Whackadoodle Times Galore

TWO-1

TWO

I didn’t sleep very well that night. I kept getting up and looking out our window to see what I could see in the garden house. Didn’t see anything. Which made me very suspicious. Maybe Eartha was sitting inside the house, in the dark, figuring out where to plant the listening devices so she could spy on us.

I even went into David’s room and looked through his window. He sleeps through almost everything, including me tripping over whatever crap he has on his floor.

I still didn’t see anything.

Except for David’s electronic whatever flashing under his sheets. I took it out, turned it off, and put it on his desk. Shouldn’t have those things so close to his body so much of the time. He was going to grow an extra appendage.

Or become as obnoxious as his sister.

I couldn’t see Eartha or any of her kittens from David’s window either.

I had tried to recreate her martini—even though I didn’t ordinarily like martinis—so it was possible my psycho-detector was registering more than usual. I was a paranoid drunk.

I slept through breakfast and David and Hayword heading out for the day. Hayword took David to his private school. We’d sent Fern to public school—because we were idiots trying to remain “grounded in our Midwest values” or some such s**t. But Fern could take care of herself. Someone picked on her, she’d punch them. Or outwit them with her words. She could be very cruel. In fact, for all we knew, she was one of the bullies going after poor defenseless kids like David.

David was nearly ten years younger than Fern, and we knew when he was an infant that he would have to go to school someplace special. Nurturing. He was a good kid with a soft heart. Sometimes I thought it was because his little brother Alberto died when David was two. He cried for about a year after his brother died.

We hardly ever talk about Alberto.

Or what happened afterward. I was a bit depressed and Hayword decided to f**k some woman in his office. She was a young blond actress who wanted him to write a movie for her. I imagine. I don’t really know. He f****d her. I saw it all. Said I’d kill him if he ever did it again. He begged my forgiveness, swore it was his grief, and blah, blah, blah. I let him come home.

David still cried for a year.

After that, I told Hayword I needed a space of my own. You know, like Virginia Woolf. I even quoted Virginia Woolf when I was talking to him. Said if I didn’t get a f*****g room of my own, I was going to walk into the sea with bricks in my pockets.

Not that I was asking for Hayword’s permission. We had come to California together as a collaborating couple. Got some points on our very first little film, Love and Other Insanities, so we made a mint right off the bat.

Hayword really got into the Hollywood thing. He liked to schmooze and bullshit with all the other Hollywood people. Gawd. I hated it. They’d smile to your face and promise you the moon and the next day they’d sell you out or stab you in the back or whatever metaphor you want to use to indicate that on the whole they were a bunch of lying, thieving assholes. At least the ones with money.

Of course that is a gross generality. It’s a gross generality based on my experiences. I’m not social in that way. And I didn’t like trying to figure out everyone’s motives all the time. So I stopped doing the circuit—as it were—and stopped going to meetings, concentrated on raising the one kid who couldn’t stand me and on birthing a couple of others, one who died and another who was a bit more fragile than was good for—well, good for me. Hayword was already a handful. He wanted constant reassurance from me. Christ, I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to tell him to grow a pair. I knew if his self-esteem went down, I’d be the one propping it back up, and I was tired of it.

Anyway, David went to a school he liked where the teachers nurtured him and the other students seemed to like him. Hayword took him to school some days; I took him other days. When I couldn’t or didn’t feel like it or I was late getting to my art studio, I sometimes asked Violeta to take him. Violeta was our housekeeper s***h cook.

After I told Hayword I needed a room of my own, I found a house close to the village. It was a small old style ranch house from the 1930s. White with dark green shutters. White picket fence. Looked so California out under tall old sycamore trees, like a place Carol Lombard and Clark Gable would have lived. So I got it. I bought an easel and some paints, pencils, chalk. All the best material. My intentions were pure.

Thing was, I wasn’t any kind of artist and never have been. I was a pretty good writer when Hayword and I started out. A commercial writer. I knew what kind of scripts to write to create a play or a movie that people would like. Not great art but something entertaining with a bit of heart.

But I was not an artist, not someone who used a brush and paints. It didn’t matter: Hayword was so guilt-ridden about his affair he never questioned my artistic endeavors.

My Enclave neighbors, at least the female ones, called my art studio my love nest. I never confirmed or denied. Although sometimes I let on that I didn’t love anyone who came there, but I was fond of all of them.

And today, one of the ones I was quite fond of was stopping by.

Hey, no judgement here. Remember my husband f****d a blond bimbo right after I buried my son, while my breasts were still swollen and sore from the milk my child would never drink.

I figured it was my right to f**k whomever I wanted to f**k until the end of time.

Anyway, that morning, the first morning of Eartha being in our house—or next to us in our garden house—I woke up with a headache. I stumbled into the bathroom, downed a painkiller, took a shower, then put on sweats. I looked out the window and saw the garden house. “Shit.” I had nearly forgotten that some little hippy dudette was staying there. Last night I had made Hayword swear he would not leave me alone with her. But he was gone.

I texted him, “You better get your ass back here.”

He texted right back, “I’m having my police source check her out. Chill. We’ve still got one great thing coming to us today.”

“I’ll ‘chill’ you, buddy,” I said.

I went downstairs. Violeta was working in the kitchen, cleaning up Hayword’s mess, no doubt. She looked up at me and nodded. Her eyes were red. She brought me a cup of coffee and a croissant.

“I told you that you don’t have to wait on me,” I said. Although I liked it. I liked someone bringing me things. I liked someone cooking for me. Loved it, actually. Violeta wasn’t much of a cook, but she loved us—or faked it well. It used to matter to me whether she meant it or not. Now I didn’t care. I took everything at face value.

It was much easier that way.

Okay, maybe not everything at face value. But Violeta, at least.

I drank the coffee—gulped it—and pulled flakes of dough off of the croissant and let them melt in my mouth.

I squinted and looked over at Violeta who was putting dishes into the dishwasher.

“How are you this morning, Violeta?”

She shrugged. “Do you want to know?”

I raised an eyebrow. Did I want to know? Hmmm. Well, hell, I had asked the question. I couldn’t get out of it now.

“Yes, of course I want to know.”

“Mi madre is dying,” she said. “My sister said it’ll be any time now.”

Seemed like Violeta’s mother had been dying for about ten years now. Or had she already died? I bit my tongue so that I didn’t say that out loud. Violeta probably just wanted to go home early. Or take some time off. But she wouldn’t lie about a thing like that, would she?

No. I would. I had. Once when I stood up one of my love nesters, I told him a relative had died and I had to go out of town unexpectedly. A place where they didn’t have phones. I gave myself points that I picked a relative who was actually dead.

“Shouldn’t you go home then?” I said to Violeta. See, this was why everyone who worked for us loved us. (Or pretended they did.) We always did right by them. “Be with your family. We’ll be fine.”

She shook her head. “She’s in Mexico City,” she said. “I can’t afford to fly there.”

She couldn’t afford to fly to see her dying mother? That implied we were not paying her a decent living, didn’t it?

“I’ll buy you a ticket,” I said. Hayword would love it. Helping the help always made him feel like we were one of the little people again.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I couldn’t leave you now.”

“Why not now?” I had already gotten up and found my purse, had pulled out the checkbook.

“Mr. Lightman is so worried about this project,” she said, “and David is having trouble at school. You’ve got the Benefit. The fires, the protests.” She shook her head. “No. It is not a good time.”

“Well, isn’t it too bad your mother couldn’t die on our schedule,” I said. I wrote out a check for two thousand dollars. I ripped it out of the checkbook and held it out to her. “Is this enough?”

She came and looked at it but didn’t take it.

“That is plenty,” she said.

I set the check on the countertop.

“Mr. Lightman is always worried about some project,” I said. “And David will survive.” I had no idea what trouble he was having at school, but I wasn’t going to ask her. Then she would know I didn’t know what was going on with my own son. “I don’t do much at the Benefit except stand around and still look cute. And the fires come every year and someone is always protesting something.”

“The fires are bad this year,” she said. “It feels like the end of the world some days.”

“We live in California,” I said. “Some days it is the end of the world. Please take this money as our gift. I’m so sorry about your mother. Go and stay as long as you like.”

“Do you want me to find someone to help you out while I’m gone?” Violeta asked.

I shook my head. “Naw, we’ll figure it out.” I’d call the agency I used whenever Violeta went on vacation. “Go on.”

“I’ll finish cleaning up,” she said. “Thank you.” She looked like she wanted to hug me or something. But she didn’t. I left the room. The kitchen felt more like her domain than mine.

I took my coffee and went outside to sit by the pool. I had two hours before I was meeting Mark P.—my former plumber— down at the art studio. I needed to do some yoga—or pretend to—and shower, put on my makeup so that it didn’t look like I had any on, and make my hair look natural.

I didn’t feel like doing any of that right then. I sat in the lounge chair and leaned back. I wished my coffee was a gin and tonic. Or one of the martinis Eartha had made. Oh Christ. I had nearly forgotten about her again. I glanced behind me. No activity that I could discern coming from the garden house. I sighed and leaned back again.

It would be so much easier if I could go to the art studio and f**k Mark P. looking like I did right now. What a relief that would be. I sighed. Who would have ever guessed that I would end up as a Hollywood wife, or an Enclave wife as we sometimes called ourselves?

Never. Never would have guessed in a million years. Hayword and I had come to California wet behind the ears, certain we were going to change the world and the movie business because we would be different from everyone else here. We didn’t care about money. We didn’t care what people looked like or where they came from.

We’d been in theater and we wrote this script that we thought was a play, but then we realized it would work better as a movie. Someone knew someone who knew someone. And soon we got an offer on it. The studio loved it, loved every word, every scene. They handed us a contract and asked us how soon we could start on the rewrite.

Ah, Hollywood.