So 5 Minutes Ago (21 page)

“Jack, I’ve been finding my way into the city since before we got the Volvo,” Helen says, slightly miffed. “I don’t know why you say things like that.”

“They’re fine once you get used to them,” Amy says, retying the sweater around her neck. “I finally got used to ours and it’s great.”

“I was just commenting on the system,” Jack says, raising his hands. “Frankly, I consider it a safety feature. Like a cell phone.”

Barkley punches the button again. “Mr. Chow’s,” he repeats.

“It’s
Chow,
not
Chow’s,
” I say, without thinking.

“Ciao?”
says Helen. “I thought we were eating Chinese.”

“We are eating Chinese,” says Amy, still fiddling with her sweater.

We’ve been at this for at least five minutes, parked on or rather blocking the hotel’s slip of a driveway. Out the window, I see two cars behind us in the garage, three in front of us trying to get up the drive, and the valet heading our way. I’m about to suggest that Barkley just fucking chill with the high-tech directions and drive, at least off the hotel property, when the navigation system springs to life: “Mr. Harbinger, your directions.” A glowing list flashes onto the tiny screen. I don’t even bother to look. If it sends us to Pasadena, I could care less as long as we get off this driveway.

“Okay, here we go,” says Barkley, peering at the screen. He studies it for a second and then puts the Navigator in gear. “Next stop, Mr. Chow’s,” he says, heading down the rain-slicked drive, honking wildly at the cars we’ve blocked.

“No, no. This table good. Good one. Banquet. You sit here.”

We are in the back at Mr. Chow. Five of us wedged around a four-top in a banquette, squeezed between two couples, one of which looks to be two male models on their first date, given the number of aqua-colored martinis going down, and the other a couple of stunned-looking tourists with
Zagat
guides and uncolored hair. Across from us is a party of some British band, or wannabe band, and their groupies, who are already whooping it up in that annoyingly loud
Oy, mate
way Cockneys love to do in America. So far, it’s exactly what I predicted. Siberia. And all its lovely denizens.

“I don’t know why we couldn’t sit in the front room where Tony Curtis was,” Helen says, looking mournfully over her shoulder. “I thought I saw an empty table there.”

“Mom, there were three empty tables, but that’s how it works here,” I say, fishing out a menu from the pile the waiter dropped on the table. “If you’re not a star or a regular, they dump you back here.”

“I’ll talk to them,” says Jack, pushing back his chair.

I have visions of a ten changing hands. Like that would do anything.

“Dad, don’t even bother. They’ll just tell you they’re reserved. Let’s just stay here.”

“I’ll never understand this town,” Helen says with a shake of her head, reaching across me for a menu. “You’d think they’d want people to sit next to Tony Curtis, for goodness’s sake. So you’d know he was there.”

“So how was the visit to the animation studio?” I say, as I stare, or pretend to stare, at the menu. Eating is the least of my concerns.

“Fine. If you’re into animation,” says Amy, behind her menu. She and Barkley spent the afternoon taking a private tour of Disney’s animation building because an old college buddy of Barkley’s worked in marketing or something and arranged it.

“Fantastic. You should see the way they do computer graphics up close,” says Barkley. “It’s so amazing. Nothing like you’d expect. You know, they actually have to get the actor to perform the role first, film it, and then do the animating. That’s why it takes so long.”

“Yeah, I heard that,” I say, trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. Christ, every kid with a PlayStation knows that. “Dad, what are you going to have?” I say, changing tactics. The sooner we get started, the sooner we can get out of here.

“Well, what’s good here?”

“You know, I don’t eat here that often—”

“No, no,” Barkley interrupts. “We have to let them order for us. For the table. That’s the way to do it.”

“Was that in the article too?” I get out before Amy elbows me sharply in the ribs.

“Honey, then you do it,” Amy says, laying aside her menu with a flicker of impatience, the first cracks in the dam. “We’ll let you take care of it.”

“Okay, but make sure there’s some fish dish. And a chicken,” Helen says, eyeing Jack over her menu. “We’re trying to eat less red meat these days.”

Jack tosses down his menu. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I could use a drink. And I can order that for myself.”

I look up. Nailing a waiter in here is about as difficult as getting an agent to return your call. Chinese guys and the occasional whippet-thin Caucasian are rushing around, beads of sweat gleaming on their brows. It’s so humid with the crowd and the rain that steam is gathering on the glass divider atop the banquette. The noise is deafening, the Cockneys are shrieking with laughter, and I’m starting to get a crick in my back from sitting jammed in between Amy and Helen.

“You know, our firm just opened a branch in L.A.,” Barkley says over the din. “It looks like we’ll be starting to do some entertainment business. I’m probably going to be coming back out.”

I suddenly have a horrifying vision of Barkley and Amy moving to L.A. Pasadena. No, the Palisades is more their style, especially given what Barkley could earn as an entertainment lawyer. I look over at Amy, but she has the hatches battened down. What am I worried about? It would take a nuclear explosion, or some serious therapy, to get Amy out of Philly permanently. Barkley may come out, but he will go back. Still, of all my family, the guy who is least equipped to leave Bucks County is the one who loves L.A. Go figure.

“Really,” I say, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Well, that would be great.”

“Yeah, so I might even be able to help you the next time one of your clients has to go to court.”

I can’t tell if this is a dig about Troy and my job or if Barkley is just being his eager, clueless self. Before I can parse it, a waiter miraculously stumbles to a stop at our table.

“Drink. You want drinks?”

We practically fall over one another to get our orders out. Scotch for Jack. Barkley wants a Tsingtao. Helen and I go for white wine.

“Amy?” I say, turning to her.

“I’ll have a mineral water with a lime,” she says, smiling up at the waiter.

“You’re having water?” My sister isn’t much of a drinker, but she always has a glass of red wine. For the antioxidants.

“Didn’t Mom tell you? I’m pregnant.”

“Honey, do you want to say grace?”

“No, Mom, not here I don’t,” I say, looking around the Getty’s dining room. I’m not inclined to indulge my mother’s holiday traditions under her own roof, let alone in public, and at 3
P.M.,
Thanksgiving afternoon, this place is packed.

“We could have said it in the car in the garage,” says Barkley. I look over at him. He’s either serious or doing some major sucking up. You’d think he’d be beyond that, having fathered what will be the family’s first grandchild.

“Oh well, I just thought it being Thanksgiving and all . . .” says Helen, letting her voice trail off. Normally her
poor-me
strategies don’t guilt-trip me anymore, but she looks so disappointed—I know the trip has largely been a letdown with the rain and the hotel, or maybe I’m just still so obviously a letdown, still divorced, and now not with child—that I relent.

“But I will propose a toast,” I say, picking up my glass of the Veuve Clicquot Jack has ordered. “To us,” I say, as we all clink glasses. “To the first Bradford family—sorry, Bradford-Harbinger family—gathering in Los Angeles. Thank you all for coming. And for the meal we are about to share,” I say, dropping my voice on the last part. “May it be the first of many.”

“Thank you, Alex,” Helen says, smiling at me over her glass. “That was lovely, although I don’t know about the first of many.”

“Really?” I say, sticking my toe in that frigid water. “You wouldn’t come back? I mean, I know the rain has cramped our plans, but I think L.A. has its charms.”

“Well, yes, of course,” says Helen. “And we haven’t even seen your new office yet. Or met your friends.” She lets the last part hang in the air.

“Well, everyone is away for the holiday,” I say, foolishly taking the bait. The unspoken accusation that my life, however tricked up with celebrities and movies and limos and court trials, is just compensatory Plan B. Plan B because I willfully fucked up Plan A, which was pretty fucked up to begin with.

“It’s been fine,” says Jack. “Next time, might even get in a little golf. I think a couple of the guys at the club back home know somebody at Riviera. Get in a round that way.”

“I’m sure our firm will be having some sort of local club membership,” Barkley pipes up. “I’m sure I could work something out there.”

“No, I just meant that with Amy expecting the baby in June, we won’t be traveling much in the immediate future,” Helen says, unfolding her napkin like she’s opening a hymnal.

“Mother, I’ve already said that you and Daddy do not need to turn your lives upside down just because I’m having a baby,” Amy says, taking a sip of her water. Evian with lime and no ice.

Of course not. Not when they can turn their lives inside out for
you.
Against golf and this baby, I don’t stand a chance. Forget my job, my office, my clients. Even if I had thrown a party at Skybar and the entire DWP-BIG client list had shown, it would have been wasted on them. Except for Barkley. L.A. is just another oddity in my odd little life. Steven was right. I had wanted something from their visit. Not praise. Not awe. I wanted them to understand why I had come to Hollywood. Even if I don’t fully understand it myself.

But I’ve failed. Tripped up by rain, an unborn fetus, but mostly by that disconnect, that gap that exists between the movies, the TV shows, the racks of magazines at grocery store checkout lines—the endless fat issues with their beaming celebrity covers—and the reality that is Hollywood. The country is besotted with celebrity, obsessed with it, but somehow the place that creates it, churns it out by the bucketful, is still a little unseemly up close. Still leaves a bad taste in the rest of the country’s mouth. And now I’m part of it.

“Right,” I say, nodding. “The baby. Well, it was a thought. Maybe another year.”

A waiter cruises by and we bury ourselves in the menus, heads bowed as if in prayer. Festive offerings are listed: pheasant, foie gras, strawberries with blackberry coulis, and pumpkin tart with a walnut crust. The room is blazing with light. The first sun we’ve seen in days and the views are astonishing. The hills, green from the rain, and the gray-green ocean are visible with the slightest turn of the head. The crowd too is good. Well-dressed foreigners. Japanese. Italian. Families with quiet, gleaming, ebony-haired children. And locals who look like they work for foundations. Or the museum. Not studios. Who are faithful contributors to NPR. Women in long skirts and with their long gray hair wrapped in chignons. Men in blazers and ties. Anonymity at its most perfect. Its most acceptable.

“Oh, this is lovely,” my mother says, turning excitedly in her chair. “Alex, I’m so glad you chose this place.”

The pace of our conversations, so halting and awkward over the past two days, quickens, loosens. We talk about the baby, the hideous inappropriateness of the Chateau, and how next time, yes, next time, the Bel-Air Hotel with the swans and the stream. And golf. And no rain. And a drive. Yes, a day trip up the coast to Santa Barbara. And lunch at the Biltmore, yes, where the press used to stay when Reagan was at his ranch. Yes, all of it sounds lovely. Yes, California is lovely, lovely, after all. And we are lovely, lovely, after all.

“So, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the baby.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Amy and I are in the upstairs lounge of the spa at the Century Plaza Hotel watching the cracks in the dam grow ever larger. Actually, we’re dressed in identical butter-colored microfiber robes lying on lounges gazing out at the rain lashing the giant floor-to-ceiling window. Or I’m gazing. Amy has a lavender satin eye pillow over her eyes.

I take a sip of my raspberry tea in the little sea-green ceramic cup and take a poke at the largest crack. “But why didn’t you tell me?”

Amy sighs. “Because we only just found out and when I told Mom she said, ‘Don’t tell Alex yet. Let’s let it be a surprise.’ ”

“Yeah, well, it was.”

Amy rips the eye pouch from her eyes as the water bursts through the dam. “Well, I’m sorry I didn’t clear it with you first. I hoped you might be happy for us. For
me.
But I knew you’d be mad. You always have to see everything in terms of you.”

“I do not see everything in terms of me,” I say, struggling to sit up and managing to spill the tea on my robe, so it looks like a pale bloodstain. “That is such BS.”

“Really? Then why have you been such a bitch the whole time we’ve been here?” she hisses. “Even Mom thinks you’ve been acting weird.”

“Mom always thinks I’m acting weird. She thinks it’s weird that I moved to L.A. You
all
think it’s weird. Except for your husband, who’s so whipped up about Hollywood. At least he has the grace to talk about my work. The rest of you could give a shit.”

“Leave Barkley out of this. I just want to know when you’re going to stop being jealous of me. I was so stupid to think that my having a baby might make things easier between us.”

“Jealous?”
I can’t believe Amy is going this far back. Here in my own city, on my own turf, she is managing to yank me back twenty years, to the fights we used to have in our old bedroom in Upper Darby. The little house we lived in before Jack and Helen moved up in the world and out to Bryn Mawr. “You think I’m jealous of you?” I shake my head, disbelieving. “You are so far from the truth. So far.”

“Oh really? Well, believe what you want,” she says, replacing the eye pillow and sinking back on the chaise. “We all know what it looks like.”

“Oh gee,” I say, flopping back on my lounge. “Next, you’re going to tell me Mom always liked you best.”