Benchley, Peter - Novel 07 (10 page)

 
          
 
into a wail of despair, punctuated by a crash
and some muted rhythmic thumps.

 
          
 
Marcia smiled at Preston and said, "See?
Therapy can be a real blast."

 
          
 
DUKE FLATTENED HIMSELF against the wall and
covered his ears to blunt the blades of pain that the tumult before him was
inflicting on his tequila-ravaged brain. Maybe he'd picked wrong; maybe he
should've gone to jail. Treatment was supposed to be mellow, soothing. Nobody'd
told him therapy was war.

 
          
 
He wished he could be absorbed by the paint.
Yet he wouldn't have wanted to miss this. It was better than Animal House,
something to regale his children with (children, that is, if Clarisse would
ever again give him access to her pearly gates). It was just that he wanted to
be a spectator, not a player, and he knew that as long as he was visible,
somebody was going to insist that he join the group grope. These people were
like the Red Chinese: We all work together or we don't work at all. You say you
want to march to your own tune, they grab you by the flute and stick it up your
ass till you agree to play the national anthem along with everybody else.

 
          
 
He couldn't remember exactly how it had
happened, but somehow this tedious therapy session—everybody mumbling about how
they were prisoners of alcohol or how the demon cocaine still visited them in
their dreams; he thought he'd go off his tree listening to all the whining—had
suddenly exploded like a skyrocket. Somebody had said something about somebody
else being uptight and superior. Then some other person had said you can't go
out into the world thinking you're better or even different because that leads
to isolation, which is a prescription for failure. Then the object of all this
said she was sick of being picked on and she felt like kicking the shit out of
all of them, and then Dan, the counselor, said something like "Why don't
you, then?" and WHAM!—like when a fist hits a mirror, the place was a
shambles.

 
          
 
The folding chairs had been kicked back and
cast aside. Six people were bunched on the floor, as if praying to the God of
Weird. One of them—Dan, the escapee from Woodstock, with his scruffy beard and
granny glasses—was holding a chair and encouraging a fiftyish woman who looked
like a rejected bratwurst (overstuffed in all the wrong places) to beat the
crap out of it with a stuffed cloth baseball bat. And not just any fiftyish
woman. This was NATASHA GRANT (or her remains, anyway), one of the great movie
stars of the past forty years, who had defined glamour for two generations, who
had had too much too soon and too often, and who had always believed that she
was the fantasy creature described in press releases, a belief difficult to
sustain when the press releases started describing how she had been fired from
this picture and that TV show for being smashed, stoned or simply bloated.

 
          
 
Now this raving beauty over whose image Duke
and countless millions of other ambitious lads had pulled their puds was
nothing more than raving—a frowzy, frazzled fishwife gone berserk, howling,
weeping and cursing. At a chair.

 
          
 
The four other votaries—including a man whom
Duke recognized as a former Padres shortstop named Clarence Crosby—were all
clustered around Natasha, shouting, "We love you, Nat!" and
"Feel the love, Natasha!" and trying to pat and hug her, which was a
dangerous game, since Natasha was flailing like a dervish, waving that club,
which, if it caught you right, could do damage, no question, especially to the
face or the balls.

 
          
 
Dan ducked behind the back of the chair to
keep from having his nose pulped, and when he peeked out from a new angle he
spied Duke.

 
          
 
"Duke! Get in here!"

 
          
 
"Me?" Duke didn't move.

 
          
 
"Get in here! Now!"

 
          
 
"But what am I—"

 
          
 
"Tell Natasha how much you love
her!" Dan ducked as the club skinned the top of his head and Natasha
shrilled like a stepped-on dog.

 
          
 
"Oh . . . right." Duke took a couple
of steps forward. / haven't even been introduced to the woman. Why should she
believe I love her? Maybe I should offer to show her my sheets. He kneeled down
and tried to nudge his way into the mass of thrashing arms and legs, but a
little butterball of a woman—all Duke knew about her from this one session was
that she was a hairstylist who still had nightmares about how she had permed an
entire glorious head of hair off her best customer while ripped on Gallo
chablis—hip-checked him and blocked his way.

 
          
 
"You're new," Butterball sniffed.
"You can't love her as much as I do."

 
          
 
"Right you are," Duke said, and he
backed off.

 
          
 
Dan poked his head up. "Duke!" WHOP!
Natasha swung the club and clipped just enough of him to knock his granny
glasses across the room and into the leaves of a rubber-tree plant. He ducked
down again and shouted from his refuge behind the chair. "Duke! I'm
warning you! Participate!”

 
          
 
"You're the boss." Duke dropped to
his knees again and pushed forward.

 
          
 
Butterball wasn't having a bit of it. "You
don't even know what love is!" She hit Duke with her hip.

 
          
 
"Sister, I'll be brutally frank with
you," Duke said. "I don't give a shit." Then he feinted with a
little dipsy-do and whacked Butterball with his own hip.

 
          
 
Because he was taller than she, and stronger,
and because Butterball was off balance, she pitched face forward directly on
top of the box-office queen, who, with an enraged yelp, was driven forward into
the chair and knocked it up on two legs so that it, in turn, collapsed onto
Dan. Two other worshipers, evidently assuming that this was all part of the
script, piled on, shrieking, "Natasha! Natasha! We love you!" and
"I feel the love all over!''

 
          
 
From somewhere far away, muffled by upholstery
and flesh, Dan could be heard crying, "I think that's enough for today!"

 
          
 
Duke rolled to his feet and surveyed the
wreckage.

 
          
 
Clarence Crosby crawled free and joined him.
"Man! What you make of that? That's love!”

 
          
 
"I think it's time to break for a
gin-and-tonic and a shrimp salad," Duke said.

 
          
 
And then the voice that had cooed to a billion
ears in half a hundred films over two-score years called out, "Get the
fuck offa me! I think you broke my goddam leg!”

 
          
 
Marcia knelt before Cheryl's chair and held
Cheryl's hands and looked up into her face as if hoping to lure her eyes out
from their hiding places. "Don't grieve for it," Marcia said.
"Cherish it. It was a sober friendship and it was wonderful. There'll be
others."

 
          
 
"Maybe." Cheryl wouldn't free her
eyes to look Marcia. "Maybe not for me."

 
          
 
Marcia sighed. Without turning around she said
"What do you think, Scott?"

 
          
 
What did he think? What would anybody think?
This is a sad, sick little girl. But he couldn't say that. " think ... I
think maybe it's wrong ... no, I don'1 mean wrong, but . . . maybe it doesn't
do any good t( worry about what's going to happen . . . maybe it's better to be
happy for what has happened, and to have hope." Oh shit. I've probably
said something asinine, Now Marcia 'II whip around and kick me in the teeth.

 
          
 
Marcia didn't react to him at all. She stroked
Cheryl's hands and said, "Do you hear what Scott's saying? He may not know
it, but what he's saying is, One day at time. That's the only way we can make
it, any of us By being grateful for every day we've had and living today the
best we can. One day at a time."

 
          
 
Cheryl nodded.

 
          
 
Lewis wrapped an arm around her again and said
"It's higher-power time, hon."

 
          
 
Marcia looked at her watch, stood up and
extended her arms out to the sides.

 
          
 
Immediately the others stood too. Hector took
one of Marcia's hands and held his other out to Cheryl, who took it and held
her other out to Lewis, who took it and held his other out to Preston.

 
          
 
What now, O Lord? Ring-around-a-rosy?
Preston
let Lewis take his hand, felt him squeeze
it, conquered an impulse to snatch it back and wipe it on his trousers and jam
it into his pocket. Marcia took his other hand.

 
          
 
They bowed their heads and (with Preston
humming in incoherent harmony) together prayed, "God, grant me the
serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things
I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. . . . Amen."

 
          
 
Nice, Preston thought, and he was about to ask
Marcia who had written the prayer when Lewis suddenly spun on him and embraced
him and said, "Welcome, welcome. . . . You'll find love here."

 
          
 
Help! Preston panicked. The guy's flipped his
wig. Holding hands was too much for him,
Preston
's arms stuck out like branches, his hands
flopped helplessly. He thought of tripping Lewis, throwing him to the floor, subduing
him till medical help could be summoned.

 
          
 
Then he saw, over Lewis's shoulder, that
Hector was embracing Marcia, that Marcia then embraced Cheryl, that Cheryl then
embraced Hector.

 
          
 
I guess it's hug time. Tentatively, he let his
hands pat Lewis on the back. Abruptly Lewis pulled away and was replaced by
Hector, who obviously didn't like hugging men any more than Preston did and
squeezed him quickly and violently—like crushing a fly—and pulled away, to be
replaced by Cheryl, who flitted in and out of his arms like a hummingbird.

 
          
 
Marcia hugged him last. He did his best to
respond, but it wasn't much—about as convincing as social kissy-face in the
Grill Room at The Four Seasons.

 
          
 
Marcia knew. She winked at him and said, ''You
are one hard-ass nut to crack. But I'm gonna do it."

 
          
 
The doors to the two therapy rooms opened
simultaneously, and as the patients poured out there was the instantaneous
combustion of a dozen cigarettes.

 
          
 
“You look like shit," Duke said to
Preston
.

 
          
 
“Thanks." He glanced over Duke's
shoulder. "Hey! Did that used to be Natasha Grant?"

 
          
 
"Don't get in her way," Duke said.
"She makes Clarisse look like Mary Poppins."

 
          
 
"I was going to marry her, live in her
mansion and cover her with unguents." Preston couldn't take his eyes off
her. "She could be somebody's maid."

 
          
 
"She was never true to you. All the time
you thought you were her one and only, I was boffing her brains out."

 
          
 
The crowd was ambling toward the front door,
and they followed.

 
          
 
Preston said, "It sounded like you were
playing rugby in there."