Spoiled Page 13

  At this, Susan raises her eyebrows sardonically at Josh and though this is outrageous, Josh is no longer surprised. He’s identified her, by now, as the type of waitress who tries to make a private pact with the man, letting the female half of the couple immolate and go to hell. It’s a phenomenon they know well, from early in their relationship, when nobody in L.A. knew who she was but everyone recognized Al Stein’s—the studio head’s—son. Once in a Thai restaurant a cocktail waitress actually said to her, “And you are … ?” “Jessica Lacombe?” Josh said rudely, as if the girl was a complete fuckwit for not having heard of her. Josh shifts in his chair remembering—he got a blow job that night, yes, indeed; she loved him for that.

  “I’m just …” Susan turns her palms up—looking for a word that will adequately express her joy “I’m just great, Jessica. Things are truly great.”

  “And you’re—you’re living here? In Maidenhead? Well, I mean, obviously, you’re living here … Wait, that’s right! You grew up here—you were a day student!” she remembers, as Susan waits, patient as a vulture, for Jessica to dig herself in deeper and deeper.

  It’s funny, Josh thinks, watching her writhe and squirm, because usually poise is what attracts people, and Jessica is not poised. And it’s early to attribute the quick looks as they came in tonight to fame, though she will of course be famous. (He finds her dogmatic maintaining of uncertainty on this front an amusing, puerile superstition. She knocks a lot of wood, as well; touches the medal of some Catholic saint that’s clipped to the sun shade of her Miata when she runs a red light.) Nor is it her looks alone that you’d notice. If anything, the requisite blondness and thinness, the sad eyes countered by a mouth that smiles too easily, as if to preempt envy, undersell her. (Before he knew her, at the Oscar party where they met in fact, he’d heard her described, with telling condescension, as a “very pretty girl.” That had been his pickup line: “Those people over there are describing you as a very pretty girl.” It had been a thrill to him that she had gotten it—had known it wasn’t a compliment. He wanted to lead her off to a dark room and get his hands on her, yet at the same time, he kept up the pretense of non-goal-oriented conversation. Interrupted here and there by an acquaintance of his, or hers, but mostly his, he felt a gnawing pit in his stomach, not dissimilar to the days leading up to his parents’ divorce, as if he had sensed that some self-defining possession of his was profoundly at risk.)

  “Wow, still putting up with the Maidenhead winters. I was telling Josh”—Jessica gestures rather wildly to him—“how when we walked to breakfast in the mornings, our hair used to freeze—oh, but that was just the boarders, I guess. He grew up in L.A., so the idea of ice that doesn’t come in a rink with heated locker rooms—” But before she can finish her umpteenth dig at Josh’s spoiled half-sisters, who skate competitively at such a facility, Susan squats down beside their table and says in a bizarrely inflected stage whisper, “I am so sorry to interrupt because this is fascinating, but it would be soooooo helpful if you guys could decide what you want to order.” With a grimace for Josh alone, as if the two of them might yet be in this together, she jerks her head toward the kitchen to indicate some presumed demand.

  “Sure, let’s order,” Josh says, and he can see Susan sucking out his eagerness to be rid of her and twisting it into a compliment—a desire on his part to personally help her out. “Do you want to just leave now and go fuck in my car?” he’d love to say to her, just to call her on it, except he’s too busy cringing as she whispers, “That is so nice, thank you,” and winces gratefully at him.

  “What a fucking freak,” Josh says when she’s gone. He gives a loud shudder at the thought of her bizarre, implicating assumptions. “Bluuhhhh!”

  Jessica is watching him pensively. She takes a deep calming breath, exhaling through her nose. “It’s actually really sad.”

  No, not tonight! thinks Josh. He might have predicted she would go this way, but had assumed the ad hominem attack would quell the pity.

  “She was genuinely talented, Josh.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She was,” Jessica says huffily. She’s taking herself seriously now—flirting with it, at least—trying out the righteous stance. “And now, yes, okay, I’ll say it: She’s a waitress. And you know it could be me—it could be the other way around.”

  “Talk to Sandy,” Josh says dismissively, sitting back in his creaky chair, authoritative. “Talk to my dad. I know the type. Those girls who go to auditions with their high school plays still listed on their résumé?” He shakes his head. “No way, no how. Not everybody has the killer instinct, Jess. Besides”—he looks around for Susan—“isn’t she kind of fat?”

  “That’s so obnoxious. That is so sexist and obnoxious.”

  He shrugs.

  “Especially considering you know that my sister is obese. And that I’ve had eating issues as well, Josh.”

  Josh makes a gesture like a traffic cop—“bring it on”—as a goateed waiter in a butcher’s apron appears to introduce himself and to tell them, “My personal favorite on the whites is the California chardonnay.” Over Josh’s audible groan, Jessica gives the young man a brilliant smile and says: “Great! That sounds really great.” She removes the menu from Josh’s place setting and hands it to the man. “Thank you so much … Kurt. We’d love to try it.”

  “God,” Jess says, when it’s been brought and, over her objection—“I’m sure it’s fine”—tasted and poured, “it’s really awful.” Cautiously, she takes another sip. “No, I mean, obviously it wasn’t going to be good but this is—wow, seriously bad. Almost undrinkable.”

  Josh just shakes his head, looks at her: What am I supposed to say?

  “Never mind,” she says, and her voice catches.

  “Oh, my God. You’re actually upset.”

  “I’m fine.” Unaccountably, though, there are tears in her eyes.

  “Jess! Come on! Who cares?” He looks at her across the table, gulping and pressing her lips together. “No use crying over oaky chardonnay,” he tries. The bad wine should be funny—something they laugh about and forget. But all day he’s picked up on this sense of desperation from her, more acute than the usual anxious-ness. It’s as if she designed this nostalgia day trip to Maidenhead in order to pitch her adolescence to him but has only just realized that she should have presented it to him in an entirely different genre: instead of the edgy, depressing, premium-cable miniseries that aired most nights the first several weeks of their courtship—all anorexia and best friends’ backstabbing, near date-rape and walks of shame—a, well, if not a sitcom, then something pretty close—an upbeat hour-long drama, perhaps; Gilmore Girls meets Facts of Life, filled with learned compromise and character-building challenges. She had gone through school with serious financial aid, after all. Boarding school had been by no means a given, not that she dwelled on it, or seemed to resent in any way the sense of outsiderness it might have created; she only brought it up when it gave her an edge in an argument—when she could play, as she had been playing a minute ago, the poor card.

  In the early afternoon, skipping out on the wedding brunch, they had been to see the school itself, though it meant an extra round trip from the remote B&B. “I will say this about these New England boarding schools: They’re very picturesque, aren’t they?” she’d said, watching his profile carefully, as they drove up the long driveway, past the trim Greek Revival colonials that constituted the original campus, and turned down the river road (the jigsaw-puzzle chunks of ice floating in the running water as if she had cued them to underline the hardship—or at least the inclement weather—she’d overcome), at the end of which the modern buildings lay, the auditorium among them, which housed the theater. “I mean, this is the image of a picturesque New England boarding school, isn’t it?”

  “It’s … nice,” Josh had said uncomfortably, avoiding looking at her. It was clear she wanted the school’s archetypal attraction to confirm something for him, to satisfy some outstanding
question she presumed he had. But while he enjoyed rounding out the picture with a quick visual to go with her story line, he was baffled by the urgency in her voice. He found himself tempted, as the tour dragged on (dormitories, sports fields, though she had never played sports), to say boldly, “I don’t give a shit about all this,” and would have, if her sudden eagerness to expose this part of her life to him hadn’t made him think that would be just a tad harsh.

  THIS MUCH HE knows: When Jessica was thirteen, she and her mother, Nancy, conspired for her to leave the Warwick (bumfuck central Massachusetts) public schools and go to Maidenhead. Up till then, boarding school was beyond the family’s ken, let alone their means. Vicky, Jessica’s older sister by three years, was plowing through Warwick-Dunham High School, head down, blinders on. But plump, embarrassed Vicky, her diffident father’s daughter, had never been into theater—that was Jessica’s thing; it had been from the age of four, when she used to memorize and perform commercials for the family. By eight she was doing TV commercials out of Worcester: a family-owned Italian restaurant; a furniture warehouse—“Make Yourself a Home!”

  With Nancy backing her up (or, Josh suspected, having grown up among the more extreme examples of stage mothers, lying awake nights to strategize), Jessica told Jim that she didn’t want to go to Warwick-Dunham because the academics were “pathetic. And only like one person every year goes to a four-year college.” This was close to the truth, but unlike her sister, Vicky, a worker bee and teacher’s favorite, Jessica was a haphazard student. The real reason she wanted to go to Maidenhead was that she had read an interview in Seventeen with the school’s one famous graduate—a TV actress from a preppie background, who now played the mother in a prime-time sitcom. The woman had cited the Maidenhead drama program as having nurtured her ambitions—and Jessica wanted to be a movie star. Another thing she considered pathetic was when people were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up and they said, “A teacher, maybe?” as Vicky did, “or a vet?” or “I’m not sure yet, I’ll have to see” because she felt they just weren’t being honest with themselves and admitting that they of course wanted to be movie stars. Until that career ceased to exist, what else would anyone conceivably want to be?

  “SO, JESSICA …”

  With an unhurried, leisurely air, Susan serves Jessica her butternut squash soup. She sets down Josh’s walnut–cranberry–goat-cheese salad in front of him—gives the plate a maternal quarter turn. “… You’ve really done it, haven’t you?”

  Jessica averts her eyes—preparing to be complimented, Josh realizes, amazed that she can continue to miss the antagonism in her old friend’s voice.

  “We all saw your spread in Maxim.”

  “Oh—right.” Jessica’s burned her mouth on the first spoonful of soup; she has to reach for her water. “God, that was a while ago.”

  “Jason, the chef, gets it.” Susan giggles, hand to mouth, at the lasciviousness of this.

  “You don’t say,” Josh says rudely, starting to get fed up.

  “He brought it in one day and there you were on the cover.” She turns to Josh.

  “There she was! I couldn’t believe it.”

  “Really?” Jessica frowns. “Well, you have to do it, you know. You’ve got to get yourself out there. Mine was actually very tasteful—”

  “I almost didn’t recognize you! I mean, it’s not as if you’re actually naked, but …” She looks again to Josh, as if for confirmation.

  “It’s pretty close!” he says. Now Jessica looks at him slowly, mistrusting what she’s heard.

  Susan laughs aloud, again putting her hand to her mouth, a look of worried pleasure in her eyes, as if to say, “Oh, gosh, we shouldn’t gang up on her like this, you and I!” “So, are you an actor, too?”

  “I’m a writer?” Josh says, the question in his voice a trick he finds useful to keep these interactions brief.

  “Oh, wow. What do you write?”

  “Television, mostly?”

  “Like, scripts? Pilots? They’re called ‘pilots’ aren’t they?” Susan says, and giggles at her bold segue into shoptalk. “Oh, did you write that show that Jessica was in—”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Jessica says. “No, he didn’t write that!”

  “—that only lasted six episodes?”

  “She’s so jealous of you!” Josh makes his preemptive bid, lunging for her arm, before Susan’s even out of earshot. “She’s so jealous of you she can’t stand it. You just know it was her copy of Maxim. I’m sure she ran right out and bought it.” He swallows some wine though he keeps telling himself not to drink it, it’s that bad, and cracks up at his own picture: “I bet she owns the boxed set of your Clearasil commercials.”

  Jessica puts her spoon down and looks out into the dining room, visibly trying to control herself, her mouth working, her eyes flashing. “It’s not funny.”

  “It is, though—here she’s this fucking waitress … !”

  “‘Fucking waitress.’ You just can’t stop, can you?”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “Where the hell do you get off, Josh?”

  “Bullshit, Jess—you can’t have it both ways!” Knowing he’s risking a blow-up, Josh sticks with his stance: “What’d you want me to do? Make a long speech about how you’re a serious actor? You want me to defend your career to some fucking waitress?” Defiantly, nervously, he picks up his fork and knife and starts on the salad.

  “It’s not my fucking fault that your dad gave me my first job,” Jessica says after a moment.

  “My God, Jess!”

  She begins to spoon her soup, her face tense with misgivings. Josh wishes he could reassure her—none of that matters now: Dad was just a conduit. Like God, Al Stein helps only those who help themselves. But with the marriage proposal in the air, it’s become a taboo subject. And right now, as when he Googled her before their first real date (they’d slept together a few times but had yet to have dinner) and what he found left him omnisciently speechless in her presence, he’s afraid he’ll expose himself once again as knowing too much if he says anything now. A few months ago, just after she got the final payments for The Sticks, Josh found a crumpled Starbucks napkin in a Windbreaker of his that Jessica likes to borrow. On it was a budget of sorts, a list of income set against large itemized expenses—rent, food, clothing, car; a fifth category she called “personal maintenance.” He couldn’t fathom it, but it was definitely her handwriting. It took him a day or two before he understood it. She had tallied up an alternative life, one in which his parents don’t own the house they live in, in which she pays her own way and always had. On the napkin she had added up the money she would owe him now, as if she was contemplating paying him back. Uneasily, he had recalled a plan then, a short-lived plan, which he himself had never taken seriously: that when she moved in with him, she would pay him rent. He hadn’t cashed the first check she pressed on him (and there had been just the one). He thought he’d squirrel it away and drag it out in a couple years, give it to her framed—remind her of her salad days. As for now, he’d told her, pocketing the check, he would be demanding sexual favors instead.

  “So was he at least hot?” he says, polishing off the salad.

  “Who?” Jessica frowns suspiciously.

  “The drama teacher whose dick she—” He pumps his fist to his mouth.

  It’s a gamble, but she relents, the tiniest bit amused, and gives a long sigh, like a teacher dealing with a remedial student. “No. Mr. Tooker was not hot. Mr. Tooker looked like … Al Delvecchio.”

  “God, no wonder he was molesting all the girls,” Josh says broadly, but finds himself fighting a wave of uncertainty now. In his pocket, he grasps the ring again. This bonding over TV references: It reminds him of the kind of thing you talk about after a one-night stand with a girl, as they indeed—he doesn’t see fit to remind her—talked about the morning after what he assumed would be theirs (somewhat predictably, ABC’s Love Boat/Fantasy Island lineup of the early eighties)
. But then he reminds himself, exhaling, that it’s a sign of maturity that he doesn’t need them to have everything in common. He doesn’t need to be able to discuss the political situation in the Middle East with his fiancée. This was how he put it to his shrink, as he described what he called a “breakthrough”: “I don’t need to be able to discuss the political situation in the Middle East with her, you know?”

  AT LAST JOSH has coaxed her back with him, on the cozy track toward bliss. Generic cozy restaurant glow, which tonight is replicated by the fire in the hearth and enhanced by the black New England cold beyond the mullioned windows, has begun to infuse not only their faces and their fellow diners’ faces, but their thoughts as well. She makes herself vulnerable; he is generous. He tones down the glibness. They touch frequently across their entrées—the acceptably indigenous flank steak and halibut. A big wedding, he thinks, in Santa Monica—the beach, maybe, or wine country. He’s already assured his mom that she won’t want to be married at home.

  When Jessica goes to the bathroom, he dares to upgrade the wine.

  “Sorry,” says Josh, coming clean as she returns and tries the new stuff—an Oregon pinot noir he had missed earlier. “It had to be done.”

  “Whatever,” she says, but he knows she can’t keep up the censure because she’s greedy about her wine and clearly likes this one. “It’s probably the high point of his night recommending the chardonnay—but whatever, Josh.”

  “He’ll survive,” Josh says, topping off their glasses.

  “So, anyway, you see her in Macbeth with the boys’ school—Whiplash Soldiers or whatever—”