Til the Real Thing Comes Along (39 page)

“Honey, we need to talk about this. I’m glad you like him, but I’ve made a mistake with you in the past about men I’ve dated,
and I don’t want to repeat it with David. And the mistake is about expectations. I’ve looked at a lot of men as husbands for
me and fathers for you, and that’s why you looked at them that way too. And then, when the relationship was over, you and
I were much more disappointed than if we had just said that this person is a nice friend for now and we’re glad to have had
his company. That’s what we have to do with David. Because of everyone I’ve dated, he’s the least-likely candidate to be husband
and father, and I don’t want you or me to kid ourselves.”

“Baloney, Mom.”

“Not baloney.”

“How come? What’s wrong with him?” Jeffie asked, not looking at her.

“Nothing’s wrong with him. He’s just younger. Much younger. And he isn’t Jewish, and I was raised very Jewish. And I want…
wanted to be with someone who is… and…,” Now she found her mind racing for answers. “The main thing is, you know how I was
raised—living upstairs from a grocery store and working to survive. He’s lived a life of servants and grand houses all over
the world, and the best schools and camps and…”

“So?” Jeffie said.

“What do you mean,
so?
That makes a big difference. And it creates dramatically different people who—”

“Who what?” he asked.

“Are crazy about each other,” she answered quietly.

“Yeah, so where’s the problem?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

It was midnight, and R.J. sat in the last row of the bleachers of the ice-cold sound stage. Patsy and Freddy were bickering
hotly between takes of the last few pickup shots for the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sketch. The good old world of series
television.

“This sucker ain’t funny no more to me,” Freddy said. R.J. stiffened. Happily, David sat next to her, holding her hand in
one of his and patting it with the other.

“It’s working great, Arj,” he whispered to her. “He’s heard the jokes five hundred times, so he can’t tell… but believe me,
they’re funny. Honest.”

“Let’s take your close-up here, Patsy,” the director said.

R.J. smiled at David. He loved to tease her by telling her she was “the luckiest woman in the world,” but she knew it was
very true.

Now the fight was escalating and this time Don Jarvis, the producer, was involved.

“Shit. I ain’t givin’ up no million-buck deal. That’s fer goddamned sure,” Freddy hollered.

R.J. was picking up only bits and pieces of it, but it sounded as if now it was about Patsy and Freddy being offered a job
in Las Vegas and the two of them wanting to
take a hiatus from the show to go and do it, and Jarvis not wanting them to take the time off.

“Christ, we’ve already taped sixteen shows, you motherfuckin’ slave driver,” Freddy yelled at the top of his voice, and Don
Jarvis, a small man, backed away, as if the power of Freddy’s voice could knock him over. Freddy was an obnoxious, mean man.
He was back with Patsy for business reasons but still seeing the poor little teenaged girl, who occasionally showed up at
rehearsals, driving Patsy mad. R.J. put on her jacket. This fight had nothing to do with her. She and David were heading for
the door when Don Jarvis called out, “R.J.?”

She turned.

“Can you get your writers to take a few weeks’ hiatus and stay with the show?” R.J. had no idea what her staff had in mind,
or even if the Writers’ Guild would allow that. She hesitated.

Then David said softly, so only she could hear, “Say yes, I can and I will, because my lambic and I will have time to go to
Paris for a few days.” Paris. David was offering to take her to Paris.

“I’ll try, Don,” she said.

R.J. had never been to Europe. For some of her life she couldn’t afford to travel, and when the time came that she could,
it was because she was working so hard there wasn’t any time. She had told that to David when they first met. Now she sat
in the back of a taxi next to him, and when she saw the Eiffel Tower come into view, her eyes filled with tears. She was embarrassed
by how choked up she felt.

“I know,” David said. “It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? I’ve been here many times, but every time I’m still staggered by its beauty.”

“This is my first time,” R.J. said, telling him something he already knew. She was so overwhelmed with emotion she couldn’t
look at him.

“Well, it’s really my first time, too, because I’m here with you,” he said.

“Smooth talker.” She kissed him.

“Speaking,” he said.

Beautiful. So beautiful. The beauty of the city as it
passed by the taxi window left her breathless, and combined with all she was feeling for David, she was afraid that anything
she said would set off an outburst of feelings that would embarrass both of them. When they had checked into the Plaza-Athenee
and the bellman had closed the door behind him, leaving them alone, R.J. excused herself and went into the bathroom to be
alone because she felt so silly about the tears of joy that wiggled down her face, carrying little pieces of black mascara.
She looked into the bathroom mirror and laughed through a trembling lower lip at how stupid she was for crying. Then there
was a tap on the door.

“May I come in?” David asked.

She dabbed her eyes and opened the door, and he stood in the doorway, holding a full champagne glass in each hand. He walked
into the bathroom, looked around, and then handed her one of the glasses, touched his glass to hers, and they both sipped.

“Well, this isn’t exactly the specific environment I had in mind in which to say this,” he said, gesturing with his glass
around the bathroom. “Although, as bathrooms go—or in this case,
salles de bain
—this
is
a lovely one. But… I love you very much,” It was the first time he’d ever said those words to her.

R.J. sniffed a big sniff and her lower lip trembled, and she took a very long swig of champagne, then put her glass down on
the floor and her arms around David’s neck and felt the softness of his cashmere sweater next to her cheek.

“And I love you,” she told him. “Thank God I found you to love and to…” She couldn’t go on.

“To soften up your act?” he asked.

She grinned through her tears.

“Boy, you cry a lot. Why is that?” he asked, and then kissed her. “Is there a reason why you cry so much? I mean, why would
you? You’re the luckiest woman in the world.” And then he kissed her again. And again. And soon she was carrying their champagne
glasses into the bedroom, which was where David, who was now saying “I love you” to her for the second time and the third
time and the fourth, was carrying her.

They spent three days touring the city and its environs, and R.J. floated blissfully beside David, hearing only half of what
he read to her from the guidebooks, because all she really wanted to do was touch his face or hold his hand, or
tease him about his French accent like a lovesick teenager. Sometimes he would catch the look on her face and say, “Oh, Sandra?
Miss Dee? Here we are at Versailles,” and they would laugh.

“The approach is everything,” he would say with his hands over her eyes. Before he would let her look at anything remarkable—the
“Mona Lisa,” the “Winged Victory,” any Monet, Notre Dame Cathedral—he would cover her eyes with his hands and make sure she
was standing in exactly the right place to get the most perfect view of it, and then he would take away his hands making sure
she could appreciate each work completely.

One day they just walked. Everywhere. Hand in hand. Stopping to peek into store windows. To watch other people talking, other
lovers walking. Down to the Faubourg St. Honorg, past Hermls and Dior, past the Palais de l’Elysee. In and out of antique
shops and past perfumeries. Down tiny back streets to the Place des Temes, looking up at the Arc de ‘Triomphe. Sometimes stopping
just to look at each other and smile a smile of shared joy.

“Ahh,” David said, suddenly taking her hand and pulling her into a store called Maison du Chocolat

“Oh, God,” she said, looking at the goodies in the glass cases.

David spoke in French to the saleswoman, who filled a small brown box with his choices. As they walked, he and R.J. tried
each one, oohing and ahhing over them, feeding them to each other.

That night he held her, and just before they fell asleep he said, “I didn’t even know that this was an option,”

“That what was an option?”

“Loving this way. This much.” Then he pulled her even closer and he was asleep.

“Some old friends are in town tonight, close friends of my father,” he told her the next morning as they were eating breakfast
in the hotel courtyard. It was their last day in Paris. “Apparently they heard from my office that I was here and left a message
that they’d like to meet for drinks tonight at the bar at the George Cinq. Would you mind?”

The mention of his old friends always caused a little discomfort in her stomach, wondering what they would think of her. Until
now, she’d met only one couple. Daphy and Charlie Woods. It was in Westwood, one night after a
movie when she and David had bumped into them, and after standing outside the Bruin Theater talking, the four of them had
decided to go out for coffee together.

“We love David,” Daphy Woods, who never stopped talking, told R.J. “Anyone he picks is all right with us. No matter how old
or what religion.” So if she’d ever doubted it, R.J. knew that the word about her was out in David’s crowd.

“I don’t mind at all,” she told David now.

The others had already arrived at the George Cinq and were seated around a large table when R.J. and David arrived. One couple
was R.J.’s age; another was a couple in their early fifties. The third was an English couple about David’s age. The wife was
pregnant They were all dressed beautifully and the conversation was very lively.

“Bellinis all around,” the young husband said, “except for my wife, who will have the peach juice plain.” R.J. had no idea
what a Bellini was. The pregnant wife had a pronounced British accent. She was pretty and bubbly and excited about the nursery
she was planning for the child she hoped would be Nicky Junior.

“Can you just imagine Nicky as a father?” someone said.

“God, no,” said a few of the others.

“What about you, Dave boy? When are you going to bite the bullet and contribute to the gene pool?” someone asked.

“Probably not ever,” David said.

“Does J.R. know that?” one of the women asked.

“It’s R.J.,” R.J. corrected her. The woman didn’t even hear her.

“If J.R. hears that, she may want to find herself someone more eligible,” the woman said, smiling.

“R.J. has a son,” David told her.

“Oh, really? How old?” the woman in her fifties asked.

“Twelve,” R.J. answered.

“No? Really?” the pregnant woman said. “You hardly look old enough.”

R.J. forced a smile. She was very uncomfortable.

“Are you longing to have another?” the pregnant woman
asked. R.J. didn’t have a chance to answer when the pregnant woman went on.

“It’s silly really, but now that I’m pregnant, I find myself looking at couples and wondering how their babies will turn out.
Strikes me you and David would produce a lovely baby.”

“You know,” the older woman said, looking at David and then at R.J. and then back at David again, as if assessing the way
their features would combine to make a baby, “when they breed dogs for red, they always breed in a little black.”

R.J. looked at the woman. Dogs.

“Which means the baby
could
have red hair.”

“Quite right,” said the English husband.

Dogs. Was that some slur against R.J.’s lack of breeding or was it just the way people like this thought about things? After
all, she did include David in the comparison but… R.J., stop it, she told herself. Just stop it. You take your own terror
about not being right for David and you listen for other people to tell you that it’s true. Stop.

The conversation had moved on to something else, and now it broke into small conversations, and the man—the gray-haired fifty-year-old
man—turned to talk to R.J. Probably, she thought, because he was sitting next to her and that was what he was supposed to
do. And just as the Bellinis were arriving—champagne and peach juice—and everyone was oohing over them, he asked, “You and
David serious?”

“Yes,” she said, “we are.”

“His father will never accept you,” the man said.

“To us,” someone said, as they all held their glasses up, “because good folks are scarce.” But R.J. didn’t hear the toast.
She only heard the man’s words. This wasn’t Dinah reading articles about Rand Malcolm. This was a friend. Practically family.
The horse’s mouth.

“And not only because you’re older than Davey—by how much?”

“Seven and a half years.” She felt as if she were on trial and had to answer the questions honestly, though she wanted to
scream “None of your goddamned business” and pour her drink on him. Instead, she sipped the Bellini.

“But because you’re a Jew. It’s that simple. He will do
everything and anything he can to end it. You met him yet?”

“No.”

The man smiled a knowing smile. David was on the other side of the table talking to the pregnant woman, laughing now at something
she was saying.

“Of course not,” the man said. “Because David knows just what he’ll say about you.”

R.J. steeled herself. “David and I have so much to work through, before we even get to what his father will think, that I
really can’t get myself to worry about it right now,” she said, trying to keep some semblance of a smile on her face. But
with that she was lying on the stand, and she and the man both knew it. She finished the Bellini in two swallows. When she
looked at David, he was looking at his watch and then at her.

“R.J. and I have got to run,” he told the others. “We’re going to be late for our dinner reservation.”

“Where’re you two off to?” someone asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” David said, holding R.J.’s chair so she could emerge. “I’m going to have a quiet dinner with
a beautiful woman. So, happily, my friends, I bid you all a fond adieu.”