The Decent Proposal (22 page)

“
That's
where you're wrong.” Bev poured herself another gimlet, declining to offer any to her lightweight of a companion. (The pitcher was almost empty anyway.)

“It's
not
your story. It's no one's story. It isn't a story at all.”

They lapsed into silence. Mike turned sideways, leaning back against the fainting couch's headboard. The extra support helped steady her, and she swiveled her head toward Beverly while the rest of her body remained perfectly still.

“So what should I do now?”

Bev paused to light another cigarette. “I'm not going to lie to you.” She took a long drag, shaking her head at the end of it. “I have no idea what you should do.”

Mike closed her eyes before nodding, to minimize the dizziness. At least the old woman was being honest.

“But I know you'll figure it out. And do what needs to be done.”

Mike nodded again, more slowly this time, drawing her legs up onto the couch. She had an instant of perfect, panicked clarity in which she wondered if this was really happening, if she was really passing out in a drunken stupor inside a strange old lady's mansion. But seconds later she was snoring.

Bev finished her cigarette, staring at the sleeping beauty splayed before her. She rang for Peaches, ignoring the uncharacteristic gasp that escaped her housekeeper's lips upon entering the room. Bev took great delight in antagonizing Peaches, and gestured carelessly to the girl in an offhand manner she knew would infuriate her:

“Let her sleep it off for as long as she needs.”

Peaches cleared away the mess quietly, which did not prevent her from shaking her piebald head of hair more fiercely than before. After she left, Bev stepped through one of the French windows Peaches had cracked open earlier to vent the cigarette smoke, and walked onto the lawn.

The sky was yellow-red with pink around the edges, like the petals of one of the hundreds—if not thousands—of exotic flowers strewn over the grounds. The sun had dipped below the highest peak, and its warmth would linger no more than ten or fifteen minutes longer in the bone-dry air blown in from the desert by the Santa Ana winds. It was no wonder people still believed the city was built on a desert—especially these days, with California's protracted droughts lasting years at a time. Los Angeles actually had a classic Mediterranean climate with relatively rainy winters; the desert myth was an old lie dating back to the Water Wars of a century ago—the basis for the movie
Chinatown
. Bev was old enough to remember her father,
the shipping magnate “Big Stan” Chambers, arguing with his fellow business titans over whether William Mulholland was a villain or a hero. She could still see him gesticulating wildly with the tumbler of Scotch practically glued inside his giant, hairy-gorilla hand for the duration of every evening.

She threaded her way among the colorful obstacles on the lawn with a slow but steady gait. When she reached the middle she turned around, facing northeast, where she knew she would see the
HOLLYWOOD
sign. When she was a little girl, the sign had still read
HOLLYWOODLAND,
and there had been lightbulbs surrounding each fifty-foot letter. In those days it had lit up in three discrete chunks:
HOLLY,
WOOD,
and
LAND,
before flashing in its entirety. What would she do if, one day, she turned and it wasn't there?
Die, I suppose.

Hollywood had been different back then: the hills and canyons were wild, filled with oaks and hollies and natural springs. There were foxes and coyotes everywhere—a great deal more than there were today. Playing in the farthest reaches of the estate, it had been easy for her to imagine she was a princess in an enchanted forest far, far away. But all she had to do was look up at that sign—
her
sign—and she knew she was home. When she went to sleep she always saw the big white letters on the insides of her eyes. They played a starring role in her favorite dream, in which she would climb to the top of the H and soar over the city, which even back then was spreading into the basin below like an electric patchwork quilt.

Of course, when at age ten her big brother Tom told her that the very same year she was born, a struggling actress named Peg Entwistle had climbed to the top of the H and plunged to her death in the ravine below, Bev's favorite dream turned into a recurring nightmare that lasted for weeks. But she refused to give her brother the satisfaction of knowing he'd gotten to her,
and never cried out from her bed. No one other than Charlotte ever knew.

Charlotte, always Charlotte. Beverly had left out one important detail in her recital of the life and times of CharBev that afternoon. CharBev was dead. “Beat you,” had been Char's final words six months earlier, as Bev watched her slip away.

The sky turned purple. A chill invaded the air.

It hadn't taken long for Bev to hurtle over the precipice—into the abyss of excess from which her best friend had rescued her time and time again. It started with the smoking. Charlotte had quit in the early seventies like any reasonable person, when it became clear how harmful cigarettes really were. Bev, of course, had refused. Out of respect for Char, however, she refrained from smoking in her presence, which limited her to half a pack a day at most. Now that Char was gone, Bev took a grim joy in smoking almost every waking minute. She was averaging four packs a day. Her doctor was beside himself; he said it was a miracle she had no ailments other than an intermittent cough, and guessed that without the smoking she could easily live to a hundred, but that if she continued on her current course she wouldn't make it past ninety. “Good,” she'd told him, and when he'd recommended that she see a psychiatrist, she'd laughed in the poor man's face.

This business with the prisons: this, too, had originated in Beverly's love of excess. She chose this particular social dilemma precisely because it meant immersing herself in such an unpleasant, such an
unlikely
world. Bev delighted in upending the expectations of all her friends and family, and it was only to deny them the satisfaction of her failure that she stuck with the plan after her first few horrified visits behind the clanging prison doors. (If she had a nickel for every time she'd been called the C-word . . . she would have at least a dollar, maybe two.) Here as well Charlotte saved the day, remaining by her side,
her steady partner, and in truth, though Beverly was the one who had started it, Charlotte became the more passionate advocate—as evidenced by Beverly's failure to visit more than one prison since her best friend's demise.

Char always had a knack for seeing the two of them more clearly than Bev ever could, but for once, on this night, Bev forced herself to look at CharBev without the obfuscating haze of self-regard. She had claimed this afternoon that she and Char were more than a spinster and a widow, and while it was true they'd been an unusually fun-loving variation on the theme, this didn't change the fact that for half a century it was exactly what they were. And now the widow was dead, and the spinster was alone.

Bev let out a sigh that no one other than the
HOLLYWOOD
sign could hear. She thought back to the version of herself she'd conjured earlier: the dewy twenty-year-old, to whom spinsterhood was never truly an option. She hadn't married, but it wasn't from lack of opportunity. She racked up no fewer than fifteen proposals in her day (and one of them from a young William Holden). She was simply too rich not to receive offers, even if she had been stupid and ugly, and she had been neither. Her serial refusals first amused, then baffled, and ultimately alarmed her friends and relatives. But her reasoning was simple: she refused to marry without love. “The one” hadn't gotten away; she'd simply never found him.

It was one thing for Beverly not to realize the dream she'd dreamt like every other human on the planet—to fall in love, to find the one person who was more special to her than all the others—but it was another not to attain that which she had always expected to achieve—to eventually marry
someone
, to have children, to make a life together with a man. It hurt more keenly than she could have imagined, especially since she thought she'd gotten over the “marriage issue”
decades ago. Her biggest regret was
underwear
? What a joke. What a lie.

She began shivering, and moved farther across the lawn to ward off the cold. If her biggest tragedy was something that hadn't happened to fulfill her emotionally, she knew she should take comfort in having snagged a choice spot on Fortuna's Wheel. Besides, her charmed life
had
been filled with love, though it was a friend's and not a lover's. She'd even had plenty of sex, much of it good, some of it
great
; it's just that the love and the sex had never matched up. It was a shame, but it wasn't a tragedy.

And yet Bev imagined that girl now: here, on the lawn, underneath the indigo sky, wearing nothing but the nightshirt she wore to bed that Valentine's Day in 1952, too young, too angry to feel the cold.

“What have you
done
, you old hag?” the girl demanded. “You failed me. What do you have to say for yourself?”

Beverly opened her withered mouth to speak, but she faltered, croaking helplessly. There was nothing to say. It
was
a tragedy. It was
her
tragedy. Better to have loved and lost, etc.—as Charlotte had. For all of Arnold's doltishness, Char truly loved him, and was married for so little time she never had the chance to grow to despise him, not even a little bit. Charlotte never remarried because no one could measure up, whereas Beverly had never loved at all. Suddenly she remembered a heated argument (one of many) with her brother Tom, who'd married a year out of Stanford and was constantly setting her up with his awful friends, desperate to secure both the family's wealth (which was more precarious back then) and their elevated social standing. All these years later, his words returned to her, cutting, precise: “You don't even know what love
is
.”

Was this why she had done it—this stupid, impulsive proposal? There was no mystery (to
her
, in any case) about how she'd found Elizabeth Santiago and Richard Baumbach. But un
til tonight she had never asked herself
why
exactly she wanted so badly to bring them together, why she had been so obsessed by the idea of their falling in love. Charlotte would have simply waved her hands in the air as though she were swatting a fly, and told her to stop being an idiot, and that would have been the end of it. But Charlotte was gone, and there had been no one to stop her.

It wasn't
really
about proving her dead brother wrong; Tom didn't deserve so much credit. But he deserved a little, because deep down a part of her had always believed him. It was about proving to herself, she supposed, that she
did
know a thing or two about love. And now, if the gorgeous girl passed out in the library was to be believed (and Bev was convinced she was), it was within her power to answer the question definitively. Had she actually known what she was doing when she brought together Richard Baumbach and Elizabeth Santiago? Did they actually love each other?

She would have to see for herself.

The girl in the nightshirt raised a full and luscious brow, as if to say, “get to it then,” and before Bev could tell her she really
did
look like a young Bette Davis, she faded away into the night, which was black now, and freezing (which was to say, somewhere in the upper 50s).

It wasn't part of the plan, but screw the plan. There had barely
been
a plan. Bev hurried back inside the house.

BEFORE MIKE KIM
had so much as twitched an eyelid from her perch on the fainting couch, the e-mail went out from the law offices of Heaney Schechter in Century City:

            
Dear Mr. Baumbach and Miss Santiago:

            
Your benefactor requests the pleasure of your company one week from today, at a family estate in Death Valley,
which I have been assured will be of particular interest to you both. You will be responsible for getting yourselves there (I will provide directions) no later than noon, to avoid the midday heat. Please note that this trip will qualify as your required session for the week.

            
I look forward to your prompt confirmation by return of e-mail.

            
Yours sincerely,

            
Jonathan Hertzfeld, Esq.

RICHARD HAPPENED TO BE
scanning his inbox when the e-mail
pinged
into sight. He opened it immediately.

“Holy
shit
,” he breathed, failing to notice when the traffic light ahead of him turned green. The car behind him honked. He looked up, catching the driver's operatic gesture inside his rearview mirror:
move!

He dialed Elizabeth with one hand while maneuvering through the intersection with the other.

“Hi, Richard.”

“Did you see it?”

“
Hello
, Richard.”

“You didn't see it yet, did you?”

She sighed. “See what?”

“The e-mail!”

“I've been reviewing tax codes for the last four hours. So, no.”

“I think you might be the only person I know who doesn't check their e-mail every two seconds in their office. What's the Internet
for
other than shameless workplace procrastination? Is this the pharmaceutical thing?”

“Yes, actually.” She sounded surprised.

“Don't sound so surprised. I listen. Anyway, sorry to tear you away from tax codes, but I'm going to need you to check your e-mail. Right now.” There was a pause. “I think I can actually hear you rolling your eyes.”

“Hold on, I'm checking.”

He let a few seconds go by, thumping his leg against the floorboard of his car. “Oh, by the way, you'll be so proud of me, I read another whole page of
Tess
today!”

Tess of the d'Urbervilles
had become something of a joke between them; they'd been reading it for over a month and a half. More specifically, Elizabeth had read it all the way through, twice, but Richard still had about a hundred pages to go. For him, wading through Hardy's muddy prose felt like a pointless exercise. Tess had been raped and then blamed for becoming a “fallen woman” by pretty much everyone she knew. This was bad—very bad—but how many ways did it need to be said? Quite a few, apparently, and each of them via run-on sentences.

“I'm done,” said Elizabeth a minute later, more quietly than before.

“Can you believe it?!”

“I can't.”

“We're gonna meet the man behind the curtain! Finally!”

She hesitated. “If we go.”

“Why wouldn't we?”

“Well, it's on Wednesday.”

“Yeah, a week from today. So? You can get off work, right?”

“Probably. But . . . isn't that the day after your premiere?”

“Oh,
crap
, you're right.”

Fight on a Flight
would be premiering that coming Tuesday, and since Richard was technically a credited producer, he would be walking the red carpet, a first for him. Per an arrangement made months ago, Mike was his plus one, but he had a second, optional invitation, and a few weeks earlier he'd asked Elizabeth, who was the only one of his friends who'd never been to a premiere. Keith would be there too, of course. All this fanfare for a movie he hadn't actually produced felt a little silly to him, which was why he hadn't invited his parents (it would have been ridiculous for them to fly out), but opportunities to show off in Hollywood were not to be missed. Celebrating oneself was practically a duty, and Richard couldn't afford to shirk it. He was sure to be massively sleep-deprived on Wednesday, if not hungover.

“Well,
you'll
still get a good night's sleep, right?”

“Right.” Elizabeth had already told him she'd be going straight home after the movie.

“If you can drive us there in the morning, I promise to go easy. I'm not as much of a lush these days anyway, I swear. And then I'll definitely be okay to drive us back at night, cool?”

“I guess so.”

“Hey, I'll skip the stupid premiere if I have to. There's
no way
we're not going.”

At this point in the conversation, Elizabeth had moved from her office to the tiny kitchen down the hall. She opened the freezer, blindly grabbing two Smart Ones from among the handful of frozen dinners she kept there for late nights. She had at least a few more hours of work ahead of her, especially if she was going to take off a day in one week's time.

“It's not that. I just want to make sure nothing's changed.” She slammed the freezer door shut. “With the payment schedule and everything.”

“Oh, sure. Good point. Well, do you want to write back? For both of us?”

“I talked to him last time,” she reminded him, peeling the plastic back on one of the dinner trays and tossing it in the microwave. “About reimbursement for the books and movies.” She set it on high, the metal box humming to life.

“Exactly, and look how well that went. You two just get each other. It must be a lawyer thing.” He paused, but she didn't respond. “Unless it goes deeper than that? I always thought I saw a spark between you two that afternoon. Have things gotten . . . uncomfortable? Did you say things that can't be unsaid? Has he—”

“Fine,” said Elizabeth, ignoring the sound of what she wouldn't have thought was possible before getting to know Richard: a grown man actually
giggling
. “I'll write him back later tonight. Go read
Tess
.” She clicked off.

RICHARD SHOVED HIS
phone into his glove compartment, grinning. He glanced around him; how the hell had he gotten onto Hollywood Boulevard? He drove north to avoid the tourist mess surrounding the Hollywood & Highland complex like a stink cloud. It wasn't uncommon for him to get turned around like this while talking on the phone; Mike would have given him
such shit
if she were in the car with him. He made a right, heading east on Franklin.
What was she doing tonight?
he wondered idly.
Probably a work dinner, maybe a screening.
Everyone agreed that Mike was “killing it,” though lately Richard had begun wondering whether “it” deserved such a violent end. He had nothing to do, not a single thing, but it was still early enough—a little after seven—to feel as if anything might happen tonight, though he was fairly certain nothing would.

The Magic Castle loomed into view on his left, a kitschy
mansion made of turrets and gables where magicians performed nightly in several different theaters. The venue was restricted to members and their guests, and it was one of the few places in L.A. with an actual dress code, but he could have ferreted out an invitation with a few phone calls, and dashed home for the lone suit collecting dust at the back of his closet. Nor was there anything stopping him from buying a last-minute ticket to a sketch comedy show at the Upright Citizens Brigade a little farther east, or driving north to the Griffith Park Observatory and checking out the moon through the big telescope there. Tonight, it was enough simply to have these options, so he stayed the course on Franklin, heading toward a quiet night at home.

What's happening to me?
he asked himself. The question was only half-serious. Like many, Richard was accustomed to sudden, sporadic bouts of introversion: “alone time,” as it was commonly known, though these days he found himself opting for it a bit more than sporadically. In truth, “these days” was an unnecessarily vague time frame; he knew exactly when things had begun changing for him—six weeks earlier, after Keith's birthday party. (He drove onto the Shakespeare Bridge, which traversed a dry and rather unimpressive ravine among the Franklin Hills. Because of the bridge's name, the tiny pointed cupolas on either end always reminded him of those peaked hats—like dunce caps—that women wore in
Romeo and Juliet
and other Renaissance-era plays.) For a few weeks, he gave up drinking entirely. His lean physique got leaner, the pounds sloughing off him so easily it was “offensive,” according to Mike, at least. Even after falling off the wagon—because was there anything more dispiriting (
literally!
) than marking time in a bar or club without drinking?—he went easier than usual, calling himself out on his own vanity by joking that he needed to keep his “new figure.” (While making a left onto St. George
Street, his stomach rumbled. What was he going to do for dinner?) Usually in September he made a point of growing out his annual “summer buzz cut,” but this year he didn't feel like bothering with his hair and kept it short, thereby accentuating the deeper hollows of his concave cheeks, the newfound prominence of his already oversize eyes. His friends began calling him “Hot Monk,” which was partly a putdown for his relative withdrawal from the social scene. It wasn't like he
never
went out, but when he did there was a reticence to him that had subtly yet unmistakably altered his standing within the group. Richard had always been the life of the party, the one who galvanized everyone else into action, but now he was merely a participant, and at times a halfhearted one at that. Mike, in particular, was beside herself, though she hadn't said anything to him yet. He hadn't even hooked up with anyone since August. Which was crazy.

He pulled into the Trader Joe's on Hyperion to pick up a prepackaged dinner. The parking lot, as usual, was totally backed up, and he eased into the line of cars waiting for a spot. There was no question the Retch Heard 'Round the World had been the watershed moment, not that this made much sense. The vomiting incident itself was already ancient history, and besides, it was exactly the sort of funny, self-deprecating story he normally would have loved to tell everyone who was willing to listen (except his parents), now that he was safely ensconced on the other side of it.

A topknotted hipster ambled toward a car parked a few feet ahead. Richard turned on his blinker. His newfound reserve was beginning to hurt his friends' feelings, and in the case of Keith it was beginning to damage their business relationship too. Richard had always been the one to urge them to meet new people, to read
just one more
script, even to attend those horrible “pitchfests” wherein crazy writers pitched their crazy ideas.
But his new Zen-like state (apparently Hot Monk was a Buddhist) extended to his career as well. (The hipster was just
sitting
in his car, probably Instagramming his groceries or something. Richard honked, giving him the same spread-armed “move!” gesture he himself had gotten earlier in the evening.) He'd lost the hustle that used to come so naturally to him, and up till now Keith had been too considerate to do more than inquire gently whether everything was “okay,” but the winds of a serious talk were in the air; Richard could feel them. And he had no idea what he was going to say.

Mike, of course, had been more forceful—though less direct—in voicing her discontent with the new Richard. At the thought of her, Richard's stomach jerked in rhythm with the parking brake he yanked upward now (he'd finally parked,
hallelujah
). He had no idea what to do about Mike. There was no question he'd been avoiding her, and he felt terrible about it. But their friendship had been built on the notion that they were practically the same person, two halves of a whole, and it was disorienting to spend time with her now, they were so out of synch. It actually made him
uncomfortable
to see her. Richard sighed, whipping his phone out of his pocket to avoid eye contact with the do-gooder brandishing a clipboard outside the store. It was as though he'd reverted to the pre-Mike version of himself, a shy, quiet kid who was content to play video games with his equally shy and quiet best friend all afternoon until said best friend
died
and he spent most of his free time (as a senior in high school!) on long, silent nature walks with his mom. He couldn't believe he was turning into that kid again—and he wasn't, not by a long shot—yet something about reacquiring the elements of that teenage reticence felt
right
to him, like returning to his true self. But how could he ever explain any of this to Mike without hurting her? He didn't even fully understand it himself.

Richard checked his e-mail: nothing yet from Elizabeth. It was funny how these weekly sessions of theirs, which had begun as such an oddity, were now his only angst-free social engagement. Was that ironic? He was always scared to use that word, in case he was using it incorrectly. Elizabeth would know. It was actually a relief to focus on the continuing mystery of the Decent Proposal, especially now that they were finally going to get some answers. He didn't even mind pondering the enigma of Elizabeth herself anymore. They were friends now, it was true, but there was still a great deal he didn't understand about her, such as her estrangement from her family (old mystery), and her sweet yet bizarre friendship with that old black guy he'd met at her place (newer mystery).
What was her deal?
he asked himself, for what seemed like the thousandth time while drifting down the frozen food aisle. It had become an almost comforting question.

BEFORE FINISHING HER
first Smart Ones, Elizabeth had e-mailed Amber Hudson, the partner in charge of the pharmaceuticals merger occupying most of her time, to ask about taking a personal day a week from today. She hated asking for time off; it always felt as if she were asking for a favor, even though the personal days were hers to use and she had weeks upon weeks of them accumulated from over the years.

She watched the second plastic tray rotate slowly inside the microwave's chemical-yellow glow. Her next e-mail would have to be to Jonathan Hertzfeld. She had told Richard she wanted to be sure the rules of the proposal hadn't changed, but she was reasonably sure the lawyer would have brought up any proposed amendments in his e-mail. Besides, they already had a signed contract. No; she couldn't pretend—to herself at least—that money was the source of her anxiety. The microwave beeped. She took out the tray, peeling back
the plastic cover. It had taken almost two months since the action-packed weekend of the dance and the sleepover, but finally,
finally
, they'd fallen into a comfortable routine. The two hours that used to gape before them like a chasm were no longer so difficult to fill. Elizabeth scolded Richard about not reading
Tess
, but secretly it pleased her that they didn't need a book or movie to prolong their conversations anymore.