Читать книгу One Hit Wonder - Charlie Carillo - Страница 15

While I’m obsessing over the girl I lost, I should probably mention my ex-wife.

Her name is Lois Butler and I doubt very much that I could pick her out of a police lineup if I saw her today, given the toll of time and cosmetic surgeries that have certainly happened since we parted.

I met Lois on the set of the doomed-from-the-start TV pilot for Sweet Days. The premise of the show was that an aspiring singer-songwriter (guess who) working as a dishwasher falls in love with a waitress (Lois) who dreams of being an actress. Late at night after work they drink coffee in the deserted hash house kitchen, share their dreams, fall in love, reach their goals, get married, have kids, grow old together, and are buried in adjoining plots.

Kidding, kidding! As I said before, three episodes aired and that was the end of Sweet Days, the TV show. The critics crucified it, and one guy even went so far as to say I was “unconvincing” as a dishwasher.

He was probably right. My mother never let me anywhere near the kitchen sink for fear that I’d “splash too much” when I did the dishes, and so the first time I ever had my hands in a sink full of suds was the day the director yelled “Action!” on the Sweet Days set. Maybe if I’d played a gardener, the show would have worked….

Lois wasn’t half bad as a waitress, having actually put in time supporting herself that way. She was a tall, wiry girl with flame-red hair and a big cobblestone of a chin, the kind of chin you’d expect to see in profile on a coin commemorating some great pioneering feminist.

Lois was no feminist, though. We got involved soon after we got working on the pilot (you spend sixteen hours a day together, things are going to happen) and right from the start she made it clear that a boyfriend was supposed to light a girl’s cigarettes, open car doors, and “pay for stuff,” as she put it in her giggly way.

So I did. Why not? She was willing and wild in bed, the perfect distraction from a broken heart. We were either on our feet shooting scenes the writers couldn’t stop rewriting or flat on our backs at my condo, resting up for the early morning call.

Nine days after Sweet Days went belly-up Richard Robinski, my trusted agent, died of a massive heart attack. Suddenly I had no job, and no representation. Meanwhile, Lois started having nightmares about returning to her hometown in West Virginia and waiting tables for real again. Her career was in ruins, her confidence was shot, and there was one other thing.

“Mickey, I’m pregnant.”

She broke the news while we were cuddling in bed the day after the show got the axe. At this point she was living with me, though I don’t exactly remember having invited her to do that. Each time she came to stay over, another item of clothing or furniture came with her, but I guess I didn’t take it seriously until the plants started arriving.

Suddenly, it was serious. Grim, to use a more appropriate word.

I remember my lips going dry and my legs tingling. If I’d been standing up, I certainly would have fallen. Lois peered into my eyes all this while, looking for truths I was trying to hide.

“It’s definitely mine, right?”

“Oh, Mickey, how could you even ask me that?”

I embraced her, merely to protect myself from that gaze, the way a losing boxer hugs his opponent to stop the rain of punches.

“What are we gonna do, Mickey?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you happy about this?”

“Jesus, Lois….”

She was wise to my false hug and broke the embrace, shoving me away to get back in my eyes. “This isn’t the greatest thing that ever happened to me either, you know. My career is screwed.”

“Take it easy, Lois.”

“An actress has a baby in this town and that’s it. Kiss it all good-bye.”

I hesitated. “There’s another way, you know.”

Funny, how I couldn’t even bring myself to use the word “abortion.” Instead I called it “another way,” which I’m pretty sure was the title of a catechism they made us study back at St. Anastasia’s grammar school.

Lois gasped. “I could never do that, Mickey!”

“All right, all right, forget it.”

I was dizzy. At this point I was still trying to write songs, convinced I hadn’t been a one hit wonder with a follow-up record that tanked. Maybe I’d write a new song that would burn up the charts, and put another fortune in my pocket. How about “You’re Havin’ My Baby?” Nah, Paul Anka had already beaten me to it….

Her eyes softened. “I want to marry you, Mickey.”

“You do?”

“Don’t you want to marry me?”

I swallowed. “I never really thought about it, Lois. We’re pretty young.”

“Well, now we have to think about it, don’t we?”

“I guess.”

“Will you marry me, Mickey?”

I swear to God she asked me just like that, flat on her back, naked in my bed, her hand snug around my suddenly hardening cock.

Why did I go firm in a situation so horrifying? The prospect of a shotgun wedding should have made me shrivel, not swell, so what was the explanation for it?

I don’t know. Being twenty was part of it, I guess, twenty and lonely and terrified of the abyss I was facing in the wake of the TV show disaster.

“Yeah, Lois, I’ll marry you,” I replied, and we went at it like wildcats. That very night we drove to Las Vegas and got married at a chapel by a preacher in a lime-green tuxedo who looked like a faker but turned out to be absolutely legitimate, as I learned six months later when Lois served me with divorce papers.

The marriage was real. The pregnancy was another matter. Lois claimed to have miscarried a few months into it, but I don’t remember any change in her figure or morning sickness or any behavior you could call even remotely motherly from this woman who insisted that smoking a little pot every night was good for the fetus because it relaxed the mother.

At that point I was worth about half a million dollars, and when the fairly uncomplicated divorce proceedings were over (no prenup, so the fifty-fifty California law applied) my lawyer took me aside.

“We’re off the clock now, kid, so this is free advice you can take or leave.” He put a pudgy hand on my shoulder to cushion the blow. “Next time a girl tells you she’s pregnant, get her to piss into a cup. And be there when she pisses into the cup.”

My parents met Lois exactly once, right after we were married. I flew them over for a visit and my mother spent a long weekend sniffing the air for marijuana smoke I’d tried my best to Air Wick away. She cringed when Lois called her “Mom,” and my father kept asking about the TV show.

I lied to them, told them I had another pilot in the works. I lied to them again when I told them I loved Lois, and I thought I was lying one more time when my mother cornered me to ask point-blank if Lois was pregnant.

“No way, Mom!”

Anyway, I had to sell my condo to share my assets with my ex. That was painful, but not nearly as painful as something Lois said to me when we parted for the last time on the courthouse steps. It was a brilliantly sunny Los Angeles day, the kind of all-penetrating sun you have to squint against even if you’re looking at the ground. Lois grabbed my hand and pulled me close, not for affection but for scrutiny. She lowered her sunglasses to peer into my eyes, this woman I’d known for less than a year who’d just cut a deal worth a quarter of a million dollars.

Honest to God, I was expecting her to thank me for my generosity, but instead her eyes narrowed and her lips went rubbery in that pre-crying state I’d come to know.

“You never did love me, did you, Mickey?”

I hesitated, which was in fact almost as much of an answer as Lois would need. She had half my money, and now she was after a whole truth. So I gave it to her, right between the eyes.

I shook my head. “Not the way a man’s supposed to love a wife, Lois.”

It felt good to say it, but only for as long as it took to say it. Her eyes twitched with the pain of it, but I also knew she was tough. She took a deep breath, a fighter’s breath.

“Do you want to know if I loved you?”

“Do you want to tell me?”

“I did. I do.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, damn you, I do.” Her eyes brimmed with real tears, not the kind she had to summon up on camera.

The smoggy heat was getting to me. I giggled with a weird giddiness. “Lois. Let’s try to remember what happened here. You filed for divorce against me.”

“Yes, I did. Because I knew you’d never divorce me. You’d already left me emotionally, but you never would have left the house.”

“Funny you should mention the house. I have to sell it now, as you probably know.”

But Lois didn’t hear those words. She jabbed her forefinger at my chest. “Don’t you ever do this to another woman.”

“Do what? Split my assets?”

“Don’t promise her a future when you’re stuck in the past.”

My heart was hammering. Lois wasn’t stupid, but her intelligence was a kind of organic thing, and words weren’t always her best friends. This observation was a rare thing, almost a lyric from a country-western song. I wondered if she’d heard it someplace or if she came up with it herself, but before I could wonder too long, Lois asked, almost casually, “What’s her name?”

I sighed, felt my shoulders slump. I had to tell her. I owed her that much.

“Lynn.”

I trembled at the sound of my own voice. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spoken her name aloud. I felt as if I were violating a gravesite, just speaking her name.

Lois was breathing hard. “Is she prettier than me?”

I sighed with weariness and impatience over her refusal to let me and herself off the fucking hook.

Prettier? Jesus Christ, it wasn’t a question of measure. Lynn was all alone in my mind. There was Lynn, and then there was everybody else.

But try and explain that to your brand-new ex-wife.

“No, she was not prettier than you.”

“Where is she? Back in New York?”

“I have no idea. She ran away from home when she was a kid.”

“How dramatic.”

“As a matter of fact, it was pretty damn dramatic.”

“You love her.”

“I did, yes.”

“No, you mean you do. You still do.”

I rubbed my face, spoke through the forest of my fingers. “We’ve been divorced for twenty minutes now, Lois. Why are we even talking about this?”

“Because it’s all over and I realize I never even knew you, Mickey. God! What are you, man? An actor? A singer? A songwriter? Or maybe you’re just a lost soul.”

“That last one, yeah. That sounds about right.”

“Make jokes. But I want you to understand that I am not a joke.” She was practically bawling, and shoved the sunglasses back over her eyes. “I have to know all this stuff before I can get rid of you, Mickey. I have to know why you couldn’t look me in the eye after we made love. So now I know, okay? Thank you. Thank you. We’re done now, Mickey. I know it wasn’t my fault. I was competing with a ghost, and ghosts always win.”

She turned and walked off to her car. I sat on the courthouse steps and watched this normally graceful girl staggering with a clumsiness brought on by fury, and when she got in her car she roared off at such high speed I was sure she’d kill herself and maybe a few other people before she could get home to the hotel I’d been ordered to pay for by the City of Angels.

Two months later the sale of my condo went through and I sent Lois a check for two hundred and fifty thousand bucks.

I never resented her for taking me for half. Without that money, Lois wouldn’t even have been in the game to get a second husband. A desperate woman never gets anywhere in Los Angeles.

Funny, though, how Lois got the wheelbarrow full of money that I’d promised Lynn. And now I was back pushing a lawn mower for a living.

Three hundred and twenty bucks a week, before taxes. It would take me a hundred years to fill up a wheelbarrow, even if the bills were all singles, even if I could live that long.