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Authors: Nancy Kelly

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“Grunge came back in style?”
“It never left this place,” Kristl observed. “I used to work here.”
I gave her a once-over. She was in a deep purple-blue long-sleeved top, tight black cords, and a massive pair of black boots that added at least three inches to her slender frame. With the added elevation, she almost looked me in the eye. Everything was skintight and her red hair glowed under the dimmed lights. Male eyes followed her body’s every movement.
“You’re not dressing the part anymore,” I said. I was getting a few looks myself. Glancing over the crowd, I wondered if this was a good thing.
“Yeah, it’s changed.” She sighed and lit up a cigarette. Here, you could still smoke if the establishment deemed it okay. “Kind of grunge, but different. Nothing’s the same.”
“How’re the wedding plans?”
“Well, let’s see ...” Her lips tightened. “Brandon’s whole family has gotten into the act. I caught his mother field-testing several types of ribbon—satin, velvet, grosgrain—to see which would be best to tie on the knife that cuts the cake. None of them worked. It took hours.”
I made sympathetic noises. What could you say about wedding day obsessions?
“And his sister, whom he insists I have in the wedding party, is a crier. I can’t talk to her without her eyes welling with tears. I can’t even tell anymore if she’s happy or sad or something else. I think she secretly hates me.” She sucked on her cigarette as if it had life-giving powers. “Brandon’s father’s a lech. He brushed his hand across my breasts twice before I caught on. Every time he hugs me he pushes his crotch against mine. The day he starts thrusting he’s getting bitch-slapped and I don’t care who sees.”
I made a face. Father-in-Law lechers? A new deterrent to my already lukewarm wedding desires. “Have you told Brandon?”
“Oh, sure. Like he’s listening to anything I have to say.” Kristl squinted through the smoke. “I’m not going through with it. I can’t. This is the worst one yet.”
I wanted to say
I told you so
and possibly point at her and say
nanny, nanny, nanny
, but I kept my juvenile reactions to myself. I didn’t want to chance it that I could spoil things. I was just happy she’d come to her senses.
She shot me a look. “What? You have nothing to add?”
“I’m trying to be adult.”
“Difficult, huh?”
“You have no idea.”
That scared a smile out of her. “I miss you, Blue. And your friends, too.”
“Come back to LA.”
“I just might.”
“Excuse me ...”
I jumped in my chair, the male voice coming from somewhere behind my left shoulder. I turned to find a Kurt Cobain wannabe circa 1992 hovering nearby. He looked scraggly and emaciated, and his blondish hair fell in front of his eyes and curled toward his stubbly chin. His gaze was fixed on me, not Kristl, which definitely made me worry.
“Oh,” he said, unable to hide his disappointment as we gazed at each other full on. “You’re not who I thought you were.”
“Sorry,” I said, not sure what my response should be.
Kristl eyed him critically as he sort of stumbled, shuffled away. “Major drugs,” she decreed.
I shrugged. The incident kind of depressed me for some reason. Though it fell into my ‘there aren’t any good men out there’ theory, it also seemed like the Cobain clone had experienced the reverse: there aren’t any good women.
“What a pisser,” I said on a sigh.
We left the bar and shivered down the street to Kristl’s car. She saved me a cab ride and on the way to my hotel, I said thoughtfully, “If you leave, Brandon’s going to think I had something to do with it.”
“Let him,” she sniffed.
“Maybe you ought to have it out with him. All the problems.”
“You’re kidding!” She gazed at me as if I were Benedict Arnold. “You gave me the lecture on staying single. Now, you’re playing marriage counselor?”
“Hardly. I’m just saying you need your day in court, metaphorically speaking. Tell him why you’re out of the deal.”
“Yeah, maybe.” She didn’t sound convinced. “So, tell me about you and your friends. I’m sick of talking about me. How’s the job going?”
“Not bad.” I caught her up on what was going on with Daphne, CeeCee, and Jill, and I even touched on my own problems. It was really great to get it all out there—especially without having to pay someone to listen. I finished up with a quick review of my kinda-relationship with Will and the news that he, Jackson, and I were the core of the production team for Jackson’s script, which I’d read on the plane and found incredibly good.
She listened carefully; I think she was dying for news outside of her own life. When I wound down, she said, “Are you happy to be working with Jackson?”
“Happy? I guess. Why? It’s Will I’m worried about. We’re in relationship limbo, which is just a less-involved version of relationship hell. I swear, neither of us really knows what to do with the other.”
“You and Will are through,” she stated. “You know it. He knows it.”
“Well, yeah ...”
“I could tell when I met Jackson that there was something going on with you and him.”
“Oh, bullshit. You only saw
him
that night—and the blonde who stepped all over your game.”
“At first,” she agreed congenially. “But you guys have got something unresolved going on. That kind of deep-down shit that never goes away.”
“You’re full of it.” My hand scrabbled for the door handle.
“Chicken.”
“Everybody acts like I have some secret thing going with Jackson,” I said hotly. “It just isn’t true.”
“Everybody?” She pulled out a tube of lipstick and drew a luscious red coat upon her lips. We were double-parked in front of my hotel and getting dirty looks. Kristl just didn’t care.
“Good-bye.” I stepped onto the sidewalk. I wasn’t really mad at Kristl. I was secretly pleased that she’d said what she had. Junior high reaction again. Deny, deny, deny.
“Let’s just say,
aloha, au revoir, adieu
. Until we meet again. Maybe sooner than either of us knows.”
“Come back to LA,” I urged. “Come live with me. We were good roommates.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I gently shut the door and waved. Kristl put on her left blinker and edged into traffic, then pushed the button for the passenger window and yelled, “Bet you get married before I do again!”
She quickly rolled up her window. I managed to give her a loud raspberry before she succeeded.
 
 
I landed in LA two days later at nine P.M. Bleary-eyed, I turned on my cell phone as I waited to deplane. The landing had caused a baby in the rear to wake up and begin an earsplitting howl. His screeching created a dull headache. I realized I had one missed call. My heart jerked painfully upon seeing it was Will. I’d added his name into my phone directory under Will Power. Now it was more like giving me the Willies.
I called him back, preparing all kinds of things to say to his voice mail, as Will never answered his phone. But he proved me wrong this time, surprising me into blurting, “Well, hi, there. You called?”
“Did you listen to the message?”
“Haven’t had a chance. I’m just getting off a flight.”
“I wanted you to know, since we’re going to be working together, that I’m back with Rhianna.”
That caught me up. Really. Huh. I couldn’t find anything appropriate to say, so I just said, “Oh?”
“It wasn’t working with you and me. Might as well just get it out there.”
His voice was terse and practiced. He was delivering bad news and he wanted it out. I realized I was being broken up with, sort of. This pissed me off some.
“Keep her away from snow globes,” I suggested, but I forced a smile as I spoke. Didn’t want to give away the fact that I was infuriated. I don’t take breakups well. Any kind of breakup. And really, who does?
“I don’t have a problem with you being the producer of Jackson’s film,” he said, as if I’d asked.
Big of him. “I don’t have a problem with you being the director.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
“See ya soon, then. Jackson wants to get together at Someplace Else, probably tomorrow.”
“I’d rather go to The Other Place.”
“Take it up with him,” Will said, completely missing the point. He was that anxious to get off the phone. I wasn’t exactly dying to hang on the line. At least he’d broken up with me so I hadn’t had to do the dirty deed myself. Had that been the case, I might have received the brunt of his notorious temper.
I walked to baggage claim, reminding myself that this was all a good thing. Never mind that I wanted to bite someone’s head off. Into this cheery mood, my cell phone trilled again. Blocked call. I debated answering it. If someone wasn’t in my phone’s address book, chances were it wasn’t anyone I wanted to talk to. And I didn’t feel like talking to anyone right now anyway.
But curiosity won out over seething anger. “Hello,” I answered tautly.
“Ginny?” a male voice inquired.
It took me a moment. Two syllables just isn’t enough to place a voice. Struggling, I said, “Brad?”
“It’s Bradley, yes. Hi. How are you?”
I thought it apropos that Knowles-It-All had found me, not the other way around. I said, “I’m okay. How about yourself ?”
“I’m buying a house in Santa Monica.”
I fell into immediate panic. Brad ... ley in Santa Monica again? That was way too close. When he and I had been together we’d lived in Pasadena, which was straight east on the 10. Close enough to drive to, but far enough to count as
someplace else
, and I didn’t mean the bar.
“A friend of yours called me. An old boyfriend, I think.”
“Ah, yes. Don’s looking for a good personal injury lawyer.”
Brad had a good memory. I could give him that. I winced, wondering how much I’d told him about all of the Ex-Files. He’d been Ex-File Number Seven, second to last; the one before Nate. I’d been circumspect about discussing my past relationships with Nate, but I think I might have been a blabbermouth with Brad ... ley.
“Mr. Delaney wants to sue your landlord over a faulty automatic garage gate.”
“Who? Oh. Don” I’d begun to think “the Devout” was his last name.
“Can you tell me something about this accident? Honestly, Gin, it doesn’t sound like something I want to bother with. How dangerous is this gate?”
“On a scale of one to a hundred? Two.”
“It doesn’t bear down on you?”
“Sure it does ... at a rollicking snail’s pace.”
“Any warning notices?” I could hear him taking notes.
“Schematic Man is doing the doubled-over in pain dance in black and white.”
He went right past that. I don’t think Brad
ley
ever really appreciated me. “Would you say there’s any case, there?”
“No.” I was bluntly honest. “I don’t even know how Don did it. Did he fall into a temporary coma? Did he just forget to move? It’s one of life’s great mysteries.”
“Can I see you tonight? I’ll show you the house and you can buy me a drink.”
I drew in a breath of remembrance. Knowles-It-All at his finest. Push fast to capture what you want—then bore the hell out of whomever you trap.
“
I
can buy
you
a drink? I don’t think so.”
“I’ll treat,” he said, as if that answered it. “Give me your address. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
I hesitated. Although this was a golden opportunity to meet and greet Ex-File Number Seven, was I really ready to spend some time with him? Being with Brad
ley
could be excruciating. And he was moving back to Santa Monica? Good God.
“Ginny?”
I must have capitulated because before he hung up he said he was looking forward to seeing me and he gave me his new cell phone number. That woke me up enough to remind him that I was starting a job the next morning—although that was a fib—because I suspected I might need an out if he either put me to sleep with his myriad political facts that I DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT, or if he pushed me into an argument where he ended up having all the answers and I had none.
You can see why our relationship didn’t last.
Give me time ... I might remember how it got started.
Chapter
21
O
kay, I’m kidding. I remember. Knowles-It-All was the Ex-File right before Nate, so it would be hard for me to really forget. But sometimes it’s a struggle. I have to get past the locks and keys on my own recall, and believe me, that can be a job. I’m pretty good at actively forgetting, which is kind of scary. It’s like wishing yourself short-term memory loss. A truly effective defense mechanism against the Godawful breakup.
But I could remember Brad Knowles, all right. As I unpacked from my Seattle trip, I forced myself to review our relationship. Oh, yes. What a peachy time we’d had. Recalling my time with Knowles-It-All was not conducive to raising the mercury on my enthusiasm meter. I had to try very, very hard not to dread our upcoming meeting.
Brad had been forty-one when we started dating. I was twenty-seven at the time. It wasn’t a huge gap; it wasn’t even as huge as mine and Lang’s had been. But Brad and I were light years apart in experience, whereas Lang and I had been about on par. This was because thirty-eight-year-old Lang suffered from a self-professed ten-year-old mind-set: he was basically a kid who happened to possess his own place and a boatload of money. Lang wasn’t far off in his assessment of himself. I was a green, twenty-one-year-old production assistant and yet I was way ahead of him in maturity and worldliness. This worked for us basically because I never lived with Lang. We just had fun together.
Not so with Brad
ley
Knowles. He and I made the colossal mistake of cohabitation soon after we met. But that was only part of the problem. A bigger slice was that Knowles was an expert in all ways. I mean, he really was. There was hardly a topic he didn’t know something—a whole
lot
of something—about. The Ex-File directly before Brad was Black Mark. It goes without saying that meeting intelligent, calm, and worldly Brad Knowles was, timing-wise, just what the doctor ordered. (I’d used this phrase referring to Brad in Dr. Dick’s office one time, and he made a face. I guess Brad wouldn’t have been Dr. Dick’s particular prescription.)
Anyway, Brad and I met at a party. Friends of friends of friends, and at a time when I hadn’t been my usual scintillating self. In fact, I’d pretty damn well become a wallflower. It had been quite some time since I’d run from Black Mark, and I was feeling parched for male companionship and somehow letting it erode my self-esteem. All I could think was I might never be with a real live man again—which is such a crock of shit for any able-bodied young woman to think. I mean, come on! But nevertheless I was wallowing in self-pity, nursing my dating disappointments over a Ketel One vodka martini and sucking on one of the olives, when Brad walked straight up to me.
At first I didn’t believe he was really interested in me. Brad Knowles, tall, gray-haired (his was already way gone before the start of our relationship, so I’m not blaming myself on that one) and handsome, with a devastating crooked smile and gray-blue eyes that matched his mane, seemed out of my league. He truly was head-turningly attractive, but my first thought was that he was way past his pull date. (That gray hair and aura of maturity ...) I automatically figured I was too young for him. Maybe I was.
“Could I get you another one of those?” he asked, indicating my nearly empty glass.
“I’ve had three already.”
“You know what Dorothy Parker says about that?”
I almost said, “Who’s Dorothy Parker?” but wisely decided to keep my ignorance in this matter a still-to-be-discovered characteristic. Instead I raised inquiring brows.
Brad quoted: “
I love martinis, one or two at the most, three you’re under the table, four you’re under the host
. A woman’s point of view, obviously,” he added, grinning.
I gave him a once over. It was an unusual come-on line. “As far as I know, our host is married. Not really my style.”
“If I bring you a drink, I’ll consider myself a very hopeful host,” he said lightly.
Bold, but not crossing the line into crass. I smiled and allowed him to order me another Ketel One martini. While I slowly sipped it, he informed me that Dorothy Parker was a famous New York writer from the thirties who spent time with fellow writers at the Algonquin Hotel—which became the meeting place of their group, the equally famous Algonquin Club—drinking martinis and creating witticisms and swapping stories and generally bullshitting. I was pretty buzzed by the time I got all this information. Well, to be frank, I was out-and-out drunk, and that’s how I ended up at Brad’s place, both under the table and under the host.
I remember finding this the height of hilarity, laughing myself silly until I bonked my head on the underside of the table and developed a rabid case of the hiccups. After that we moved to his sumptuous king-sized bed and I crashed into a pillowy loveliness that basically sealed the deal. I moved in within two weeks.
Brad lived in Pasadena in a bungalow that was cuteness personified and undoubtedly cost an absolute fortune. He wasn’t far off Colorado Boulevard, made famous in the Jan and Dean song,
The Little Old Lady From Pasadena,
as she “drives real fast and drives real hard/She’s the terror of Colorado Boulevard.”
I decided I loved, loved,
loved
Pasadena. I was moving away from production assistant status and into production management/ coordination. I was happier than I’d ever been. This was absolutely great. Brad made me feel like a grown-up, something that had pretty much eluded me until this time. I hate to admit it, but I was feeling inwardly superior to my girlfriends as CeeCee was tearing through jobs like a race car; Daphne was dating her perennial losers; and Jill and Ian were already into the first stages of their dysfunctional “he loves me, he loves me not” thing. But I, Ginny Blue, was with Brad Knowles, successful personal injury attorney. I liked to call him Brad Knowles, Esquire, which he seemed to enjoy. There was something British about him though he was born in the Bronx. Somewhere over the years he’d lost his New York accent and developed this sort of polished diction that totally turned me on.
We set up house together, my first attempt at actually living with the object of my affection. I tried cooking. Started out with a basic Betty Crocker cookbook and built from there. Brad was hopeless in the kitchen, but hey, we were doing fine in the bedroom. Life was wonderful. I actually entertained fleeting ideas—scenarios, if you will—of us as a married couple.
Then Brad let me in on the big secret: he’d been married before. This did not bother me. In fact, it kind of put my mind at ease. A guy who’s reached his forties without even one marriage behind him is kind of a red flag. Maybe he’s the swinging single type who’s never been interested (
uh huh, yeah,
read “gay” for that) or maybe he’s just been so focused on a career (read “pathologically self-involved” here) or maybe he’s simply been unmarriageable and therefore rejected by any woman with any worth (read “loser”).
So, I was initially happy to hear about the ex. Brad said they were on amicable terms, so okay, even better. I had this unformed notion that she and I might actually get along and share Brad stories, or something.
Then he told me that he had a child. Children. Three, to be exact. And they weren’t babies. One was actually fifteen. A boy. With a surly expression and a monosyllabic delivery that became like the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard to me. His name was Tremaine and he started spending more and more time with his dad, which Brad professed to love, but which left me teensitting him whenever I wasn’t on a job, which was most of the time since Brad really resented my work and its long hours.
Thus, I found myself in the role of wicked stepmother, even before any serious thought of a wedding. I also found myself racking my brain, struggling for some kind of meaningful communication between us. With a Stepford-wife smile, I asked, “Tremaine, would you like me to order a pizza?”
“Nah.”
“I could make lasagna. I’m good at that one.”
“Nah.”
“Chicken?”
“Nah.”
“Hamburgers?”
Ha, ha, ho, ho. Oh, Ginny Blue, trying to jolly the unjollyable, miserable teenager sprawled on the sofa, watching television and playing video games.
“Nah.”
“Cioppino?”
“Huh?”
“Never mind.” I gave up any interest in culinary skills at that juncture in my life. Tremaine just sucked the joy out of anything domestic. Brad sensed that I was unhappy and he knew the cause but rather than face the fact that his lovely offspring and I weren’t getting along, he chose to break into long dissertations on the law and his latest case rather than talk about anything personal, interesting or relevant.
Brad’s other two kids weren’t much better. The middle daughter, twelve, surly, and possessed of huge mascaraed eyes which she constantly rolled, was a teensy-weensy little bitch. She hated me thoroughly. I could tell she went straight home to Mumsy and laid out all my faults. I used to obsess about this until I stopped loving Brad; then I scrutinized my own faults as well, chief among them being the fact that I’d gotten myself into this trap in the first place.
The youngest boy was simply rude. Wouldn’t talk to me. Wouldn’t look at me. And as for Mumsy herself, she was all sweetness and sugar to my face but a real rattlesnake behind my back. I read that one straight off. My illusions were shattered upon first meeting, thank God, so I didn’t have to feel like an idiot for ever believing in her.
So, what did this all say about Brad?
The way I saw it, he helped create these little monsters by marrying one.
Still, I hung in there. Some kind of sick desperation on my part, I guess. Me, trying to do something I can’t: tolerate bad behavior for the sake of a boyfriend. How pathetic can you get!
Then, the
coup de grace
. And this is where it gets really ugly. Knowles-It-All decided it was time to change
me
! His screwed-up family wasn’t enough. He needed fresh meat to pound down.
“Ginny, who’s your stylist?”
He caught me as I was digging into my favorite dish: pizza casserole. It was one I’d learned to make during the failed get-close-to-Tremaine era: ground Italian sausage sauteed with sliced mushrooms added into spaghetti sauce and olives then poured over pasta and baked with a crust of mozzarella cheese. Yum! Even Tremaine ate it and grunted “good,” which was high praise indeed. Brad wouldn’t eat it, however, as he was fashionably “no carb” long before it became the rage.
“My stylist?” I repeated, gulping down a bite before speaking. Brad didn’t like me talking with my mouth full. My hair was always stick straight and sometimes I curled it and sometimes I didn’t. There was no stylist, as he well knew.
“You need something more around your face. Go to Sylvia’s on Fairfax.” He opened his wallet and peeled off some bills.
Well.
I couldn’t decide whether I was totally pissed or marginally amused. I chose amused, for the time being, and went to Sylvia who chopped, sheared, scissored, and prattled and pretty much ruined me in one sitting. My hair was supposed to feather around my face but it simply got in my eyes. Brad professed to love my new look, but Brad was never wrong about anything, or so he liked to believe.
I left Brad after about a year of this torture and scoured the ads for someplace to live. The Santa Monica condo was available for lease and I threw down the first and last month’s rent with a gulp as I hadn’t been working as steadily—owing to Brad—and it was highway robbery, what they wanted to charge.
My friends were thrilled that I was a) living closer to them, and b) through with Knowles-It-All, but none of them could move in with me and help out with rent as they were all deep into their own leases. I advertised for a roommate and got Nate. Nate and I lived together for two months before we became a couple. I realize, somewhat belatedly, that it was nice of Nate to just up and move out without creating a problem for me. The trauma of trying to find another place around Santa Monica—my preferred choice of location but where the rents jump astronomically once you move—might have sent me around the bend.
My trip down this Knowles-It-All Memory Lane ended in an epiphany so strong it sounded like a
bang
to my ears.
My mother wanted to help me buy my condo.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” I practically yelled at myself. The empty walls were the only ones who heard. Good God. What was I waiting for?
In a frenzy of sudden decision, appreciation, love, and gratitude, I called Mom.
“This is Lorraine,” she said in her bright realtor’s voice.
“Are you serious about the down payment for the condo?”
“Virginia! Er ... Ginny. Yes, of course I’m serious.”
“And you’ve talked to Mr. Norrell about it?”
“Yes. If you’ve had a change of heart, just say so.” I could hear the smile in her voice.
“I have,” I said humbly. “I’ll pay you back. I need some kind of security in my life.”
“Darling, if it’s not going to be a wedding ring, it sure as hell better be real estate.”
Words of wisdom from Lorraine Bluebell, she of the big-ass purses and vast knowledge of the residential market. I said, “I love you.”

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