Til the Real Thing Comes Along (50 page)

“Next,” someone said.

“I’m Ellen Calter, and I’m here because my husband always gave me papers and said, ‘Sign these, honey,’ and I did, and honey
left me for his secretary and I had signed away everything to him without realizing it.”

Ellen Calter sat down, but this time there wasn’t any cheering, just the clicking of tongues.

The meeting was at Joanna Pollack’s house. Joanna was a painter who lived with Ryan Adler, a sculptor, and the white-walled
modern house was a gallery for their art.
Dinah and Joanna had gone to Bard College together in New York. The large assortment of women sat on every available surface
in the living room. Sofas, pillows, hearth, floor. If one more woman walked in the front door, there wouldn’t be a place to
put her.

“By the way”—Joanna Pollack spoke up—“as we’re going around the room, when we get to you, if the real reason you’re here is
not because of some burning desire to raise your consciousness but because somebody dragged you here, you can say that too.
Next”

“My name is R.J. Misner,” R.J. said, “and I’m here because Dinah Goldsmith Weinberg dragged me here.”

She saw two women exchange looks, as if to say “Isn’t she naive,” and suddenly Dinah stood and spoke in a voice that surprised
R.J.

“Bullshit,” she said. “Next to me you’re the most oppressed woman I know. It doesn’t count if you have a career because your
husband lets you. That’s a privilege, not a right. You married Arthur for the same reason I married Ted. Because they said
it was okay with them if we worked. Why did we
ask
them? Did Arthur ask you if he should quit his job and stay home to take care of the house and the baby?”

Christ, R.J. thought. Look at Dinah. She is really bugged. Veins forming a V were bulging out on her forehead.

“Isn’t it true?” Dinah asked her.

R.J. was embarrassed. All the women were looking at her now. She never would have agreed to come to a C.R. meeting, which
was all Dinah ever talked about anymore, if she’d known she was going to be attacked this way by her best friend.

“I
don’t…”

“It’s insidious,” Joanna Pollack offered, in a much nicer voice than Dinah’s.

“But I’m happy,” R.J. said.

“So were some of the slaves in the South,” someone across the room said.

She was about to say “I don’t feel like a slave. I love my life,” when she looked around the room at the faces looking at
her. Many of them wore smiles. Knowing smiles.

“Let’s go on,” Joanna Pollack said.

The woman next to R.J. stood.

“I’m Reva Weingarten. I put my husband through toedical
school, internship, and residency. Now he has a thriving practice and I want to go back and get my associate arts degree and
he laughs at me.”

R.J. felt a tap on her arm from Dinah, who offered her a piece of chewing gum with a look that asked
Are we still friends?
R.J. nodded and took the gum, which she slid out of the silver wrapping paper. Then she put the paper in her purse because
she didn’t see anywhere to throw it. Someone was hissing and booing about Reva Weingarten’s husband. R.J. looked at her watch.
It was only eight-thirty. She would never make it through this whole meeting.

She thought about Arthur putting Jefie to bed right now and how adorable the two of them had looked, just before she left
tonight to pick up Dinah. They were both naked in the bathtub. Jeffie standing. Arthur making a waterfall for him from a yellow
paper cup. Jeffie’s little fist stopping the stream of water as he squealed with glee.

“Say bye to Mommy,” Arthur said. Jeffie had been too intrigued by the water to look up.

“Ted gave me so much shit I couldn’t believe it,” Dinah had said when she got into R.J.’s car. “He’s so threatened when I
go to these meetings, it’s a joke. What did Arthur say?”

“Nothing.” She didn’t mention that when she told Arthur where she was going he had been sound asleep.

“Oh, c’mon. Arthur? He didn’t make some joke?”

“No joke.”

“Amazing,” Dinah said.

It had occurred to R.J. as she had walked out the door earlier, that Arthur thought she was on her way to have a “girls’ dinner,”
which is what he called it when she and Dinah made plans every now and then to get together without their husbands. And chat.
It wasn’t that she was afraid to tell him where she was going, which is what Dinah thought. It was that when she
did
tell him, he’d been sleeping, and then she’d just never bothered to…

“Arthur always says that every time I go into an unfamiliar experience I should pretend that I’m an anthropologist” R.J. said.

“Meaning what?” Dinah asked, pulling down the visor in front of her so she could look into the mirror behind it and fluff
her freshly penned hair. “That you’re not a part of it? Just an observer?”

“Well, it gives me an objectivity about things.” R.J. answered. They had been driving down Ventura Boulevard. R.J. loved Ventura
Boulevard. Dozens and dozens of little shops. It seemed as if there were new ones every week. Each with a story to go with
it, like charms on a charm bracelet.

“Yeah, that’s just his way of making sure that you set yourself apart and don’t take it seriously.” Dinah told her, and put
the visor back up.

I’m
not
involved, R.J. thought now, looking around the room. I understand what these women are saying, but I’m not involved. Joanna
Pollack was reading an article by Robin Morgan, and R.J. remembered when Robin Morgan was a little pigtailed actress who played
Dagmar on
I Remember Mama.
She had watched it a few times on a Friday night, at Uncle Shulke’s house after
Shabbes
dinner.

When the meeting was over, a blond woman with long straight hair stood and said, “I thank God that I found you people. I thought
I was losing my mind.” A few of the others stood and embraced her, and many of the other women were wiping their eyes from
the emotion. Women were talking animatedly to one another and R.J. felt as out of it as she had in grade school. Inadequate.
In the car on the way home she felt a distance from Dinah, who opened the car door to get out the second R.J. pulled up outside
her apartment building, as if she couldn’t wait to get out of the car. Then she turned and said, “Sorry if I was too tough
on you,” and was gone.

“You see, what you have to remember about Dinah,” Arthur said in bed that night, after doing all the jokes he would have done
on Sunday night if he’d heard her tell him where she was going, “is that she’ll jump with both feet into whatever’s happening.”
He was flipping channels on the television as he talked. “I mean, she was one of those people who dropped acid seven or eight
years ago. Do you get my point?”

R.J. was making a grocery list.

“Baby?”

“Mmm,” she said. But she wasn’t sure what one thing had to do with the other.

* * *

Harvey Lembeck’s comedy workshop met every other Monday night in a drafty old room, upstairs from the editing department at
Columbia Pictures, and from the minute she walked in the door at seven, when it began, until past midnight when it was over,
R.J. was afraid. Afraid she wouldn’t be called on to get up and work, afraid she
would
be called on to get up and work, afraid when she got up she wouldn’t be funny. Afraid, afraid, afraid. Why was she doing
this? She didn’t want to be a performer. But it was a way for her to try out new material, to meet other writers, to hear
what was funny out loud instead of just in her head, so every other Monday night she forced herself out the door. If Arthur
was home on those nights he put Jeffie to bed. If he wasn’t, R.J. hired Cindy, a teenager from the neighborhood whom Jeffie
liked.

Comedy workshop. She had to be funny if she wanted to continue to stay in it. Already she had seen a few people drop out,
discouraged by their own performances in the group. And worse yet, a few had been asked to leave when Harvey didn’t think
their work was up to par. It was a thrill for R.J. to walk into the lobby at Columbia and see the big black-and-white photos
by the guard’s desk of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and Gregory Peck and know that those people had walked right in
those same doors, nodded to the guard, who buzzed the door open for them and let them pass, just as he did for R.J. Rabinowitz
Misner. From Pittsburgh.

“You’re up, peanut,” Harvey Lembeck would say. It was a nickname he had given her the first night she’d attended the group.
“You get up and work with Billy. You’re in a movie house and the couple behind you are having a fight and won’t shut up.”
Or “You’re robbing a bank and the bank teller won’t take you seriously, no matter what you do. Frank, you’re the teller.”
Or “You walk into what you are certain is your apartment and there is a guy there you’ve never seen who swears it’s his apartment.”
Subjects for the improvisation.

Her mind would race almost as fast as her pulse was speeding, and the improvisation would start. Sometimes it was deadly.
She could feel it flopping from the first line, dying, falling dead from the moment she opened her mouth. Other times, what
she said and did would come out so funny that it was all she could do not to start laughing
herself when the rest of the group laughed. On those nights she would fly home to Arthur the way she had when they’d first
met at the apartment hotel, and pray while she drove that he was still awake, so she could relive her excitement by telling
him everything she remembered about how the Jokes and sketches had worked. Arthur would laugh and tell her he was proud of
her for being what he was certain was “the best one in the class.”

Sometimes celebrity guests came to watch the work. Harvey Lembeck knew everyone. Garry Marshall, Harvey Korman, Elaine May,
Jerry Lewis. Then the pressure was really on. Having to get up in front of those people. After class they would answer questions,
and R.J. was always too tongue-tied even to ask any.

She had been in the workshop for only three months when Harvey Lembeck called her at home. “Peanut?” he said when she answered.
Why was he calling her? Even though she was home, in the safety of her kitchen, it made her nervous to hear his voice. He
was the teacher. The arbiter of humor. His approval meant so much to her, in that barnlike poorly lit room at Columbia, that
her mind went into full alert now, wondering if she had to be funny over the telephone with him. All she could think of was
hello, and she stuttered saying that.

“You interested in a writing job?” he asked.

All the silly answers people in the group gave to obvious questions raced through her mind. Is the Pope Catholic? Does a bear
shit in the woods? Or, as one of the guys had said a few weeks before, Does the Pope shit in the woods? A writing job. “Yeah,”
was all she could say.

“It’s over at Dick Clark’s company,” he said. “I recommended you already but I figured I ought to ask you before I had them
call you. I think it’s for some special about the fifties.”

“Yeah?” she said again. Great wit is my specialty, she would tell Dinah later when she reported the conversation and the news
that Harvey Lembeck had called her at home because he’d recommended her for a writing job. Arthur. After she thanked Harvey
Lembeck at least twenty times, she got off the phone and tried Arthur at the Warwick Hotel in New York. He had left this morning
and should be there by now. He wasn’t and she left a message that she’d called. Someone from Dick Clark’s office was supposed
to call her
this afternoon to schedule a meeting sometime later in the week. A meeting for a television special. She couldn’t wait, to
tell Arthur.

He called her at ten that night. “I’m going to have to stay here all week.” he said. He sounded tired and irritated. “There
are three different acts I have to see, and they have gigs every other day, so I might as well just hang out and get them
all over with at once. How are you doing, baby?” he asked.

A long time later, when she thought back on this telephone conversation, she remembered that what she wanted to answer was
“I’m fabulous. I’m thrilled. I’m so excited I can’t stand it. Tomorrow I have an interview to write a television special.”
But she didn’t. She didn’t mention a word about it to him in that phone call or in any of the phone calls with him every night
that week. On Thursday night when he called, instead of telling him how she had wowed Bill Lee, the producer of the Dick Clark
special, with some of her material, and instead of telling him that, wonder of wonders, she actually had gotten the job, her
first television job, hooray, she talked to him about Jeffie, and the Tiny Tots group she went to with him at West Hollywood
Park, and that she’d had the front doorbell fixed. And she decided that the reason she wasn’t saying anything to Arthur on
the phone about it was because it would be so much better to tell him in person and see how excited he was for her.

Several times over the few years they’d been married, especially since Jeffie was born, they had talked about getting help
in the house. A combination house-deaner/ babysitter. If she could continue to get television jobs, they could really afford
it. On Friday she had gone to an agency that specialized in domestic help and found a woman who would come in every morning
and straighten up the house and be with Jeffie. In addition, R.J. would pay Cindy the babysitter to come by for a few hours
after school to be with him too. When Arthur got back from New York, she would dazzle him with the way she had pulled everything
together so she could be ready to start work in two weeks. For seven weeks. Five of the weeks, the writers would he working
in offices at NBC, and two of the weeks would be in Philadelphia at the original studio from which
American Bandstand
had been televised in the fifties.

There was always something sexy about Arthur’s return. They both knew it and felt it. And R.J. would prepare for it by piling
cookbooks on the breakfast table that morning and ploughing through them until she found something special to make. Then the
would plop Jeffie into the car and, eager with anticipation, hurry to the market and the flower shop, and sometimes, like
today, she’d even have Cindy come after school to be with Jeffie and then go and have her hair done.