Leading Man (11 page)

I wanted to strangle King with his own suspenders. But I knew that Samantha was lying. She had let slip the truth during one of our late-night talks. It might have been a symptom of the cancer, or a side effect of the unorthodox treatments he was taking, but Johnny was all but dead below the waist. At first, I have to admit, that news had me cheering inside. For years the thought of that big oaf defiling my darling Samantha had been fueling my nightmares—at least that part of my torture was finally over. But then, as I thought about it more, I started to feel something odd. Something I never would have guessed I was capable of feeling. I felt sorry for the guy. The fact that Johnny Mars would never again be able to make love to my ex-girlfriend made me sad. How weird is that?

That fall, my dad had a heart attack. He’d been raking the backyard when a shooting pain in his chest knocked him to his knees. I got the news from the neighbor who found him in a pile of leaves, unconscious. My father was at White Plains Hospital, the neighbor told me over the phone. Alive, as far as he knew.

I hailed a yellow cab outside the
KNOW
building and had the driver take me all the way to White Plains. It was faster than the commuter train. It took a while to find his room—turned out there were two Robert Lerners listed as patients, but Dad wasn’t the one having a vasectomy. He was sleeping when I tiptoed in. He looked pale as a ghost. There were tubes coming out of his nose and others going into his arm. An EKG machine beeped softly at his bedside. A doctor in green hospital scrubs gently tapped my shoulder and led me into the corridor. “He’s going to be okay,” he said. “It was a posterior myocardial infarction, which is bad, but not the worst kind of heart attack. We’ll
monitor him here for a couple of days, but he’ll need help when he goes home. He’ll need a nurse.”

“He’s going to hate that,” I said. “He doesn’t even like having a cleaning lady in the house.”

“He’s going to have to make some changes,” the doctor went on. “He’s going to have to change his diet and start exercising.”

“He’s pretty set in his ways,” I said. “He’s not great with change.”

“How great is he with death?” the doctor asked.

I went back into Dad’s room and sat in a chair for a while, watching him breathe. I realized I couldn’t remember ever seeing my father sleep before. Eventually, a nurse came in to tell me visiting hours were almost up. I opened the closet door and hunted through Dad’s clothes until I found his house keys. For the first time in fifteen years, I’d be spending the night in Shady Hill, in my attic room above the garage.

The ancestral abode was exactly as I remembered it. In fact, all of Shady Hill seemed frozen in time. Nothing had changed. The same picket fences around the same houses, the same well-groomed yards, the same dogwood and oak trees. In Manhattan, neighborhoods rise and fall in the span of a decade, but the suburbs are eternal.

I saw my father once or twice a year, but it was always in New York, at the Russian Tea Room or the ‘21’ Club or one of the other antediluvian establishments he’d dined in during his Madison Avenue days. It was more comfortable for both of us. He didn’t like visitors and I had zero
emotional attachment to the house I grew up in. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d set foot in the place. Five years? Ten? Looking around now, I noticed that Dad hadn’t redecorated much. When something broke or wore out, he simply replaced it with as close a match as he could find. I don’t think he was being sentimental about my mother’s furniture. It was just easier to keep things the same. The only new additions to the decor were the flat-screen TV in the den that I’d sent him for Christmas two years ago and a golf putting set in the living room. I didn’t even know Dad played.

Judging from the way the door stuck, my old room hadn’t seen much foot traffic since the day I left for college. When I finally pried it open, I felt like I was cracking the seals on an ancient tomb. Inside were the artifacts of my teenhood, perfectly preserved through the ages. The bookshelf by the window was still filled with dog-eared Ian Fleming and Alistair MacLean paperbacks. On my desk was a first-generation Macintosh computer (I was always an early adopter), and on the wall above that was the faded blank space where I had once tacked up a Jack Montana movie poster. Dad had apparently entered the room from time to time; he had turned one corner into a storage hold. There was a stack of cardboard boxes. When I looked inside, I saw they contained every copy of
KNOW
magazine that had my byline. Dad had been collecting my stories. I sat down on the small bed. The springs creaked so loudly it startled me to my feet. Maybe I’d sleep on the sofa downstairs.

The refrigerator contained pretty much what you’d expect from the home of a widowed seventy-year-old
retiree: A half-empty jar of martini olives and some old salami. Fortunately, there was also a six-pack of beer. I was about to open one when I heard a short burst of musical beeps—was that “Swanee River”?—coming from the basement. How weird. Like every idiot victim in every cheesy slasher film I’d ever seen, I opened the basement door and slowly stepped down the stairs. Except there wasn’t a serial killer in a hockey mask waiting for me. Dad had recently bought a new clothes dryer that played a little ditty to let you know its drying cycle was done, and then repeated it every thirty minutes until the dryer was shut off. Dad had obviously been doing a load of laundry while raking the backyard. I had to give the guy credit for keeping busy.

I shut off the dryer, but before I climbed back up the stairs, I happened to glance over at Dad’s workshop table. There were bundles of old letters scattered on its surface. They were all in my mother’s soft, flowing hand. I picked one up and noted the date—January 16, 1967—three years before my birth. Some were dated earlier, others later. I sat down on a stool and started reading. What was in them wasn’t always very interesting. The letters written during their courtship were filled with minutiae about rendezvous arrangements at train stations and airports—the sort of details modern-day lovers send via text message. But there were also anniversary cards and birthday poems and other corny notes scribbled after they were well into their marriage, before my mother’s car accident. Next to the table, there was a dusty trunk filled with even more letters. It broke my heart. After all those years since her
death, Dad still climbed down into the basement to spend time with Mom.

I decided to get out of the house for some fresh air before the sun set. Without really thinking about it, I found myself taking a stroll down memory lane—literally. I walked the six blocks to Sammy’s old house, where her parents still lived. I knew the route so well I could have made the trip with my eyes closed and walking backward.

I hesitated before ringing the bell. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Sammy’s parents. I wasn’t sure how they’d feel about a blast from their daughter’s past turning up on their doorstep, but I needn’t have worried. “Oh, come in, come in!” Sam’s mom said, as if she’d been expecting me. The house was still a study in chaos. A cat zoomed out the door, pursued by a dog. Another cat was playing a free-form jazz tune by walking on the piano keys in the living room. Sammy’s dad was sitting on a La-Z-Boy in the den, watching an old
I Spy
rerun on TV. We had always bonded over our mutual love of crappy espionage shows (and of his daughter). Nothing had changed here, either. Until I looked a bit closer. There were framed pictures of Sammy and Johnny all over the place. I also noticed that the bookshelves in the den, which used to be cluttered with unread Book-of-the-Month Club editions, now held a tidy row of neatly labeled DVD cases. “Sammy Age 12,” one of them was marked. “Sammy skiing in Vermont,” said another. They looked brand-new.

“
20/20
is doing an interview with Samantha next month and they went through all our home movies looking for footage of her as a kid,” Sam’s dad explained
when he saw me checking out the DVDs. “We gave them boxes and boxes of old videotape I found in our attic, and they brought us back these. They practically indexed every frame. Want to see one?” I had a private coronary while I tried to remember what Sammy did with a particular home video we’d made together in college, but was quickly distracted by the scene that sparkled to life on the TV screen. It was an image of ten-year-old Sammy at a beach, trying to coax her younger sister into the waves. “Cape Cod,” her dad said. “Summer of 1980.”

“Show him the prom,” Sammy’s mom said, laughing. “That one is priceless.”

Sammy’s dad switched discs and there we were—Sammy and me at eighteen, standing in her parents’ driveway in front of a hired limo. I was going through a punk stage and had on a midnight blue tuxedo, a black ruffled shirt, and a red skinny tie. Sammy had squirted enough petroleum jelly in my hair to fill the
Exxon Valdez
and had given me a spiky ’do that she thought was trendy. I looked like Sid Vicious on the way to a black-tie circus. But Sammy was beautiful in the cream-colored silk gown she had borrowed from her older sister. Fifteen years later, sitting in her parents’ den, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. “This isn’t going to turn up on
20/20
, is it?” I asked her dad.

“No, I’m saving this one in case we ever need to blackmail you.”

“Dad, you’re not dying.”

“How do you know?” my father asked, adjusting the
angle of his hospital bed with the remote control for the fiftieth time that morning. The tubes were gone from his nose and arm and the color had returned to his face. But he was sure he was a goner.

“Because the doctors say you’ll be fine,” I told him. “You need rest and a proper diet. And a nurse. We have to find you a nurse.”

“I don’t need a nurse,” he said. “I need a funeral director. I’m not making it out of this room alive …”

“Dad, if you don’t knock it off with the adjustable bed, I’ll make sure you need a funeral director. Give me that thing.”

I loved the guy—he was my dad—but he drove me nuts. Not to be disloyal to my mom, but I think even she would have wished that he’d fallen in love and remarried after her death. Twenty-five years of solitary widowerhood had made him as sad and hard as a gravestone. He still hadn’t gotten over her. He brought her up every time we spoke. Granted, Mom was pretty much the only thing we had in common, especially after I left the house to make my way in the world, but the truth was I barely remembered her. All I had were fleeting sensory ghosts. The sound of her laughing. The softness of her hair. The warmth of her touch. I was only eight when she died. I hardly knew her.

“You look more and more like her every year,” my dad said.

“Dad, please,” I said, rolling my eyes.

“That’s a compliment, kid. Your mother was a beautiful woman. You know she was in
Life
magazine—”

“In a toothpaste advertisement, I know,” I interrupted
him. “Dad, look, I went down into the basement yesterday, and I saw the letters.”

“You’re snooping around in my house?” He grabbed the remote out of my hand and raised the back of the bed in order to confront me. The adjustment took several seconds, somewhat undercutting the effect. “I don’t snoop around in your house! Why are you snooping in mine?”

“I was turning off the dryer—it kept beeping at me. And I saw the letters. I’m concerned about you, Dad. It’s not healthy. Mom’s been gone a long time. You really need to let her go. Maybe even meet someone else. It’s not too late.”

“Ha!” he snorted. “That’s funny. I’m seventy years old. I’m not about to start picking up chicks at discotheques. No, Max, I made my choice. I chose your mother. It was the best choice I ever made, no matter what happened. But look who’s talking! What about you? When are you going to make a choice? You’re thirty-one years old—”

“Thirty-four,” I corrected him.

“That’s what I’m saying. You’re in your mid-thirties and you still haven’t found the right girl.”

“How do you know I haven’t found her?” I said. “Maybe I have found her but just can’t have her. Maybe I had her but she was taken from me.”

“That girl who married the movie star? The one who lived down the street? Samantha?”

I nodded.

“She made her choice, Max, and it wasn’t you. That means she wasn’t the right girl.” He motioned me to come closer. “Find the right girl, son. She’s out there somewhere. Just open your eyes.” He reached up and affectionately
ruffled my hair, just like he did when I was a boy. Then he started playing with the bed’s remote control again.

A few days later, I got a late-night call from Samantha. Her parents must have told her about my father being sick. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I hope he’s doing better. Remember when we were fifteen and he drove us to that Duran Duran concert and spent the whole night sitting in the car in the parking lot? The poor guy. I always felt bad for him. He never got over your mom.”

“Well, you know, we Lerner men—we mate for life,” I said.

We talked for an hour, our longest conversation in months, and would have talked longer except Sammy had to catch a flight in the morning to Wyoming. They were selling the ranch—the bills from Korean doctors were piling up—and she needed to be there to close the deal. But we arranged to have dinner when she got back to New York, just like old times. It would be our first meeting since before Johnny got diagnosed with brain cancer.

“Nine, four, four, double-B, D, C,” Samantha said.

“Pardon?” I replied.

“Nine, four, four, double-B, D, C,” she repeated, flustered and irritated. “That’s the license plate of the black SUV that’s circling the block right now. It followed me to the restaurant. It’s a photographer. He goes wherever I go, day and night. He’s made Johnny his specialty. Except Johnny hardly ever leaves the apartment, so he ends up taking three hundred pictures of me every day.”

We had just settled into a booth at a restaurant on Eighth Avenue in the Theater District, not far from
KNOW
’s offices. Holiday decorations were up all over the city. The tree at Rockefeller Center was sparkling with shiny balls. The Cartier Building was wrapped in a giant red ribbon. The mannequins in Barneys’ windows were strangling each other with Christmas lights. And the Italian bistro where Sammy and I were meeting had hung sprigs of mistletoe above all the tables. I pointed ours out to Sammy as she slipped out of her coat. She smiled and
planted a kiss on my cheek. Then she continued on about the photographer in the SUV.