Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

“Why, thank you,” Perry said, relaxing under the warm assurance of Rackley’s smile and comradely grip. He gave the dean a bashful grin.

“Evidently, the idea of me in Hollywood boggles most people’s minds around here,” Perry confided to his unexpected new ally.

“Odd,” mused the dean, “it doesn’t surprise me in the least.”

Perry felt himself tense again.

“Oh?” he asked cautiously.

“Mmmm,” the dean purred. “I always thought you had a streak of it in you.”

“‘A streak?’ Of what?”

A slight smile played at the dean’s lips.

“Of Hollywood,” he said, then took a delicate sip of his sherry, savoring.

Perry could feel his cheeks burning, remembering the dean’s little dig. It was like an accusation, a recognition of hidden corruption. He spooned up the last of the sundae, wondering if his choice of mocha royale with Kahlúa sauce was an early warning sign of creeping decadence.

For God sake, sit back and enjoy , he told himself.

He licked the last of the sauce from his spoon just as a festive tinkling sound heralded the return of the flight attendant, pushing a cart that was crowded with brandy and liqueur bottles.

“Care for an after-dinner drink?” she asked with a smile.

Perry automatically turned to Jane, not precisely for permission or even approval but more for guidance, advice as to what would be not necessarily the most virtuous but ultimately the most satisfying choice, in this as in all things. They huddled, whispering. Perry confessed he was happily flying on champagne and wine as well as on the plane itself, and was so enjoying the vacationlike high that he hated to bring himself down from it with coffee, yet feared that the dark alcoholic potions being proffered might lead to heaviness and headache. Jane understood, agreed, and as usual came up with what seemed to Perry the perfect answer. He smiled, nodded, and looked up at the waiting attendant.

“Instead of any of that, may we just have some more champagne?” he asked.

“Of course!” the attendant assured him, adding a wink, as if giving her personal approval to the plan, and in a few moments was back with fresh, fluted glasses and a frosty new bottle whose cork she popped on the spot.

When Perry and Jane touched their glasses in a toast, they didn’t even speak, but just exchanged a nod, a sign of their mutual appreciation and understanding. They were on a wavelength that Perry had never imagined possible, a shared communication that was not only apparent to others, but even seemed unsettling to those whose own marriages were neither so harmonious nor close.

“You seem to have a symbiotic relationship,” the elegant Professor Evelyn Parkhurst, chairman of anthropology, told them once, making it sound like a textbook neurosis rather than the actual meaning of mutual dependence they were both proud to acknowledge.

“We clicked right away,” was how Jane explained it.

In spite of the circumstance , Perry always added in his mind, experiencing a nervous tremor and an automatic outbreak of perspiration that recurred whenever he was reminded of their first, near-disastrous meeting. Jane had come up to Vermont to take his photograph for the Boston Globe five years before, to accompany a Living page article on Perry prompted by publication of his latest book of stories. He had forgotten the appointment, and gone to the door a little after ten in the morning unshaven, shaking still from a monumental hangover, wearing only undershorts and a soiled button-down shirt he had grabbed from a pile of dirty clothes in his closet when he couldn’t find his bathrobe.

“Oh God,” he said when he saw Jane, “I had no idea—”

“Didn’t we agree on ten o’clock?” she asked.

He remembered the appointment to have his picture taken then, but what he could not have known beforehand was that the very sight of the photographer would cut through the fog of his hangover, of the fuzzy condition not only of his head at the moment but of the whole frayed feeling of his life at that time. There was a glow about this woman who had suddenly materialized at his doorway, an aura of brightness and energy. She was tall and big-boned (not at all his type), and her high cheeks were flushed a ruddy pink, without makeup, her shock of thick blond shoulder-length hair pulled casually to a pony tail and tied with a piece of bright green yarn. He felt a deep and immediate impulse to throw his arms around her, but managed to restrain himself.

“Come in—I’m sorry,” he said, motioning toward the living room of his bachelor apartment, which he realized with a wince of embarrassment looked like the scene of a rock group’s reunion. His record albums from the sixties—the last ones he had bought—were spilled all around the stereo cabinet out of their jackets, lying on the dusty floor, which was bare except for splayed piles of magazines and newspapers, an empty bottle of Scotch and a couple of decomposing Chicken McNuggets from last night’s “dinner.” Perry reached down and grabbed an old sock from the detritus, then added to it by brushing off the remains of cheese and crackers from a corner of the couch so Jane could sit down while he went to shower and shave.

“Make yourself at home,” he said plaintively, trying to be unobtrusive as he kicked a large black frilly bra beneath the couch, then realized the subterfuge was senseless since the garment’s owner was still in his bed. He plucked the incriminating item from the floor and bunched it behind him as he backed out of the room, wondering if there was any way he could slip his overnight guest out the bedroom window; but he knew in his heart that was hopeless, especially since Lana Molloy, the hair stylist who had driven up from Brattleboro to party with him, had brought along her faithful dog, who would have to be dispensed with at the same time.

When Lana came wobbling out of the bedroom a little later in her violet spandex pants and high heels, carrying her brace of mambo drums and followed by her dog, Jane stood up and said uneasily, “Maybe I’ve come at a bad time.”

“Oh no!” Perry exclaimed in true panic, adding like a plea from someone drowning, “ Stay! ”

“As for us, we’re on the road,” said Lana with a wink, and Perry, pulling himself together as best he could, smiled gamely and said, “Jane, I’d like you to meet Lana Molloy—and Langley Wallingford.”

Perry held his breath as he watched Jane’s eyes widen at the introduction and her mouth start to open in disbelief (or was it disgust?), but then to his surprise and delight she bent down and took the dog’s paw as she broke out laughing.

“Why, Langley,” she said, “I know you —you’re Phoebe’s husband on ‘All My Children’!”

“Oh, you’re a fan!” Lana exclaimed happily. “Do you remember back when Phoebe was married to Dr. Charles Tyler?”

“I never thought he’d leave her for Mona Kane, did you?”

As Jane and Lana, like long-lost sisters, began rehashing events on the soap, Perry snuck back to the bathroom and popped another four aspirin.

He tried to look self-assured and authorially wise when a half hour later he leaned dizzily against a pine tree as Jane focused her Nikon on him.

“Lana’s not one of my students,” he explained, for he wanted to make clear that he didn’t stoop to such unfair exploitation. As soon as he said it he realized what a pathetic claim it was to any pretense of nobility.

“That’s none of my concern,” Jane said, and Perry felt even worse. She told him “Smile,” and the effort to do so in order to please her, combined with the nausea he still felt from the night before, as well as the sickening sense that his very existence was a sham, led to the quick, unexpected moment he later claimed was the worst one of his adult life to that point: he vomited on his shoes.