Madge opened her door after my loud and urgent knocking and stood there in her long silk pj’s staring at me with a twisted smile.
“I just got in on the red-eye and caught Clare with another woman.”
“How great is that!” Madge said, rubbing her hands together with more-than-obvious glee. “You’re free and it happened surgically. Cut, amputate, done!”
“Why didn’t I know this was going on?” I asked as she held the door for me, signaled me to take a seat on the couch, then went to the kitchen to pour me tea.
“Because you’re not in tune. You’re a smart, talented executive, but when it comes to women, you’re thick, Brice,” she stated as merely fact.
“Well, when I’m done, I’m done. And nothing gets me done faster than being somebody’s seconds! Maybe Clare’s fucking the entire ladies’ basketball squad, for God’s sake! I should go get checked.” I was pacing and snorting and stomping around like a horse in a stall. “She said she didn’t need sex in her life the way I do. Here I thought she was freaking asexual, and she was only freaking asexual for me!
“It all brings back terrible memories of my blue-fronted Amazon parrot who bit through my finger to the bone on the first day I had him. If I answered the phone, or spoke to someone, he screamed, shook his mammoth cage condo off the table, and shredded all the newspaper flooring in a rage. I was convinced he was insane, and I knew I had to keep him to save him from being killed by someone less tolerant. Then one day, my nerves could no longer take the screaming—not being able to speak above his shriek—so I gave him to a medical doctor who called that night to say my bird bathed with him in the shower and sang ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ My parrot who had dive-bombed me and shredded my scalp until it bled sat happily on the naked doctor while he showered, and serenaded him with ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ Here I was trying to save the bird, and it was trying to tell me that it hated me and wanted to move on. Jesus, Clare is my parrot!”
A long pause. “If that works for you, good,” Madge said, tilting her head to one side and peering at me not unlike a large bird. “You need some help getting your stuff out of there?”
“No, it’ll be fine. Clare is nothing if not civil,” I said, thinking of how many boring, civil evenings I’d had with Clare.
*
I ducked as my peau de soie dress shoes came flying across the room at my head and Clare shrieked at me like a blue-fronted Amazon. “You don’t want to talk it over, great! You just want to walk out, great! Get the fuck out of my house!”
She had been crying for two hours and looked absolutely horrific. It flashed through my mind that I had never seen Clare do anything but mist up, and here she was wailing. It was shocking to hear her utter the word “fuck” because, in addition to never doing it, she never said it.
“Frankly, I don’t give a shit how upset you are, darling,” I said archly, moving at a slow and deliberate pace. “You, and not I, were found fucking some cunt in the bed in which I sleep!” I whirled and put my face within an inch of hers, wondering if I would actually strike her and deciding I should leave rather than develop a bad habit like battery. “You who never looks up from her sheet music apparently found time to go down on a cow! The bovine jockey shorts were the piece de resistance—they make her ass look like a Gateway Computer box.”
“You’re never here and we don’t talk! Brice, I love you.”
“And you demonstrate that by butt-fucking some bovine in boxers?” It was a crude remark but I was mortified, embarrassed, and not myself.
I picked up my dress shoes, stuffed them into the last bag, and said the movers would arrive in an hour to collect the boxes and my furniture. My computer was already safely in my car, and with that, I left Clare squawking in the foyer.
*
Exhausted, disgusted, and angry, I drove in deeply ponderous silence to the Chinese drive-thru and grabbed dinner for Madge and me. She’d offered to put me up until I’d found a place to stay. Having already called one of the townhouse communities that had rentals, I knew I’d be in within a day or two. That’s one thing money can do for me—make the tactical aspects of crises more easily manageable.
The kid at the drive-thru took my order, then eyed the backseat of my car jammed with clothes and high-tech gear, books, and a tricycle horse.
“You move?” he asked.
“No, just taking my stuff for a ride,” I said sourly, thinking of Jeff Foxworthy.
I phoned my office, lying to Jane about not feeling well and blaming the plane’s air-vent system. The only remaining issue was telling Jane I had a new address. I hated telling her anything. I had hired her upon learning that her boss had been fired and she was about to be summarily dismissed because of her age, although the age issue was not overtly discussed. Jane had been with me for only a few weeks when I discovered that she was a professional busybody, and her hair, which seemed to have been given electric-shock treatment, might well have received it from her own central nervous system, which seemed to have shorted out, making her supremely sensitive and causing her to spend a good deal of her day inordinately addled. My hiring her simply proved Clare Boothe Luce’s point that no good deed goes unpunished.
I drove to Madge’s house late in the day and used the key she’d left under the mat for me, saying she’d be at the store when I arrived. After tossing the Chinese food on the kitchen counter, I undressed and fell into bed, planning only to nap, but ending up sleeping for hours. When I did awaken, I was staring at a strangely different ceiling—lower and spackled like old, dirty popcorn.
Disoriented, I began thinking it might be morning, but I wasn’t certain. Where is the clock? 1:11a.m. It was always 1:11. In fact, for several years I’d noticed how ones were everywhere. But at the moment, I had bigger problems to contemplate than my predilection toward only checking the clock at 1:11.
Where am I? I thought, catching sight of the Shaker rocker in the corner. I sat straight up in bed, feeling as if I’d just been captured by aliens. Madge’s spare bedroom. My mind made sense of the surroundings. Madge’s tiny house where everything smelled different and looked different and the bed was lumpy. I rolled over and covered my head with a pillow and wished I had a sleeping pill.
Four hours later I awoke again, this time depressed, and crawled around trying to locate my clothes and makeup. I was in a daze and came out of the bedroom forty minutes after the alarm went off, feeling only somewhat disheveled.
“I’ve never lived with anyone, so how does it go…Hi, honey, sleep well? Can I get you some coffee?” Madge handed me a cup of thickly brewed caffeine.
“Omigod, real coffee, thank you!”
“Yes, well, you’re pathetic so I went out and bought some,” Madge said gruffly.
“Not a bad morning greeting. You might also try, ‘you look smashing in that suit.’”
“Don’t press your luck, the sun’s not even up,” Madge growled.
*
I pulled my Jaguar into the parking lot and sat for just a moment, practicing breathing.
Do not share your breakup with anyone, that’s a sign of weakness. Yeah, well, weakness is having a goddamned breakup in the first place! I chastised myself before gripping my briefcase, slinging open the car door, and picking up my step. Pace was everything for an executive. Pick up the pace and own the place.
Papers were piled high, phone messages were in neat stacks, and my phone was ringing. Jane was on lines one and two, so I picked up line three.
“So how have you been?” Michael Kaloff boomed. Michael was a dark, dapper, self-absorbed man in his mid-fifties—a board member rich enough not to have to care how things turn out in the end.
“Great, just great,” I lied.
“Good!” Pleasantries over, he lowered his voice as if people were lurking just outside his office door desperately wanting to overhear this information. “I’m an advocate of Anselm’s, I think you know that. He’s not the easiest person to be around, but he drives the business. I’m less than happy right now with this two-headed monster we’ve created,” he said, referencing Anselm and Puckett’s power wars. “As things begin to shift, just hang on to the rails and don’t bail.”
“What’s shifting?”
“Let me put it this way. It’s time to surgically separate the conjoined twins, and I don’t think they’ll both survive. Keep this to yourself. Got another call, talk to you later.” He hung up.
“Line two,” Jane said over the intercom, “Jonathon King.” I picked up the phone to speak to Kaloff’s nemesis on the board.
“How are you doing?” he boomed. Jonathon King was a diminutive, middle-aged, brown-suited guy with sandy blond hair and a Midwestern attitude. He wasn’t as rich as Michael Kaloff, nor was he as clever.
“Great, just great,” I lied again.
“Good!” he said, not meaning it. “Listen, we’ve got a few board members, I don’t want to name names, who are stirring the pot. They’re not giving the new structure the support it needs to work. For the record, Walter Puckett is a hard driver who is fired up and will turn this place around, given the chance!”
I thought about Walter’s tits-and-ass comments and wanted to ask how Jonathon King defined “fired up,” but I bit my tongue.
“I’m aware you’ve known Anselm longer, but I don’t want you to take a bullet for him. Just lay low, keep your skirts clean. We’ve got a lot to do this year!” King chortled over nothing, to let me know he was a warm, friendly guy, and hung up.
Jane stuck her head through the doorway, saying Anselm had summoned me. I walked over to his office and coded myself in through the two sets of double doors that separated him from the rest of the working world.
“You’re back,” he stated, not wanting a reply and not pretending to care whether I’d had a good time. I had to give him points for being direct. “Gotten calls from anyone on the board?” Anselm never looked up from his scribbling, but I could tell from his tone that he knew I had.
“Kaloff and King.”
“Stay out of it.” Anselm disliked the fact that I had a passing acquaintance with several of the board members and that they phoned me from time to time. “Let me know what you hear?” He never looked up, to underscore that what I might hear was of little consequence.
On the way back to my office, I mused that other entertainment companies were breathing up our collective shorts while our leadership was busy trying to kill each other off, as if we were suffering from corporate autoimmune disease.
I had plopped into my chair and was staring out the window when the pinging sound associated with arriving e-mail broke the silence. Expecting it to be from Anselm, I glanced at my computer. It read lchase@kbuu. I stared at it breathlessly for a moment before clicking it open and reading So you’ll know what you missed.
It took me a minute to realize she was referring to the photos attached. I clicked them open and saw pictures taken during the photo shoot at Tina’s ranch. The horses frozen midchew on my screen looked darling in the confines of my air-conditioned office separated from the heat and the flies. The third photo showed Liz standing next to a horse, her arm around it, looking directly into the camera with those piercing blue eyes. She looked spectacular: her hair blowing in the wind; her beautiful, strong, slightly androgynous face aglow in the superb light; her eyes softened by the presence of the gentle animal resting against her. I had to remember to breathe. As I was forwarding that single picture to my PDA, I thought, I want to see her again.
I replied to her e-mail: Beautiful pics, thanks. Would next weekend work for our horse adventure? When my finger hit Send, my heart zoomed up into my throat and a voice in my head said, What in the hell are you setting in motion? Too late.
The instant reply: Yes. I’ll set it up. Meet me Friday morning, my house at 7 a.m.
She has audacity, presuming to set the time. I wrote back that I was working Friday.
Her e-mail reply was You’re the boss; give yourself a day off. See you at 7 a.m.
I smiled in spite of myself.
*
It was as if everyone on the planet had been assigned the job of subverting my trip with Liz. By Thursday evening my office looked like a deli, the line stretching back six people deep, each trying to get one last approval or decision or opinion. Talent acquisition, networks, and research stood in a clump waiting for Jane to quit reciting the phone messages that needed an immediate return.
“I assume you haven’t formed a singing group but are gathered here for some business reason,” I said to the trio of humanity looming nearby.
Maxine, head of research, smiled, apparently enjoying my particular brand of humor, and spoke up on behalf of saving the networks’ ratings. “Jack is demanding we sign a guy whose entertainment representation to date, not to mention talent, is marginal at best—starred in infomercials about depilatory remedies, penile dysfunction, and right-wing religious groups.”
“Does he have a following?” I kept from grinning.
“Not unless you count the very hairy, impotent guy seeking salvation,” Maxine said dryly as I dialed Jack.
He answered immediately, saying he thought I was out of town, then addressed me as his own personal goddess of talent, a sure sign that he was up to something.
“Why are we signing a piece of talent who’s starring in a penile dysfunction commercial?” I asked.
“Because his brother lives with the network exec who is three layers above Elgin Aria and can get your poor-man’s Jacques Cousteau series green-lighted at a time when programming slots are scarcer than virgins at a rock concert.”
“That kind of crap erodes our credibility. Not doing it,” I said flatly.
“Okay, look, no one’s supposed to know this, but…are you alone?” he asked, and I glanced up at Maxine and her entourage and politely waved them off.
“Go ahead,” I said into the phone.
“Puckett traded out a penile implant for our handling this kid’s career for a year.” Jack spoke as if he were residing inside his own desk drawer.
“Jeezus,” I snorted. “I hope the talent isn’t the one who did the surgery.”
“The talent’s brother, who’s a doctor, did Puckett’s surgery. So you get the kid’s career up, Puckett gets his gear up, and I get to cheer up…because the sonofabitch will be off my ass.” Jack snickered at his own joke.
“We’re turning into whores,” I moaned, syncing my PalmPilot with my computer.
“That would be a step up. They get paid every time they get screwed,” he said and hung up.
I threw my computer into my briefcase, gathered up the phone messages to be returned while I drove, waved good-bye to Jane, and dialed Madge as I exited the office. When she answered, I told her I would be out of town for a few days because I was going on a horse-sightseeing trip with Liz Chase.
“I thought you were going to leave that alone.”
“I am. It’s about horses.”
“It’s about sex. Otherwise you’d be inviting me to go look at horses,” Madge said dryly.
“Point taken. But I can assure you I’m not going to have sex with her. I’m not going to share a place, space, or my life with her. Can I just go spend a weekend in the country and admire her nice ass?”
“You’re on the rebound, so just be careful. And don’t mount anything you can’t ride.” Madge hung up.