Til the Real Thing Comes Along (7 page)

“Michael, the ring your mother gave me doesn’t exist anymore. Remember? We called it the chandelier and I had it all changed
around?” Laugh, she prayed, but he didn’t.

“Give me the ring right now or I’ll find it myself. That ring is a family heirloom, and you’re not going to be in my family,”
he said through clenched teeth, “so give it to me.”

He walked toward the armoire where she kept her jewelry box.

“Michael, stop this,” she said.

“Give me the ring!” he screamed.

“Get out of this house, you crazy son-of-a-bitch! If you weren’t so crazy you would have gone into your office where I sent
the ring by messenger three weeks ago, with a lovely note that said I’m sorry it didn’t work out. Well, I’m not sorry. I’m
thrilled. I thank God every day for saving me
from the brink of disaster by making you too nuts to get married. Because I was so stupid and wanting to get married so much
that I would have married you. A mama’s boy who is so hung up on his mother that he’ll never get married until she dies.”

“Shut up,” he said menacingly. “Shut up.” Now she was really afraid, because she could see she had really touched a nerve
with that one. “I’m not hung up on my mother,” he said. “I’m not. And she’s never going to die, do you hear me?” he screamed,
jumping up and down, his fists clenched. “Never, never, never.”

With each word he bent his knees and took off from the ground with both feet and landed hard again and again and again. R.J.
looked on in shocked silence, and suddenly, when the absurdity of what he had just said registered and at the same time it
occurred to her how much he reminded her of what she was sure Rumpelstiltskin must have looked like when the princess guessed
his name, she couldn’t control the huge laugh that rolled up out of her chest and into his face. It was a combination of relief
that she finally saw him as foolish instead of romantic, and the absurdity of what he’d just said, and the way he’d said it…
She’s never going to die. Rumpelstiltskin. Agghhh. Like a child at a solemn event she tried to hold it in, but that made her
laugh even harder. Oh, God, she could tell by Michael’s flared nostrils that the laughter made his rage even hotter. His face
curled into a sneer.

“You’re a mean bitch,” he said with a little stamp, and then he stormed out of the bedroom, through the living room, and out
the front door, which he slammed behind him.

She was shaking, still laughing and simultaneously fighting off tears as she went into the bathroom, washed her face, and
ran a brush through her hair. After a few minutes she noticed Jeffie reflected in the mirror. He was wearing his football
pajamas, standing sleepy-eyed in the doorway.

“Hi, baby,” she said.

“What was all the Yellin’ about?” he asked.

“Um, it was me. I mean, I just had the TV up too loud,” she lied. “I’m sorry I woke you, baby.”

“Jeez, what in the heck were you watching?” he asked.

“Oh,” she said, putting an arm around him and walking him back to his room, “some really bad show.”

Have Patsy say: I was having a relationship with a great guy, but we broke up because of religious differences. He was a devout
coward. He gave me a gorgeous diamond ring and then he wanted it back. Can you believe it? Next time some guy asks for my
hand, I think I’ll just give him the finger. (Censor will delete, leave it in for now, Patsy will laugh.)

“Eyyy, R.J.,” Harry Elfand said, kicking her door open as usual. His brow was furrowed and he was carrying some typed pages
in his right hand and a Styrofoam cup filled with coffee in his left. The steam was rising from the coffee. R.J., never able
to shake her role of Nice Jewish Girl, made it fresh for the guys every morning. When she first started working on the show,
she occasionally brought in homemade cookies, until one of the other writers accused her of trying to “bake her way to the
top.” For a minute she thought that Harry was coming in to complain about the coffee. Then he handed her the pages.

“Could ya quit pourin’ yer friggin’ personal life all over the goddamned script?” he said. “First you give me guys who can’t
make a commitment, then lines about broken engagements. Lighten up, will ya? Besides, program practices will chew your ass
off.”

“Sure, Harry,” R.J. said.

“I mean, they’re sort of funny… but enough is enough,” he said, turning to another page. “Now this one was for Patsy to do
with Jerry Lewis. Right?”

“Right.”

“Well, he’s out. He’s got another gig, so can ya rewrite his part for the guest we got to replace him?”

R.J. nodded. “Who is it?”

“The Pointer Sisters.”

Harry went back to his office and R.J. stared at the sketch for a few minutes, until the intercom on her telephone buzzed.
It was Harry.

“Did I mention that the Pointers will be here at two o’clock to see the pages?”

R.J. looked at her watch. It was one-fifteen.

“Thanks, Harry.”

Every day of every week was like that. The staff of writers were all bananas. The pressure to be creative on deadline was
getting to them all.

“What’s the ending, the goddamned ending of the sketch?” she heard Iggy Richmond say, frantically pacing up and down the hallway.

“Do what you always do,” Marty Nussbaum yelled out the door of his office. “Have the guy jump out the window.”

“The window,” Iggy Richmond hollered back, excitedly. “Brilliant idea! The guy could jump out of the window except for two
small factors. The first factor is that there
is
no guy in the sketch. There’s two gorillas. And the second factor is that the sketch takes place in the jungle.”

“Nuance,” Marty Nussbaum replied.

There was a chuckle from one or two of the other cubicles.

“If you guys would shut the fuck up out there and do your work insteada cockin’ around,” Harry Elfand shouted from his office,
a double cubicle because he was the head writer, “maybe we could go home at a decent hour tonight.”

R.J. got up from her typing chair and closed her door. Not that it would help very much. The worse the pressure, the louder
they got.

Patsy hated the current script. After the read-through she’d been very quiet; then with a flick of her wrist she’d tossed
it across the reading table. As it landed in a nearby wastebasket she announced, “This script sucks the hind tit.”
Then she stood, aimed her famous breasts toward the door, and marched out.

The writers were surprised. They’d all been congratulating themselves for days about how funny this week’s script was. All
of them looked down at the table in disappointment, except R.J., who looked at the group of them, amazed at how much they
resembled a bunch of little boys. Their expressions reminded her of a group of Jeffie’s friends at a birthday party when she
told them there would only be birthday cake because she’d forgotten to buy the ice cream.

“Hey,” Harry Elfand said. “At least ya can’t say our star ain’t elegant. I mean, what a way with words that cunt has—no offense
there, R.J.”

“So what do we do?” Sherman Himmelblau asked.

“We start again.”

“From scratch?”

“Unless you want Madame Patsy to say she’s not showin’ for rehearsals on Wednesday,” Elfand said, sucking on an unlit cigar.

“Wednesday—Christ, that’s forty-eight hours from now.”

“That’s right, kiddies. So call your wives and boyfriends, and your wives’ boyfriends and your boyfriends’ wives, and tell
them not to hold dinner for you… or anything else for that matter, ’cause we got our work cut out for us.”

That was Monday. On Tuesday they came back with little or no sleep and stayed until two Wednesday morning. Finally abandoning
the idea of working alone or in teams, they decided they’d get more work done if they all worked together. Wearily, they moved
into the conference room. R.J. had inhaled as much cigar smoke in the past day and a half as if she’d smoked a box of stogies
herself. And the food that the constantly browbeaten office runner brought in to sustain them throughout the long days was,
as Harry Elfand aptly described it, “as tasteless as the jokes get at half past midnight.”

By Wednesday at nine
A.M.
, R.J. had chills from exhaustion though she wore her jeans and her black turtleneck sweater. The script had to go to be Xeroxed
at noon. She wore no makeup and her hair was limp and dirty. And the worst part was that all of them would probably have to
stay all night tonight. Thank God she had Manuela to look after Jeffie.

“So all right,” Harry Elfand said. “Where
are we?
“

“We’re on the funeral home sketch, Harry,” R.J. said. “Where Redd Foxx goes to his father’s funeral and the guy in the casket
is white.”

“Oh, yeah. Okay, let’s see… Nussbaum, this was your sketch. What’ve you got? Nussbaum!”

Marty Nussbaum’s face was on the conference room table and it was clear to all of them that he was asleep. Poor Marty. Of
all the writers on the show, he was R.J.’s favorite. He looked like those dolls they used to sell when she was a kid, the
ones that were called troll dolls. He had wild long hair that stuck straight up all over his head, and a big belly. And he
always wore a silly little smile. The sketches he wrote were invariably bizarre—strange but wonderfully clever. He would write
a whole piece in what he called “Nussbaum insults Shakespeare,” in which all the characters spoke in iambic pentameter, or
he could write a nonsense dialect so cleverly that you were sure the characters were speaking a foreign language. Unlike the
other comedy writers, who never laughed at one another’s jokes but rather nodded in appreciation if they liked one and mumbled
a barely audible “That’s funny,” Marty Nussbaum laughed when he liked your joke, until he had to pull a handkerchief out of
the back pocket of his jeans to wipe the happy tears from his eyes.

“Eyyy, Nussbaum, ya
putz,”
Harry Elfand said, but Marty Nussbaum didn’t stir. “You doin’ the Redd Foxx shit or what?”

Nothing.

“What
is
this asshole? Dead or something?”

No one moved, especially Marty Nussbaum.

“We’ll get back to ya, Nussbaum,” Harry Elfand said to the top of Marty Nussbaum’s long curly wisps of hair. “Who’s got the
sketch with the Pointer Sisters?”

“Harry,” R.J. said. “Shouldn’t one of us see if… Marty’s okay?”

“What are you, Florence Jewish Mother Nightingale over there? Sure, why dontcha give him mouth-ta-mouth resuscitation too?”

R.J. stood and walked over to Marty Nussbaum’s chair.

“Marty,” she said softly, touching his back.

“He’s out like a light,” Eddie Levy said.

“What about the Pointer Sisters?” Harry Elfand asked. “I need someone to write the intro to their song. Now who’s it gonna
be?”

“Holy shit,” Iggy Richmond said, as R.J. gently lifted Marty’s head and the others were able to see his face. “Nussbaum is
dead.”

“Christ,” said Sherman Himmelblau.

“Well then,” Harry Elfand said, lighting his cigar, “I guess that means he’s not writin’ the Pointer Sisters’ sketch. Levy,
why don’t
you
take a pass at it?”

Marty Nussbaum’s funeral was held at the Writers Guild theater, and the eulogies were funny and moving. “Marty Nussbaum was
a method writer,” Harry Elfand said, standing at the podium wearing a solemn face. It was the first time anyone had ever seen
Harry in a tie. “I mean, he really threw himself into his work. I asked him to write a funeral sketch for this week’s show,
and just to get the essence of it, he died.”

R.J. sat in the, last row of the theater watching as the various comedy writers, each one trying to top the one before, paid
silly, zany, sometimes brilliant tributes to the funny little man. The writers, usually so critical of one another, were laughing
at each other’s Marty Nussbaum stories in spite of themselves.

At Arthur Misner’s funeral no one had laughed. The service had been punctuated by Jeffie’s anguished cries as he held tightly
to R.J. His tiny face, soaked with tears, was pressed against her skirt. Yiskadal v’yis Kadosh, the mourner’s prayer. “My
daddy,” he cried every now and then. “My daddy.” The sound of the little boy’s pain bounced off the walls of the sanctuary
and pierced the hearts of the onlookers, who clucked their tongues, making pitying noises.

The coffin had been closed for Arthur’s service, but before it was closed, the funeral director advised the family that they
could go into a private viewing room, “to say their last goodbyes.” Arthur’s parents had gone in first. R.J. had stood frozen,
watching them, knowing it would be her turn, and Jeffie’s, next. Should Jeffie go? She was afraid the sight of Arthur in a
coffin would be more than
she
could stand. How could a little boy…? Arthur’s parents emerged from the viewing room weeping, arms around each other’s
waists, as if to hold each other up. Arthur’s mother was moaning quietly.

“Maybe you should take Jeffie in now,” someone said to R.J.

Slowly, feeling everyone watching the two of them, R.J. held her son’s hand and moved toward the door of the room where Arthur
lay dead. But before they reached the doorway, Jeffie squeezed his mother’s hand tightly. When she looked down at him his
eyes held hers, and with great conviction he said, “I don’t need to go in there. I know what my dad looked like.”

“One time Nussbaum wrote a blackout that kind of summarized his point of view,” Eddie Levy said from the podium. “It was a
family sitting around at a dinner table, and all the food was on the table, and the father of the family said, ‘Thank you,
God, for the food we’re about to eat, and for the roof over our heads.’ And all of a sudden, the roof collapses and falls
onto the food.”

A giggle fluttered through the audience.

“I’m worried that when Nussbaum got up there, the big guy mighta held that against him.”

A bigger giggle.

“My son told me, a few nights before he was murdered,” Arthur’s father had told R.J., taking her aside at Arthur’s funeral,
“that you two were having problems. Maybe if you’d been at home instead of running off to New York, this never would have
happened.” R.J. had frozen in her tracks. Wasn’t the loss of Arthur pain enough for all of them?