The Best Revenge (13 page)

“Finished?”

“Finished.” Alex handed me a folded sheet of paper across the desk.

“What's this?” I said.

Alex cantilevered himself up. “I'm a human being with one fifty-five over a hundred. I don't need any more threats from bookkeepers who want their money yesterday.” He pointed at the folded sheet of paper in my hand. “You don't have to open that. I'm not one of your writers. It's just two words,
I resign,
and my name.”

Ben, if Alex leaves, Charlotte will leave, then Jane will leave.

“Shut up!” I said.

Alex took a step back. “That's no way to talk to me, Ben, not after all these years.”

“I wasn't talking to you.”

The top half of the Pencil's body leaned back as if he didn't want to breathe the same air I was breathing. “Then who are you talking to? You got a woman hiding in the closet, Ben? I'm the only one in this room.”

Ben, stop him from leaving.

“Are you okay, Ben? Where are you looking? Look at me. Maybe you better sit down. I didn't mean to shock you. I assumed you could guess I had enough.”

I let myself down into my high-backed chair. Alex put the bentwood back in its place and sat down in the Naugahyde chair alongside my desk.

I said, “How come I never fired you, Alex?”

Alex picked up the daggerlike letter opener from my desk. For a moment I thought he was going to stab me with it but he was only pointing it at me for emphasis. “Because you're surrounded by ass-kissers and I tell you the truth.”

“Then how come even before the play goes out of town you're ready to bury me?”

“Because you're better off dead. Insurance is cash, and cash is what you don't have. Don't reach into your pocket, your forty dollars mad money will get you a taxi from here to Hoboken. Have you forgotten we owe Grayson the final payment on the set of a play you closed four months ago? His bitchy bookkeeper calls me at home.”

“Why doesn't she call you here?”

“Because I duck calls, just like you do.”

“Tell what's-her-name to call me. Charlotte is very good with people who misbehave about money.”

“So am I. Grayson's not misbehaving. You're eleven months overdue on that payment.” Alex expelled another of his calamitous sighs.

“What is it?” I said.

He shook his skinny head barely an inch side to side. “Do I have to say it out loud?”

“You're not supposed to keep things from me, Alex.”

“I don't want to hurt you, Ben.”

Whatever he was holding back colored his face.

“Out with it,” I said.

“I can't make payroll.”

I stood up. “Son of a bitch, we had a deal. We always reserve payroll no matter what!”

“Don't jump on me, Ben. We got served with papers on the costumes. If they didn't withdraw the filing, you'd be all over the newspapers. The only way I could shut Bixler up was to settle with him.”

“By giving him some of the payroll? Are you crazy?”

“I had to, Ben. I know what the papers do to you and Jane when they find something. I was relying on the money from Martinson.”

“It was due this week.”

“Yeah. I called. We're not getting it this week or next week or the week after. Martinson's filed for chapter eleven.”

“Shit.”

“That's exactly what I said.”

“Hold my paycheck.”

“I already figured that. Holding back mine, too. It's the cast I'm frantic about.”

“Alex, how can you be concerned about the cast and in the same breath say you're quitting? Take a Kleenex, blow your nose, get on the phone. We can't miss payroll. You're a genius at collecting.”

“I've been at it all week, Ben, ever since I learned about Martinson. I guess I'm not a genius anymore. All the money out there seems to be dead or dying.”

Money was my father's song.
I put it in the ground and nothing grew from it. In 1929 I took it to a bank, and the bank went to heaven, taking my money with it. Forget money, Ben, do what you like to do. There'll always be a few dollars somewhere.

Where, Louie? I was listening, and hearing nothing. Everybody hears somebody's voice, though some of us don't have the guts to admit it. I have heard Louie's voice in New York and Hollywood, in the shower and while driving on the open road, and once when I was about to make love to a woman I wasn't in love with. It was for Louie's approval that I set out to conquer the world, not like Alexander the Great, who hated his father, and Genghis Khan, who hated everybody. Alex is right, Broadway is an unmarked minefield in which everybody says they're in love with everyone else.

“Alex, please don't sniffle.”

“I'm sorry, Ben.”

“What are you sorry about?”

“I should have told you earlier. I was so sure I could come up with something. We always used to.” He picked something invisible off his upper lip. “You've got four business days, Ben. Equity is not going to extend.”

“Alex, when you first came here—”

“Eighteen years is a long time.”

“You're my colleague, not a bookkeeper. You're in charge of my money matters. You're my friend. I trust you.”

Alex blew his nose. “I'm used to you spending it first and making it afterward, but I have to tell you, Ben, this flop could kill you now.”

“Don't talk flop. We're not even out of town yet. We've got months to the opening.”

“Didn't you hear me, Ben, we can't make payroll. The play isn't going to get out of town.” Alex slumped into the depths of the Naugahyde chair like a long, skinny balloon deflating.

“I don't want your blood pressure going up over this, Alex. I'll get to work on the payroll right away, first things first.”

I despised the deprecating hand I laid on Alex's shoulder. I loathed hearing my voice turn into its Vigor One Mode. “Alex, just for you, I'll produce a hit.” Why was I bullshitting this man?

He said, “Take your hand off my shoulder, Ben. I'm older than you are. Even if the play was a hit, you're in so deep, it might only pay for your past sins. To get ahead, you need two hits in a row. Neil Simon plus Neil Simon.”

“Alex, because you're a longtime friend, I want you to sleep well. I'll let you in on something.”

Alex looked at me with his owl eye.

“Ezra and I have had a talk with somebody important.”

“To hell with important, has he got money?”

“Tons.”

“How many units is he talking?”

“All of it.”

“You wouldn't lie to me, not now, would you, Ben?”

“Scout's honor.”

The Pencil looked skeptical. “True?”

“On my life.”

“At least you could swear on something worthwhile.”

“On your life then.”

Alex's wrinkles beamed, a boy rewarded. “How long will it take to get his money in?”

Forever. There's no way I can take Manucci's deal. I said, “Alex, truth time. You haven't taken another job, have you?”

He was as good as the best of actors. He waited a beat before replying. “If I left I'd feel like a coward. I expect to die down the hall, in my chair, in my office. A long time from now.”

I held his resignation out to him.

“Throw it in the wastebasket,” he said, getting up.

“Thank you, Alex.”

“Don't thank me. Just make payroll, do two comedies in a row that your backers will love, and I'll be a happy man forever.”

I accompanied him to the door and watched him trek down the long hall to his office, a blur of a lovable man. How had I dared say to him
truth time.
The truth was I'd just sent back a very commercial comedy because the idea of doing another one bored me. Once I'd read Gordon Walzer's
The Best Revenge,
it had opened a door into my past I couldn't close.

10

Ben

Louie used to say experience is what enables you to have a guilty conscience when you do something you know is wrong because you've done it before.

I should have sent Walzer's
The Best Revenge
back the day I read it. The bastard had written the kind of play I'd hoped to write. Ardor is bad for business. The professional in me argued: When was verse drama a hot ticket? This is not for theater parties. The scalpers won't line up for it. Let someone else do Walzer's play, off Broadway, on the cheap.

I put the script in my desk drawer.

A month later Charlotte had said, “What did you do with the play Bertha Goodman sent over? Did you take it home?”

“It's right here,” I said. “In my desk.”

“It's not going to get better lying there. When you want to do a play, you head for the phone like sixty. Bertha's called twice. Why don't you let me return it?”

“My instinct won't let me.”

“Instinct? I remember your instinct about Meryl Streep.”

*

Meryl Streep came to see me on February 14, 1979. All of Broadway knew I was casting the female lead for a play called
Other People.
I had in mind a younger Jane Fonda, or a Diane Keaton type who can hold a live audience in the theater, but nobody suggested Meryl Streep, possibly because she hadn't had the lead in a hit movie yet or been in a noticeable Broadway part, and maybe because she was very pregnant at the time. Charlotte was soft on pregnant women. Or maybe over the decades she had come to recognize the difference between aspiring hopefuls and great actresses on the verge.

When my waving hand offered Meryl Streep one of the upholstered armchairs to sit in, she declined with that self-effacing nod that has become so familiar to us and let herself down into the straight-backed chair in which Charlotte usually took dictation. “It's easier for me,” she said.

I was instantly caught up in the details of her face. The individual features were imperfect, but the whole of it was like a reservoir with dangerous unseen cracks. Bette Davis, when young, had seemed like that. What Streep said was, “I apologize for not doing this through my agent or lawyer,” she said, “but I
want
to play that part.” She said
want
as if it were the apogee of desire and necessity, ordained by the universe and incontrovertible.

Like a klutz I nodded in the direction of her burgeoning midriff. “What about…?”

She smiled a mock-deferential smile that the whole world has now seen. “Babies get born,” she said. “This one will be before rehearsals start.”

I was always a sucker for a woman who exuded authority. I said, “I don't doubt you have the range. Your age is right. But I was hoping to get some of my financing from a studio and you know what they'd say.”

Anger flushed her face. “I'm not bankable,” she said.

I swear I remember her words exactly. “Mr. Riller, I can't bend my choice of roles to superstition. Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson are damn good actors, but they don't carry a flop. You know Jane Fonda is too old for this part. I want to play it. Tell your studio financiers they can put Betty Boop into the movie version. I'm sure a producer with your experience doesn't have to rely on what pygmies think.”

“I can't ask you to read for it,” I said.

Meryl Streep stood the way a heavily pregnant woman will, in two motions, out of the chair and then up. “You can ask anyone for anything.” She took a slip of paper out of her purse. “I'll expect you to call soon.”

When I walked her to the door, I said, “I hope I have a play one day that's got a scene like this in it. You played it to perfection.”

*

You think an impresario doesn't have night sweats?

“What's the matter, Ben?” Jane said, shaking me awake.

I tried to talk.

“Catch your breath first.”

“I've caught, I've caught,” I said loud enough to wake the kids down the hall.

“What could you have been dreaming?”

“Never mind what I was dreaming, I'll tell you what it meant. Why shouldn't I cast Meryl Streep in
Other People
?
She wants to do it. That makes it unanimous. Who cares what the schmucks on the Coast think? I've got enough investors east of there to finance this play twice over. She's perfect for the part.”

“Then what are you waiting for?” asked sensible Jane.

So after weeks of churning uncertainty I called the number Streep had given me. The operator referred me to another number. It was her agent's phone. I told him I was ready to offer her what she wanted, the lead in
Other People.

You know how agents laugh when they are about to twist your balls? He said she'd have to work forty weeks on Broadway in my play to make what she'd been offered for six weeks' work in a new movie. She wasn't available for Broadway. Out there in fucking Hollywood the great actress with the funny name was suddenly bankable.

Alex is right, why does anyone in his right mind get involved in this business?

Jane says it's the turn-on of discovery, the excitement of holding in your hands something that, once it's a hit, everyone wants to be part of it. You take the head of a Fortune Five Hundred company who comes to New York with his wife or his bimbo and what does he want? Seats to a show, even if he has to pay a scalper to get them. Ask him in the secret itch of his soul would he like to trade places, produce a Broadway show? He may build skyscrapers in Houston, but when he hits the Big Apple he wants to build what I build. Even actors who've made it on the Coast say they'd give their left tit or their right ball to star in a Broadway smash. In showbiz it's the top of Everest.