Second Chance Love (10 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Three weeks later, Elizabeth was sitting in her normal spot behind the counter, enjoying the morning’s first cup of coffee, when Gail slammed through the door with above-normal exuberance. “I got a callback. A
callback.
That’s what they call it when they think you’re so wonderful that they want to see you again.”

"Oh, for
Bed and Breakfast Bullies
?”

Gail put one hand on her hip and raised her eyebrows half an inch. “No, that’s not what it’s called and you know it. For
Guest House Gestapo.
There were about a thousand people at that tryout at the mall. They put us all in front of a video camera and asked us a lot of silly questions. The guy who was running the auditions said he was going to have to send a runner to buy more tape after my first answer. I think he was kidding. Anyway, they must have liked what I had to say because now they’re flying me out to Los Angeles to be interviewed by the executive producer. That’s what they call the woman who’s in charge of the whole thing."

Elizabeth hurried around the counter and hugged Gail. “That’s so exciting! Congratulations. I can’t think of anyone that deserves to be on television more than you.”

“Well, it’s not the same as having an old boyfriend turn up and sweep you off your feet and, oh, yeah, he’s a millionaire, but I’ll take my thrills where I can find them.”

Elizabeth smiled and shook her head. “When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow. They’re putting me up at a hotel, and paying for my airfare and everything. I’ve got Dalya all set to take my place at the store. I’m taking this afternoon off too, so I can go home and pack and get ready. Let’s face it, I wouldn’t get any work done today anyway.”

She hustled to the door and was gone before Elizabeth could say goodbye. “Call me,” Elizabeth shouted into a slipstream perfumed with incense and lavender.

The following Wednesday, Gail walked back through the front door of the
Prints and the Pauper
. Without a word.

“Well?” Elizabeth said.

“Well, what?”

“Oh, don’t you be coy with me. Are you on the show?”

“I don’t know yet. They sent me back home last night and told me that if I made the show, I would know this week.”

Elizabeth looked at her more closely. “Don’t worry. They’d be crazy to pass on you."

"Are you so sure?" For once, no self-assurance.
I have never seen this. This is solemn Gail. I miss Tropical Storm Gail
.

"Someday I’ll be able to tell people that I knew you when—"

The door to the shop slammed open hard, sending a few bargain paperbacks tumbling to the floor.

Elizabeth stepped toward the door, a warrior-priestess ready to defend her temple from barbarian invaders, but a young man pushed past her. He had sandy blond hair and a million-watt plastic smile, and sported a gray suit with a red tie. Immediately behind him came a burly man aiming a camera as if it were a surface-to-air missile launcher. The parade continued with a guy wearing a
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
t-shirt, carrying a long boom with a microphone attached to the end of it.

“Excuse me!” Elizabeth said, but the young man pushed right past her. His smile turned up another half notch. Before Elizabeth could react, Plastic Smile took a position opposite Gail.

“Gail Weathers, I am Skip Corcoran. Congratulations! You have been chosen to be on
Guest House Gestapo!
You have one hour to pack whatever you can fit into this bag.” He handed her a green duffel bag with the Guest House Gestapo logo printed on it, a fist superimposed upon stylized chains.

Gail squealed, jumped, and clapped her hands like an unhinged person.
And now her whole body is smiling. Such unbounded joy!

“Do you have anything you’d like to tell our viewing audience?”

With great difficulty and iron self-mastery, Elizabeth suppressed a belly laugh.

“Hi! I’m Gail, and you’re going to be seeing, and, I guess, hearing, a lot from me this summer on Guest House Gestapo. I have been waiting my entire life for this opportunity to come along, and you can bet your sister Sadie’s very last dollar that I am not going to blow it now that I’ve got it…”

The verbal avalanche caught Skip Corcoran by surprise. His smile faded when her voice did not. Finally, Skip leaned forward toward the camera and said, “Cut. Wrap. Let’s go on to the next one.”

Gail was still talking, holding the duffel bag.

Chapter Seventeen

That Friday night, Steve picked up Elizabeth at the shop and drove across town to his condo. As soon as Elizabeth was buckled in, Steve said: “So, tell me again, why we’re going straight home instead of stopping for our normal Friday night blue plate special at Maybelle’s?”

“Several reasons, actually. One, we agreed we would limit ourselves to Maybelle’s once a week, and we went last night. More importantly, though, tonight is the premiere of
Guest House Gestapo
–the night Gail becomes a star!”

“I know, I know. I’ve got it set to DVR. We don’t need to be there to watch it live.”

“I was talking about it with Max a little while ago, and he told me that these kind of shows sometimes require people to call in and vote for them. I want to be there for her in case she needs it.”

Forty-five minutes later, Elizabeth had made a fair effort at a chicken stir-fry. They were eating on the deep leather couch in front of Steve’s 60 inch Samsung, waiting for the show to begin.

“How long’s it been since you’ve watched a television show?”

“Oh. Let me think.” Elizabeth twisted her mouth to the left, then right. “I went over to Gail’s for a Christmas dinner a few years ago, and we watched
It’s a Wonderful Life.
It was very good. Just like I remember it as a kid. Does that count?”

Steve laughed, and said, “No, not really. How about a series, like
Law & Order,
or
The Sopranos?”

“
The Sopranos
sounds good. Is it about Beverly Sills?”

Steve looked at her closely, but couldn’t tell if she were serious.

“I remember watching
Sex and the City
," she added, "but that was probably a while ago.”

“Well, things have changed a little bit since you were last watching television. They call this 'reality TV,' but it has almost nothing to do with reality.”

Just then, a TV-themed version of Wagner's
Ride of the Valkyries
blasted out of the surround-sound system, showing a sequence of names and faces behind mock prison bars. "There she is!" exulted Elizabeth, as Gail's open-mouthed smile tracked across the screen. When all the contestants' names and faces had passed, Skip Corcoran appeared on the screen. He flashed his Brylcreem smile, then assumed a tone of mock severity. His voice was low, pitched as though taking the viewer into his confidence.

“Good evening, America, and welcome to the premier of
Guest House Gestapo,
the show where contestants will be pushed, prodded, tested, and…for all but one, ultimately broken. Behind me is the guest house, where nineteen people are about to find their lives changed…forever!”

The theme music blared again, and the camera zoomed in on a large, stone-built house. A linked
GHG
was projected on one wall above a fist with crossed chains. The scene faded out, replaced by a small Australian-accented reptile who seemed to be selling insurance.

“Well, that was cheesy,” Elizabeth said.

“That was pretty typical for these sorts of shows. The whole idea is to put people with divergent backgrounds into a closed environment, ratchet up the pressure and see who breaks.”

The commercials eventually ended. When the show came back on, Skip Corcoran was standing in front of a studio audience. They applauded as though he had just uttered the most profound words in human history.

“Welcome back, America. Tonight, you will be witnessing one of the greatest social experiments ever attempted, and we’ll put you right in the middle of the action. We have placed over fifty cameras and twice as many microphones inside the guest house. From the moment the detainees enter the house, privacy will be a distant memory. Now, let’s meet our detainees!”

A curtain behind Skip opened to reveal nineteen people standing, smiling and waving. The camera started at the left side of the group and panned slowly to the right, pausing for a moment on each face. Gail was fourth from the left. She had promised to send a message to Elizabeth that she was thinking of her, and when her moment in the sun arrived, she mimed locking her lips and throwing away the key. Then she laughed, but the camera was already moving on.

“She looks beautiful,” Elizabeth said.

“Yes, but one of these things is not like the other. Everyone else looks like they are auditioning for an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, and Gail is a little more, um, mature.”

“She knew it was going to be that way going in. She thinks it’s an advantage. Maybe she can be the house mom.”

The contestants were a melting pot of backgrounds and races. There were two people dressed in business suits. One was wearing jeans and a cowboy hat. A surfer dude wore nothing but board shorts and a smile. The only other person that looked to be over thirty was a small, bald man dressed in an ankle-length robe, tied around his middle with a rope.

“All summer long, we have surprises and twists and turns galore in store for our detainees, so they should never get too comfortable. In fact, we’ve got one right now, before they even enter the house!”

Two brown-shirted, calf-booted uniforms stepped out from behind the curtain. Both had blue eyes and chiseled features, and walked—it was not quite a march—like athletes. The male looked like a blond cyborg who might have been sired by Rocky's Russian nemesis. The female, with golden hair bound up in a military weave, stood well over six feet tall and had the shoulders of a competitive bodybuilder. Each uniformed paragon wore a red armband with crossed chains that read
GHG
, and both wore nightsticks, handcuffs, and what might be Tasers on black belts. They passed out small whiteboards and dry-erase markers.

“Detainees, please take fifteen seconds to look over the others, then write someone down. Whoever gets the most votes will be arrested by our guards right now, and will not make it inside the house.”

A young man dressed in business casual and carrying a briefcase said, “How can we vote for anyone? We don’t know each other’s names.”

“Oh, right,” Skip said, as if this were a revelation. “Since you have all met for the first time just now, you’ll have to identify the person you want to vote for by some distinguishing characteristic.”

Elizabeth’s jaw dropped a bit. “Well, that’s horrible! Really? They want to boil everyone down to a single characteristic?”

“And…time’s up, folks. Vote for someone now. If you don’t write anything down, it will count as a vote against you." After a few seconds for hasty scrawls, the brown-shirted guards walked along the line, collecting the white boards and turning them over to Skip Corcoran.

“Let’s see who's under arrest!” Skip proposed in glee.

He turned the first whiteboard around to face the camera. Written on it, in neat script, was “The Cowboy.”

A collective
ooooh
issued from the audience. The man in the cowboy hat looked chagrined.

As Skip revealed the votes, each with suitable anticipatory pauses, distinguishing visual characteristics proved perilous. When the eighteenth vote was revealed, there were seven votes for “The Cowboy,” seven votes for the man in the ankle-length robe—variously voted for as “The Buddhist Guy,” “Robe Dude” and “The Bald Guy in the Bathrobe"—and three votes for “Surfer Dude.” The lone vote for anyone else was cast for “The pretty blonde lady who never smiles at anyone.”

When that vote was read, Steve and Elizabeth looked at each other and said simultaneously, “Gail.”

“Now, the nineteenth and final vote,” Skip said, in a tone that could have conveyed breaking news of a terrorist attack. He looked down at the whiteboard, raised his eyebrows, paused for dramatic effect, “will be revealed...right after this word from our sponsors. Stay right here!”

“Oh, watching this is very frustrating, isn’t it?”

Steve shucked his shoes off, laid his head in Elizabeth’s lap, and said, “You might be the last person in America to realize that.”

Three minutes later,
Guest House Gestapo
was back. Skip announced that it was indeed “Bald Man in the Robe,” a.k.a. Jeremy from New Jersey, who would never enter the Guest House. "Guards, place Jeremy under immediate arrest," added Skip. The two blond uniforms materialized, cuffed Jeremy's hands behind his back, bent him forward in a classic perp walk, and routed him offstage. For reasons not entirely clear, the studio audience booed.

“Are they booing him, or booing the fact that he got kicked off? He looked like a nice man to me.”

Steve shrugged and smiled. Watching Elizabeth's reactions promised to be much more interesting than anything on the TV screen.

After that, the contestants were allowed to pick up their bags and claim their bedrooms in the house. All the rooms had four beds in different arrangements, just right to encourage late-night plotting and conversations, which the sleepless cameras and microphones would record for posterity. The house was austere, with no television, telephones or computers; in fact, no contact from the outside world. The decorations in the house were minimalist, with grey carpeting and walls. The only decorations of note were blood-red drapes that hung on the walls, each displaying the
Guest House Gestapo
logo.

The rest of the first show laid out the format for the coming weeks: each week, a House Commander would be chosen through a competition. That Commander would choose two other contestants to be nominated for Arrest, which sounded ominous, but amounted only to elimination from the show. There were a few gimmicky other things—people could win extra food rations by learning secrets about other competitors and ratting them out to the Commander. Also, it was possible to be detained in an isolation booth where Rick Astley, Justin Bieber, and Madonna music were played twenty-four hours a day.

All gimmicks aside, though, the game was mostly about relationships, and Gail was a master at that. By the end of the first episode, she was in the kitchen, baking, sautéing, and basically making herself indispensable to the rest of the house, who looked like they’d never met a spatula before. The whole time she cooked, she talked—even when no one else was in the kitchen with her. Occasionally, the director would cut away to the rest of the cast in the back yard, tanning themselves by the pool, then back to Gail, merrily chatting with the Chicken Florentine.

Besides Jeremy from New Jersey, there were no other 'arrests' that first night, but there was promise of more to come. “Be sure to tune in Tuesday night at 9:00, when we fight to appoint our first Commander,” Skip Corcoran intoned as the end credits rolled.

Elizabeth looked down and saw that Steve had fallen asleep with his head in her lap. She pushed his hair back from his face and smiled. When he was asleep, all his cares melted away. He looked even more like the boy she remembered, owner of a face she had always loved, even when she couldn’t admit it to herself.

For the next ten days, they made sure they were always in front of Steve’s television when
Guest House Gestapo
came on. Elizabeth had done a Google search on Gail’s name and found that she had fans all over the country. There was even a blog called, “Gail talks…and talks” that was dedicated to her monologues. Her Facebook fan page was called "Conversations by GHG Gail."

In the first three episodes, Gail’s survival in the house was never in jeopardy. She chose not to align with anyone, but managed not to make herself a target, either. Her cooking didn’t hurt, and no one seemed to perceive her as a threat. The only irritating side effect was the media presence around
The Prints and the Pauper
, with local, regional, and even the occasional national print and TV media sweeping in. They parked in loading zones, nearly backed over elderly ladies, shoved microphones in faces, let doors slam behind them, asked vapid questions about Gail, and seemed to take instant access as their birthright and due. The world would—
must
—drop whatever it might be doing, to dance attendance upon reporters who would often use none of the material. Elizabeth pondered suitable analogies for them, and decided that they ranked between baboons and yellowjackets on the welcome scale.

Other than that, it was kind of fun.