Til the Real Thing Comes Along (42 page)

R.J. left the room in tears.

* * *

Dinah and the twins were over for an early dinner—“Like the old days” Dinah said—and after the meal, while the kids played
Atari games, she and R.J. sat in the living room.

“So it was what it was,” Dinah said. “Be glad. Some people never get that much. It doesn’t even matter what turned it around.
Because you can’t dwell on it. You have to move on.”

Move on? This was David. Her love. Where could she go after loving and being loved like that in return? After finally letting
her guard down. Why had she believed him? And why hadn’t he just called and said, “I can’t do it,” instead of avoiding her,
ignoring her, not telling her to her face? What was once her terror was becoming anger.

“Ma, I have homework,” one of the twins whined.

“I know. We’re leaving in a minute,” Dinah said. When the phone rang, both Dinah and R.J. froze.

“It’s him,” Dinah said. “I just have a feeling that it’s him. Go get it”

“It’s not him,” R.J. said. “He hasn’t called me in three weeks. Why should he call now?” But she hurried to the phone anyway
and grabbed it

“H’lo.”

“Hiya, babes. Are you sitting down?” It was Stanley, her agent.

“No, but go ahead anyway,” she said.

“Kip Walters wants to do your pilot.”

“That’s impossible. He hated it. I didn’t even pitch the whole thing to him. He wanted an eight o’clock show.”

“Yeah. Well, evidently he tried it out on the brass and they liked it. Also, it doesn’t hurt the salability of it that you’re
Patsy’s head writer. The question is, with your schedule, when in the hell are you gonna have time to write a pilot?”

“I’ll have time,” R.J. told him. “I foresee having a lot of extra time in my life.”

“Hey,” he said, “if you want to do it, I’m delighted. I’ll call and make a deal with those guys. Huh? Isn’t that great? You’re
doing great there, kiddo. Doesn’t that make you deliriously happy?”

“Mmm. Deliriously happy,” R.J. said, and put the phone down.

DAVEY AND ROSDE JANE

1966-1976

1966

R
and Malcolm and Eleanor Benning (David always thought of his stepmother as Eleanor Benning, even after she’d been Eleanor
Malcolm for five years) slept in separate bedrooms. And for some reason—the most likely being that before a certain age matters
like that don’t interest one—David never noticed until he came home from Hollingsworth that summer. He was fifteen, nearly
six feet tall, having kissed and been kissed more times than he had his wits about him to count, and filled with a deep and
abiding interest in who was sleeping in the same bed with whom. Probably in the case of his father and Eleanor, he might not
even have noticed if it hadn’t been for Eleanor’s frequent complaint that the family’s very grand Hancock Park house, which
had four huge bedroom suites, was inadequate because it had no guest bedroom. Let’s see, David thought There’s my room and
one for Douglas, and one for… Ahhh, he realized. There were two others. One for Eleanor and one for his father.

“Night-night,” Eleanor would say when a dinner party was over, not even making a pretense of going to her husband’s room first
and then slipping, via some secret entrance, into her own, the way she would in a Restoration comedy. No, in a Restoration
comedy, David remembered now from literature Class, she would have slipped
out
of her own chambers and into his father’s. At any rate, it was clear to David Malcolm that his father and his stepmother
were not “getting it on”—which is how they referred
to sex at Hollingsworth, but only when they were being very polite.

On the other hand, Yona, who was the head housekeeper and laundress, and Rico, her husband of nine years who was the family
chauffeur and sometime houseman, couldn’t conceal the passion they still had for each other. Rico would tickle his wife provocatively
as they passed each other in the hallway of the Malcolms’ Hancock Park home. And she would pinch him lustily as he bent over
to check the various mousetraps he had set everywhere since the mice hid decided, as the Malcolms had, that this year they
would summer in Los Angeles.

And David watched it all, the passion and the dispassion, through the screen of adolescence—to which one’s lifetime judgments
too frequently stick. And it made him feel so lonely that, for the first few nights after his arrival, he spent the endless
dark hours longing for the girls at school. The teasing writhing of Cathy Kirk, or even the steely mouth-full-of-braces kisses
of Linda Martin, which weren’t much but at least had filled his time.

Of course he needn’t have given it another thought, for as F. Scott Fitzgerald tells us, a young man with a large income lives
the life of a hunted partridge. After David had been home for only a few weeks that summer, he could sense that the hunt for
him had begun in earnest. His first due was when the mother of a fifteen-year-old girl he knew only vaguely invited him out
to the dub to caddy. When he agreed and arrived for the early-morning tee-off, there was the woman’s daughter, her makeup
perfect, her hair pulled back under her headband, her long tanned legs nearly as brown as her Bass Weejuns, as she perched
on the back seat of the golf cart. She had decided—at the last minute, she told him, although her appearance spoke to endless
preparation—to join him and her mother for the ride. At six-thirty
A.M.

And there were a few brothers of girls who dutifully made overtures of friendship. One in particular invited him over to the
house to hit tennis balls. Coincidentally, in the adjacent pool was Sis, doing the stroke that had won her kudos and medals
at Westlake. What a surprise when she emerged from the water, wearing her brand-new bikini, to find David Malcolm, back from
the East and staying around for the summer. And not nearly as subtle, but certainly
worth notice, was the carful of girls who drove by the Malcolms’ house on their way to and from the Maidborough summer school
and yelled “Dayveee” every time they did, frequently waking him from his hot adolescent dreams, which despite their extraordinary
cast of characters were becoming less interesting than his hot adolescent reality.

The phone rang relentlessly in the Hancock Park house, and Yona, answering it with a knowing grin on her face, always reported
in her deep husky voice as she handed David the phone: “It’s a woman.”

David, who had learned above all else to be a gentleman, did what he thought was right, which was to take each girl who presented
herself as available at her word, and pursue her. As numbers would have it, many of them turned out to be less interested
in him than their mothers thought they should be. Many others were less interesting to him than their mothers wished they
would be. Finally, after careful thought and consideration David culled out the one who was the obvious choice to be his summer
love.

Her name was Alison, and she was very beautiful. In fact, she looked like him, with thick red hair and blue eyes. She played
a great game of bridge and sometimes she would be his partner in beating Eleanor and his father. She was on the varsity tennis
team at Westlake and she was older. Sixteen and a half. And she had her own car. She seemed to be very aroused by his kisses,
and always made him believe it was with enormous effort and terrible regret—and because of the restraints placed on her chastity
by her fiercely overprotective parents—that she didn’t submit to him completely. And best of all, she let him know that in
a moment of rebelliousness, which could strike at any time, she might one night let him have his way no matter what her parents
said. So for all of those reasons, even before the end of July had arrived, she owned him. Eleanor Benning hated her.

Eleanor hated every girl he had brought home. And always with good reason. Big legs, too short, brainless, she had said when
the girl had barely closed the door behind herself. As if anyone had asked her opinion. But All stopped Eleanor cold, because
there was nothing she could find about the girl that didn’t work. Ali had perfect manners, wrote prompt and lovely thank-you
notes, dressed appropiiately,”spoke when spoken to. So all David’s father’s wife
could do was pick on David’s preoccupation with the girl, which she did every day.

“My word, aren’t we wasting away our summer?” she said as David emerged from his blackout-curtained bedroom one day at eleven
after a late evening with Alison. “If there’s one thing I know about, it’s boys,” Eleanor said, an absurd statement, since
she knew nothing at all about boys and yet that was what she loved to say about herself. “At least my Douglas has found an
outlet for his adolescent energy. Not necessarily one of which I approve but…”

Her Douglas. Everyone at school thought Douglas Benning was the biggest dork alive, and unfortunately everyone knew, because
“her Douglas” never left it alone, that he and David were brothers. “Stepbrothers,” David would always tell them hastily,
clearing it up, so no one would think that fat turkey was a part of his natural family.

“Stepbrothers,” Douglas would always repeat, and then as his perverse idea of a joke, and undoubtedly insulted by David’s
renunciation of their kinship, would step hard on David’s foot and laugh. God, was it great that Douglas wasn’t at home this
summer! David wouldn’t have to see his nasty pimply face every day, the way he had at school, or last summer on the Orient
Express, or the summer before when they sailed around the Caribbean on the
Sea Cloud.
Stuck with him on a family vacation in a compartment of a train or a cabin of a boat. It was torture. This year, oh blessing
of blessings, “her Douglas” was at school where he was learning how (and every time David thought about it he laughed at the
picture that came into his mind) to race high-performance cars.

Imagine Benning—“Gutterball Benning” at the bowling alley, “The Tilt” Benning on the pinball machine, Benning, who couldn’t
even hold onto his fork in the cafeteria—having the reaction time necessary to race those cars. But he had whined to his mother
so loud and so long, she had finally sent him the money and agreed to let him go there. An outlet for his adolescent energy.

“Why does Mrs. Malcolm hate me?” As the icing on the cake to all of her other virtues, All was very observant

“Why do you care?” David asked. He was unbuttoning her blouse in the back seat of her GTO convertible, while a movie neither
of them had any intention of watching played on the drive-in screen.

“Because I admire her.” The answer so startled him that, before he regained his presence of mind, he almost rebuttoned the
hard-earned buttons he had opened.

“Ali” was all he could say, but for a moment he was sure he might be spending the rest of the evening actually watching the
movie.

“I mean, she was a very successful socialite when she was married to Keaton Benning, and then she was a great patron of the
arts while she was a widow, and then she married your father, and everyone says she’s just right for him and…”

Ali went on, but David had stopped listening. There was something about her having all that information that he didn’t like,
because it spoke to research into his family of a kind that he was hoping she hadn’t done. In fact, the reason he had finally
chosen her over all the others was that she seemed very blasé about who he was, and seemed sincerely interested in who he
really
was.

After that night he noticed her cozying up to Eleanor whenever she could, a feat which, if she could accomplish it, would
be nothing short of a miracle, considering nobody else ever had, could, or wanted to. Yet somehow, Mrs. Malcolm, as Ali always
called her, seemed to be falling for it. Eleanor seemed to like the girl so much that once David was certain he overheard
a conversation in which she was actually trying to sell her Douglas to Ali. “Thoughtful, dependable, a perfect boy,” she said.
“And I miss him so much this summer.” She hadn’t telephoned him once, and vice versa.

No. Eleanor didn’t like Ali. She was a phony. One of the great phonies of the world. She’d call everyone “my love,” as in
“It’s so grand to see you, my love,” and they’d leave and she’d criticize everything about them down to their shoelaces.

She’d give formal dinner parties in honor of this one and that. Lambaste the servants until the dinner, the flowers, and the
musical ensemble were just perfect. Then insist that his father stand up and offer a toast, which she reacted to as if she
hadn’t heard it a dozen times while she was rehearsing him. And when everyone was gone she would go around the long rectangular
table in her mind, and one by one annihilate each person’s virtue, taste, intellect. Whichever trait she decided he or she
didn’t have. And every time
he saw her do it, David, who thanked heaven for boarding school, watched his father retreat into his newspaper or some work
he’d brought home from the office, and a vague memory of Lily would flash through him. Her laugh, or the way she and his father
had sung duets or looked together at a particular event. Pulling each other close as they danced.