Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts (3 page)

What a laugh. To begin with, I liked Velveeta. No—I loved Velveeta. I demanded that my local upscale grocers carry it and campaigned for a display case to showcase my treasure. My secret ingredient: more mushroom soup, in everything. I regularly urged my hide-your-middle-class-background friends to drop the faux pretension of an “official-preppie-background” and RETURN TO THEIR ROOTS by making me a dish that included hamburger, Velveeta, mushroom soup, and taco shells, chased with a tri-colored Jell-O creation.

And then there were my interior decorator obligations. I would have to rid myself of the early ’90s white-on-white Southwest environment and embrace the faux French Provincial grandma’s over-stuffed sofa look. All wood would be oak or walnut. All sofas so soft that you could drown yourself in them. Dried flowers would cascade over the armoire, fresh flowers would adorn every room. Cold white walls would suddenly be painted Vanilla Bean, Champagne Gold or Sea Shell Green, with border prints at the crease where the wall met the ceiling. God, I could kill Martha Stewart and her latter-day by-product—the fashionafia—those gay and female friends who felt it was their self-appointed duty to give you advice on how to dress, whom to date, and how to decorate.

My personal interior design philosophy was that of a tornado—me being it. When I went into a room, everything physically left its place of order and was strewn in a dozen little piles. I had chosen to help my box-challenged cat, Abyss, with not one but two litter boxes, approximately ten feet apart. And this was in a one-bedroom apartment. My furniture was best described as “post-graduate”—a combination of Mom’s leftover Danish modern, IKEA, and the pieces that a boyfriend had made during some revolutionary make-your-own-furniture phase. And I had cottage cheese ceilings to boot.

I guess you could say that I was not anyone’s version of a perfect wife. But I, Courtney Hamilton, a woman who was a genetic mutation of the blond Californian looks of my San Marino, California-born Episcopalian father, and the searing ambition and overwhelming assimilation desires of my Brookline, Massachusetts-born Jewish mother, reluctantly acknowledged that I knew what I was getting into.

There were also going to be social obligations, as in, I was going to have to be the bonder with his difficult family, especially his father’s second wife, a woman with a taste for outfits that included studded blue jeans and white patent leather heels, worn together. She was not more than 30 years younger than his father, nor two years older than Frank. His father described her as “a leader among women” because she religiously followed the advice of the female anchor on
Good Morning America
and once a year organized the Upper Cape Cod Home Craft Fair. And Frank detested her, especially after she did the unpardonable: she had a baby, a step-brother who was 31 years younger than he was.

The food arrived, and Frank wheezed forth. “You know, if I had stayed at my public high school and wasn’t up against everyone from Andover, I could have gotten into Harvard.” It was maybe the sixty-eighth time that I had heard this.

And then I knew—this wasn’t going anywhere.

We had been together for two years. At the time that we had gotten together, I had been dating an artist named George who drove a ’70s model Porsche and lived in an area of town where the windows and doors were covered with bars. Every time we went out we each paid for ourselves, and if I happened to eat, say, a couple of his fries, he would average out the cost of the fry and make me pay for it. “If we both pay for ourselves, I can go out with you more,” he said. I almost bought into it until he did this in front of Jennifer at Cantor’s Deli. That’s when I met Frank, and he invited me to be his date at the Emmys.

“Let me see,” said Jennifer, “the way I see it, you can pay for yourself with George at Cantor’s, or you can go with Frank to the Emmys.” Best friends are good for this. They often have a miraculous ability to make you see the obvious. I stopped returning George’s phone calls after he left a message in which he screamed that he “wasn’t seeing enough of me.” I considered his statement and then decided—unless I was looking for an ugly fight—that I really didn’t want to call him back that evening. The next day he left five messages on my voice mail and three messages taped to my door. And then he started blasting me with emails.

100 REASONS THAT I LOVE YOU. Interesting. Wonderful though I may be I was pretty sure that there were not 100 reasons to love me, at least not 100 apparent reasons. It was difficult for me to believe that he had taken the time to write this down. JUST CALL ME, ALL I WANT TO DO IS TALK WITH YOU. Sure. This was a running narrative of how he had fallen asleep with the phone cradled in his arms after I didn’t return his call. WE ARE CO-DEPENDENTS. How could this be? I was trying to get away from him. Maybe he depended on me to make him feel awful.

After one email in which George stated that he had joined some co-dependents group, he stopped calling and taping notes to my door. I figured that he had found someone in one of the co-dependent groups to go Dutch with him at Cantor’s.

But then there was Frank. We had known each other during my college days when I attended an arts institution at which Frank’s father, an accomplished painter, taught, or should I say, was the dean of the art school. Frank attended this school because he didn’t know what to do with his life after graduating from Andover. After his father told him that he could get him a full scholarship because he was his son, it was a plan. There was just one catch: Frank had to get in.

On his first try Frank’s application was rejected because his portfolio didn’t compare with the other applicants’ portfolios. In a rare turn of events, the school’s admissions committee decided to reconsider Frank’s portfolio. Frank was then granted admission to the school, with full scholarship, for entrance into the very same class to which he had previously been rejected. I later learned that it was Frank’s father who had strongly suggested to the admissions committee that he would really appreciate it if they would reconsider his son’s portfolio.

We didn’t date during college because I was too busy chasing pretty boys with faces like Botticelli cherubs who took speed and smoked unfiltered Camels. According to my friend Marcie, Frank was nowhere near my level on the L.A. Eco-Chain of Dating. “Date him,” she said, “and it’s nothing but Relationship Terrorism.”

Later, after I had denounced my artistic past and attempted to establish credentials as a corporate attorney, I met him in the most unlikely of places.

I hadn’t seen him for ten years. When he walked in, I thought he was his father. But then I found out. It wasn’t his dad. It was the adult Frank.

At a few months shy of 36, Frank looked like they had ridden him hard and put him away wet. He was long past relaxed-fit, and had gone from eat-drink-anything-anywhere-you-want to a high-blood-pressure-cholesterol-producing machine that was gaining somewhere on the average of 15 to 20 pounds per year. In short, his youthful athletic beauty was going to require planning and hard work to maintain and it was too late for him to develop the discipline to do it. Besides, due to the fact that he was sporadically employed as a sound editor, he thought that he didn’t need to. He considered himself “a catch” for the ladies of Los Angeles.

He wasn’t a catch even by L.A. standards, which allow that if you don’t have any recent felonies, have kicked the addiction over three months ago, and can name your illegitimate children, you’re dateable, as long as you’re “cute.” He was, however, the current standard of what my friends had come to expect in a boyfriend—someone who was going to be there. And that’s it. When I met him again, Roberta, a woman who had the audacity to counsel single people with their dating/‌relationship problems in the new millennium, despite having married her high school sweetheart in the late ’70s, had finally gotten me to join the ultimate self-improvement setting: Group Therapy.

The Group was composed of the usual West Los Angeles types: a former child actress who was between shows—trying to make the nearly impossible leap from a teenage star-kiddie actress on a family cable channel to a grown-up prime-time adult actress on a network show; a female wardrobe supervisor, who, having seen firsthand the absurdly favorable treatment which stars received, really wanted to be an actress; a divorced housewife, who had already redecorated the house (and of course the garden) for the fifth time and really wanted to be a therapist; and me, an attorney who really hated life. There were also a couple of guys who really didn’t want to be there, and Frank, a sound editor, who like everyone in L.A., really wanted to direct.

Roberta would lead the group from a large overstuffed velvet-green chair, which she referred to as “her space.” She supplied the group with a large wicker basket filled with tea selections such as “Wild Blackberry,” “Country Green Apple,” and “Cape Cod Cranberry,” which to my utter delight all tasted like liquid Jell-O. We positioned ourselves around the room amidst Roberta’s last season’s love seats, throw pillows, and Hockney collection, which she had recently removed from her Benedict Canyon home because it was being remodeled. Again.

It often struck me as strange that Roberta was the only person in the entire group who was ever able to have or sustain a serious relationship. Whenever anyone in Group would even approach the concept of marriage, the relationship would quickly implode with chastened self-recriminations along the lines of, “I take responsibility for it,” “I still have so much work to do,” or “It just isn’t right,”—and a knowing but approving nod from Roberta. But then that person would go through another three-year cycle of therapy because they were completely depressed by their inability to have a serious relationship. It frightened me: There were people in their late 40s who had done Group for over 15 years and had never finished their “work.” And Roberta got a new Bentley every two years.

They loved having me in Group because I would “engage”—I fought like crazy with everyone. I couldn’t believe that I was forced to sit in a room and discuss my most intimate and personal feelings with six other persons whom I had no use for, and pay for it. And I didn’t believe the façade of confidentiality, which allegedly was going to keep Group—six of the biggest blabbers I had ever met—from spreading my intimate secrets throughout Los Angeles, or the world, for that matter.

“I see you have a problem with trust,” said Roberta after hearing my issue with confidentiality, something which I discovered was violated by every Group member on a daily basis through incessant emails to everyone they knew, specifically when there was a hot topic or a famous Group member.

“No, I have a problem with confidentiality,” I said. “There is none.”

I ran into trouble by interfering when the divorced housewife was trying to “engage” with one of the guys in the group by asking him a question to which I thought the answer was painfully obvious: Why wouldn’t he “be present” with her? she asked. “Because he thinks you’re repulsive,” I blurted out. That, by itself, did not get me kicked out of Group. I got kicked out when I, as Roberta put it, violated the “Implied Therapist-Patient Agreement” by asking her why I felt just as depressed as I did the day I had entered therapy 15 years ago, and for ruining the working relationship of Group by sleeping with Frank.

As for sleeping with Frank, well, that was a mistake. Not because I did it, at least I didn’t think so. Sometime before he met me—or maybe it was always like this—Frank had developed different desires. If it had come down to three Big Macs, two large packs of fries and a Big Gulp Coke Classic, or five hours of the wildest, hottest, wettest sex with, let’s say, a bouncy Laker Girl, there would have been no contest: it was Big Mac Time all the way. To Frank, sex had become a relationship obligation, like doing the dishes, cleaning out your car, or paying your Visa bill.

But Roberta had different ideas.

“You see,” Roberta explained when she called to announce that I could return to Group, “Group is like a laboratory where you get to work on relationships, not have them.”

“Ok,” I said.

“So I need to know…” said Roberta.

“I take responsibility for it,” I said.

“For what?” said Roberta.

“For having truly mediocre sex with Frank?” I said.

“Sounds like we have something to discuss in a session,” said Roberta.

On our first date, Frank took me to the Emmys. Ten minutes before he was supposed to pick me up, he called me from the car wash to announce that he was going to be late because he needed to clean the car—and go to Bloomingdale’s to buy a tie, pick up his suit at the cleaners, and take a shower. Interesting. It was 6:50 p.m. and the show started at 7:30.

We made it to the Emmys by 8:45 p.m. in time for his category. He won. That was enough to make me decide, OK, there may be a future with this guy.

There are always signs along the way that will show you what direction your relationship is headed, even if your boyfriend is telling you something different. If you honestly look at them, and don’t rationalize the obvious failings, you won’t find yourself chucking away the logic born of a college education to “consult” with someone answering the phones for 1-800-PSYCHIC.

“The bad sex, the passive-aggressiveness, the verbal warfare—you deserve it,” said Marcie. “It’s all a by-product of violating the L.A. Eco-Chain of Dating. I told you, only date people on your level. Not above. Not below. It’s not like you haven’t done this before.”

She had a point.

On our first major holiday together, Thanksgiving, I wanted to attend my traditional celebration, a production of taste and refinement equaling a dinner created by Alice Waters which my gay friends James and Stefan produced. “But, Blanche, we need you to come,” said Stefan who referred to me as Blanche since the day he had his first boyfriend when we were fourteen. “We were counting on you to be the token heteros of the table. Someone has to dress terribly and have genetically inbred bad taste.”

But Frank insisted that we celebrate with his family because this was a really important day for them. He won. When we walked in the door at 5:45 p.m., Frank’s sisters, Mary and Sari, suddenly remembered that they had to defrost the skirt steak which Mary was planning to serve for dinner at 6:00 p.m. His sisters had forgotten because they were in their eighth hour of watching the Twilight Zone Marathon. Frank took it in stride as we ate at 9:00 p.m.