Plus One (35 page)

“Alex? You okay?”

“You remember that ad, don't you?”

Alex could remember the exact moment when he'd first seen that TV commercial. He'd been eleven, maybe twelve, alone in his red-checked flannel pajamas, sick with a viral infection. Much later, recounting the episode with a therapist, he blamed his inappropriately intense response on a 102-degree fever and anxiety over the whereabouts of his mom. He'd been running the same high fever for two straight days when the Gap ad had triggered something akin to a psychotic break. The images were horrendous enough, a big phallic cartoon needle-and-thread flying frantically through space, careening over undulating mountains of blue denim. Then there was the melody of the jingle itself, the way it plunged down, dropping into an impossibly low register—hearing it for the first time, he'd felt a flurry in the pit of his stomach that grew into a full-body quake. He was teetering over a void, an eternal darkness, an infinite chasm. When his mom came home after her weekend away, he was trembling in the corner of his room, dehydrated and delirious, face slick with tears.

“
Fall… in… to… the… Gap
,” he sang again now, that same deep-down flurry overtaking him again. “How was that even an
ad
? Can you believe they sold jean shorts with that horror show?”

“Seriously, Alex? You get up right now and put on some clothes. No chinos either. I'll be outside in twenty minutes.”

• • •

Huck ignored Alex's feeble protests and drove west to the Davies. After splitting with Katherine, he had practically moved into the club, partly for the emotional support of the boys at the bar but also to establish a claim on the club as
his
domain during the reshuffling of their marital assets, financial and otherwise.

“I shouldn't be out in public,” Alex said as they saddled up to barstools under the gnarled branches of what looked like an old-growth olive tree. He felt greasy and rumpled. A few tables over, four guys in suits were swirling amber-colored alcohol in bulbous snifters.

“Come on, homes—it's a tequila tasting!” Huck said, raising two fingers to a passing hostess, who beelined past their table without a pause. “Small-batch shit from Jalisco. Infused with peppercorn and yopo plants—loaded with DMT, same stuff the Incas snort with bird bones. Mixed up in a cocktail called the Mystic Sombrero. Shit'll put a pretty golden halo on everything, make all your hurt go away. You need this.”

Alex shrugged and squinted up at a string of white lights in a low-hanging branch overhead. He imagined what it took to get this tree up here, thirty stories up. He pictured a two-prop chopper hoisting the tree over the rooftops, the roots bunched in a bulging mesh sack, the trunk spinning in the wind, long, feathery leaves scattering on the sidewalks below.

Huck craned his head around the room, then ducked down and motioned for Alex to come close. “I tell you about my thing with Cruise?”

“
Cruise
Cruise?”

“He's between movies right now. Sits in the lounge, reads the paper, chugs smoothies. So last week I'm sitting right across from him and I figure—why not? He's a member, so am I, what the hell. So I lean over and I say, ‘So Tom—I gotta ask: What's the
deal
with Scientology?' ”

“You said that? Seriously?”

“Sure.”

“What'd he do?”

“He looks me up and down, shakes his head and just goes, ‘You're not ready.' ”

“That's it?”

“That's it.
You're not ready
. Then he goes back to his paper.”

“Wow.”

“I know, right? What do you wanna bet Paul Haggis wrote him that line?”

Alex perked up as another waitress passed their table with a tray of cocktails. She reached the foursome of suits then went into a crouch. Alex zeroed in on a crease in her tweed miniskirt and watched it bunch up over a pair of sheer gray stockings.

“Figgy's gone,” he said.

“What?”

“Flew out this morning. New show in Baltimore. Said she'll send for the kids in a week or so. Send for them—that's how she put it.”

“And you're what—
bummed
?
You
wanna go to Baltimore? You're kid-free, wife-free—you should embrace that shit.”

“I guess.” He knew he
should
embrace that shit. But somehow, the thought of sending the kids with Rosa to visit Mommy on the set of her new TV show felt terrifying. It felt like a whole new reality. One in which Figgy's life kept right on going, busy as can be, all her responsibilities and needs attended to—while his life froze. Rosa would pick up the slack with the kids, Anne-Marie would help out with house duties, Zev would help Figgy work out her early-stage pregnancy hormones—and soon everything Alex contributed to the Sherman-Zicklin clan would be…
subcontracted
. She had the cards. She'd keep working, keep earning, keep being the same tough, anxious, hard-charging, powerhouse she was. But Alex? What became of the husband-of?

The waitress passed by again, this time giving Huck a quick shrug as she hustled by. Letting out an exasperated moan, he went over to the bar, reached over the counter, and returned to the table with a Mystic Sombrero in each hand.

“They better not be freezing me out,” he said as he sat down. “I heard they're doing housekeeping on membership rolls—but
it's only supposed to be agents and bankers and dweebs that get the boot. I'm a fucking creative!”

Alex took his glass and held it up to the light. “How much of this yoyo stuff are we talking here? Because I'm not really in the best shape to take a serious
trip
. I'm about two sips away from crumpling into your lap and weeping.”

Huck shook his head, took a long draw on his glass, and leaned in close. “What is so wrong anyway?”

Alex explained as best he could, the events of the last few days tumbling out over one, then two more snifters. The kiss with Miranda. The strap. The stick. The feeling today that the fight last night was the big one, the one you never come back from.

When he was finished, Alex reached for his water glass and shut his eyes, woozy. When he looked up and across the table, Huck had his fist propped under his chin, regarding him like a clinician considering a chart. “What did she actually
say
?” he asked. “Did she formally, officially say the word ‘separation'?”

“No—I don't know,” Alex said, running the exchange back. “This morning when she left… she said something about us ‘needing time'. But last night she did say we were ‘done'. ”

“But no email, no note—nothing in writing?”

“No. Why?”

“Why? Come on. The clock is still running is why. There's been no formal notification, no official date of separation. How long 'til the anniversary?”

Alex felt his head swim. “Oh Jesus, Huck, this isn't about that.”

“Come on. You can deny it all you like, but you both know what's really going on here. So when is it?”

“Next March. But it doesn't matter—she's pregnant, remember? She didn't get pregnant because she wants a divorce.”

“Is that so?” Huck said. “Think about it. All the guys who take off on pregnant women—people don't talk about it, but come on, how many get
pushed
? A lot. Figgy got what she wanted. And now
one phone call and she's got a nursery at the studio and twenty-four-hour childcare. You can come visit twice a week and then go home to your shitty Oakwood apartment and start dating batshit-crazy cocktail waitresses. Not a problem for her at all.”

Alex straightened up on his barstool and put his face in his hands. The taste of the tequila was hot on his tongue. What Huck was saying—that was just Huck working out his own issues. His whole life had become a game of relational warfare—but he and Figgy weren't anywhere near that kind of hostile territory. But as soon as he'd had this thought, a jolt of doubt shot through him. Maybe Huck was right and Figgy was already far gone. Maybe like everything else in their lives, Figgy had figured out where they were going long before he'd had a chance to get acquainted with the new scenery.

“There wasn't enough Paxil in the world to get me to ten with Kate,” Huck said. “But you—you can still squeak this out. I know you feel bad. You're wading around in the muck. But I'm telling you, shake that off. Quit this whole power mope. You can't believe how much better you're gonna feel when you stop living your life as a fucking
handbag
.”

“What? How am I… a handbag?”

“You're an accessory, Sherman. A trinket. A coke spoon. A hood ornament. I've been there. It's crushing—you can't live like that.”

Alex drained his tequila and motioned to the waitress for another.

“Look, just make nice,” Huck said. “Let her know you're good with the pregnancy, sorry about everything. Get some sun. Relax. Go ahead and have some fun with that butcher girl of yours, but you keep that on lockdown. No matter how good it feels to have this sweet tattooed thing take off her apron for you—don't get sloppy. You go out tomorrow and get yourself one of those prepaid SIM cards—and you pop that in whenever you and butcher
girl trade recipes or whatever. You treat that second SIM with the care and respect you showed the rubber you smuggled around in your Velcro wallet in high school. Otherwise one day the wife is gonna pick up your phone, find a text from the butcher girl, and start typing away, pretending to be you. Next thing you know your wife and your girlfriend are sexting back and forth, having a grand old time—”

“Huck, stop.” Alex waved his hand in front of him as if cutting through a cloud of noxious cigar smoke. “I'm not sexting with Miranda. And I'm not making nice with Figgy just so I can hit some magic ten. That's… deplorable.”

“It's
sensible
, bro. Look, I didn't make ten, but I'm gonna be just fine. You, son, you need to worry. You're a bit part in a star vehicle. Unless you're careful, you'll get kicked off the movie before you join the union.”

• • •

The particulars of the night out with Huck were lost to Alex the next day, blurred beneath the weight of a crushing hangover, the mix of Vicodin, tequila, and Inca hallucinogens producing a monster headache. He remembered running his hands over the olive tree while staring out at the silvery sci-fi city below. He remembered Huck clapping him on the shoulder in the elevator down. And he remembered going home in Huck's Audi wagon, the sunroof open, the radio up, his voice wailing into the night.

All the talk about the magic ten and the rest of it—when he thought about Huck's tutorial now, panic ricocheted around his chest. It wasn't so hard, not thinking about it. He had other concerns. Clive's show, his book, the kids—he was too busy living his life to worry about the ramifications of his anniversary or to plot any sort of settlement strategy.

Still, he couldn't help feeling like maybe Huck wasn't so full
of shit. After drop-off at school the following Tuesday, he made a stop at a mini-mall electronics shop and asked the clerk to show him how to switch the SIM card in his phone. He practiced popping out one card and inserting the second one. In a few days he could do it in a single smooth gesture. He texted with Miranda while the kids were watching TV, shooting her a message about where she got beef cheeks. She said she'd order some at Malcolm's, then texted back with an offer to take him to a place in the San Gabriel Valley that did an amazing dessert made with mango and condensed milk.

During the week, after dropping the kids off at school, he had long pre-production meetings with Clive about
Top Dog
. As co-EP, Alex had imagined his role would be supervisory, even ceremonial. But Clive had other ideas. He tasked Alex with production budgets, casting sessions, and equipment rentals. Clive even asked him to negotiate the lease on the storefront for the Top Dog gym, a cavernous space occupied until recently by a Chinese restaurant with red leather booths and flocked wallpaper.

One night, after the kids were asleep, Alex found himself in the spare bedroom, naked save for a pair of rubber slippers. He powered up Mrs. Benjamin's tanning bed, heaved open its metal top, and inserted himself inside. The heat of the long bulbs radiated below his skin. He pictured his flesh turning toasty and hard, shellacking him like the crust of a crème brûlée. He couldn't believe how pleasant it turned out to be. Why had he never done this before? This, it occurred to him, is how people in his position get by. They harden their outsides, tenderize their innards, gather their strength. He pictured Figgy in her hotel suite, talking strategy with a divorce lawyer on her cell phone while Zev hovered nearby, feeding her triangles of Toblerone. No way was she not making the necessary preparations. Alex had to prepare as well. He'd remain still and calm and keep his eyes closed tight against the glare.

Fourteen