Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts (4 page)

At Christmas, I was overjoyed to find Frank running around like a madman to buy presents—until I found out that they were all for his sisters. I didn’t receive anything until the last day of January when I called him and told him that I was going to buy the bookcase which he had promised me, and either he paid for it or I would. Frank explained that he just couldn’t get it together, and had thought that I “would be cool about it.”

On Valentine’s Day, Frank told me that he had a big surprise planned. At 8:00 p.m., he walked in the door with Chicken Fajitas for two from El Pollo Loco and a juicer, which he told me that I could use whenever I wanted to. He later confessed that he had tried to get reservations all over town, but at 7:30 p.m. when he called, everything was all booked up.

My birthday, however, was remarkably different from the pattern set on other major days—he forgot it entirely. Or I should say, he forgot it until Jennifer called him from my birthday dinner and asked him when, or if, he was planning to arrive. As we were cutting the cake, he waltzed in the door with a dozen short stem red roses and a bag of oranges which I knew he had gotten from the guy who sold flowers and fruit off the back of a pick-up near the Wilshire Boulevard on-ramp to the 405 freeway.

At year one—the legal deadline for determining the direction of relationships—Frank asked me to marry him on a Saturday morning after I had just paid for breakfast. The moment struck me as strange because Frank had just pulled the “forgot my wallet again” routine and we were suddenly surrounded by a chorus of car alarms that had been set off by an earthquake measuring 3.2 on the Richter scale which had its epicenter in Barstow.

I should have known that he wasn’t really serious about the engagement because I never got a ring. Over the following year he would tell me that he was going ring shopping, but always ended up at an all-night gambling club in Gardena located near an off-ramp of the 710 freeway.

Our relationship was OK as long as I bought into the cup-is-half-empty victim’s posture of life. After a while, the posture of downward mobility seemed pretty ridiculous for two people whose parents had performed heroic feats to give them the best education money could buy. And then I made a fatal mistake: I accidentally found something I liked to do. And then I did it well.

While stumbling through my I-Hate-Litigation career, I discovered an area of the law which catered to my two strongest talents, talking on the phone and going to lunch. I gained a small reputation among clients who made staggering amounts of money for surprisingly little work as being “an attorney who didn’t seem like an attorney,” a talent not completely appreciated by my former colleagues.

And then the fun began. It wasn’t just that Frank blew it on all of the major holidays and events. It was more that I was beginning to notice that he had a latent talent that I had not previously noticed: He had all the makings of a world-class whiner and he was beginning to epitomize the Angry White Guy.

He was angry with his dad for leaving his mom, yet he despised his mother so much that he couldn’t be in a room with her for more than an hour, even at Christmas. He was angry at his mom for giving him a watch with a scratch in it, feeling sure that she had personally put the scratch in it to hurt him. He was angry at his father’s second wife because she was going to inherit his father’s work, and rob him of his inheritance. He was angry at his sister for deciding at age ten that she wanted to be an artist, a position he felt robbed him of his chance. And he was angry with me because I refused to live life stuck in neutral. And this was just personally.

Professionally, Frank honestly felt that the reason his directing career had not taken off was because his student film had not been awarded a Student Academy Award. This he attributed to the fact that someone on the Academy judging committee had wanted to sabotage his career in its early stages. Nearly ten years later, he was still furious about it, and he insisted on projecting his student film on the white walls of my dining room at every dinner party I had, figuring someone would see the brilliance of his vision and hand him a sixty-million-dollar studio film to direct.

“I just don’t feel seen in this relationship,” lamented Frank on a regular basis. It’s the skill of those who have spent too much of their lives in therapy to use jargon which they don’t understand to signify feelings that they don’t have the courage to be honest about. Roughly translated, this meant that Frank wanted me to take the attention and energy that I had to invest in my own career to be remotely successful and put it into his and make him successful.

This was to be the Faustian bargain of our marriage—I was to do everything, including the Herculean feat of creating a directing career for him while supporting us, and in exchange I would get to be Mrs. Frank Jamieson.

Maybe it was all those years of drinking liquid Jell-O with Roberta that made me believe that marriage was supposed to be a “shared equal partnership of responsible individuals with/‌without children.” This was quite far from what I was experiencing. In retrospect, I now know that my utopian concept of marriage was about as far from reality as the O.J. Simpson Defense Team’s theory of the Brown-Goldman murders, but that didn’t keep me from attempting to engage with Frank, using the skills that Roberta had taught me.

As I plowed through my meatloaf, I surveyed the scenery. I wasn’t going to go through another year of this. One of us had to make up our mind.

I started in. “Listen Frank, it’s time to stop screwing around.”

“OK, OK…” he mumbled, “I’ll leave your mashed potatoes alone.”

Hmmmmm. This was
not
going to be easy. “No,” I said, “cut it with the potatoes. Where is this relationship going?”

If there are five words which can stop a man’s heart quicker than those, I don’t know what they are. Frank looked like I had just sucked the life out of him.

“Well… you know,” he said, “it’s going.”

I shook my head. “Not good enough,” I said. “That’s not an answer.”

I’m sure that Roberta would have counseled me to create a safe place in the dialogue where Frank felt that he could “be present” with me. I wasn’t having any part of it.

“Look,” I said, “we’ve been engaged for over a year. I still don’t have a ring. Every time I suggest a date, you make it six months away. When three months pass, you put the date out another six months. Enough already.”

Although I really should have seen it coming, when I heard it I laughed so hard that I fell right out of my Copper Pan chair.

“I still have so much work to do,” said Frank, with the chastened look which I had seen so many of Roberta’s patients adopt.

“Oh my God!” I said as I spit out my mashed potatoes. “Frank honey, the only work you need to do is to figure out how you can get it constantly, instead of occasionally.”

I attempted to address the issue.

“Look, time is moving on. And while I’m willing to be in this relationship with you, I’m not willing to do it as your girlfriend.”

Frank looked around the room.

“Well,” he said, “I need more time.”

“Well, I’m going to give you more time—two months to be precise. Two months to make 50 percent of the decisions in this relationship, two months to take 50 percent of all of the responsibilities, two months to pay 50 percent of all of our bills. And, two months to pick a wedding date, which must be executed by the end of this year, not the decade.” I paused for a moment to get him some water because he appeared to be choking on his burger.

“Also, I want an engagement ring. So, I’ll give you two months to find one. And I want at least a one carat ring,
with no inclusions
in it.”

I knew perfectly well that there was no chance on God’s green earth that any of this was going to happen. Frank had been ruined by therapy. His ability to make any decision, from what color car to buy, to whether he should still be mad at his dad, had been handed over to Roberta. And unless Roberta gave him the “thumbs up,” he wouldn’t marry me. And I knew Roberta wouldn’t.

But it was time to move on and this was another decision that he would not openly make. So I gave him his out. By doing what he always did—nothing—he would end the relationship.

As a matter of fact, he never did say or do anything. He just stopped coming over. Then he stopped calling. One morning when I went to make orange juice, I realized that his juicer was gone. And then his keys arrived in the mail.

About the time that the juicer disappeared, my friend Stefan met Frank at a gallery opening. Frank never did tell him that we had broken up. He just said, “Courtney was great to me. But it just wasn’t right. And I have so much work to do.”

Almost Single

“So?” asked my therapist, Roberta.

“Can we wait until my Blueberry Tea seeps?” I said.

Like into a Slurpee or Jell-O.

“Tick-Tock,” said Roberta.

“More like cha-ching,” I said.

“I don’t like that.”

“Sorry. Frank’s juicer is gone. I’m pretty sure that this means he is gone.”

“Yes. He told me.”

“Told you? I thought you ordered it.”

“Courtney.”

“Get real,” I said while rolling my eyes.

“Frank and I were working on—well—you know his issues regarding commitment.”

“What did he say?” As if I didn’t know.

“Courtney, you know I can’t talk about this,” said Roberta while giving me a disapproving look.

“Oh. Of course. Confidentiality,” I said, hoping not to sound sarcastic.

“But
you
gave him the ultimatum,” said Roberta, hoping to make me uncomfortable.

I took a sip of my blueberry tea. “Decaf or regular is an ultimatum to Frank.”

“Well yes, he does have a lot of work to do.”

I sensed that I was getting into dangerous territory, but decided to push it.

“You think?” I said with a big smile.

“I don’t like cynicism. It makes our work so difficult.”

I looked at Roberta and gave her my most serious look. “I take responsibility for it.”

Roberta looked pissed. “Well, why the sudden ultimatum?” she asked. “You might have worked things out.”

“Yes, after the next Ice Age. Look, I didn’t see kids, a house, and a golden lab named ‘Thor’ in our future.”

“No one does,” said Roberta. “It’s not 1975.”

“Yeah. Well, our marriage would have been a horrible, horrible mess.”

“Welcome to life,” said Roberta.

Maybe I’d made a mistake. I know that Frank was never going to marry me. But he wasn’t really awful. He didn’t beat me or anything.

I was on a blind date with Josh, “a hot item,” because my actress/‌Chinese herbalist friend, Halley, had set us up. I was a little unsettled about the whole thing, especially when Josh didn’t pass my first requirement.

“He’s single, right?” I asked her.

“Almost.”

“Almost single?” I said.

“He’s separated—they’re planning to divorce,” said Halley.

“That’s a hot item?”

“Courtney, he’s employed, tall, thin, under 40, and has hair. I’m giving you a crack at him,” said Halley, with the same enthusiasm I had heard people use to describe their rent-controlled ocean view apartments in Santa Monica.

He sounded suspicious to me.

“Yeah. Why don’t you date him?” I asked.

“I did. We’re just friends now,” she said.

“Uh huh. Why just friends?” I said.

“Because he can’t help my career and he’s not rich… enough.”

Josh and I were at the hipster Berliner Café, my current Come-To-Jesus spot. When my clients had screwed up so enormously that even Olympic backpedaling wouldn’t save them, I’d take them to Berliner Café to fire them, or force them into an act of contrition.

Today there was a table of three women—so thin—around 6 feet tall and 110 pounds, all angles, collarbones, hip bones and cheekbones. They were clearly addicted to dieting. Or something.

In the northeast corner table was a tiny Asian woman with 24-inch, platinum blond extensions who occasionally pecked at her laptop, but mostly chatted on her cell phone. Her conversations were loud and migraine-inducing annoying.

And of course, there
he
was. The short greasy guy with a three-day stubble and dirty blond hair: The Star—of course the male action star, the feral Celebrity Royalty of the moment—with about 20 extra pounds on his famous butt.

The Star was sitting with an even shorter nervous guy who looked like he had just graduated from the Ray Stark Producer’s Program at USC. I guessed the shorter guy to be an agent’s assistant who was assigned to run errands or babysit The Star. The assistant had styled himself in the agent-fashion of the moment: Lew Wasserman glasses—horn-rimmed, big and black—a shaved, bald white head and a $200 Macy’s suit.

I wondered—why was it that the male action star of the moment was never a millimeter over five feet six inches tall? The Star got nervous when he thought that I was looking at him. Please. Did he really think I was going to call the paparazzi when he inhaled a piece of German chocolate cake?

Actually, I was almost positive that one of the waiters already had. Like I cared about the Star. The cake, however, had endless possibilities. I would have asked The Star his opinion of the cake, but I knew the L.A. Etiquette for Interacting with Star/‌Celebrity Royalty in Public Places:

(1) No eye contact and absolutely no gawking.

(2) No verbal interaction unless The Star/‌Celebrity Royalty first speaks to you.

(3) If spoken to by the Star/‌Celebrity Royalty the only thing that you may say is: “I love your work.”

(4) If there should be an Accidental Public Encounter with a Star/‌Celeb and his/‌her Entourage, the non-Royalty must wait to be granted an audience with the Star/‌Celeb before joining the Star/‌Celeb’s Entourage.

(5) The Star/‌Celebrity Royalty always goes first and has priority in every situation, even if they have arrived three hours after their scheduled reservation/‌appointment—and you were 45 minutes early for yours.

Josh and I had been sitting there for about 15 minutes. I wasn’t going to give it much effort. I didn’t think that Josh—“the hot item”—was at my level on the L.A. Eco-Chain of Dating. And I had made that mistake before.