Til the Real Thing Comes Along (3 page)

“Yes, darling,” Michael answered, walking to the car and leaning against the door. “Let me be your husband.” At
least that sounded like what he said, because his words were nearly drowned out by the noise of the -passing cars. “Let me
be Jeffie’s father. You’re my life,” he said louder. It was sweet. There were tears in his eyes.

“Oh, Michael,” R.J. began, but a motorcycle whizzed by, roaring above her words. When it had passed, Michael said, “Don’t
answer now. Give me some time to prove to you how wonderful our life together can be. Tell me every dream, every fantasy you’ve
ever had, about how you want your life to be, and I’ll make it come true.”

His eyes were filled with tears. R.J. took a deep breath to stall for time so she could decide what to say to him. She could
hear an ambulance in the distance and she waited while it got doser and very loud, then passed and disappeared.

“This is wrong,” she said finally. “It’s too soon. We’ve just been seeing each other for such a short time and—”

“I’ll quit smoking,” he said, as if that would change her mind. “I’ll do anything. I’ll even grow taller.”

Then he laughed a little laugh at that, but she knew it was a touchy subject. He’d always been the shortest boy in his class,
in his family too. On his twenty-first birthday his mother had taken him out to dinner to a fancy restaurant, and after the
meal had given him a box containing a pair of elevator shoes. Michael had had a few drinks the night he finally felt close
enough to R.J. to tell her that story, and when he did, she remembered thinking how sensitive and dear he was. And how hurt
he’d been and how much he needed her.

“R.J., I love you. I want to dedicate my life to you and your son. I want to marry you and adopt Jeffie.”

Jeffie. Since Arthur’s death he’d never been the same. The hopeful glow was gone from his sweet little eyes. Two years. Her
friends said two years was long enough and it was time to stop mourning and get on with her life. She would get on with her
life, she told them, but she would never stop mourning. That was when the friends always exchanged a look that meant “she’s
so neurotic” and then told her with a pat on her back or her arm or her hand: “We’ll find you someone.”

Michael Rappaport had been a fix-up by her accountant and his wife. He was a literary agent at a large show-business agency
and a Harvard graduate. “He should have
been a lawyer,” her accountant, Morrie, told her. She guessed he said that to point out how smart Michael was.

“You’re both single, and you’re both Jewish. You’re petite and he’s five something. Three… four… not a giant, but extremely
attractive,” Sylvia, her accountant’s wife, had told her.

Hardly criteria for a relationship, but it was a beginning. Short men. People loved trying to fix her up with short men. Always
she turned them down since the fix-up she’d had once in high school with Phil Stutz, who was even shorter than Michael. Phil
took her to a dance, and while they were dancing to Johnny Mathis singing “Chances Are,” R.J. overheard someone refer to them
as “the puppet couple.” Short men. Her accountant’s wife, Sylvia, must have heard the hesitation in R.J.’s silence.

“Hey, you’ll go,” she urged. “It’s one evening. How bad could it be? You’ll talk. You’ll be sitting down and you won’t notice.”

So she went. On one date with a man to whom Dinah referred for weeks afterward as Michael How-Bad-Could-It-Be Rappaport. And
then she went on another because the truth was, he wasn’t so bad. And then another because he was very persistent, and then
another because she didn’t know how to say no, and now… She should have known it would go wrong when after only four dates
with Michael he told her he loved her. My God. How could he possibly know so soon? It embarrassed and unnerved her.

She had been seeing him for nearly two months when she introduced him to Jeffie and watched the way he had knocked himself
out to charm the kid. Jeffie was crazy about airplanes. Michael knew airplanes. Promised to take him out to the Planes of
Fame Museum at Chino Airport. Jeffie played soccer in the park. Michael promised to come out to watch him play. Jeffie loved
video games. Michael promised to spend an afternoon in a video arcade with him.

When R.J. finally decided to say yes to Michael’s proposal, she told herself it was because she had to make a new life for
herself and Jeffie. A family for herself and her son. Jeffie seemed excited by the idea, and that convinced her that she’d
made the right choice. To be a family. Her son needed that. Some corner of her knew that it was a rationale. A place to hide.
Michael promised her—no, swore to her—that he wanted to be part of a family too. That’s
what he was offering her. In August. Now it was November, and not only had there been no Chino Airport, no showing up at a
soccer game, and no visit to an arcade, but now the little shit was backing out of the marriage too.

When he’d consumed and smashed out what R.J. counted as three more Dunhills and made a phone call to his mother to tell her
he was on his way over to see her with some bad news—“No, Ma, I won’t tell you over the phone. No. No one died, and it has
nothing to do with Aunt Minnie’s surgery”—Michael begged R.J. once more to forgive him, swore he’d never stop loving her,
recited a litany of thank-you’s for her patience, kindness, thoughtfulness, charm, sense of humor, and grace under pressure.
She responded with all she had left. A numb half-smile. Then she watched him walk to his car and get in, find his dark glasses
in the spot where he always kept them, tucked up behind the visor, and put them on. Even from just inside her front door where
she stood, she could see him turn the rearview mirror so he could look at himself, and then push the bridge of the glasses
down to the middle of his nose, which is how he always wore them. Then he started the car. As he backed out down the driveway
he glanced at R.J. over the top of the glasses, puckered his lips, made what she was certain would have been a little smacking
kiss if she had been able to hear it, and was gone.

When Jeffie came home she would tell him the bad news. Oh, God. Poor baby. Or maybe not such a poor baby this time.
Bad news
was what she’d told him when Arthur was murdered.
A terrible thing happened last night. A robber came into the house to steal some money and then he killed your daddy.
Is that how she’d said it? She knew she hadn’t said
shot him in the stomach.
Killed. Murdered. Words coming out of her mouth that sounded as though they were from some horrible movie or television show.
Words that a nice Jewish girl never even imagined she would ever hear someone else say, let alone say herself. Guns, robbery,
murder. Those were things they talked about on
Adam 12
or
Quincy,
or in newspaper articles she’d skimmed, shaking her head while she did, with pity for the poor sad people in the crime-filled
ghettos.

Now she remembered. “It’s okay to cry and scream and fall on the bed and hate everybody,” she had told her son, certain from
the even look he gave her that he wasn’t really
sure what she was saying. “You’re allowed to be furious and tell the whole world how full of anger you are.” Her cousin Mimi’s
husband, Jack, the psychiatrist, had told her to say that. R.J. and Jeffie were sitting on the flowered bedspreads on the
twin beds the morning she told him, in the guest room of Mimi and Jack’s apartment in New York. She held her little boy’s
left hand with her right hand while his right hand played with the fingers of her left, tapping on each of her polished fingernails.
She ached, watching his sweet little face as he slowly absorbed what he had just heard. Eventually he sighed a tiny sigh;
then he stood, walked out of the bedroom, down the hallway and into the living room. R.J. followed him feverishly, and saw
him sit down at Mimi’s upright piano, think for a moment, as if to review his repertoire, and then pound out a violent rendition
of “Chopsticks”… over and over and again. R.J. knew she would never hear “Chopsticks” again without feeling sick to her stomach.
For the rest of her life when she heard it, she would remember every detail of those few days. Like the smell of formaldehyde
in the morgue, where she had gone to identify the body. A drawer. The body of the man she loved in a drawer.

No. Michael Rappaport’s change of heart was not such bad news. This was not like losing Arthur. Nothing. This was nothing.
It was simply the loss of a relationship she hadn’t even been sure she’d wanted. One she’d been involved in for all the wrong
reasons. She would go back to work in two weeks, as planned. She and Jeffie would go back to their lives as usual. It would
help when she had to get up early, get dressed, go into the office, think, be funny, be productive, turn out pages, get the
show on the air. Maybe she’d even try to find an exercise class to go to every now and then. She hadn’t been to one since
she couldn’t remember when, and her legs were turning to Jell-O. No, they weren’t. She still had great legs.

“Are these the legs of a comedy writer?” Harry Elfand would joke on the rare days that R.J. came to work dressed in a skirt
instead of pants. “I ask you, America. Are they?” And all twelve of the guys—R.J. was the only female writer on the staff
of the show—would have something silly to say, like: “Never mind the legs, honey. Show us your skits.”

Her first day back on the show she forced a smile onto
her face and settled into her chair at the morning meeting. She riffled through her appointment book, hoping to look preoccupied
so no one would ask her any questions. It was working. The men were filing in, talking to one another, and no one said a word
to her. If only the meeting would start, there wouldn’t be time for personal chatter.

“Say, R.J.,” Eddie Levy said. “What happened to the wedding?” Oh, shit. “The guy musta caught some of your reruns and decided
to marry Gail Parent instead. Now
she’s
funny.”

“Thanks, Eddie.”

“Poor kid,” Artie Zaven said. “First a dead one, now a no-show.” Then he thought to himself. “Wait a second. Maybe that woulda
worked better if I had said: ‘First a dead one, now a dead
beat’?
“

“Thank your lucky stars, R.J.,” Harry Elfand said. “The truth of the matter is, and I know every one of the guys here will
agree, marriage sucks. So be glad that asshole dumped you.”

“Harry,” R.J. said, “now that you express it so eloquently, I feel much better.”

“Marriage,” Marty Nussbaum said, getting the faraway look in his eye that he always got when he was about to say something
silly, “is like a besieged fortress. Everyone on the outside is trying to get in, and everyone on the inside is trying to
get out.”

Comedy writers never laugh. One or two of them muttered a barely audible “funny,” and Harry Elfand gathered a bunch of freshly
sharpened Blackwing 602 pencils into his hand as if they were pick-up stix, a signal that the meeting was about to begin.

Thank God, R.J. thought.

“The guests are Carol Burnett, Marty Feldman, and Glen Campbell. Glen’s going to sing a duet with Patsy. So we need a sketch
for Marty and Carol, and then a musical number for Patsy and Carol with a…” R.J. stopped listening. She doodled with a pencil
on the yellow legal pad in front of her. She was recovering. She was back at work. The swing of things would take over and
she wouldn’t think about Michael Rappaport. Harry was giving everyone an assignment now.

“And you do the wraparound blackouts for Patsy and
Carol. Got that, madame?” Harry Elfand said in R.J.’s direction.

And she wouldn’t cry anymore as she had been for the last two weeks, since the day of the school fair. After all, even if
it had been a mistake to be involved with him in the first place, this was still an ending, dashed hopes, another failure.

“R.J?”

R.J. looked up. “Yeah. Sure. Wraparound blackouts. I’ll do them.”

“By four o’clock, guys… and gal,” Elfand said.

The men all pushed their chairs back and stood. R.J. didn’t move. Michael Rappaport. How could she let him make her feel this
rotten? Why did she ache every time she thought his name? It must be because of the rejection.

All the other writers had left the conference room before she got up and walked slowly to her office, a tiny windowless cubicle,
sat down on her creaky typing chair, and looked at her watch. She had to start working. Maybe she should go downstairs to
the taping and try to catch Patsy in her dressing room to discuss some ideas. Patsy liked that. It made her feel as if she
were a part of the creative process. The wraparound blackouts. Three short sketches that would later be connected by a musical
number. Carol and Patsy would sing and Marty Feldman would join them in the sketches. Maybe it should be something about men
who can’t make a commitment. Yeah, that was funny, all right. Shit, there was an ache inside her that made her feel like an
elephant was sitting on her chest. Michael… my God… how could he?

She picked up the phone and dialed Dinah’s number. Dinah would comfort her, and
then,
when she felt a little better, she could start to work. When she heard Dinah say hello, her throat filled with tears and
she couldn’t speak.

“Hello? Hello? Hey, who
is
this?” Dinah asked.

“Di…” She could barely get it out.

“Oh, hon…” Dinah said. “Where
are
you?”

“At work,” R.J. managed. “But I can’t work. I can’t do anything. Maybe because, according to my appointment calendar, I’m
supposed to be just getting back from my honeym…” she couldn’t finish the sentence.

“Hey, do
I
know? I’m sitting here staring at the pink dress I was going to wear to be the world’s oldest bridesmaid
and now I’ve got no place to… R.J.? Ahh, Arj, think back a few weeks. You sat on my sofa and said, ‘Di, do I really want to
go through with this?’ You always knew deep in your heart you were going to marry that little Toulouse-Lautrec for all the
wrong reasons. Someday you’ll fall to your knees and thank the gods that this happened.”

“I know. I know, but I did a terrible thing to my poor Jeffie. He’s been saying to me every day, ‘Ma, now I’m gonna have a
father at my bar mitzvah.’ I mean, he was so glad to finally be a family.… Oh, God. Michael promised he was going to have
the papers prepared so he could adopt Jeffie as soon as we were married. Oh, God, Di…”