The Boy Who Never Grew Up (46 page)

I couldn’t remember the last time my life seemed so barren and hopeless.

I was at the typewriter working on the first time Matthew Wax met Pennyroyal Brim when the phone rang. I glanced at Grandfather’s Rolex. It was three o’clock in the morning. It rang some more. I stared at it. It wasn’t her. It wasn’t ever going to be her. I picked it up.

It was the drum banger. He was depressed.

“Oh, who cares, Hoag?” he moaned, when I assured him I was hard at work. “What difference does it make? Can you tell me that?”

Here was one of the big changes in modern publishing. It used to be that editors were paid to hold writers’ hands. Now it’s the other way around.

“What seems to be the problem?” I inquired pleasantly. After all, he was paying me a lot of money. And knowing that he was miserable was already making me feel better.

“The problem,” he replied glumly, “is that I get paid righteous bucks. You know I’m the second highest paid editor in all of publishing? Only Michael Korda makes more than I do, and everyone knows he’s a dickhead.”

“And?”

“And I fucked up. Pennyroyal’s book is
the
hot property of the decade. The Literary Guild just paid more for it than any book in the history of publishing. Me, I’m sitting on Matthew fucking Wax.” He sighed heavily. “I’m shook, Hoag. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I look like an idiot.”

“We’ll make out just fine,” I assured him soothingly. “Matthew still happens to be the most successful director of all time. And I’ve got major stuff about his father.”

“Oh, who gives a shit about his father?”

“The guy
was
married to her,” I pointed out.

“That’s true,” he conceded grudgingly. “Could you maybe do more on her? Deemphasize him?”

“It’s his book.”

“It’s my reputation.”

“I’ll do what I can.” A meaningless phrase, but it always makes them feel better.

“Good man,” he said, brightening. “Have you got a sexy title?”

“I was planning to call it ‘The Boy Who Never Grew Up.’ ”

Long silence from his end. Plus another heavy sigh. “Oh, well, there’s still time. …”

I hung up on him. Lulu looked up at me anxiously, hoping it was finally time to get the suitcases out. I shook my head. She went back to sleep. The phone rang again. I snatched it off the cradle.

“Now what do you want?” I snapped.

“Merciful heavens, Mister Hoagy. It took me thirty-eight calls on two different coasts to track you down and
this
is the hello I get?”

My heart started pounding, which it always does when I hear that feathery teenaged girl’s voice that is hers and hers alone. The connection was fuzzy, and there was an echo. But it was her. It was really her.

“How are you, Merilee?” I asked casually.

“Forget about me—what on earth is going on there, you son of a sea cook?”

“I’ve missed your quaint little expressions.”

“Never you mind, mister. Our assistant costumer just flew in with all the appalling news. Pennyroyal Brim and Matthew Wax and
Lulu
. My Lord! When did you go to work for him, anyway?”

“You didn’t get my letter?”

“I did not. I hadn’t the slightest idea you were in L.A. I’ve been calling your apartment, my apartment, the farm … I’m completely in the dark, don’t you see? We’re on Wakaya Island, completely cut off from civilization. No television. No phones. No mail. That’s how the director wants it. I had to charter a plane to Viti Levu so I could call you. I’ve been sitting here in the airport for the past three hours trying to reach you. Now tell me everything, you gherkin. At once.”

I did, while Lulu the Wonder Dog stared at the phone and whimpered. She always knows when it’s her mommy. Don’t ask me how. “You would have been proud of her, Merilee.”

“My brave little sweetness,” she exclaimed. “What possessed her?”

“She got the bug, I’m afraid.”

“That happened the last time she traveled. Put her on a high-fiber diet and bottled water. She prefers Evian.”

“The acting bug.”

“Never. I forbid it.”

“Not to worry. It’s out of her system for good now.”

Merilee was silent a moment. “I almost feel for Pennyroyal, you know that? There’s no excusing what she did, of course. But why she did it … Believe me, it’s awful being someone like her. One of the sweetie pies. I know. I was once one myself.”

“You still are.”

“Hoagy, I happen to be playing a middle-aged nun with pronounced butch tendencies. I am no one’s sweetie pie anymore.”

“How is it coming?”

“God knows.”

“How is Michelle?”

“Skinny.”

“And how is Merilee?”

“Ready to talk,” she informed me gravely.

Here it was. Our good-bye scene. “Okay,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I’m ready to listen.”

“First I want to say I’m sorry I left you in the lurch the way I did. I needed to—”

“Get in character, I know.”

“You don’t know,” she said sharply. “You don’t know a thing. It has nothing to do with this stupid movie.”

“What does it have to do with?”

“A woman’s body.”

“Any particular woman’s body?”

“Mine. It so happens I’m forty years old and—”

“I’m well aware of how old you—”

“I’m pregnant, Hoagy,” she blurted out. She waited for me to say something. Anything. “Are you still there, Hoagy?”

I cleared my throat and managed to say I was.

“I realize this comes as a bit of a surprise.”

“You knew before you left?”

“I did.”

“Why on earth didn’t you say something, Merilee?”

“Because I needed to make up my own mind about it. Now hush up and let me say what I have to say, okay? I want a baby. I’ve been wanting one for a while. I haven’t pressured you about it because I know how much you hate them. What is it you call them? Midget human life forms? I understand your feelings perfectly. I honestly do. But I’ve decided to have this baby. I have to. I can’t put it off any longer. Now, before you go into complete cardiac arrest, let me assure you that you are absolutely, positively under no obligation. It’s my baby. I will raise it on my own, and provided we’re both mature, sensible adults—”

“What’s your second choice?”

“I see no reason why this should have any effect on our nonrelationship. We’ll go on as we have, or haven’t. The only difference is I’ll now be toting a small child along with me.”

“You seem to have it all figured out,” I observed.

“Yes, I believe I do. And I feel good about it. I feel happy and wonderful, and I just hope to God we finish up here before I begin to show. It would
not
do for Sister Mary Catherine to be overtly preggers. Hoagy, I think you should finish that book here. I miss thee somethin’ arful. I’ve my own little thatched beach hut—they call them bures here. Nothing but white sand a mile in each direction. Sunshine, fresh air, fresh fish for sweetness. And wait until you see me in a grass skirt.”

“I’d rather see you out of it.”

“You’ll join me?”

“You know I will, Merilee. And you know you can count on me. Who knows? Maybe this is the best thing that could have happened to us. Maybe it’s what we’ve been needing all along. And maybe fatherhood is something I’ll actually take to. Stranger things have happened. After all this isn’t going to be just any midget human life form. It’s going to be
our
midget human—”

“Oh, dear, I’m afraid I’ve made a total mess of this. I thought you understood, darling.”

“What’s to understand, Merilee? All that matters is that we love each other and that we stick together and we—”

“You’re not the father, Hoagy.”

She said it gently. She was very gentle about all of it. Classy, too, I must admit. But, hey, so was I. I didn’t even try to find out just who the father was. That wouldn’t be gentlemanly, and I’m always the perfect gentleman. Ask anyone. After I hung up I sat there staring at the carpet for a while. There were cigarette burns in it I hadn’t noticed before. My chest ached. I got up and poured myself three fingers of Glenmorangie and drank it down. It didn’t help. It didn’t hurt either. I poured myself another and drank that down. Then I sat on the bed. Then I broke the news to Lulu.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Stewart Hoag Mysteries

L
YLE HUDNUT’S BEACH HOUSE
may have been the ugliest house I’d ever seen. It was certainly the ugliest house in all of East Hampton. And, trust me, there are a lot of ugly houses in East Hampton. His sat perched atop a choice dune at the end of choice Windmill Lane, right next to the choicest of country clubs, the Maidstone, where Lyle Hudnut was not a member. They wouldn’t have his sort. Even before all of the trouble.

My cabbie pulled up at the end of the gravel drive and gaped at the place. So did Lulu, my basset hound, who had her back paws planted firmly in my groin and her large, wet, black nose stuck out the open window. I did some heavy gaping myself. Couldn’t help it. It was so huge. It was so hideous. It was so … I don’t know what you’d call it. Me, I’d call it postmodern blech. Once, maybe forty years back, it had been a modest Nantucket-style beach cottage. Too modest. So, some time during the Stylish Seventies, its then owner had erected a second, much grander house right across the driveway, this one an upended two-story Bauhaus shoe box of white cedar with Palladian windows and a network of queerly angled balconies and sun porches and catwalks with curved pipe railings like you’d see on an ocean liner. Especially if you suffered from migraine headaches. And then Lyle Hudnut got his big, fat hands on it. It was he who had just finished building the third house, this one shoehorned in between the other two so as to misconnect them all into a single, monstrous unit. The new centerpiece, an homage to the
Catalonian Modernisme
school of Antoni Gaudi, was a surrealistic two-story structure of undulating milk chocolate stucco that gave the appearance of melting there in the hot August sun, like one of Dali’s clocks. Looked positively edible, if you like milk chocolate. I prefer bittersweet.

And then there were the awful grounds. Not so much the plants but the utterly lifelike, utterly kitschy bronze statues all over the damned place. Of a man trying to peek over
the
fence. Of a gardener crouched before the rose bushes, pruner in hand. Of an Irish setter, male, in the act of peeing on a birch tree. This one Lulu snarfled at with great disapproval. She has pretty strong taste in art.

My cabbie, a sour runt in his fifties, shook his head. “Christ, you’d think with all their money they’d have some taste, y’know?”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew a lot of people who have a lot of money.”

“What kind of guy lives here, anyway?”

“I’ll let you know when I figure that out.”

I paid him and let Lulu out. She made right for the setter, nose quivering. The cab pulled away and left us there. It was quiet, except for the sound of the surf roiling on the beach, and of Lulu mouth-breathing. She doesn’t do well in the summer heat, being covered with hair. There was a bit of a breeze, which there hadn’t been in the city. Also a hint of fish in the air, though that may have been Lulu’s breath.

The front door was a slab of whitewashed wood smack dab in the center of the milk chocolate house. A pair of bronze Halloween trick-or-treaters were there ahead of me. A little girl dressed as a witch, a boy as a ghost. His finger was poised to ring the doorbell. I beat him to it. Though it wasn’t a bell at all. It played a little tune, the familiar, insipid nursery ditty that was the theme song to
The Uncle Chubby Show.

A steamy young blonde in a leopard-patterned string bikini answered it. She was at least five feet ten standing there in her bare feet, and there was nothing delicate or frail about her. She was meaty and big-boned, with a wild, tousled mane of sun-and-bottle-bleached hair, and a pair of hooters so outrageously immense as to defy nature, not to mention gravity. They jutted straight forward through the doorway—no droop, no sag, no way. It was as if she had some kind of double-wishbone suspension hidden there in the top of her bathing suit, though I seriously doubted that. Her string bikini offered no more support than a length of waxed dental floss. She was about twenty-seven and deeply tanned. She smelled of suntan oil and sweat. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous, but then I’m sure it took people—particularly men—a long time to get to her face. It was a rather blank face. Her blue eyes were set far apart and one of them, the left, drifted slightly, giving her a semizonked appearance. She had a fat little pug nose and too much chin and a mouth wide enough to drive a tractor-trailer through. Other than the bikini she wore a pair of long, heavy, studded necklaces of silver that looked like a collision between Paloma Picasso and Johnny Rotten. They plunged down into the valley to be found between her twin peaks, cleavage so deep and vast a yodeler would get an echo down there. I stared. I tried not to, but I stared.

“I made them with my own two hands,” she informed me. .

“Made them?”

“The necklaces. They’re of my own design.”

Now I was trying not to giggle. Because she owned the squeakiest, ootsie-fooeyest widdle baby-doll voice you can imagine. She sounded like Minnie Mouse on helium. It was so unlikely I half believed she was putting me on. She wasn’t. She was most serious.