Judith Krantz (31 page)

“Your choice. Say, you wouldn’t want to sell that T-Bird, would you? No? Didn’t think so. Well, have a nice night.” He handed her the ticket, returned to his car and, Jazz thought, undoubtedly vanished into the hiding place where he must wait like a bloodthirsty leech for just such another innocent one as she, so that he could fill his quota of tickets before he went home for the day.

Jazz’s small apartment was in a large, luxurious, expensive old apartment building, The Penthouse, in Santa Monica. She had picked it for several reasons. It wasn’t a real home, and unlike a home, she could leave the apartment without worrying about anything happening to it while she was away. Someone else worried about the roof and the landscaping and the pipes. Jazz could stay away for a weekend or two weeks and it would always be there. The building had optional maid service, valet parking, and high security—a reception desk for all visitors, an elevator man in each elevator twenty-four hours a day—and a view of the ocean.

Except for the view of the ocean, the apartment meant little to her. It was like a particularly comfortable hotel suite. Jazz’s real home was the ranch, and when she couldn’t be at the ranch, her home was her studio. Most of her evenings were taken up with dates and parties and restaurants, when she wasn’t too tired to go out. Basically, her apartment served as a bedroom and dressing room into which she dashed to change for the evening, then dashed out again and returned only to sleep.

Tonight, however, Jazz found herself wondering if she should spend some time redecorating the place, warm it up a little. It would repay a little loving kindness, she thought, feeling as sorry for the neglected apartment as she did for herself. Traffic School lay in her immediate future. She dared not attract the attention of the insurance company.

Jazz made a cup of hot tea and poured vodka into it until it was cool enough to drink quickly. Perhaps she was reinventing the martini. Traffic School. The perfect end to a perfect day. She’d never had to go before, but she’d heard horror stories from everyone. On any shoot, the mere mention of Traffic School turned the most frostily remote movie star into an instant buddy of the humble pizza-delivery man. It was like root-canal work. Everyone in California seemed to pass through its hell sooner or later.

Jazz decided to call her father and tell him. He’d had to go to Traffic School twice. He’d comfort her. He’d tell her what she should have said to that cop. Once he’d given her the ticket, was there anything worse he could have done if she’d told him what she thought of him? Could you be cited for verbal assault of the LAPD? Probably.

She dialed the hacienda number and let it ring. There was no answer after a dozen rings. Where could her father possibly be? No father, no Susie, not even Casey Nelson to talk to. Jazz was willing to accept his condolences on the subject of her ambush and entrapment. If he was there, surely he’d answer the phone, unless he was laid up in bed with saddle sores. Nobody to home at home, Jazz thought mournfully.

She called Newport Beach information and got Red Appleton’s number. No answer except a recording on a machine. She hung up hastily, without leaving a message. Red not at home, and her father not at home. They had to be out somewhere together, having dinner, sharing jokes and confidences. They must be having a marvelous time, Jazz thought. She didn’t begrudge it to them, but still, where were they when she needed sympathy? It wasn’t as if she came around demanding sympathy on a regular basis.

She put the phone on the bedspread and looked at it as if she’d never seen it before. Tears blurred her eyes, and she brushed them away impatiently. This was absurd. Traffic School was only eight hours. No picnic, agreed, but then not even a picnic was a picnic. How many people really liked picnics? Why, then, did
the prospect make her feel so utterly … abandoned? As if she’d lost her best friend?

She couldn’t call Mel, he’d be all wrapped up in Sharon. She couldn’t call Pete, he’d roar with laughter at the idea of her getting caught driving at five miles under the speed limit. She couldn’t call any of her friends because—she didn’t know why, but she couldn’t possibly call at this time and intrude on anybody. Whoever wasn’t out on a date would be making dinner at home with some man or other. It was amazing, just when you felt like calling people on the phone you couldn’t reach anybody, yet when they called you it was always at an inconvenient time.

Maybe she would write somebody a letter, Jazz thought gloomily, giving the ocean an indifferent glance. It was fascinating by day, but dark and unfriendly by night. Perhaps it would be better to have an apartment that looked out on city lights instead of the uncaring blackness beyond her windows. She could put the letter in a bottle and throw it in the ocean like the little girl in a story she’d once heard from someone, who sent a message in a bottle that said, “Whoever gets this, I love you.”

Jazz padded into the kitchen in her bare feet, the old bathrobe tied securely around her waist, planning to make another cup of tea and maybe look for a cracker. She was too gloomy to feel hungry. The house phone rang, and she jumped at the sudden noise. It rang again, aggressively, and she answered it.

“Miss Kilkullen,” said the voice of the receptionist, “there’s a visitor here for you.”

“Thank God,” said Jazz. “Who is it?”

“A Mr. Gabriel. Shall I tell him to come up?”

Jazz gaped at the house phone as if she’d found herself fondling a snake.

“Miss Kilkullen? Shall I send Mr. Gabriel up?” the receptionist repeated patiently.

“Hold on a minute.” Jazz was transfixed by confusion, not knowing, for one frightening moment of time, what year it was or why she was barefoot in this
kitchen. She was thrown back to the rending pain of the wedding that hadn’t taken place, to the months of recovery in Mel Botvinick’s studio, to the astonishing shot of Richard Nixon lying relaxed in the sun on the sand of the San Clemente beach and reminiscing about Diane Sawyer with a lazy smile no one had ever seen on his face before, the shot that had made her famous all over the world when it was published in magazines in every foreign country, everything jumbled together as if they were happening now, simultaneously.

She looked at the calendar on the wall: 1990. Jazz’s sense of time returned, steadied, settled in. She knew who she was. She couldn’t behave as if she were afraid of Gabe, that mixed-up guy with the emotional age of an eleven-year-old, whom she had loved in her own foolish immaturity. If she ducked him, he’d think she couldn’t face him.

“Tell him to come up in seven minutes, Joe,” she instructed the receptionist and hung up.

Five minutes were enough for Jazz to compose the perfect outfit in which to greet, after nine years of silence, the first man she’d ever loved, the only man she’d ever trusted with her whole self, the man who’d left her waiting at the church. Every girl was entitled, she told herself as she dressed, to one gigantic mistake in her life.

She concentrated on her clothes, beating down an attack of nerves that could only be an aberrant, irrational form of stage fright left over from another life, another girl, an innocent, gullible person she barely remembered. Gabe could never happen to anyone but just such a dumb kid.

Jazz pulled on the purple and gold Lakers T-shirt she always wore to the games—the glory and power of the splendid team, led by Magic Johnson, the most valuable and charismatic player in NBA basketball, would isolate her from Gabe as a necklace of garlic protected a sleeping person from a vampire.

Being dumped by Gabe had been the most important favor anyone had ever done her. If, God forbid,
they’d gone through with that mad marriage plan of his, she would have continued to live in his shadow, without a career of her own. Impossible as she now knew that would have been, Jazz was annoyed to realize that she still didn’t feel as totally invulnerable as she was. As she had been for years.

She pulled on a well-worn pair of black leather biker jeans, with studs on them that would keep a member of the Hell’s Angels at a respectful distance. Black high-top sneakers, an extra layer of mascara, a quick brush-through to make sure that her hair was as disorderly as possible, a smudge of lip gloss, and she was almost ready to open the door.

She surveyed herself critically in the mirror. Don’t mess with me, motherfucker, said her image. But, silly as it was, Jazz decided that if this were a picture and she was taking it, she’d know that something else was needed—some kind of prop. Jazz ran to her fridge and got an apple, took a bite, carefully removed it from her mouth and put it in the garbage, went to the front door and opened it a fraction. She turned on the television set in the living room and fell into her usual, cross-legged perch on the rug, propped up on half a dozen pillows, apple in hand.

The doorbell rang. “It’s open,” she called, nipped a tiny bite of apple and chewed vigorously, never taking her eyes off the set, trying to ignore the agitated pounding of her heart. It was no more than a reflex reaction, the proverbial chicken with its head cut off.

“So,” Gabe said, stopping in the hall at the entrance to the living room.

“Oh, hi, Gabe. Come on in. I have to see the end of this show—it’ll be over in a minute,” Jazz said as she chewed, gazing intently at the screen and waving vaguely at the couch behind her. He sat down and waited silently for three minutes as the episode of a television series came to an end. Jazz picked up the remote control and snapped off the set. She glanced up at Gabe. He hadn’t changed, she thought, except that his eyes were world-weary and his mouth sardonic
in a way it never had been before. Such an ordinary man. “Sorry, but ‘thirtysomething’ is the one show I watch religiously,” Jazz said. “Do you like it?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Apple?”

“No. Thanks.” He fell silent as Jazz nibbled away unconcernedly. “So,” he said at last.

“You sound like Mary Tyler Moore. Remember, on her show, how she always said ‘So,’ with that big, bright, nervous smile, whenever she couldn’t think of anything else to say? Blair Brown does it too.”

“Is this the television trivia quiz night?”

“I forgot you haven’t had a chance to see American television in a long time.”

“So you’ve become a Lakers fan?”

“If you’re tired of the Lakers, you’re tired of life,” Jazz said with mocking eyes. “You’d probably think it’s not enough of a contact sport. After all, nobody gets killed. There aren’t any riots. No bombs are thrown. There’s no blood on the floor. Still, as someone once wrote, when Cooper guards you, it’s like the worst wet kiss you ever had. You should be at the Forum when the Lakers have to get physical. I wouldn’t want to be out there then, not even if I were as big as Michael Jordan or Charles Barkley.”

“Barkley?”

“Of Philadelphia,” she said patiently. “You sound like someone from outer space. How’ve you been keepin’?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Never better. Busy, up to my eyebrows in work, but then aren’t we all?”

“Jazz!”

“What?” she mumbled, through a bit of apple.

“Just stop. I came here to talk to you, not play games.”

Jazz let his words hang in the air as she chewed and swallowed. She turned around on the rug and put some pillows behind her, hugging her knees with her
arms and looking up at Gabe on the couch. Her cloud of wavelets, streaked with every color from chutney to tortoiseshell, fell back from her open, flower-fresh face. She spoke lazily.

“Well, sure, Gabe, say whatever you have to say. I’m not stopping you.” Jazz kept her expression benignly neutral, even though she was thinking that if what he had to say was too difficult to confront her with, he could always write her another lovely letter.

“I had dinner with Phoebe a while ago. She told me you don’t want me in the studio and you don’t want her to rep me. I told her you were just another groupie, because I didn’t want her to know anything about us.”

“I’m amazed that you didn’t tell her the truth. Phoebe usually insists on knowing all.”

“Since she obviously didn’t know we even knew each other, I assumed you hadn’t told anybody here.”

“You can’t expect that experience to be—how can I put it?—the favorite item in my memory book. Those years seem to have happened to somebody else. No one but my father knows what kind of human being—no, strike the word ‘human’—what kind of being you are.”

“It’s about time you got hostile.” Gabe leaned forward. “Now we can get this out in the open.”

“Wrong. I’m not hostile. That was merely the most friendly way I could think of to describe you. A being. You exist. There’s plenty of room for both of us in L.A., but there’s no room
on my turf
.”

Jazz took another bite of the apple. There was another silence as she chewed methodically. “Want to watch ‘Nightline,’ with Ted Koppel?” she offered finally, in a friendly tone. “Wherever you’ve been, it’s probably the best way to catch up. That and ‘Washington Week in Review.’ That way you won’t have to spend as much time reading the morning papers.”

“I do not want to watch ‘Nightline.’ I do not want to catch up. I do not want to know what’s going on in the world. I’ve seen too much of it.”

“I’ll bet you’ve never bothered to vote again, after that one time in Paris,” Jazz remarked with a lightly scornful edge to her voice.

“Fuck! I didn’t come here for Civics 101.”

“I don’t remember inviting you. On television night I try to stay home.”

Gabe got up and sat down on the floor near her. She edged away immediately.

“Jazz, I can find other office space, that’s no problem at all, but I need Phoebe to be my rep. I’ve known her for years, I trust her judgment, and I don’t see how that can intrude on your territory.”

“Any connection between us is out of the question,” Jazz said coldly. “Your old pal, buddy, sidekick, Phoebe the know-it-all, is nothing if not a connection. She’s like some gonzo computer hacker who can sneak in everywhere and stir up trouble. It would be impossible to maintain a distance between us once Phoebe was involved in your work.”

“Jesus, Jazz, you’re still hooked on me!”

Jazz jumped up from the floor when she heard the faint but unmistakable note of not-quite-hidden triumph in his voice. She stood over him, flooded with the rage she’d been suppressing since he’d walked in the door.