Til the Real Thing Comes Along (49 page)

Kate. The look she’d shared with her father. The old man figured the only way he could pull this off with Farley was if David
came along for the ride.

“Fars, it’s an impossible game. You can’t win. If your father wants to buy the studio, that’s one thing, but you have to take
a lesser job, a learning job, and see how it’s done first. Then, when you know something, you move up. Or work somewhere else
for a while. Learn all you can. Then reevaluate. Both you and Billy are setting you up to fail. Don’t do it.”

“I guess that means you won’t be joining me?” Farley said, the forced grin still on his face.

“I’ll be at Rainbow Paper,” David said.

“Starting at the bottom?” Farley asked. David heard the sneer in his voice.

“Pretty damn near,” he answered.

That night Bill Coburn had dinner brought to him in his room, and never emerged to say good-night. At about seven-thirty,
after a loud blast from a honking horn outside the front gate, a perfumed and flushed Kate, whom David hadn’t seen since the
night before, came flying down the front steps and rushed out the door, shouting back, “Got a hot date,” and was gone. And
Farley was drunk and asleep by eight. David, who was served his dinner alone by the pool, read a few magazines and retired
early. On Sunday a quiet Farley drove him to the airport to put him on the commercial flight he was taking back to Philadelphia.

“So I’ll see you at the graduation, my friend,” was all he said, punching David on the arm when the flight was called. Then
he turned on his heel, and David watched him walk a round-shouldered walk out of the airport He never came to graduation.

“Name’s on your office door,” Rand Malcolm told his son, by way of congratulating him after the commencement exercises.

“Thanks, Dad,” David said. They were walking toward the waiting car, on their way to lunch.

“You start work on Monday. Want to know which department?”

David shook his head no. “I’ll let you surprise me,” he said.

A few weeks later, one July day, David read in
The New York Times
that Kate Coburn, twenty, had married Roger Hunt, forty-two, to whom she’d been engaged for a year. In August he read in
The Wall Street Journal
that, due to an inability to come to terms, negotiations between William Coburn and the Hemisphere Corporation had broken
off.

1973

W
hen R.J. got back from the newsstand she parked the car, then looked at little Jeffie, who was sound asleep in the back seat.
Eyes tightly closed. Breathing evenly. He clutched his yellow thermal blanket in his tiny fist and, in his sleep, rolled the
tattered satin edging between his thumb and forefinger. Instead of waking him, R.J. lifted him carefully out of the car, hoping
he would stay asleep just a little while longer so she could look through the stack of magazines she’d just bought to try
to find a place to sell some of her poetry.

Arthur was in New York for a few days—no, maybe it was Nashville. Anyway, he would call her tonight and tell her he missed
her and where he was staying, and what time she could pick him up at the airport on Sunday. Meanwhile, she had plenty to do.
The shower drain was stopped up; the refrigerator bulb was out; the garage was a mess. She turned the key in the front door
and pushed it open with her shoulder, then stood in the foyer of their rented house looking into the ugly ornate gold-framed
mirror their landlady had pointed out to them as one of the “fine antiques” with which the house had been decorated.

Her face was flushed from the Valley heat
and,
she noticed, very round. Probably because, though three and a half years had gone by, she had never lost all of the weight
she’d gained during her pregnancy. Some of it showed around her cheeks and what used to be her waist. Maybe she was eating
too much from frustration, which was something
she had read in several articles that women did who weren’t happy in their lives.

She frowned at herself, then smiled what wasn’t really a smile, just lips moving back so she could examine her teeth. That
rule of frustration definitely didn’t apply to her. She was ecstatic. To begin with, she had her wonderful husband, Arthur,
who worked hard and adored her and their son. Her parents would have loved Arthur. His parents were crazy about her. And he
respected and supported her writing career.

At first she and Arthur had been romantically poor. Struggling to get ahead. Arthur working in the record business and R.J.
working during the day, sometimes at three different jobs to help keep the household afloat. Answering the telephone at a
beauty parlor in Beverly Hills, showing prospective tenants through the models at a condominium complex in Hollywood, wrapping
gifts at a children’s shop in the Valley. There were times when she sat across from Arthur at Steak ’n Stein, sawing away
at the tough slab of meat that came with salad and a baked potato for under three dollars, and thought about Rifke. How much
her mother had wanted her to marry Alvin Feld and be a doctor’s wife. The ultimate.

She grinned when she remembered two of her mother’s homilies and the way Rifke shook her nicotine-stained finger when she
offered them. “Ven poverty valks in the door, love flies out the vindow,” and the ever-popular “It’s just as easy to love
a rich man as it is to love a poor man.”

Rifke. She hadn’t practiced what she preached. She loved Louie Rabinowitz with blind devotion, and he was a man so worried
about money that he never bought a new pair of shoes until Atillo, the shoemaker on Murray Avenue, looked at the old pair
he’d already remade twenty times and said, “I’am can’t save you sole no more.” It was an announcement that always sent both
her parents into shrieks of laughter. Her parents’ marriage had convinced R.J. that struggling with someone you loved was
okay. The way it was supposed to be.

Late at night, when Arthur slept, she crept into the closet-sized kitchen of their tiny apartment, made a cup of tea, then
sat on the living room floor and worked on a speculative script. It was cold and lonely and not easy to be funny when she
knew she had to be awake soon to hurry
to her morning job, but she moved ahead slowly, one page a night, sometimes just a few thoughts, reading them at breakfast
to Arthur, who always loved her ideas, laughed at her jokes.

Then Arthur got a new job, at
A&M
Records, and he started making a nice living. They rented a small house in the hills and bought some furniture. They went
to concerts and to evenings at the Troubador and met exciting new people. One night at an
A&M
party, R.J. met a man who told her he managed musical performers. The manager said that his performers needed what they called
“special material” for their acts.

Special material. That meant funny songs and jokes to tell in between the songs. Exactly the kind of thing R.J. had written
in Pittsburgh for Mona Feldstein Friedman. The day after the party R.J. had sent the manager a copy of the material she’d
done for Mona and the first act of her unfinished speculative script, and crossed her fingers. A week later he’d called her
and said he loved them. Since then she’d sold two songs to John Davidson and one to Charo for their nightclub acts, and next
week she was going to have a meeting with a man who was producing a nightclub act for Telly Savalas. It wasn’t playwriting,
or screenwriting, or television writing yet. But it was work as a professional writer, and it was comedy, and that was a beginning.
And Arthur was proud of her. Without a doubt her life being married to him was so much better than anything she’d ever had
before.

This cute little house. This angelic little boy. She rubbed her nose against Jeffie’s soft cheek, then carefully placed him
and his yellow blanket down on the living room sofa, ran out to the car and brought in the magazines, put those on the living
room floor, and plopped herself down there to read. The only noise breaking the silence of her Hollywood Hills nest was the
sound of the automatic pool sweep, clicking and swooshing out there, like a plastic octopus rubbing against the tile. Jeffie
might stay asleep for another hour. It was her chance to get work done.

Work. It was hard to think of writing as work. Especially the jokes and special lyrics. It felt like just a grown-up version
of what she’d done in Pittsburgh. Only now she was making really really good money for it. Money Arthur would ooh and ahhh
over as his wife’s “private little income.”
Already, from the few songs and sketches she’d sold, she earned more than she had during the first few years of their marriage
in all of her jobs combined. And Arthur was doing great at A&M. “On the way up.” Destined to be a big success in the music
business.

Thank God, R.J. thought again and again, that she hadn’t married Alvin Feld, that she had listened to her instinct to move
to Los Angeles, and not stayed in Pittsburgh to get lost in the role of being the wife of a man who thought her wanting to
write was a dumb fantasy.

With Arthur she could be a wife and a mother and work too. As long as everything in the house was taken care of and Jeffie
was happy, she could do anything she wanted. Of course, entertaining was important, too, and she was learning how to be very
good at that. So when Arthur wanted to have anybody over from A&M, he could really be proud of the dinners she served. She
had taken a vegetable class at Design Research and an all-around cooking dass at Beverly Hills High School when she was pregnant.

It was fun for her to be able to do those things. For the first time in her life she didn’t have to appear at a job all day
every day. And she was able to write. Sometimes. When there weren’t a million other things to do. But of course, pretty soon
Jeffie would be in school. Well, not pretty soon—in a year and a half he’d be in school, and then she’d really get some writing
done.

Cosmopolitan.
Maybe she’d try to write something and submit it to
Cosmopolitan.
She really had to psych these magazines out and determine what kind of material they wanted. Sexy. Articles in
Cosmopolitan
were sexy and mostly for single girls. “How to Tell if a Man Who Won’t Show His Emotions Really Loves You.” Who cares, she
thought, stopping to look at a lingerie ad, and realizing that, since’ Jeffie’s birth, she hadn’t bought one piece of new
underwear. Horoscopes. Pisces. Always the romantic dreamer, this month brings Neptune’s Nymphet a new love. Thanks anyway.
Maybe
Mademoiselle.
She was about to open it when Jeffie awakened with a start and began to cry.

“No, my love. No, Mummy’s sweet boy. Don’t cry,” she said, going to the sofa and sitting next to him. He put his sleepy face
down on her shoulder and hummed the little baby song he always hummed when he first woke up. God, the loved him so much. More
every minute. She would
give him lunch, then take him to the park and play. She could look at the magazines tonight when he was asleep.

That night, the phone jangling on the bedside table next to her jarred her awake.

“Arj?”

“Hmm?”

“Did I wake you? It’s only nine o’clock there, isn’t it?”

“Hi, honey.” she said sleepily. She was lying on her bed surrounded by all the magazines, which she still hadn’t read. Between
lunch and dinner there had been too many things to do around the house and Jeffie needed her to play and…

“How come you’re asleep so early? What’d you do all day?”

She didn’t remember.

“How’s Nashville?” she asked, instead of answering.

“It’s great,” he said. “Remember I told you about that Bluegrass group here that I’m courting? Well, the lead singer is this
girl who is so dynamic I’ve never seen anything like it. She’s going to be a huge star. The group is ordinary, but. the only
way I’m going to get to her is to take them all. Eventually she’ll get the picture and dump them but…”

He was rattling on, but R.J. could tell he really didn’t care about the information he was giving her. He was Just trying
out on her the pitch he was going to give his boss tomorrow about the group he’d discovered.

“So what do you think?” he asked when he’d finished his spies.

“Sounds great,” she said.

“How’s my son?” he asked.

“Wonderful.”

“Does he miss me?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Do you?”

“A lot,” she said.

“Me too, baby. See you Sunday at American at five,” he said. “Oh, and I’ve been eating like a horse, so make dinner something
really light. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Love you.”

“Love you.”

Arthur. She loved his sweetness. The way he called her
baby.
The way he was working so hard to build a future for them.

On Sunday night, after Jeffie was asleep, they had lemon chicken and carrot salads and sourdough bread and white wine, and
when she unpacked his suitcase, at the bottom in a paper bag was a Grand 01’ Opry T-shirt he’d brought back for her, and he
grinned when she wore it to bed.

“What does our week look like?” he asked her after he’d turned off the light and was curling his body against hers.

“We’re going to the Grammys on Tuesday, and the Kalishes are coming for dinner on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Dinah wants
me to go to some C.R. group with her. It doesn’t meet until eight, so I’d still be here for dinner, and if you wouldn’t mind
putting Jeffie to bed, that would really be great.” She lay there in the dark, wondering if Arthur’s silence was because he
didn’t want her to go to a C.R. meeting. If he thought it was stupid. If he was about to say “C.R. group? Get serious, baby.
Everyone knows that your C. is already plenty R.’d,” or some other Arthur comment like that. Then she realized that the reason
he wasn’t saying anything was because he was sound asleep.

“I’m here because I hated getting my legs and armpits and crotch waxed so I wouldn’t offend Herbie.”

Some of the women cheered and some laughed, and Jessica Norman, who was wearing a sleeveless blouse, held up her arms and
proudly revealed her bushy armpits. “I’m never removing another hair from my body again,” she said, and there was another
cheer.