My Lucky Star (2 page)

We’d been friends back in high school, though only briefly as we’d moved in very different circles. Chuck had been the brightest
member of the football-playing, cheerleader-groping set, while I had been a leading light of the sarcastic, underwear-ad-ogling
theater crowd. He’d crossed lines once, gamely agreeing to play the braggart warrior Miles Gloriosus in
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
when our own group failed to produce a single nonrisible candidate for the role.

I scrutinized his face, which seemed different, improved in some way.

“You’re looking at my nose, right?” he said with a laugh. “I broke it boxing a few times. They kept having to reset it.”

“Ah,” I said, wondering what it must be like to live so charmed a life that facial injuries only made you handsomer.

“Look at you.” I grinned. “Mr. Big Shot Lawyer.”

“Not so big, trust me. How ’bout you? Still writing plays?”

“Just did one.”

“That’s great! How’d it go?”

“Really well,” I said. “Big hit.”

It was the sort of fib I might have gotten away with had we met at a cocktail party and I was wearing the secondhand yet stylish
jacket Gilbert calls my Salvation Armani. The problem was we
weren’t
at a cocktail party. We were in the stately foyer of his white-shoe law firm and I was wearing faded jeans, waterlogged Nikes,
and a gray polo shirt adorned with my company’s logo, a zealous, bucktoothed rabbit in a mauve tracksuit. In short, I was
in no position to swank.

Charlie, bless him, managed to say “Great” without a trace of irony, but the receptionist, who’d never liked me, didn’t even
try to keep her eyebrows in neutral. Mortified, I averted my gaze, which landed on the foyer’s large gilt mirror.

I spoke earlier of moments that carry a great symbolic weight. This was unquestionably such a moment. There we stood, Charlie
looking straight out of a Barneys catalog and I in my soggy ensemble from the
Grapes of Wrath
Collection. So perfectly did we exemplify our divergent fortunes that we might have been allegorical figures from some medieval
morality play, with Charlie starring as Diligence Rewarded and self in the cameo role of Dashed Hopes.

“So,” said Charlie as the blood drained from my face, “been in New York long?”

“Since school,” I mumbled, searching for a way to say that, while I was enjoying our chat, I should really get going as I’d
be needing to burst into tears soon. The receptionist, more eager to rescue Charlie than me, reminded him of an impending
meeting.

“Gotta run. But hey, let me know next time you’ve got a show on.”

“You bet.”

“My wife loves the theater. In fact that’s what you just brought me—tickets for this new musical. Friend of mine couldn’t
use ’em.”

“Ah.”

“Maybe you’ve heard of it?” he said, then smacked his forehead comically. “What am I saying? Of course you have. It’s by Marlowe
— you know, Marlowe Heppenstall from school? Are you two still in touch?”

W
HEN SUCH MOMENTS BEFALL US
, we have, of course, two options. We can say “Fiddle-dee-dee” and shrug it off or we can surrender entirely to self-lacerating
despair. I chose the latter course and, after walking sixty blocks in the rain to my small, unkempt apartment, settled into
a chair with a nice view of the air shaft to contemplate my future.

It did not look bright.

I was twenty-nine. This meant I was still technically a young man, though no longer
young
young, thirty being, as everyone under it knows, the middle age of youth. True middle age was still reasonably distant, though
not, as it had once been, unimaginably so.

My career to date had consisted of a frustrating series of near misses. While I’d never had any trouble imagining the ultimate
breakthrough, it was now equally easy to picture this dispiriting pattern repeating itself till I woke one day to find I’d
become that most poignant figure the theater has to offer, the Struggling Old Playwright.

I’d met my share of them, bloated pasty fellows, doggedly upbeat or surly and embittered, haunting the workshops and readings
where their younger brethren gathered. I’d seen them in theater-district bars, cadging drinks while boasting of their latest
effort, often a retooling of some earlier work culled from the trunk and reread with a parent’s myopic affection.

“Amazing how well it holds up! Why it’s more timely now than when I wrote it. Can’t believe Playwrights passed on it back
then. Just as well though since Streep was too young at the time to play Fiona and she’d be perfect now. Damn, left my wallet
home.”

There was one especially Falstaffian old gasbag whom Gilbert and I had often observed in our favorite watering hole. Not knowing
his name, we’d christened him Milo. In my imagination, which had grown uncontrollably morbid, I pictured him twenty years
from now, older, fatter, but still warming the same bar stool. I watched him turn toward the bar’s entrance, his blubbery
lips parting in a smile of welcome. He patted the stool next to his with a nicotine-stained hand and bid the weary newcomer
welcome.

“Philip! We’ve been wondering where you were. Wouldn’t be a proper Friday without you. Sorry I missed your birthday bash at
the Ground Round. Any word from MTC on the new one?...The philistines!... How awkwardly you’re holding your glass —the old
carpal tunnel acting up again? Well then, here’s a bug I’ll just put in your ear—you tell Blue Cross they can stuff their
job, then come join me behind the necktie counter at Saks! What fun we’ll have, discussing our plays and ogling the young
ones! I tell you, Philip, the days just fly by!”

This ghastly reverie was mercifully interrupted by the shrill buzz of my intercom. I shambled to the door and asked who it
was.

“It’s me,” said Claire through the crackle of static. “Can I come up?”

I buzzed her in, relieved to have a sympathetic listener to whom I could relate the day’s tragic events. You can imagine my
chagrin then when she burst melodramatically through the door, her mood apparently even fouler than my own.

“It’s over!” she declared hotly, stabbing her umbrella into the orange crate that served as a stand.

“Oh?”

“I mean it this time. He saw her again!”

“He,” I knew, referred to her boyfriend, Marco, a very hirsute ceramist Gilbert and I had nicknamed “Hairy Potter.” “Her”
could have referred to either of his two former girlfriends. Since moving in with Claire he’d vowed to put them both behind
him, though when he met one he tended to put her beneath him. Claire did not elaborate. She just removed her raincoat and
hurled herself onto my couch, where she sat, arms crossed, awaiting compassion.

I found this quite irksome. I’d assumed that if there was any sympathy to be offered I’d be on the receiving end. To be asked,
in my shattered state, to start dishing it out made me feel like a stabbing victim who’s just lurched into the emergency room,
only to be tossed a pair of scrubs and told to get to work on the burn victims.

“What’s with you?” she asked, noting my tetchy expression.

“Sorry. It so happens I’ve had a pretty vile day myself.”

“Oh?” she asked.

There was a note of challenge in her voice, and, hearing it, I decided not to elaborate. A woman whose man has just done her
dirty was not likely to care that I’d been seen to bad advantage by an old classmate. I could, of course, have thrown in the
stuff about Milo and the necktie counter, but Claire’s a logical girl and would only have pointed out that my undistinguished
midlife, however sad, was still somewhat theoretical, that her own misfortune had actually
happened
and that this was, perhaps, a useful distinction.

“Never mind. Scotch?”

“Please.”

I poured us both stiff shots of Teachers as Claire poured out her tale, which differed little from the others I’d heard since
Marco had oiled his way into her heart. Three suspicious hang ups, questions as to recent whereabouts, inept lying, expert
grilling, confession, tears, shouting, “Go back to your whore,” curtain.

“It’s really over this time,” she proclaimed. “I mean it.”

“Good.”

“And don’t roll your eyes.”

“When did I roll my eyes?”

“Just now. Inwardly. You’re enjoying this.”

“
Excuse
me?”

“You never liked Marco. You’re thrilled to see your low opinion’s been borne out.”

“Thanks a lot!” I said, miffed. “You think it
pleases
me when Chewbacca mistreats you? You’re my friend, for Christ’s sake. This upsets me.”

A noble sentiment, if not entirely true. There is, I confess, a small mingy part of me that feels, if not quite pleased, not
exactly crushed either that, when it comes to men, Claire’s instincts are even sorrier than my own. It’s not that I wish her
ill. It’s just that in every other aspect of our lives she’s so annoyingly and unquestionably my superior.

She’s smarter than me. She speaks four languages to my one and I’ve stopped even trying to play chess with her, as my odds
of winning are the same I’d enjoy in a Czechoslovakian spelling bee. She’s a much better person too. She volunteers, writes
thank-you notes, and adheres to a code of ethics the average bishop might find uncomfortably lacking in wiggle room. Most
unforgivably, she’s more talented than me. She composes marvelous music, something I can’t do at all, and, when we write plays,
tosses off bons mots and plot twists with a facility that leaves me feeling both dazzled and superfluous.

So when she periodically announces that she has, owing to her woeful misjudgment, taken yet another one on the chin from Cupid,
my compassion is always leavened by an agreeable dollop of condescension. How nice for a change to be the one who gets to
cluck sympathetically while thinking, “Poor dear, when
will
she learn?”

I topped off her glass and let her vent some more. When she’d finished I described my mortifying encounter with Charlie, adding
several poignant embellishments.

“How awful for you!” she gasped. “There were actual pigeon droppings on your cap?”

“I had no idea till Charlie pointed it out!”

“How utterly tactless! Almost as bad as Marco. You know what he said when he left?”

“We’re on to me now.”

“Sorry, go on.”

When I’d finished we agreed that our souls required the healing balm that could only be provided by a highly fattening meal
sluiced down with a suitably excessive quantity of wine. We were donning our coats, debating the relative merits of Carmine’s
fettuccine Alfredo and Szechuan West’s Double-Fried Chicken Happiness, when my phone rang. I let the machine answer and heard
Gilbert’s voice bellowing cheerfully from the speaker.

“Hi, Philip, it’s me! Are you there? Pick up! That’s an order! You may not screen this call!”

Claire shot me a pleading look, but I raised two fingers promising brevity and crossed to the phone as Gilbert continued his
wheedling.

“Pick up! I have news, Philip! Amazing news!”

“Hey,” I said, “are you back early?”

“No, I’m still in LA.”

“When are you coming back?”

“Never!” he said exultantly. “I never want to leave this magical place and neither will you once you’re out here.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, confused. “What’s this earth-shattering news?”

“He saw Cher at Home Depot,” said Claire.

“Tell Claire I heard that. What’s she doing there? No date tonight with Hairy Potter?”

“No, they broke up.”

“Do you
mind?
” said Claire.

“About time,” said Gilbert. “The hair on those shoulders! Like epaulets!”

“Your news?” I prompted.

“I got us a job!”

So intrigued was I by the last and loveliest word of this sentence, i.e., “job,” that it took me a moment to register the
more ominous one lurking dead center. How could he have gotten “us” a job when there did not, for ample reason, exist any
professional entity that could be described this way?

“What do you mean, ‘us’?”

“You and me, naturally. Claire too, of course. Can’t have her back home mooning over wolf boy while we’re off conquering Tinseltown.”

“The job’s for all
three
of us?”

“Hang up,” said Claire, her instinct for self-preservation undulled by the scotch.

“Yes. And for big bucks too. I should think at least fifty apiece.”

“Fifty thousand
each?!
” I exclaimed and even Claire’s eyes betrayed a wary glimmer of interest. “What is it, a writing job?”

“No, I got us a gig as astronauts. Of course it’s a writing job. We’re adapting a novel into a screenplay.”

“But... but
how?
” I sputtered.

“Connections, baby! I’ll explain it all when I see you tomorrow. You’re booked on the two-thirty flight. American Airlines.”

“Tomorrow?!”

“First class, of course!” he assured me, as if that were the issue.

“Tomorrow?”

“Is that a problem?” he asked impatiently.

“Well, it’s pretty damned sudden! We’re supposed to just drop everything and hop on a plane?”

“What the hell’s stopping you?” he said, getting testy.

“Well,” I sniffed, “I
do
have a job.”

The moment I said it I realized that, while there may have been valid reasons for me to reject such an offer, my standing
commitment to trudge through Manhattan delivering parcels to the contemptuous was not the most compelling I might have offered.
Gilbert concurred.

“Your JOB?” he shouted incredulously. “Your MESSENGER JOB? Are you
insane?!
For ten years I have listened and pretty damned patiently while you’ve bitched and moaned about your tragic career. Poor
noble Philip, struggling to keep the torch of Molière aloft and no one will give him a break! Now I’m standing here handing
you Success on a silver tray with tartar sauce and you’re
arguing
with me? I’ll only say this once—TAKE THE DAMN JOB! Pass it up and, as God is my witness, I’ll write the damn script myself,
win an Oscar for it, then spend the rest of my life following you with a sharp knife and a saltshaker!!”