Looking for a Love Story (5 page)

“The shrink part is a good thing if he’s going to marry me,” my mother told Pete and me with a grin. But then she blushed and her eyes filled with tears as she added, “I never thought I’d meet another man who wanted to give me a try. I’m so grateful to him. Isn’t that amazing?”

Pete and I both nodded. But I wanted to ask where the hell she’d been keeping this dewy-eyed part of her personality all my life. I mean, while I was running around with boyfriends from the Dark Side it would have been nice if I could have had a chat with my mom about what to look for in a guy. But I’d met Jake, so it had all worked out in the end.

Pete had news of his own. He’d fallen in love with an evolutionary biologist named Bonita who shared his commitment to the environment and the betterment of emerging nations, and since she was two months pregnant they were getting married.

Mother, Pete, and I toasted one another, and I thanked God once more for Jake and
Love, Max
, because if my brilliant, handsome baby brother had found true love and was starting a family while I was still living at home and earning nada, running props at the Well of Loneliness Theater, I would have been suicidal. And yes, I do know how petty and immature that sounds.

The day after Jake and I got engaged, I made a decision about something that had been nagging at me for a while. I hadn’t yet shown
Love, Max
to my mother, but now it was due to hit the stores in a couple of weeks. “I have to give Alexandra an advance copy to read,” I told Jake. And I could hear the marshmallow fluff coming into my voice.

“What are you so afraid of?” Jake had read the book by then, and he said he thought it would sell big. Back in those days, Jake was all about being supportive.

“I’m afraid she’ll think the story is inconsequential,” I told him.

But that wasn’t my only reason for putting off showing it to my
mother. I tried to explain my biggest fear to Nancy. “The story isn’t about my mother and my father. Not really. Not totally. But—”

“But it’s based on them—loosely. And now you’re afraid your mother will recognize herself. Trust me, it’ll never happen. The only time people think you wrote about them is when you didn’t.”

Nancy was right—and she wasn’t. I gave Alexandra a copy of the book on a Wednesday and, knowing her packed schedule, I didn’t expect to hear from her for weeks. On Sunday morning, she showed up at my doorstep carrying what looked like a duffel bag with holes in the side and my book. There were tears in her eyes. “Oh, Francesca, honey,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” She dropped the duffel bag and held out the book. “I never knew how you felt.”

I promised myself that the next time I saw Nancy I was going to strangle her.

“It was a long time ago,” I started to say, “and”—but my mother had gotten down on her knees and was unzipping the duffel bag.

“I never knew how much you missed having a dog after ours went with your father to California,” said my mother, as a puppy with humongous feet emerged. “I know it’s a few years after the fact, but better late than never, right?” she asked hopefully. She beamed down at the puppy. “Lenny and I picked her up in a shelter on Long Island. I couldn’t call her Max, because she’s a girl, so I named her Annie, after my mother.”

I need to take a moment to make it clear what this meant. My mother almost never mentioned her birth mother, but when she was a kid she’d had all these fantasies about Annie. Little Alexandra Karras’s dream mommy was a mix of Eleanor Roosevelt, Marie Curie, and Mother Teresa—with a little Wonder Woman thrown in. And although my mother had matured since then, I knew in her heart the dream still lived. In fact, I always thought my
mother’s career as a female Lone Ranger was a tribute to Annie, who once told her—with great pride—that her name, Alexandra, meant
defender of mankind
in Greek. Mother was three at the time, and Annie died shortly afterward, but the memory was one my mother cherished. When she named my new dog Annie, I knew it was a really big deal. So even though Jake and I had never discussed getting a pet, I said, “Oh Mother, a puppy! She’s just what I wanted!” Come on, what would you have done?

CHAPTER 5

Our apartment building came into sight as the sun was just starting to set. I figured by now Jake would be back home getting ready for the awards dinner, so I took out my cell phone and called to tell him I was on my way. There was no answer on our landline. That was a little strange, but I thought maybe he was taking Annie out for her evening potty break. It wasn’t something he usually did, since he had agreed to keep her only because I said she was my dog and therefore my responsibility, but he could have decided to surprise me. I called his cell. It was turned off. I wondered if he’d started for the awards ceremony without me. I checked my watch; it was way too early. I started walking faster again. There had been a time—when we were first married—when Jake wouldn’t have dreamed of taking off without telling me where he was going and when he would be back. And, come to think of it, I wouldn’t have gone wandering through the park without
letting him know. We always kissed each other good-bye back then. Back then, when I was a success, and Jake was proud of me.

MY SUCCESS BEGAN
before
Love, Max
even went on sale. It started with a phone call from Nancy. I’d been running in the park with Annie—yeah, we both jogged in those days—and I came back to find a message on my machine saying that a Hollywood producer was in town and she wanted to take a breakfast meeting with me to discuss making my book into a TV movie. The phrase
take a meeting
sounded so official and scary that I asked Jake to come along because he had experience with show-business people. That was how we met Andrea Grace. Given everything I’d heard about how young everyone was in the entertainment industry, I expected her to be a baby. But Andy was a year older than Jake, and she was a knockout. Her thick chestnut hair was pulled back into a low bun, and Sheryl would have killed for the name of the genius who’d done her highlights. I would have killed for a figure like hers, without an ounce of fat. Her brown eyes were big and warm, and she was one of those rare women who can make wearing eyeglasses seem chic. When we shook hands she did that two-handed thing that falls somewhere between a shake and a clasp and told us to call her Andy, in a voice that reminded me of old-time movie stars like Greer Garson and Irene Dunne. She asked us to sit.

“If the producing thing doesn’t work out for you, I’d say you’ve got a career in voice-overs, Andy,” said my husband. She laughed delightedly. That was another of her skills: She was the kind of person who laughed so genuinely at your jokes that you actually got funnier.

We talked briefly about what happens when a producer options a book. Andy explained that she would put down ten percent of the purchase price—which she would negotiate with Nancy—to
secure the rights to
Love, Max
. This option would last for a year, during which time she’d try to sell one of the networks on the idea of making the book into a movie. She’d also try to interest a couple of big-name actors. If none of this worked out, the rights to
Love, Max
would revert to me. If the project was
green-lighted
, Andy would be my new producer.

“Of course I’m not promising anything, because this business is a floating crap game, but I really think I can make this happen, Francesca,” she said.

I was already seeing my name on a credit crawl. Maybe I’d get to go to the Emmys.

“Now, tell me how you visualize
Love, Max
the movie,” Andy said. “Who do you see as the leads?”

I didn’t. For me, the characters were so tied to real people I couldn’t imagine anyone playing them. But before I had to admit that, Jake stepped in with a list of names I never would have thought of in a million years. Soon he and Andy were chatting merrily about directors and writers and which actor should do the dog’s voice-overs. When the breakfast was over, Andy kissed us both good-bye like we were long-lost relatives. Later, Nancy said she was able to up the option price for the book by twenty-five thousand dollars because Jake did such a good job of charming Andy. Talk about the perfect husband.

Getting optioned by a Hollywood producer was just the beginning for my book. I’m not going to say
Love, Max
was a huge John Grisham–sized success, but it was an impressive debut novel. Everyone agreed on that. And the momentum kept growing. When I went on my book tour, the salespeople in the bookstores told me they couldn’t keep it on the shelves. I spoke at libraries where the lists of people who were waiting to take it out were so long they’d had to order more copies.

Everywhere I went, I wore false lashes and piled up my hair
on top of my head with a few sexy tendrils hanging down. And if there were days, even back then, when spending an hour and twenty minutes making up my face, and gluing the damn lashes to my eyelids—not to mention the time I almost glued one to my eyeball—seemed like a total waste of time, and if I got sick of remembering to schlep three different kinds of hair straightener around the country, I told myself it was worth it. Certainly Jake thought it was. He flew to be with me whenever he had a free day, because he said I needed an entourage. I felt like a rock star—most of the time. Sometimes, like I’ve said, I felt like none of it was real and I was waiting for some cosmic second shoe to drop. But I kept that to myself. (Life lesson: When you’re on a roll, no one wants to hear about your angst.)

GRAMERCY PUBLISHING DID
six printings of my book.
People
magazine did an article on me.
Love, Max
made the
New York Times
bestseller list for the entire month of August. Grant you, the book never got out of the bottom half, but it was on the list. Gramercy was thrilled with me. Sheryl was thrilled. So were Alexandra and Pete. And Jake couldn’t tell me often enough how much he loved me.

Jake sold his loft apartment—it was pretty heavily mortgaged so there was only a tiny profit—and I sold the co-op I’d bought with my advance check for
Love, Max
. We took that money, plus the inheritance from Dad that I’d been saving for a rainy day, and bought our palace on the Upper East Side. Somehow it seemed ungrateful to save for a rainy day when the universe was handing us so many goodies. We ate out almost every night, and we went to lots of parties.

“I feel like I’m in my Sheryl phase,” I told my stepmother on the phone.

“But you’re not like me,” she said.

“Okay, then I’m in my Cheerleader phase.”

“You never were the cheerleader type either.”

“People change.”

I wanted to believe that. Well, maybe I missed the old me sometimes, but mostly I wanted to believe I was part of this sparkly new creature called Jake-and-Francesca. I’m not saying we were one of those high-profile couples who have to fight off the paparazzi at the airport—for one thing, we didn’t travel much—but Jake felt we were getting there.

“Getting where?” I asked him on New Year’s Eve, when we were dressing for a party at some museum.

“Oh, come on, Francesca, it’s a figure of speech. Don’t always pick things apart.” Jake hated it when I did that.

“I’m serious. What are we aiming for? How far up the food chain do we want to go?”

“As far as we can.”

“There will always be someone above us. This is Manhattan.”

“You’re just bitching because you hate New Year’s Eve.”

That was true. I’d spent too many years home alone on one of the great date nights of the calendar. December 31 was way too much pressure for my taste. I’ve always felt the same way about Valentine’s Day. But now Jake grabbed me and led me to the mirror. “What do you see?” he demanded.

The couple that smiled back at me was
New York Magazine
glamorous. Jake was wearing a tux and looked like he’d just stepped out of the pages of
GQ
. I’d had my hair and makeup done at the hot salon du jour, and my gown was a flattering pink—I’d settled on pink as my signature color. I knew I was never going to look better than I did at that moment. And if somewhere in the back of my head I heard Alexandra’s voice saying that focusing
women’s attention on their looks was society’s way of keeping them chained intellectually, I told the voice to lay off.

“We’re pretty spiffy,” I said.

“We’re going to own this town before we’re through.” He laughed happily. When Jake laughed like that, I could believe anything.

WE CONTINUED TO
do the social whirl. We went to the opening nights of galleries, Broadway shows, and designer boutiques. I became a part of a group of women—all movers and shakers—who got together once a month for dinner in wildly overpriced restaurants.

“I’ve made some friends,” I told Sheryl on the phone, knowing she’d be as surprised as I was. I’ve never been Miss Popularity.

There were reasons for that. During my teen years, I’d gone to a progressive private high school, and since there were only forty-nine students in the entire school you were either in or you weren’t. We had classrooms without walls and called our teachers by their first names, there were no written grades, and the dress code mandated only that we wear shoes every day. Sports were considered deeply uncool; that was the sort of thing kids did who lived in those parts of the country where people voted Republican. This was the kind of thinking that went on in my own home, so it wasn’t new to me. However, the other students at my school were mostly from families that successfully did creative things like act and write and paint—which meant they were rich and nuts—and I didn’t fit that mold; my mother couldn’t afford to send me to Aspen to ski during the Christmas break, and I wasn’t doing drugs. I hadn’t made one lasting friend, either in high school or in my equally progressive and nutsy small college. As for the years after
college, I believe I’ve mentioned that I worked almost exclusively for my mother’s friends.