Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

“Dallas” was all that Perry could say, as if that explained everything.

Perry felt a sudden lust for a double martini, straight up, as dry as the most malevolent Santa Ana wind in history. Luckily, when the waiter came to take their order for drinks, Ravenna shot a glance at Perry’s troubled countenance and ordered for both of them.

“Bring us each a Kir Royale,” she said with a sparkling smile and a wink to the waiter, as if they were there to celebrate some amazing stroke of fortune.

It was of course just the right thing—zippier and more festive than a plain glass of wine, and yet keeping Perry to his pledge of staying off the hard stuff. It was made of crème de cassis and that magical potion Perry still associated with the glow of his first happy days out here with Jane, that greatest of all elixirs, champagne.

By the end of the second drink, Perry realized he was crazy to even consider backing out of the condo deal. Ravenna reminded him that if the very worst happened and the show was canceled, he would simply move right onto the big deal for a feature film of his next story, produced by the powerful and popular Vardeman.

Perry’s only danger, Ravenna clearly showed him, was in panicking, in imagining any kind of defeat, in even allowing himself to think of a circumstance in which he had to worry about such minor matters as a $3,000-a-month mortgage. Defeat was self-fulfilling; think poor, become poor.

The food was reassuringly rich. After the morels, flown in fresh from France, after the Volaille à la Vapeur de Truffles et Puree de Christophines , after the Sorbet Maison aux Fruits Exotiques , Perry felt much more optimistic. When the coffee and brandy arrived, so did an impeccably dressed, slim gentleman named Scotty Shearson, whom Ravenna had invited to stop by and join them for a drink. Scotty had done some acting off and on, but now he had his own business, in the area of personal public relations, which involved getting his clients’ names mentioned by the right people, in the right way, in the right places—newspaper columns, for instance, even radio and television shows that dealt with the world of entertainment and its personalities.

A “personality,” Perry gathered, was someone who, with the right professional attention, might become a “celebrity.” He of course admitted to no such self-seeking aspiration for his own sake, but Ravenna pointed out that any public attention that came his way right now could only help the show—just when it needed all the help it could get. Furthermore, Perry was impressed with the positive way in which Shearson viewed what only hours before had seemed the unmitigated disaster of the scheduling of his fragile new program.

“I love it,” said Shearson. “It’s the old David-against-Goliath plot—and you know who won!”

As if to help celebrate the upset victory in advance, the restaurant owner himself sent a round of cognacs to their table. Scotty raised his glass in a toast to Jean Paul, evidently a close friend, which explained how Ravenna had been able to secure this choice table at the last moment in such a hot new dining spot. Among Scotty’s many services, he aided his clients in securing the right tables at the right places, so they could be viewed by the right people and later be reported in the right columns as having been seen there. As if all this weren’t enough, Scotty revealed ( sotto voce of course) an exclusive bit of info he had heard from sources deep inside the network, so dangerously new that its reverberations had not yet even been reflected in the ratings:

“ ‘Dallas’ is slipping .”

Ravenna gave a squeeze to Perry’s knee.

“And you , darling,” she whispered, “are on the way up .”

Perry went home feeling like a million dollars, justifying his addition of a personal public relations counselor to his growing staff with the age-old logic that it takes money to make money. Besides, Shearson’s retainer was only a token $250 a week, and it was, anyway, as Ravenna pointed out, tax deductible, which in Perry’s thinking had come to seem like the same thing as free.

“Welcome to kamikaze time,” said Ned.

He was holding a beer, trying to seem jaunty. Perry was glad that Ned at the last minute had invited the “First Year” inner sanctum to gather at his home to have dinner and watch the show, as they had done for the pilot, but this of course was quite a different circumstance. Instead of excited anticipation there was simply nervous tension, a sense that if you accidentally bumped into someone you might get a nasty little electric shock. Kim, who looked bleary-eyed and bedraggled in baggy blue jeans and one of Ned’s old button-down dress shirts, had not made one of her wonderful curries but ordered out an assortment of deli stuff from Greenblatt’s—sandwiches, deviled eggs, chicken wings. Instead of a snappy, red-coated bartender there was simply a variety of bottles arrayed on a card table, but most people seemed to be taking cans of beer from a big cooler on the patio.

The cast of guests was different, too.

The main difference for Perry was that Jane wasn’t there. He had waked that morning missing her more than usual, feeling her absence like an ache. He thought how nice it would be to have her comfort, her hand-holding, her support. He had called her, hoping to get some of that on the phone, but he realized at once it was a mistake. She didn’t seem to understand the do-or-die nature of the coming evening’s crisis. She actually complained that Perry hadn’t asked how she was doing herself, how things were going in Vermont. ( Vermont ?)

Oh well. Kenton Spires’s wife was missing, too, off on some therapeutic shopping spree in New York. Perry was just as glad. They wouldn’t have to put up with her whining over how she missed Bloomies.

Unexpectedly, Kim’s buddy Liz Caddigan, the actress, was there, looking crisp and fresh, perhaps because she had nothing to do with “The First Year’s the Hardest.” Perry was a bit unnerved to see her, feeling this gathering should have been limited to “the family,” those directly involved with the show, as if tonight’s airing were a private and intimate affair. Against “Dallas,” it might in fact be just that.

Watching was pure agony, knowing that at the same time, just a channel away, the flash and flesh of “Dallas” was being offered. “The First Year” seemed now too slow, too gentle, too wispy to survive in this real world. If only they had known, if only they had designed it for sophisticated, late-night viewing! If only the censors hadn’t prevented them from at least having that last scene of lovemaking in the kitchen!

At one point they flipped to Dallas during a commercial, only to have their worst fears confirmed by watching the fascinatingly evil, magnetic J.R. in bed with some exotic young beauty, with an ice bucket of champagne at their side!

“Well,” said Ned, “at least he’s doing it in the bedroom. At least they didn’t let him do it on the kitchen floor.”

“Of course not,” said Kenton. “J.R. may be ruthless, but he’s not kinky.”

At the end, Perry felt bloated, yet had another beer. Everyone decided it was best to get to bed early. There was nothing much to say.

Perry gave Liz a ride home and she invited him in for coffee

“Do you have any of that brandy left?” he asked.

She smiled.

He settled himself on the couch this time, feeling an anxious, aching mixture of anger, frustration, and lust.

It was the first time he’d been to bed with any other woman since he met Jane more than five years before. He told himself that she was the one, after all, who had left him, had physically left his bed and living quarters and gone back clear across the country by her own choice. He had nothing to feel guilty about, he assured himself.