Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

Liz walked him to the door and opened it, the musky scent of her perfume mixing with the other aromas of the night. Perry turned and hurried out, like a man fleeing a burning building. He sped home, careening around corners, wanting to call Jane, hear her voice, assure himself everything was the same between them, that she hadn’t intuitively picked up any small “blip” of his momentary temptation on the screen of her own radar.

It was not quite one o’clock when he got in, which was still not terribly late. He picked up the phone and then put it back down, realizing it was almost four in the morning in Vermont. Damn. If he called her now, it would frighten her. It would seem like an emergency. He felt in fact like there almost had been one, but he didn’t want her to know that. He got into his bathrobe, poured himself the cognac he was glad he hadn’t had with Liz Caddigan, and sat on the bed, clutching the glass with both hands.

Perry went to meet Jane at the airport with flowers. He felt light, buoyant, as if he were walking around about five or six inches off the ground, just naturally, without any effort. He got up early and knocked out a couple of crucial scenes, and he was not only feeling good about himself as a writer but as a man, a person.

Instead of feeling guilty about the drink with Liz at her apartment, he had awakened feeling relief as he realized he had met and overcome the great cliche, Hollywood temptation. He had passed up the chance to go to bed with a real-live, attractive actress in the tan, taut, living flesh. He had remained true to his wife, to his marriage, to his old-fashioned concept of fidelity—despite distance of miles or life-style—and so had remained true to himself. The whole experience made him feel less panicky about facing other temptations and tests of this place, for he had already passed one of the basic ones, the kind that changed people, changed the way they lived and looked at life.

He couldn’t wait to get his arms around his wonderful, loving wife.

She was one of the last passengers off the plane, dragging her winter coat behind her, looking pale and disoriented, like some kind of refugee. When she saw Perry she lurched toward him and he caught her as she threw her arms around him and kissed him sloppily, her mouth like a cask of stale brandy.

“For God sake,” he said, pulling away.

“Love me, love me not?” she asked, blinking, trying to focus.

He took her arm and turned her, hoping to steady her as they went to the luggage.

“You smell like a Saint Bernard,” he said.

She wrenched her arm away from his grip.

“Oh, phoo. Phoo you.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and stumbled, and he grabbed her again, guiding, gritting his teeth.

He had never seen her drunk, or rather, the few times she’d been drunk, he’d been in the same state, and so hadn’t minded. This was different. This was disgusting. She was drunk and he was not. He tried to concentrate just on getting her home.

Driving back she rolled down the window and Perry was on the alert to pull over if she started getting sick. The fresh air seemed to revive her, though, as she stuck her head out the window, singing off key as she slurred her improvised words.

“Cal-a-forn-ya here I am,

like a great big candied yam …”

He blamed it on first class. They didn’t stop pouring the booze for you. That, and after all, she had had to do all the dirty work of making the big switch, packing up, saying good-byes. He wasn’t going to make a big issue of this, just get her to bed and start fresh the next day.

“I’m sorry,” Jane said. “It finally got to me.”

She slept it off the next morning, spent the day unpacking and soaking herself in a warm bath, and greeted Perry that night when he came home from the studio with crackers and brie, a Bloody Mary for him, and a Virgin Mary for herself.

“Hey, it’s no wonder,” he said. “You must have worked your tail off getting everything wrapped up out there.”

He had put an arm around her but now she moved away, walking slowly toward the window, so her back was toward him.

“It wasn’t the work,” she said.

“What, then?”

“The whole thing. What we’re doing—the move. I realized how big it is. The change.”

“Lovey, it’s only temporary.”

“It’s also enormous.”

She turned and looked at him. There was a faint trace of red on her upper lip from the drink, and it accentuated the paleness of her face.

“Being back there,” she said, “trying to explain to people what we’re doing, what it’s like out here, I felt sort of crazy. There were moments I wondered if maybe I’d dreamed it.”

She lifted her arm, indicating the room, the window behind her, the bright lemon light falling in.

“All this,” she said. “California.”

“Yes,” he said.

He knew just what she meant, for now, trying to conjure up his life in Vermont, the one that was real to him only a little more than a month ago, all that seemed like a dream.

Jane had just moved back and forth between dreams, and it must have been frightening as well as exhausting. Perry was struck by the scary notion that one of the two of them might get caught up in the opposite dream, and that it might really separate them, take them away from each other. That was something he had never before thought possible, under any circumstance. He got up and went to her and put his arms around her and she grabbed him, digging her fingers into his back as they swayed back and forth, together, tightly, holding each other in the same dream.

You had to hold on.

You not only had to hold on to each other, you had to hold on to yourself, to your own perspective.

You had to hold on because everything started going so fast.

You had to hold on or you might fall off.

“We’re flying,” Archer Mellis said.

The project was really off the ground now that Perry had finished writing the second hour. The network loved it so much they were willing to spring for the extra expense of shooting exteriors on location instead of just on the lot and around L.A., in an effort to preserve the original New England ambience of the story. Of course they couldn’t afford to go all the way to Vermont, as Archer had originally assured Perry was the only way to do the piece properly, but the ingenious young executive had discovered a campus in a small town outside San Jose that miraculously conveyed what Archer assured everyone was “a heavy New England flavor .” He was taking up some of the “First Year” staff that day to scout it out.

“Do all of us get to go?” Perry asked eagerly.

“I can only take one,” said Archer.

Ned jumped up and started pacing, the vein in his temple turning red as it began to throb.

“Surely we can dig up a few more plane tickets out of the budget,” he said. “Is that the problem?”

Archer, who was pacing in a different direction, wheeled and fixed Ned with narrowed eyes, as if he had him in the cross hairs of his rifle site.

“I don’t pinch pennies, amigo ,” he said icily. “The problem is I only have room in my plane for one passenger.”

Archer had a pair of goggles cocked up on his forehead and a silk ascot tucked into his tunic. Though he bore a striking resemblance to the young Errol Flynn as the flying ace of The Dawn Patrol , Perry had simply assumed this was another of his dashing costumes, rather than real aviation apparel. Come to think of it, though, he knew that flying a plane was one of Archer’s many daring avocations, along with skydiving, scuba diving, steer wrestling, and white-water kayak racing.

“Forgive me, Archer!” Ned exclaimed. “I simply assumed we’d be flying up on PSA.”