Extreme Bachelor (3 page)

Jack had the idea of coming to New York to
watch his brother Parker play ball for the Mets. “Private box,”
he’d said to Michael. “Really good-looking women.”

‘Nuff said.

But now Parker wanted to come up to their
suite, and Michael didn’t think that was a good idea. He was giving
out all the signs of being a seriously wet blanket, and Michael was
ready to go out. He hadn’t been to New York in a few years and he
was anxious to hit some of his old haunts. Nothing against
Parker—he was a decent guy when he was on, but when he was off, he
was pretty miserable company, and man was he off now.

“You sure you want to come to the hotel with
us?” Jack asked in a tone that suggested he was having the same
misgivings as Michael.

“I can’t go home,” Parker
muttered. “There’s an old woman who lives on my street, and Jack,
she’s . . . she’s
lethal
.”

Something else hit the car, but it was a
softer thud than before. “Hot dog,” Michael guessed.

Jack and Parker glared at him.

The reception at the hotel wasn’t any
warmer, although they did manage to get up to the room without an
incident, which was an improvement over the scuffle they’d had
trying to leave the stadium.

Inside their suite, Jack was on Parker’s
case. “What the hell is eating at you? You used to be so damn good.
What happened?” he demanded.

“Okay,” Parker said, holding up massive
hands. “You’ll think I’ve lost it, but here it is: I think it’s
that Kelly O’Shay.”

“Who?” a clearly perturbed Jack shouted.

“Kelly O’Shay!” Parker cried. “She has a
morning radio sports show here in the city, and every single damn
day she is hammering on me. I think it’s her,” he said helplessly,
and dragged all ten fingers through his hair. “She’s really on my
case, Jack,” he said, sounding like a kid. “You won’t find a meaner
tomcat than her, I swear to God.”

Michael rolled his eyes
and tapped up the volume on the boob tube. He wasn’t a pro baseball
player, but he thought that if he were, and he couldn’t hit a
slow-pitch softball, then he’d be down at a batting cage somewhere
instead of holed up here like some felon, whining about some disc
jockey who had it in for him. A
female
disc jockey, for
Chrissakes.

Jack, however, was appalled. “Wait, wait,”
he said, waving a hand at Parker as he tried to process it. “Are
you trying to tell me that you can’t hit because some . . . some
chick is talking trash?”

“She’s jinxed me,” Parker muttered
miserably. “I swear she’s jinxed me.”

Michael sighed and flipped channels. And as
he zoomed past one channel after another, something caught his eye,
something so unreal that he suddenly bolted forward, quickly bumped
it back a couple of channels, and peered intently at the
screen.

Holy shit.

He turned up the volume.
“
There are times I just don’t feel like
myself
.” A pretty woman with
shoulder-length blond hair, tight low-rider jeans, boots, and a
suede jacket was walking down a country lane with her dog. She
paused by a wooden fence and leaned against it, looking into the
camera. “
Sometimes, irregularity can
really put a damper on my day. But then my doctor told me about
Fibercil
.”

Jack, who had paused in the dressing-down of
his brother, chuckled.

“Ssh
,” Michael hissed at him.

“Just one pill before I go
to bed, and the next day, I feel like me again
!” She smiled brightly and resumed walking, pausing once to
pick up a stick and throw it for the dog, as a male voice intoned,
“
Serious side effects may include nausea,
fatigue, hypertension
. . .”

Michael didn’t hear any of it—he was too
mesmerized by the woman. He watched as she strolled along, her corn
silk hair shimmering in the sun, her smile content, her
stick-throwing abilities pretty lame.

Leah Kleinschmidt.

He hadn’t seen her in five years now, and
man, she looked . . . she looked so much better than what he
remembered. Long blond hair. Fabulous breasts. Legs that went on
for miles. Oh yeah, he remembered those long legs wrapped around
him as he moved inside her, and his wanker gave him a little nudge.
And that warm, million-watt smile he’d carried in his mind’s eye,
comparing it to all the other smiles he’d seen in those five years,
never finding one that could match it.

So Leah had gone to Hollywood. Good for her.
He just hoped there was something a little better in her portfolio
than a commercial for some constipation product.

“Mikey . . . are you having a problem?”
Parker asked, as a male voice continued with the serious side
effects.

“Huh?”

“A
problem
. You know. . . ”

“No, no,” Michael snorted. “No, it’s just .
. . I know her.”

Leah turned and smiled at
the camera. “
I can rely on just one pill
at night, and I feel as good as new in the
morning
,” she repeated sunnily.
“
That’s great peace of
mind
.”

“So who is she?” Parker asked.

What a loaded question—she was everything in
some respects. And really nothing since he’d dumped her five years
ago. “No one,” he said. “Just someone I used to know.”

Leah’s face faded behind a
giant bottle of Fibercil. Michael quickly switched the channel to
ESPN. Two commentators were discussing the Mets game.
“
The problem with major league baseball is
there is no accountability. You don’t spend that kind of money
without being guaranteed some results. If I were the Mets
organization, I would be suing for every last dime I’d given
Par
—”

“Jesus,” Parker moaned. Michael quickly
switched again, landing on some movie channel. He handed the remote
to Jack, got up, walked to the windows that overlooked Central
Park, and stared out, as Jack demanded that Parker explain more
about the female shock jock who was harassing him to the point he
couldn’t hit.

Leah Kleinschmidt. The One Who Got Away.

Well. Technically speaking . . . the One He
Never Should Have Dumped.

Los Angeles

Six Months Later

IN L.A., Leah Klein was dressed in a huge,
thick robe and fuzzy slippers. Her hair was sticking up in two
Mickey Mouse—like earballs on the top of her head, and she was
holding a huge box of tissues stuffed under her arm.

The man across from her
cocked his head to one side, studying her face. “Redder around the
nose,” he said, because he was the director and could decree such
things. “A
lot
redder. We want her to look like she’s been blowing more than
her brains through there. Now she just looks like she’s had too
much to drink. Let’s get this right, okay?”

Apparently, considering they were on what
had to be at least the fiftieth take, getting a tissue commercial
right was a lot harder than Leah could have imagined. Her agent,
Frances, had said, “Just go without makeup. That oughta be good
enough.”

Leah hadn’t quite known
how to interpret that, but she had come without makeup and couldn’t
wait to tell Frances that apparently her bare face didn’t
look
that
ill.

A girl with two nose rings and a tongue and
eyebrow stud suddenly popped up in front of Leah and started
dabbing a brush around her face with a vengeance, shoving red
powder into her nose and eyes. There was so much powder flying that
Leah started wheezing and had to wave her hand in front of her face
to get rid of the girl and the powder.

The director leaned in, his face looming
large as he studied the newly applied powder and nodded. “Okay,
Lisa,” he said as Leah blinked several times, trying to clear the
cloud of makeup in them, “Let’s please try and get this done in
this take, okay? Just dig down deep, think back to the last time
you had a really bad cold, and let that emotion come out,” he said,
making a digging motion with his hands.

“Leah,” she said, shaking her hands
violently in front of her face to help her resist the urge to
plunge her fingers into her eyes and wipe them clean of powder.

The director stared at her. “What?”

“Leah. My name is Leah. Not Lisa.” The idiot
couldn’t seem to process what she was saying. “You, ah, you called
me Lisa earlier,” she said, pointing over her shoulder to earlier.
“I was just clarifying.”

He blinked, reared back,
stabbed his hands high in the air and bellowed,
“
Great, Leah
!” He
dropped his hands to his waist. “Okay,
Leah
, let’s try and get it this
time. Could you please try and get it right,
Leah
?”

Wow, he really meant it. Was she that bad?
Did her acting skills suck so badly that she couldn’t play a sick
housewife convincingly? If she was such a bad actress, then why was
she here? WhywhywhywhyWHY did she keep taking these gigs?

Oh, right. Because she needed money. Needed
it so desperately that she really didn’t want to lose this
commercial—it was her second national, which meant residuals good
enough to maybe get another car, and she was insanely desperate for
another car. Her ‘98 Ford Escort had a bad transmission and started
only about half the time.

“Hello! Earth to
Leah
!” the director
snapped, startling her out of her thoughts. “I asked you, can we
get this done?”

“Yes,” she said with a resolute nod,
ignoring the smirks of the people behind the camera. Who were they,
anyway? Did Fluffy Tissue really need five people to make sure this
thing went down? It was a tissue for god’s sake!

“Fabulous,” the director snapped, turned
around, and stalked behind the camera. “Okay, places!” he
yelled.

Leah jumped up and hurried to her place.
Because she was the only one with a place, she gripped her box of
tissue and smiled brightly at her director.

“Look sick,” he said.

She dropped the smile.

“Action!”

With a theatric sneeze into her tissue that
would have won her a Tony had she been back on Broadway, Leah
looked miserably into the camera. “I don’t know which is worse,”
she said in her best stuffy-nose voice. “To have the aches and
pains and the stuffy runny nose that goes with the flu? Or to have
really rough tissues?” she exclaimed, shaking a fistful of them at
the camera before tossing them aside. “I need a cottony soft
tissue!” she cried into the camera, then pulled several more
tissues from her box of really rough tissues and blew her nose into
them, wincing with pain the whole time.

And then she started shuffling across the
stage to a bedroom. When the commercial aired, this was the point
someone would be telling the world that there was a cottony soft
tissue for her tender nose. She had to make the shuffle last
fifteen seconds, which meant she had to pause and sneeze twice on
her way.

When she reached the
bedroom, she picked up a box of cottony soft tissues from the
dresser, which was really stupid, because why would her character
be complaining about rough tissues when she already had a box of
the cottony soft shit? But when she’d asked that during an earlier
take, Marty Scorsese over there almost had a seizure. She glanced
at him from the corner of her eye; he cued her, and she put one of
the cottony soft tissues to her nose and sighed with relief.
“Now
that
is a
soft tissue.”

She did some more dabbing
around her nose, waiting for the director to say “cut.” But he
didn’t say “cut,” he just stood there on the other side of the
camera, his hands braced on his knees, staring at her. It was so
bizarre that she could actually feel the giggles building and began
to panic. Why didn’t he just cut? CUT! CUT! CUT! What was
wrong
with this
asshole?

“CUT!” he shouted. “Print it,” he added, and
hitched up his pants like he owned the thirty-second commercial
world.

The wardrobe guy was instantly yanking the
skanky robe from her shoulders, as if he was afraid she would steal
it. Leah leaned over, rolled down the jeans she had worn under the
robe, then dodged her way through the crew, tripping over a cable
and nearly face-planting in her haste to make her way to the makeup
girl’s rolling cart of treats. Once there, she picked up a towel
and wiped her face as best she could. She didn’t even bother with
the janitor’s closet they tried to say was a dressing room—it
smelled awful in there. She tossed the towel aside, grabbed her
sandals and her backpack, and walked out into the bright California
sunshine.

She paused, looked up through the newly
planted palm trees at the cloudless blue sky, flung her arms wide,
and cried, “What am I still doing in L.A.?”

Naturally, the heavens didn’t deign to
answer. They never did.

With a growl of exasperation, Leah marched
across the parking lot to her old car.

She’d been asking herself that question
since her car’s transmission had started to tank a few months ago.
Five years ago, she’d been the hottest actress on Broadway, the one
everyone said was “going places.” She worked in plays that paid
some serious scratch, had a beautiful rent-controlled apartment,
loads of friends—her best friend, Lucy, who still lived in New
York, was constantly reminding her of that.

But Leah had left all that to come to L.A.
to pursue a career in acting because it was what she’d always
wanted to do. From the moment she’d been cast as a pussy willow in
the first-grade play, she’d had the acting bug. In high school,
she’d acted in every production, and when she couldn’t act, she
joined the stage crew. When it came time to go to college, her
parents—who still lived in an upscale Connecticut suburb—said
acting was frivolous and they would only pay for her college if she
majored in finance or law or even humanities. But not acting.