bend, and tell me that doesn’t do wonders for a girl’s social life.

“Yes, I could move back, but I don’t want to,” I said, suddenly dispensing with any need for subtitles. “I like it right where I am.”

“I see,” Helen said, picking up the plate and heading toward
the door. “It’s just that’s what you said when you were still married to Josh. And look what happened there.”

Now I’m upstairs twisting myself into a pretzel trying to calm down before half of Bryn Mawr descends, cocktails in hand, on my parents’ living room. Or I was until Steven called.

“Wait, after all that, your mother put your boyfriend of three years down the hall in the other guest room?” he says, laughing. “How very
Meet the Parents.”

“Yes, very,” I say, anxious to change the subject. “How’s life at the beach?”

“Life’s a beach,” he says, yawning. “I’m so bored I’m thinking of setting off the watch again just to see the coast guard turn up and impress the other boys.”

“Isn’t there some kind of limit on the number of times you can pull that fire alarm without them confiscating it?”

“No,” he says, yawning again. “You just keep paying the fine. Best three grand I ever spent was watching them chopper out to the boat in Hawaii and call my name on the bullhorn.”

“And to think you never got enough attention as a child. By the way, did Caitlin ask you if you could run the Tuesday meeting with Jennifer?”

“Umm, yeah,” he says airily.

“What’d you say?”

“I said, ‘What Tuesday meeting with Jennifer?’”

“Oh, come on, you have to.”

“Have
to?” he says in his fake arch voice. “I know you still outrank me, but you’re not technically my boss. We’re
colleagues
. Besides, I can’t. Even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. The walkthrough on the
TV Guide
Emmy party has been scheduled for Tuesday morning for weeks. Half the masthead’s flying out for it. Plus, we’re going over their gift bag, which is actually more of a minefield. So far we’ve only got a copy of the magazine, snore;
Altoids, like that’s anything special; some new energy bar; a T-shirt; and a miniature of Absolut’s new ‘Wonder’ vodka, which is just their old vodka but in a new bottle. I mean, it’s all so predictable and low-rent I can hardly stand it.”

“Half the masthead is coming out?” I say, ignoring the gift bag problem for the time being. You can always get some CD or DVD from somewhere at the last minute, and besides, MAC is very close to signing on as a sponsor, and they can always be counted on to throw in some new lip gloss or eye shadow to sex up the bag. “Who has that kind of money in publishing anymore?”

“InStyle, Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly —
you want me to go on? — although God knows our big magazine client,
C
, doesn’t but still manages to expect the world for it.”

C
magazine. Don’t get me started. Our big status client.
My
big status client, which given their anorexic editorial budget and neurotic insecurity vis-à-vis
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Entertainment Weekly, InStyle
, and
The New York Times
Style section means they’re really just a big pain in the ass. I don’t know if it’s because they’re a fashion magazine or because their L.A. office is just a revolving door for yet another set of know-it-all New Yorkers who are clueless about L.A. — most recently one Patrice Fielding, who is, even more annoyingly, one of those leggy, snaggle-toothed know-it-all Londoners — but there’s always a problem with
C
and their events. This one’s too big. That one’s too small. This one didn’t get the right A-list. That one got too many B-listers. This one had too many fashion stylists, like that would really be a problem, given that the party
C
threw was for Louis Vuitton. Frankly, if we lost the account, my life would be a hell of a lot easier. Still, they’re one of our oldest clients, and Charles has a long history with the magazine, especially the fusty old editor, Andrew McFeeney, so my little fantasy of them dumping DWP-ED will never happen. Not in my lifetime.

“Okay, never mind,” I say, trying to keep the conversation to
the topic at hand. “I get it, you’re busy. I’ll get Caitlin to reschedule Jennifer for Wednesday. But you’re handling it. I have no intention of seeing Jennifer Schwartzbaum until the walkthrough for her wedding.”

“What, and miss all the hysterics with her gift bag?”

I hear a click on the line. God, who now? “Hang on,” I say, clicking over. “Yes?”

“Hey, babe, how’s it shakin’?”

Oscar. Our event producer. Or as I like to think of him, the big brother I never had, even if he looks like Mr. Clean. A straight Mr. Clean, which is its own miracle. Except of course for his penchant for being a serial dater of twentysomething actresses. Or wannabe actresses. Well, you can’t have everything in Hollywood.

“Thank God it’s you,” I say. “Everything’s shaking, and given that I’m not in earthquake territory, that’s not a good thing.”

“Come on,” he says loudly over what I take to be a Dodgers game in the background, baseball being Oscar’s other fetish. After the twentysomething actresses. “You’re doing a good deed for your parents whether you think so or not. Relax.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Trust me, I’m right on this. I’m also right about those fucking gift bag garter ribbons.”

“Oh, please, don’t talk to me about Jennifer’s gift bag. I can’t take it. Besides, it’s not your problem.”

“I just called to say I heard she’s a pain in the ass and I’ll deal with that when I see her at our meeting on Tuesday.”

“I love you. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Yes, but keep telling me that. I respond well to affection. Unlike the rest of Hollywood. When are you coming back?”

“Monday. No, Tuesday,” I say.

“Okay, good. Call me and I’ll see you at the production meeting on Thursday.”

I click back over to Steven. “Yes, I’m still here,” he says in his fake hissy fit voice.

“Sorry, it was Oscar. Saying he would take care of Jennifer on Tuesday.”

“God, I love him. It’s one of the great tragedies of my life that he’s not gay.”

“Why is everything about sex with you?”

“Because everything
is
about sex.”

“You only think that because you’re still young. Or pretending to be. You’ll see. Life isn’t about sex. It’s about getting enough sleep.” I hear a knock at the door. “Hang on,” I say, covering the phone. “Yes?” I yell out, banking on Helen.

Charles sticks his head in. “So this is where you live,” he says, eyeing my yoga mat and the travel noise machine.

“Well, it was once,” I say, lunging for the noise machine. Or as much of a lunge as I can muster given my legs are still in pretzel mode.

“Don’t get up. I just dropped by to tell you your dad has a hell of a swing.”

“Yeah, he does,” I say, smiling up at him. I’m just about to launch into how Jack and I used to play golf together and that frankly my own swing isn’t that bad, or at least it wasn’t once, and maybe the three of us could actually shoot a round together, when I hear squawks coming from the phone. “What?” I say to Steven.

“Put Chuck on. I need to ask him about the pitch meeting next week for the Fred Segal Sundance gig,” Steven says.

I look up at Charles and point at the phone. He shakes his head. “Umm, actually he’s out,” I say. “Can I take a message?”

“Very cute,” Steven says. “Okay, I’m going. I just have one piece of advice.”

“What?”

“If the two of you don’t start fucking under your parents’ roof, you’ll never know the meaning of freedom.”