Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

She acted as if he wasn’t in the room, or maybe didn’t exist at all.

“Jane, I’m talking to you,” he said patiently.

He had never seen her like this before. She seemed perfectly calm and composed, her movements were sure and steady, yet she continued to ignore his questions as well as his presence. It was as if she were in a trance. For a moment he wondered if she was under the influence of some kind of drug.

“Please, love,” he said gently. “Won’t you answer me? Won’t you tell me what you’re doing?”

She didn’t look at him, she continued her activity, but at least she made a response, she uttered a word.

“Packing,” she said.

“Why?” he asked. “Where are you going?”

“Home.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t.”

He was still holding the bottle of champagne in his right hand. He looked down at it, as if he wondered how it had got there. A few wisps of the frosty potion were still curling out of the mouth of the bottle, like smoke from a gun. He set the bottle down on the dresser, and leaned against the wall, trying to brace himself. His heart was pounding wildly, but he tried to speak calmly, without letting his voice go quivery.

“Are you leaving me?” he asked.

“I’m leaving here .”

“It’s the same thing.”

“No, it’s not. You’re the one who’s left. I want to go back to where we were.”

“But we will! I explained all that. I even spoke to Al today. He’s going to talk to the dean. He’s sure he can fix it! I told him we’d be back for Christmas, just like you want. Then I’ll teach the next semester.”

He went to her, taking her by the arm.

“Dammit, don’t you understand?” he demanded. “We can go back for Christmas. We can live there and teach, and come out here and do TV and movies. We can do both, live in both places. We can have it all! ”

She shook his hand off, and resumed her packing, placing in a dress with extra precision.

“I don’t want it all,” she said.

“What the hell do you want?”

“I want you. Us. The way we used to be. The life we used to have.”

She was still speaking calmly but there were tears coming out of her eyes now.

He went to her, put his arms around her, held her to him.

“I love you,” he said.

“But you love this more.”

He broke away.

“What do you mean, ‘this’?”

“What you’re doing. Here.”

“I love it, sure, is that a crime? Do I have to choose? Between my wife and my work?”

“You have to think about the way you want to live.”

She turned away, wiping her eyes, and resumed the packing.

“You really are leaving me,” he said.

“No. I’ll be home. You can come back anytime you want.”

“But now—just when all this is breaking for me, just when I need you with me, you’re cutting out, is that it?”

“You won’t even miss me.”

“That’s crazy. Listen, you’ve forgot your own advice.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When we first came out and I was the one who wanted to pack it in, after that crazy network meeting. You told me to hang in there, you told me if the people bothered me, just to pretend I was a ‘field anthropologist,’ doing work among the ‘Dippy-dos.’ Well, you can do the same. You can start taking pictures of the people here. You haven’t even been using your camera, lately.”

“I know. That’s one reason I have to leave. I can’t even see things any more. Everything looks the same to me. Flat and lifeless. Repetitious.”

“Jane, please stay.”

“You don’t even know I’m here. You’re living the show. You’ll be able to do it more freely with me gone anyway.”

She shut the suitcase and pressed the lid, snapping the catches.

Something in Perry wanted to yank the suitcase open and throw everything to the floor, fling Jane down on the bed and make mad, passionate love, make her stay. He felt paralyzed, though. He stared at her and blinked, trying to put her in focus, trying to see clearly what was happening, yet everything seemed fuzzy and unreal.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I have to take a shower and change.”

She brushed past him.

He picked up the bottle of champagne and walked out to the backyard. He sat down in the lawn chair, next to the hot tub, and took a long pull from the bottle. His head felt bubbly and numb. He held the bottle in both hands and looked at the label.

Blanc de Blanc.

Blank dee Blank.

Blankety blank.

Blank.

He closed his eyes, put the bottle to his mouth, and tilted his head back, gulping.

Blank.

Perry woke to a feeling of emptiness. His arm reached out automatically in the bed beside him but no one was there to touch. Nothing. He had a sense of vacancy, of blank space. He jumped up, dressing as fast as if the house were on fire, and got out into the street, into the car, into a restaurant and up to the counter, where he ordered and ate a cheese omelette, toast, blueberry muffin, orange juice, coffee, and an order of fruit salad. Filling up. Trying to cover the hole he felt inside himself, the cavity.

Get busy. Take action. Take care of the things you’ve been putting off. Like the option on “The Springtime Women.” There was a gold mine, just waiting to be used. Vaughan had called a few days ago to say Harrison Ford had actually read the story and liked it! This was no Hollywood hype, this was a real project, ready to fly.

“ What about your agreement with Ned Gurney? ”

Perry jumped, as if a pin had stuck him.

That was Jane’s voice.

“My agreement with Ned was only verbal ,” he said out loud, as if he were answering her back.

Damn. Was he flipping out? No. This was normal, it was simply a reaction to his wife’s being gone when he was used to having her there all the time.

He had never mentioned to Jane his whole conversation with Vaughan about “The Springtime Women,” fearing she wouldn’t understand. And she didn’t! At least the way her voice sounded just now she didn’t, but that of course was just Perry’s imagination. He took a deep breath, steadying himself. Forget about Jane. There was nothing in the world to stop him from going ahead with Vaughan since he had nothing signed with Ned Gurney. He was simply taking a much better deal. He was simply being practical.

Perry whistled to himself as he drove to his agent’s office, reflecting how, as if by the miracle of his simply being in Hollywood, that once-modest short story of his had become something of a hot property!

“I thought you told me you were going to do this project with Ned Gurney,” his agent said.

Charlie Brindle was one of the old school of Hollywood agents. It figured. Perry had gone to him through the recommendation of his literary agent in New York, who himself was one of the old school of the publishing world. Clement LeMoyne had been a friend and supporter of Perry’s ever since he sold his first stories, and was perfectly good at negotiating nice little distinguished literary works, but he wasn’t really in tune with the pulsing new world of the bi-coastal entertainment business. He in fact had seemed almost as shocked as the faculty of Haviland College when he heard Perry was going out to work on a TV script in Hollywood. LeMoyne had warned him about “getting in too deep” or “with the wrong sort of crowd” (as if he were a kid going off to college!) and strongly recommended Charlie Brindle as the right man to handle his business out there.

“He’s one of the solid old-timers,” LeMoyne had said. “Not one of these flashy new shark types. You can trust this man. His word is his bond.”