Judith Krantz (33 page)

Holy shit! She had plenty of singles in her wallet, but no change. Could you get a parking ticket while you were in Traffic School? Unquestionably.

“The officer who was supposed to teach this class has a cold. I’m replacing him at the last minute, and I don’t do jokes.”

A chorus of outraged protests broke out from the imprisoned souls in the room. Muffet listened impassively. When it died down he said, “Anyone who wants to leave is welcome to do so. I don’t advise it unless you have another Saturday you want to clear for Traffic School, or unless you want to waste the part of the morning you’ve already devoted to getting up and getting here and getting your seats. The rules for the comic Traffic School are exactly the same as mine.”

Jazz heard a few people getting up noisily and leaving, but she stayed put. She’d given up a weekend at the ranch for this hell, she’d found a parking space, and she was damned if she’d go through that drill again.

Muffet waited impassively until the last defector had left, and began to speak.

“A trial by jury does not apply to your infractions. When you get a ticket, you’re guilty until you’re proven innocent. Unless your time is worth less than twenty dollars an hour, don’t fight the ticket. That’s my first lesson.”

Muffet looked around the room with a grisly smile. What had happened to the Bill of Rights, Jazz wondered?

“O.K.,” Muffet said. “Now who knows what Selective Enforcement is? Nobody? I thought so. Nobody ever does, except repeaters, and they won’t admit it. Selective Enforcement is the right of an officer to pull you over when
everybody else
is doing the same thing you’re doing. Every single car is doing sixty on the freeway, and you get a ticket for doing sixty. You don’t think you’re guilty, but you are. Why? Selective Enforcement is practiced by the LAPD because there is only one chance in
twelve hundred
that you’ll be picked out to get a ticket. In other words, if you get one ticket,
we know
that
you have committed that particular violation twelve hundred times
without
getting caught. So, no matter what the circumstances, you’re guilty. That’s my second lesson.”

Muffet hitched up his pants, his authority established as thoroughly as if they had all been deposited on Devil’s Island for the rest of their lives.

“How many people in here are single? Raise your hands,” Muffet continued. The rustle of hands was clearly audible. “How many are married?” Again she heard hands raised. “How many don’t know?”

Jazz’s hands were clenched. She hadn’t raised one for any category. Her private life was none of his concern. What did it have to do with getting an outrageously unfair ticket?

“Now I’ll ask each of you your name, what you do for a living and how you got your traffic citation,” Muffet continued.

I’m not here, Jazz thought, this is not happening to me. Behind her, people were giving answers to his questions. All their violations, without exception, were far greater than hers. The advantage of being in the first row was that when her turn came she was able to reply in a low voice. The man next to her said, in a mumble even lower than hers, that his name was Leslie Duff, that he was a construction worker and he’d been cited for running a stop sign.

“Why didn’t you stop at the sign?” Muffet asked.

“I did,” Duff protested gruffly. “But there was nobody coming in any direction, not a single car anywhere, so I looked around carefully, came to a rolling stop, and crossed the street. I thought that was good enough.”

“A stop sign means three full seconds at a full stop,” Muffet said disapprovingly. “We call those three seconds ‘the eight-hour decision.’ If you’d stopped, you wouldn’t be here.”

Duff subsided into a sullen silence. What a goon he was, Jazz thought. No way she would give Muffet any backtalk. The LAPD had its national tough-and-rough
reputation to protect, and this class was clearly taking place somewhere beyond the territorial waters of the United States.

“You,” Muffet demanded, pointing at Jazz. “Do you know the only two things that can be thrown from your car legally?”

“No, sir.”

“Water and feathers of
live
poultry.”

“Yes, sir.”

Muffet paused, and Jazz could see him tempted to actually make a joke, just to see if it was possible. “I don’t want to ever catch you on an overpass with a pillow,” Muffet told her. In disgust, Jazz heard herself giving a nervous giggle.

Muffet began to berate the class with a series of warnings about pedestrian rights, and Jazz’s eyes began to close. She was appalled by the prospect of at least seven and a half more hours of enforced confinement in this crowded, claustrophobic room. The small windows were closed and there was no air circulating; the chair was growing harder by the minute, and it felt as if Duff were taking up more and more of the little space she occupied, although he hadn’t actually moved as far as she could tell. If she could only put herself onto a higher astral level, remove herself completely, have an out-of-body experience. This would never be happening to Shirley MacLaine.

Suddenly Duff laid a piece of paper on her lap. Startled, she looked down and read the words, “Hi, gorgeous.”

She almost shrieked out loud. This weirdo was trying to pick her up. For the whole gruesome, penitential day she was going to be subjected to his harassment with no hope of escape. Jazz took a pad and pencil out of her purse and wrote, “I’ll tell Muffet if you don’t stop,” and passed it to him when Muffet wasn’t looking.

He scribbled busily and slid her another scrap of paper. “I thought you’d want to know that I forgive you.”

Duff was also crazy, Jazz realized. A sex fiend
and a nut case, and a very large-sized one. He might lash out quickly and do her some damage before Muffet could protect her. “Thanks,” she wrote. Perhaps that would pacify him.

“How about lunch?” the next note said.

Jazz was about to get up and remove herself to a safe distance and then tell Muffet what was happening, when she suddenly realized that this horrendous creature might have his uses.

“No thanks. My husband’s taking me to lunch. Do you have change for a dollar?” she wrote.

“Plenty,” was the answer.

“That’s very kind,” Jazz wrote, and sat undisturbed until the break. Everyone rose quickly as soon as Muffet announced it. Jazz held out some dollar bills but Duff simply poured quarters into her hand, turned his back, and started down the stairs. Jazz sped to her car, put in three quarters, and started running back toward the school. The street was empty, she was still two blocks away from the school, when Duff, even bigger than he seemed sitting down, materialized in front of her.

“Can’t stop,” she said, and kept on running. He caught up with her quickly and grabbed her arm.

“Come on, be nice,” he said. “You weren’t always so stand-offish.”

Perhaps sweet reasonableness would get her safely back to Fabulous Comedians, Jazz thought frantically. Muffet would take care of him. Muffet unquestionably had a gun and would love to use it. “We’re going to be late if we don’t get back to class right away,” she puffed.

“The last time we met, you were more friendly,” Duff insisted, still holding her arm.

“I’ll scream for help,” Jazz said wildly.

“No woman ever said that to me before.”

Something about his voice was weirdly familiar. He had an accent that wasn’t quite American, and even those exact words rang a distant but clearly remembered bell, Jazz realized. She looked at Duff for the first time. He didn’t have on his sunglasses. Without
the mustache … without the dirty crew hat … he would be not that bad … no, he would be … memorable … he would be …

“Sam Butler,” Jazz snapped accusingly. “What the hell are you doing clowning around with that ridiculous hair on your face?”

“You mean you really didn’t recognize me? I thought that with your eye you must have spotted me—aren’t you the lady who sees around corners? I figured you were just giving me the cold shoulder.” The Australian actor smiled his twenty-million-dollars-for-three-pictures smile, and Jazz realized that if she’d been paying any attention to her surroundings, she’d have recognized him immediately, mustache or not.

“You scared me to death,” she said severely. “Who’s Leslie Duff?”

“Me. I changed it for the movies.”

“I thought you were a mad rapist.” Jazz was furious at having been so frightened.

“That happened before too. Do you assume that every man is hot for your body, or is it just something special about me?”

“It’s definitely you.” Jazz bit her lip to keep from smiling at the way she’d frightened him with the menace of a tidal wave after that earthquake weeks ago. “Something about your attitude.”

“Do you really have a husband taking you to lunch?”

“No,” Jazz admitted. “I wanted to make you stop writing notes.”

“Then is lunch on?”

“I have to eat anyway … so all right. What did you mean, you forgive me?”

“I forgive you for being so unfairly sexy when you photographed me. You
were
sexy, you have to admit it. You really had me going. It was the first time a photographer ever got me to strip for a shoot.”

“Oh. That. Yes. Well, maybe I did take advantage of you. I guess actors are considered fair game. But what would have happened if there hadn’t been
an earthquake? You were on top of me, for God’s sake! Naked!”

“I would have let you go,” Sam Butler assured her. “I made an honest mistake. And I apologize. I was absolutely wrong.”

Studying him and trying to size him up, Jazz knew that for some reason she believed him. A man like Sam Butler didn’t have to go around forcing himself on women.

So many actors were chameleons, depending on the part for their appearance, but Sam Butler could only look like Sam Butler. He couldn’t disguise the absolute masculinity of his features, the strong, square jaw, the straight nose, the thick, almost flaxen blond hair, the resolute blue-beyond-blue eyes, the wide, determined mouth, all arranged in a way that would have left a crowd of Victorian maidens in a mass swoon … what could he do about it? Sam Butler’s features said things about him that didn’t necessarily have to be true, but which no actor’s craft was powerful enough to deny or change. He would inevitably be cast as a romantic hero. Like the young Olivier, to prove that he was a good actor, he would always have to hide behind makeup.

It had been too easy for her to categorize this actor as another guy who didn’t understand a “no” when he heard it, to overlook the loving and homesick heart he had revealed when he talked about his family back home in Australia. The attitudes of Planet Hollywood were getting to her, Jazz thought, and that wasn’t good news.

Butler looked at his watch. “Run for it. We’re going to be late for class.”

They arrived, winded, Sam pulling Jazz by her hand to speed her up the last flight of stairs, just as Muffet was about to lock the door. Sheepishly they regained their seats.

“I’ve seen this before,” Muffet said severely. “I don’t allow socializing in my class. No profane language, no chewing tobacco, no spitting, no Doritos,
no disgusting noises.” He pointed at Jazz and Sam. “And particularly no sucking face. If you wanted to meet someone, you should have gone to one of the singles Traffic Schools.”

“We’re cousins,” Sam assured him.

“First cousins,” Jazz said hastily.

“Our mothers were sisters,” Sam embroidered.

“Twins, actually,” Jazz added.

She couldn’t seem to shut up. Siamese twins? She felt hysteria mount. A crazy laugh was about to overtake her, the kind you couldn’t bring to a halt, the kind that hadn’t happened since high school, the insane laugh that came over you at the most solemn and inappropriate places and that fed upon itself. High mass, graduations, weddings, funerals—oh God!

She felt Sam Butler’s fingers pinch her upper arm, and she was able to control the fatal laughter until a sideways peek at him revealed that he was also shaking with suppressed mirth, which he was trying to conceal by hiding his lower face. He was having trouble tucking his long, unwieldy mustache away inside his collar. This absurd sight put Jazz over the top. She hunched up her shoulders, looked blindly at the floor and gave herself up to a full-fledged fit, weeping with unstoppable laughter.

“What’s going on here?” Muffet demanded.

“It’s … a … comedy … school … sir,” Sam Butler managed to choke out. “My cousin’s … very … susceptible … to jokes.”

“Well, O.K.,” Muffet said grudgingly. “But don’t let it happen again.”

Jazz finally gained control of herself through the realization that if she didn’t stop, she’d pee in her pants. It was an instantly sobering thought, and she concentrated on it until the lunch break, her eyes almost shut as she shrank her attention down to this one strong possibility, willing herself not to be aroused by the fits of giggles that shook Sam from time to time, and which were communicated to her by the quivering of his body.

Finally the lunch break came. Jazz and Sam dared to look at each other.

“Why were we laughing?” Jazz asked soberly.

“I don’t know,” Sam said.

“It wasn’t that funny.” Jazz looked puzzled.

“Not nearly funny enough, What’s so funny about twins?” Sam agreed solemnly. The word “twins” set them both off again, until they staggered out of the classroom, gasping, headed hastily for the restrooms on the ground floor.

“Got to put in some quarters before lunch,” Jazz reminded Sam when they rejoined each other on the street.

“I’ll come with you,” he said companionably. “Where’s your car?”

“There.” Sam pointed to a black stretch limousine that was following them as they walked. “The studio didn’t want me driving to Traffic School. They were afraid I’d get another ticket on the way here.”

“I wish someone took that kind of care of me,” Jazz said enviously. “I almost couldn’t find a parking place. Was it their idea to send you out in disguise?”

“No, mine. It’s the only way I can have any privacy now. Since my last flick …” His voice trailed off, embarrassed.

“You mean you’re drawing crazed crowds in
Hollywood
! Nobody gets a second look in this town. We locals pride ourselves on that.”