Til the Real Thing Comes Along (9 page)

“C’mon, R.J., it’ll do you good,” Eddie said.

“No thanks, Eddie. I’m on a huge diet. If I went to Canter’s, I’d just order a number eight, and then be sorry later.”

Hobie laughed.

“So you’ll just have a salad,” Eddie said.

“What’s the point of going to a deli and having a salad?” R.J. asked as she rolled a piece of paper into the typewriter. She
had work to do. Hobie laughed at that too.

“You’ll keep us company,” Eddie urged.

“Nope. Anyway, I have to finish Patsy At Home.”

Hobie only giggled at that.

“Nice meeting you,” R.J. added, hoping that would give them the hint and they would leave her office.

“Want me to bring you back a number eight?” Hobie asked, grinning. He was sort of cute in a stupid way.

“It’s just dinner. Hey, you don’t have to marry the guy,” Eddie Levy reminded her when he got back from lunch alone. “So I
gave him your number.”

Hobie called her that night, and they met for an early dinner in a restaurant that was halfway between their houses.

“You’re great,” he kept saying. “I mean, you’re so terrific. What I mean to say is”—and then he sang, full out, with no self-consciousness
and in a very pleasant voice—“In this world, of ordinary people, extraordinary people, I’m glad there is you.” She smiled.
Maybe Hobie was okay. He
ordered a nice French red wine and they talked. They’d both been poor as children. They both thought they’d picked show business
as a way to escape drab childhoods. “Small world, isn’t it?” Hobart sang. He knew the lyrics from every song imaginable. He
fit them into whatever they were talking about, and sang them into the conversation. It was sweet Once he looked long into
her eyes and said, “When we have a baby, let’s name him Irwin. I always liked the name Irwin.” There was something endearing
about that.

After the third glass of wine he told her that when he was very young he’d been a loser on
Name That Tune.
The original
Name That Tune,
where you had to run up and pull a bell cord before the other contestant in order to win the right to answer. Though he’d
been certain that the song was “Sailor Boys Have Talked to Me in English,” he tripped on the way to the bell cord, and his
opponent, an elderly kindergarten teacher, beat him to the bell. “Sailor Boys,” screamed the schoolteacher, jumping up and
down as the mortified Hobie lay on the cold studio floor. The old lady won. He’d never told that to anyone, he said to R.J.,
who put a conciliatory hand over his to soothe him. He took her hand and kissed it and said, “Thank you.” After the fourth
glass of wine he admitted that the
Name That Tune
story was a lie.

He called her five times after that night. Every time he did she turned down his offer of dinner. He was too crazy. Certifiably
meshugge.

“Go have dinner with him,” Eddie Levy said to her before the meeting started on Monday. “Because every time you turn him down
he calls
me.”

“You
have dinner with him,” she answered.

“Me? What are you? Crazy?”

“Hey, Eddie. It’s just dinner. You don’t have to marry the guy,” she said, and stood to get him to leave her office. But when
Hobie called her for the sixth time, he caught her on an off night and she accepted.

“Let’s tell each other things about ourselves that are really intimate,” he said to her over the salad.

I’m a comedy writer, R.J. thought. I should be able to get out of this one.

“You first” was all she could think of.

“I like to live dangerously,” he said, and then drank
some more wine. She knew he was going to tell her some story, so she didn’t say a word.

“When I was in my teens I used to go down to the Lower East Side to score a nickel bag of dope. And after I had it hidden
inside my coat, I’d purposely walk past a policeman, just to feel my heart beat, thinking he might catch me and it would ruin
my whole life.”

Oy vey
, she thought. Why did I agree to see him again? She could see in his eyes that he knew she thought his story was nothing,
and that he was going to try again.

“I go out with a lot of women, and each time I meet a new one I always tell her I want to have a baby with her and what we
should name the baby. Then I try and remember which woman goes with which baby name, without screwing up. Like you’re Irwin.
Right?”

The next time he called her she lied and told him she was seeing someone else very seriously and it wouldn’t be fair to the
new guy. It was another few months after that, that she accepted the fix-up from Dinah. With the psychiatrist from Robert’s
building. She met him at a sushi restaurant on Pico Boulevard. He was gorgeous. There was no doubt about that. Tall and blond
and tan with aqua eyes. He drove a black Mercedes and wore a black leather jacket, and he smelled great, and when he smiled
he had a mouth full of gorgeous straight white teeth. He was, he told her proudly, a sensational tennis player, an avid skier,
and a long-distance runner. This was no mere psychiatrist. He was a Jungian analyst. And he loved children, and he hoped to
meet hers one day. And most of all to have some of his own. Oh and by the way, he had eschewed (his word) current popular
literature to read the classics, most of which he was rereading, since he’d been an undeniably great scholar in both undergraduate
and graduate school.

R.J. had a headache. She was grateful when the psychiatrist excused himself to make a phone call. The headache was pounding
and she had a screaming urge to run outside, jump into her car, and leave before he came back. A fat man at another table—whose
wife was obviously nagging at him about something—was looking over at R.J. When his wife turned away from him, pouting, he
winked a conspiratorial wink at her.

He knows, she thought. The fat man knows that I’m sitting here as miserable as he is. When the psychiatrist
returned, before he could lift his arm to gesture to the waiter for another round, R.J. grabbed it.

“Listen,” she said, “you’re great, you really are, but I’ve got to… I’m not feeling very… Would you mind if I…” and she turned
and was out the door of the restaurant, into the cool evening, and finally inside the safety of her old Mustang, driving home.
Laughing. A panicky laugh.

“He was perfect,” she said to herself out loud. “The perfect man, and I hated him.” And that made her laugh even more, certain
that she was probably going over some edge of sanity.

Then there was the guy who called because he’d noticed her at the Writers Guild meeting. He wrote movies of the week and had
seen R.J.’s credit roll by on Patsy’s show, and would she meet him for a cup of coffee. Sure, why not? He looked like Woody
Allen, and later, when she thought about it, she realized that he was probably trying to be funny. People always tried to
be funny with her because they knew she wrote comedy, so when she walked into the Hamburger Hamlet and said, “Hi, I’m R.J.,”
he said, “Let’s get this out of the way right now. Do you have herpes?” She never even sat down, just turned and walked out
the door to her car, wondering if he’d call after her apologetically, saying that he’d only been trying to make a joke. He
didn’t.

The divorce lawyer who asked her to come over and “do psychedelic mushrooms.” The studio executive she went to lunch with,
who asked if she would make love with him on the floor of his office while he talked to his wife on the speakerphone.

“You’ll love it,” he told R.J., his breathing changing audibly at the thought. “She has no idea. Sometimes I tell her I’m
lifting weights. Of course
you
can’t make a sound, but that’s what’s great.”

No more. She wouldn’t put herself through it again. She’d give up dating. Become the world’s first Jewish comedy-writing nun.
It was hard enough getting through a day at work. The ratings were slipping and Patsy was defensive and edgy, and “the boys,”
as Harry Elfand referred to the writing staff, were getting more and more neurotic. Patsy was threatening to fire everyone.
Though it was a threat she’d made in the past and never carried out, it was unnerving to the staff, all of whom had families
to support.

Thank God for Jeffie, R.J. thought. He kept her sane, and responsible and laughing. She didn’t need anyone else in her life
but him. And then she met Barry Litmann.

Barry was round and bearded, with lots of bushy hair, and he dressed in silly outfits. Costumes. Like a tux jacket over a
Six Flags Magic Mountain T-shirt and jeans. Harry Elfand had hired him to replace Marty Nussbaum, only Barry would be in a
higher position than Marty had been. He would co-head-write the show with Harry. Take on some of Harry’s responsibilities.—“So
I can dust off my golf clubs,” Harry Elfand said. The thought of Harry playing golf made R.J. laugh. Barry Litmann said he
liked her laugh. When she handed her sketch in at the end of the day, he liked that too.

“You’re funny,” he said. “Not just pretty.”

R.J. nodded, a kind of thank-you nod. Coming on. He’s coming on to me, she thought. He called her on Friday night and asked
her if she’d like to come over for dinner on Saturday. Only he didn’t say
dinner;
he said something like “dinner and dancing,” and soon they were giggling on the phone like old friends, and she asked him
what he was going to cook, and when he described the few things he was able to cook, she said she’d make the dinner and bring
it. Chicken in a pot. It was her specialty.

Jokes were his, and boyishness, and he made her laugh so much while they were sitting in his tiny kitchen, eating the chicken
in a pot by candlelight, that sometimes she had to put the fork down and cover her face with her napkin because she knew her
cheeks must be flushed and her eye makeup must be running and she was embarrassed. And before she left at ten o’clock he held
her hand and asked her if she’d come back for dinner another night. She promised she would and drove home remembering all
the funny things he’d said, grinning.

Every evening that week they stayed at work after the others had left, and talked. And laughed. He had grown up in Hollywood,
the youngest in a family of five brothers, all of them funny. Their father, a former silent film comic, would dispense the
most love to whichever brother told the best joke last. It was probably apocryphal, he told her, but an older brother swore
that when he learned to talk, Barry’s first sentence was “Didja hear the one about the rabbi?”

Always on. That was the only way to describe him.
Always performing. Sometimes it was exhausting. But it was a welcome change from every man she’d ever known. Especially Michael
Rappaport. Silly. Barry would say anything that came into his head. And most of it was hilarious.

One night after everyone was gone and she was leaving the office, he came in and closed the door and took her in his arms.
He was wearing a Mickey Mouse sweat shirt with a tie.

“I want you to come over for dinner and dancing this Saturday night. Will you?” he asked.

“You bet.” She grinned. So darling. As he gave her a hug, she tried to remember what day it was, and how long she’d have to
wait until Saturday. Three days? Two? It felt good to be held. Very good.

“Oh, and by the way,” he whispered into her hair, his beard tickling the side of her face and her ear, “I’m cooking.”

“I can tell,” she said, and they both laughed.

On Saturday night after Jeffie had gone to sleep she drove to Barry’s house, where Barry was waiting with a spaghetti dinner
and low lights and music. After dinner they made love. This man was not a candidate for marriage, or fatherhood, and she wanted
marriage more than ever, and a father for her boy. But he was silly and sexy and exciting to be with and maybe this was a
necessary respite from her pursuit of forever relationships.

The following Monday at work, Patsy was on the warpath. Something about the writers always making her look like a dumb broad
in all the sketches and she wanted to look smart.

“Hey, we’re writers, not Svengalis,” Harry Elfand said. Everyone held his breath. “The reason you look like a dumb broad is
because that’s what you are,” he blurted out. A few of the writers closed the doors to their cubicles to block out the sound
of the fight in Harry’s office.

“I’m too rich for this, bitch,” he shouted. “I don’t need you, or this show, and I’m not puttin’ my writers through this anymore.
So do this script or
I
walk.”

The writers heard a long silence. Harry saw a tense forced smile on Patsy’s face.

“Then hit the road, and take your writers with ya,” Patsy said.

“Yeah?” Harry said, talking directly into her perfectly made-up face. “And what’re you gonna do? You’re gonna
stand there on television with nothin’ to say, like the dumb dipshit broad that you are. So you know what I’m gonna do now
as a favor to you? I’m gonna walk outta here, Patsy, like you and me didn’t have this discussion, see? And then you can go
talk to your lawyer and talk to your agent and talk to your squeeze of the moment, and when you figure out what it’ll cost
to replace me you’ll reconsider and apologize.” He walked out, went to lunch, and left Patsy standing in his office.

For the next two weeks the office was filled with tension. No one was getting any work done. The writers were on the phone
with agents and producers of other shows, putting out feelers for jobs. Everyone was depressed. Except for Barry and R.J.
Neither could repress a smile when the other walked by. This man was a real wacko, now R.J. knew for sure. To begin with he
drove to work every day in what used to be a school bus. He lived with three dogs in a huge house in the Valley that had a
tennis court, even though he didn’t play tennis, “because,” he told R.J. one night, “one of the dogs is thinking of taking
it up.” From the street the house looked as if it were haunted, or at least abandoned, because Barry never mowed the lawn,
and the living room drapes were always drawn.

Inside, the house was all whimsy.
Battlestar Galactica
sheets on the bed, a working telephone booth in the hallway outside the kitchen, and on the grand piano, which nobody ever
played, there was a neon sign spelling out his name that blinked on and off all day and all night. Barry. Barry. Barry. Still,
R.J. was glad to be there with him. At least she knew he was never going to make promises to her and Jeffie that he couldn’t
keep.