Beginnings and Ends (Short Story) (4 page)

“Yes,” she says, smiling happily up at him, holding out her hand for him to shake or maybe kiss. “Irene Laughlin.”

“Yeah, I know,” Tommy says, not just shaking her hand, but taking the opportunity to tug her up and out of her seat. “Would it be too much to ask you to give me a few minutes alone with your husband?”

Irene looks from Tommy to me to Tommy to me, and almost imperceptibly I nod.

She’s curious, I can tell, but she takes her bag off the table, and with a sunny smile at both of us, heads for the ladies’ room.

Tommy sits in her chair, and as he gazes back at me, I wonder what he sees. Do I look as shitty and desperate as I feel?

“What are you doing in L.A.?” I ask, because one of us has to say something. This was the last place I would’ve expected to run into him. If this were Boston, I’d be looking over my shoulder every five seconds, both hoping I’d see him and hoping I wouldn’t.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Tommy says with his point-blank honesty. “And I figured it would easier—and safer—for you, if I came out here, to L.A.”

“You flew all the way to L.A. to talk to me,” I repeat, because I can’t quite believe it.

“What the hell are you doing, Joe?” he asks me, leaning forward slightly. “Getting
married
to this girl …?”

I lean closer, too, and I lower my voice to tell him something that no one else knows, not even Richie West. “She knows.”

He’s surprised. “You told her?”

I wish I could say yes, that I’d manned up and told her, but … “She knew. She guessed. My manager set it up for us to fly to Las Vegas and get married and … We were on the way to the airport, and she raised the privacy shield in the car and …”

Tommy looks almost as surprised as I’m sure I looked that day.

I lean even closer, speak even more quietly. “She doesn’t love me. She’s not gonna get hurt. This is all about her career. It’s a business arrangement. We signed an agreement attached to the prenup. No sex. No lies. And no … one else over to the house. Ever. In fact, I need to leave the state if I want to, you know.”

Tommy laughs, but it’s not because he’s amused. “Well, that must be a challenge for you.”

“It is,” I admit, running my hand through my hair because I suddenly have the worst fucking headache. I can feel the tension in my neck, radiating up my skull. “She’s actually really great, Tom. In just a short time, she’s become a really good friend.”

“Well, okay,” he says. “That’s good. I’m glad. I was losing sleep at the idea of you ruining yet another life.”

I can’t believe he said that. For years, he’s pretended that I don’t mean shit to him, that I never mattered
.

“I ruined your life?” I ask. He’s the one who walked away. Of course, to be fair, I’m the one who locked myself here, in my pathetic closet.

Tommy sits back in his seat as he gazes at me. “No,” he finally says. “I’m good. I was talking about you. Your life.”

I laugh, because what else can I do? “I have more money than God,” I remind him. “I get paid in shitloads to do something I love to do.”

“Do you?” he asked. “Still love it? Honestly?”

I don’t answer him. I can’t. Because I can’t tell anyone, not even Irene, that the best I come up with to describe the work I used to love is
un-awful
. Which is still pretty fucking bad.

Irene comes back to the table then, and the conversation is over. Or at least I think it is.

Tommy stands to give her back her seat, and I stand, too, because I know he’s going to leave, and part of me wants to throw myself at him, to stop him from going.

He holds out a hand for me to shake, and I touch him, and touching him makes me want him, viscerally, achingly, desperately. And I’m sure that he knows it. How could he not know?

“Your past three movies were uninspiring,” he tells me. “This last one … I had to leave the theater, walk out early. It was that bad.”

“Fuck you,” I say, and he laughs and pulls me in for a pseudo-het embrace, bodies not quite touching, complete with a slap on the back. But it’s really just a chance for him to take the parting shot.

“In your dreams,” he whispers in my ear.

And then he’s gone.

My hands are shaking as I sit back down.

“Are you okay?” Irene asks quietly.

“No,” I tell her, and I look almost frantically around for the waiter.

I fucking need a drink
.

From
Shadowland
, Episode 66, “Dead Man Talking”

Starring Robin Chadwick Cassidy as Joe Laughlin

Los Angeles, present day

The silence is different when I wake up
.

It’s accompanied by sunlight and a gentle breeze through the open window, the movement of the curtains, the slow spin of the ceiling fan above me
.

I’m hung over. My head is pounding and my mouth is dry, yet I’m also somehow lighter, somehow more free
.

Irene is curled up beside me on top of the covers of my bed in her ridiculous bright pink pajamas, her gorgeous blond hair in a tight braid. She’s fierce in sleep. Determined. Driven. The sunshine and bunnies thing is an act.

In scattered bits and pieces, the night comes back to me.

I sit, alone in my private study, bottle in my hand but still stone-cold sober, looking at the handgun that was given to me as a gift after I first played New York City cop Pierce Cane. I’ve used guns before, plenty of times. I’ve done the training. I know how to handle it safely. I know how to fire it. I know the kind of damage it can do.

And I sit there, imagining my brains on the wall behind me.

It was then that Irene came in. “This,” she says, “I will
not
let you do.

“This,” she says, “is fucking stupid.” It’s the first time I’ve ever heard her drop the f-bomb, and I have to admit that it’s startling. But she’s not done. “Too fucking stupid even for you.”

“I can’t breathe,” I tell her.

“Of course not,” she says. “Look where you are, in this stupid, dark room. Who has a room like this, anyway?”

“It’s a man cave,” I say defensively.

“You don’t need a cave,” Irene says. “You need a mountain top. You need a beach. Joe, you need the sky. You need a life that’s not here, under this rock.” She leans across the desk that I’ve used to read countless scripts, to study countless characters as I prepared to live their lives instead of my own. “What kind of moron are you, anyway, that you would even take that gun out of its case? Here’s a newsflash, shit-for-brains, if you kill yourself, you’ll never make another movie. Which is exactly what you’re afraid will happen if you go running after that man who came to Henny’s to talk to you today, right?”

“I’m not
afraid
it will happen,” I tell her as the idea of my actually finding the courage to run after Tommy makes my hands shake. “It
will
happen.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” she says, but when I shake my head, she relents, even as she uses two fingers to pick up the handgun and gingerly put it back in its case. She closes and locks the box, and moves it clear across the room as she tells me, “Okay, so let’s live in that reality. You’re never going to make another movie. So what? You hate making movies. You hate your life enough to
be sitting here thinking about ending it. So why go straight to Plan Dead without trying Plan Gay?”

I stare at her, uncomprehending.

She spells it out. “Why not commit career suicide instead?” she asks me as she takes my open bottle and pours herself a drink. But she puts the bottle back in my liquor cabinet across the room, too. It sits there, well out of my reach. “Come out in some massively huge way. Skywrite it or announce it via megaphone down on Rodeo Drive. And then go chase after what’s-his-name—”

“Tommy,” I tell her in a voice that sounds like I’m already dead and gone. “His name is Tommy Howe.”

It’s the first time I’ve said his name aloud in years. And I can tell from the way she’s looking at me, with tears suddenly brimming in her eyes, that she knows that, too
.

“Tommy Howe.” Irene repeats his name in her musical voice. “Oh, Joe, he still loves you, too.”

“No,” I say, and the misery nearly chokes me. And now I’m also going to cry. “He doesn’t.”

“Yes,” she says adamantly, brushing her tears away as she leans forward. Her urgency radiates from her. “He does. Call him. I dare you. And then go and reinvent your life.”

“I can’t,” I whisper as my fear presses down on me.

“Of course you can,” she tells me, and then asks, “What would it be like to wake up in the morning and just … be happy?”

Anger sparks and I cling to it. It’s so much better then the soul-crushing sorrow. “Says the woman who got married to advance her career.”

Irene laughs at that. “I’m not you, ass-hat. I’m not hiding, I’m not unhappy. And I
am
happy when I’m acting. Have you ever been happy?”

I think of Tommy, think of that day all those years ago when we met. I think of those first giddy weeks and months we spent together, as we did that dance of getting closer and then backing away, as we fell in love.

I think of the way we celebrated when I got a part—a small one—in my first major movie.

I think of the look on his face when we ran into Billy and Freedom down on Newbury Street, and I introduced him as a
friend;
as he realized that that was never going to change, that I couldn’t and wouldn’t be honest with anyone about who he was and what he meant to me.

I think of the way, almost exactly a year later, that I received news of my first Oscar nomination, in a hotel room in Santa Fe, with some nameless trick still asleep in my bed.

And I gaze back into Irene’s waiting eyes and I confess. “I’ve never been happy.”

“Maybe,” she says, “it’s time to try.”

We made a video and posted it online. Linked it to my Facebook fan pages and my Twitter account, and sent it as an attachment to TM fucking Z. And then, only then, after it was done, I drank myself unconscious
.

I sit up, fast, in bed as I remember this, and the top of my head nearly comes off. I make an anguished noise as I clutch it, and Irene awakens, lifting her own head. She didn’t get drunk last night, so she remembers, immediately, all that we did.

I stagger out of the room, down the stairs, and into my office where the computer is still connected to the video camera.

With fumbling fingers, I slap open my YouTube account, and there it is. With over 800,000 hits. Early on a Sunday morning.

“Hi, my name is Joe Laughlin, and I’m gay. G, A, Y. Gay. Shall I say it again for you? I’m gaaaaay. If that’s a problem for you, fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

I feel Irene who has come to stand beside me, even as on the video she pushes me aside so that she’s in the camera’s frame, too. “And I’m Irene Laughlin,” she announced with her trademark smile, “and I knew Joe was gay when I married him, but I did it, I became his beard, because I like him, and, well, really because I wanted to be in a movie with him, which is kind of skeevy, I know, but we
are
being honest here. Anyway, we’ve spent a lot of time talking these past few weeks, and I kinda convinced him that it was long past time to come out. So, here he is. Here
we
are, because I am standing beside him as he does this
really
amazing thing. He’s an incredible actor and a truly great guy, and why the
fuck
anyone should care that the person he happens to be in love with is named Tommy is beyond me!” She looks at the me who is still glaring into the camera. “Uh-oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

I’m gripped by a courage I now barely recognize, I’ve used it so infrequently. “Tommy,” I say with an intensity that makes it seem like I’m about to crawl into the camera to find him. “Call me. Please. I’m gonna wake up tomorrow, and …” I don’t finish my sentence, because telling him that I’m afraid that this is gonna be one fucking big mess isn’t likely to make him want to call.

Here in tomorrow, Irene puts her hand on my shoulder as we watch the Joe on the screen lose most of his conviction and bravado. It’s clear I’ve realized that I burned my bridges and it’s much too late. All I’m doing here is killing my career, destroying the very thing that I sacrificed so much to attain. So I add, “But it’s okay if you don’t call. I wouldn’t if I were you.”

Here in the light of morning, I remember that before we turned the camera on, we wrote a list of things to include, and the Irene in the video stays on target. “Richard West, you’re fired.” She looks at me pointedly, and I say it, too, flipping my ex-manager the bird while I’m at it.

Both Irenes think that’s funny, but the Irene in the video has moved on to the next bullet point, which is Billy. She has no idea why I want to send a special message to my childhood friend, so she’s surprised when I say, “Billy, bro, I didn’t sleep with Irene.” I explain to her, “He’s in love with you.” I see her amazement along with honest delight as I turn back to the camera. “If you’re going to hate me, don’t do it for reasons that aren’t real. Hate me for being gay—”

“Your best friend is not going to hate you for being gay,” Irene chastises me, but then addresses the camera. “Bill, you’re better than that, right?” She makes the international hand signal for telephone and mouths, “Call me!”

“I’ve had a crush on him for months,” the Irene behind me murmurs as on the computer screen she points to the last item on the list. “What’s this?” she asks video Joe.

He/I nods and addresses the camera with shades of the lofty attitude of the bastard son of the British duke from
Awaken the Dawn
. “To all of the studios and production companies who hold a contract with me for upcoming projects, I release you from our agreement. You’ll receive a letter to that effect from my lawyer, on Monday.” I glance at Irene, who leaves the frame, no doubt to go and switch off the camera, but before she gets there, I look into the lens again, and tell Tommy, “I’m sorry I asked you to call me. I know it’s too late. And I’m sorry, too, to everyone else I lied to—”

And the video fades to black.