He would hyperventilate and feel nauseated and shaky, so he would get up and walk down the hall and into Ruthie's room. And Ruthie, knowing in her sleep that something was wrong, would wake to find him sitting there. He had come in just to be near her. Once she was awake she would sit up, kneel beside him on the bed, and massage his shoulders, kneading the knots of fear out of his back, saying over and over again, "You're okay. You're okay. Your T-cell count is high, your appetite is good, Sid and I love you, and you're okay." And soon her words and the comforting physical contact of the massage would ground him again, and he would relax.
When Ruthie felt his shoulders lowering and the tension ease, she would get up, put on her robe, and take his hand. "Come on," she would say, leading him down the hallway to the baby's room. And they would stand together in the nursery lit only by the Mickey Mouse night-light and look at the face of their peacefully sleeping son.
"This is why you can't panic. This is why you have to say, 'Everybody's going to die, but they're going to have to take Shelly Milton kicking and screaming out of this world, because I'm hanging in for Sid the Kid.' Are you with that, Shel? We made it through 'Rudy the Poodle,' and love, and death, we made it through frizzy hair and suicide attempts, and we will make it through this one, too." Then she would walk him to his room and watch while he got back into bed, then go to her own room and sit wide awake until she heard him snoring before she could go back to sleep herself. She loved him and she should have gone home from the stupid Christmas party with him, in fact she should leave now and meet him there. One of the women she'd been
talking to had walked inside to get something to eat, and the other one was chasing after her own little toddler. Ruthie decided to start asking around to see if she could get a ride home when she spotted Louie Kweller across the crowded backyard.
Louie Kweller was looking a little rounder than he had in the early years, when along with Ruthie and Shelly and all the other comedy writers he had haunted the Comedy Store. But he was still sweet looking, and when he greeted Ruthie with a very warm hug, it felt good and he smelled great. One of the things Ruthie remembered finding so attractive about Louie was that he was well-read. Once they'd had a conversation about a television series which had a lot of simultaneous plot lines and Louie described it as having a "Dickensian multiplicity." Another time he compared the plot of a sitcom they'd all watched together to a Stephen Crane short story.
"No kidding?" Shelly had laughed. "I thought Stephen Crane was the head of miniseries at NBC."
Most of the comedy writers Ruthie knew were funny by feel, instinct, up from pain. Louie Kweller had all of that, but he combined it with an educated overview, and the combination had caused him to become one of the most successful producers in television. He had recently made a highly publicized deal with a studio, giving him what they swore in the trade papers would be a production company with "complete artistic freedom" plus some unheard-of amount of money to do it.
"So you're a hit," Ruthie said to him as he sat on the deck chair next to her. It seemed like forever since the old days when they'd sat for hours in the group of struggling writers at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset. When Ruthie and Shelly used to split one bacon cheeseburger between them, because two bacon cheeseburgers were more than they could afford.
"And you're a hit too," he said, smiling. Ruthie found him almost humble for someone who had just been told his every idea was worth millions of dollars.
"But not like you. You could sell your laundry list now for more than I could get for my house."
"Yeah, but you've got a kid," he said, patting her hand. "Is that him in the red shirt over there?" He gestured in the direction of the big wooden structure with a fort at the top where Sid was climbing up the ladder.
"How did you know?" Ruthie asked.
"Because he's so cute," Louie said and looked into her eyes, and Ruthie was shocked when a flame rose in her cheeks the likes of which she hadn't felt in what seemed like a lifetime. Calm down, Zimmerman, she thought. You're losing your mind.
"So what are you working on?" Ruthie asked him, hoping Louie wouldn't notice that something he'd said in passing, probably as a joke, had stirred her. Made her heavyhearted self feel for even a tiny breath of an instant desirable. No. Better than that. Womanly. The party was getting busier and noisier as more and more people arrived.
A very skinny, pretty girl, wearing a spandex dress that was so tight it showed her pelvic bones, spotted Louie and hurried over to remind him that she was on an episode of one of his shows a few weeks ago and that the script was "soooo brilliant." Ruthie liked the way Louie thanked her with seriousness, didn't come on to her, and after she walked away didn't make some snide comment about what an airhead she was. He was an appealing, gentle man.
"You did a good thing, you and Shelly," Louie said now. "By having that baby together. I bumped into Shelly the other day and he's completely changed. Much
more serious than I've ever seen him. Is that your observation?"
"That Shelly's more serious? Definitely," Ruthie said, feeling really guilty now that she hadn't left with him.
"Are you living together?"
"Yes."
"Hey, Kweller," somebody yelled from the house and Louie waved and Ruthie watched him, impressed by the fact that there was no apparent show of his newfound importance. There was no patronizing air that usually accompanied success in Hollywood.
"So, I mean," he said, looking back at Ruthie, and she knew what he was going to ask her. It was a question she'd been asked before. "I mean, I know this is none of my business, and if it's rude you can say so and I'll shut up, okay? But how does that work?"
She knew exactly what he meant, but she wasn't going to make it easy for him. "How does
what
work?"
"I mean, is it a love affair, a romance? Anything like that?"
"You're right. It
is
none of your business, but how it works is, he's my best friend. The closest person to me in the world. I love him more than I've ever loved any man or probably ever will, but we each sleep in our own bedroom and we don't have sex." Louie Kweller was expressionless. "And it's okay," Ruthie told him.
"Mommeeee," Sid shouted suddenly, and Ruthie jumped to her feet and ran over to the play yard where her son was screaming at the bottom of the slide, because he'd just been kicked by a bigger boy. She snatched him up and held him and soothed him and kissed him. After a few minutes he dried his face against her shirt and wriggled away to go back to playing.
"We're going home soon, honey," she called after
him. "In a few minutes we'll go home and see Daddy. I'll get us a ride."
"I'll take you home." Ruthie turned to see that Louie Kweller had walked to the play yard too, and was standing behind her.
"Don't you live around
here
?" Ruthie asked. "I mean, wouldn't it be out of your way?"
"Yeah, but that's okay. I feel like taking a ride."
Louie Kweller. He was coming on to her. If he only knew what was going on in her life. That Shelly often woke with night sweats, that no matter what the doctors said about her status and Sid's, she was afraid she'd never stop feeling panicky over every rash, every loose bowel movement.
Louie, oh Louie, she thought, this flirtation is a very nice Christmas present for me and I can use it, but there's no room for anything in my life now. I work for a son of a bitch who I hate, I come home and I raise my kid, and I love Shelly Milton. After that I have nothing left. But when she picked up a protesting Sid, and thanked her host, and Louie Kweller carried the diaper bag over his left shoulder and put his right arm around her to walk her out to the valet parking, it felt very nice.
"You Ruth Zimmerman?" the parking attendant asked.
"Yeah."
"Your husband left the baby's car seat with me so you could use it on the way home," he said, producing it from next to the telephone pole where Shelly had left it. When they brought his Buick sedan, Louie buckled the baby seat into the backseat and Ruthie lifted Sid into the seat and closed the strap around him.
On the console in Louie's car was the box from an audiocassette of William Faulkner reading passages from
As I Lay Dying
. "I guess you don't have
Dinosaur
Ducks,"
Ruthie said. "Or
Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree
?"
"No," Louie said, smiling in a cute crooked way, "but I'll be glad to order them."
Eastbound traffic was bumper to bumper all along Sunset.
"You still working for Zev Ryder?" Louie asked.
"I'm sorry to say the answer to that is yes."
"He's a no-talent schmuck," Louie said.
"I couldn't have put it better myself."
"He hates women, Jews, and gays. I'm amazed you two have survived there this long."
"You call this surviving? He's already fired Shelly, he's constantly waiting for a reason to fire me. Every day has been a struggle."
"Want to work on one of my shows? Want to date me? Want to fall in love and marry me?''
Louie was kidding, but Ruthie was suddenly uncomfortable that Sid was hearing him say all of that, maybe because it was straight out of her fantasy of what she wished somebody would say. Somebody who would appear and save her from the dread she lived with every day.
"Yeah, sure,'' she said. They were pulling up outside her house.
"I mean it," he said. "Let's go to dinner one night. I won't jump you. I promise."
"I've got to go, Louie," she told him. "But thanks for the ride."
In the living room, Shelly sat on the sofa with the television on. He stared at it and channel-danced with the remote control. "Who brought you home?" he asked her.
"Louie Kweller."
"What did that rich asshole have to say?"
"He sends
you
his warmest regards."
"Whoopie."
"Daddy, come play."
"I will, honey," Shelly said to Sid, but he didn't move.
"Why don't we open some of our presents now? We don't have to keep the rules," Ruthie said. "As you so aptly pointed out, we're Jewish." Maybe opening presents would cheer Shelly up.
"Daddy! Open presents. We're Jewish," Sid said, climbing onto Shelly's lap. His sweet, innocent face made Shelly grin.
"Do you think we should?" Shelly teased.
"Yaaahhhh!" Sid replied, and climbed down to run to the tree. Ruthie and Shelly followed and watched Sid rip open the paper on his gifts: Talking Big Bird, and an airplane on wheels, the Match Box garage, and the Lego airport, and all of the
Star Wars
characters, and a child's tape player. Then Shelly opened his from Ruthie. An IBM personal computer, and an HP laserjet printer. After he tore off the paper, he pulled the Styrofoam packing out of the boxes and then all of the components.
Since the day they started writing, their style of putting words down had always been first in longhand on legal pads with pencil. When they weren't working on a show where a typist was provided, they typed their own drafts on a very old portable typewriter, then paid a typist to redo the script neatly. Now, staring at them, was the high tech of the 1990s.
"Merry Christmas," Ruthie said, knowing she'd gone a little overboard, but so what? Shelly pulled a manual out of the box and thumbed through it, shaking his head in wonder. "Shel, I know it seems overwhelming and confusing, but the best part of this gift is that I hired someone from the computer store to come over here at night and teach us how to use it. She's a terrific woman who's worked with a lot of writers, and she
explains things in plain English, not computerese. She swears that in a few years we'll wonder how we ever lived without it."
Shelly put the thick notebook of a manual down on the coffee table and stood, then he nearly tripped over Sid, who was lying on his stomach running the Match Box cars along the floor and using the coffee table as a tunnel. Ruthie, who still held the first of her unopened gifts in her hand, watched him walk into his bedroom, and she followed him and stood in the doorway.
"What are you thinking?" she asked him. He sat on his bed, looking out of the French doors that opened onto a balcony.
"That in a few years I may not be here. Why do you think that corner of gifts for Sid is three feet high? I bought him stuff he won't be able to play with till he's twelve, because I figured when he was twelve, I wouldn't be around to give them to him. I don't want to take up any of my time learning how to use a computer."
"It won't take long. You learned to work the video camera, and goddamn you, in the time you take worrying about it, you could be learning it, mastering it. By next Christmas you could be Steve Wozniak, for God's sake. And a simple thank you will suffice." She was about to walk angrily out of the room when Sid came running in, carrying the gift he'd just unwrapped on his own, his Ninja Turtle evaporator gun, and he aimed it right at Ruthie. "Yaggggh," he shouted.
"That's what I like to see," Ruthie said. "Another satisfied customer."
In the living room she opened a package from Shelly to her. It was a professionally taken photograph of Sid. The two of them had gone to a studio as a surprise for Ruthie, and Shelly had the picture framed in an antique frame.
"I love you," Shelly said, coming into the living room.
"I love Mommy, too," Sid said and grabbed Ruthie hard around the leg. And Ruthie held the frame to her chest and loved them both so much she wanted to cry. But that didn't stop her from wondering at that same moment what Louie Kweller would be like in bed.
40
O
N CHRISTMAS EVE Lainie's health club was open, so first she dropped Rosie off at her mother's house, where the baby went happily, and then she drove over to take an aerobics class. Today as the class started, the rock music was booming so loudly she could feel the floor under her feet vibrating. Because she liked to be able to see herself doing the exercises, she always worked out in the front row.