Best to Laugh: A Novel (12 page)

21

I
USUALLY
WENT
TO
THE
POOL
after work, and more often than not Maeve and Ed had the same bright idea. We were sprawled out on chaise longues, but instead of regaling each other with what had happened during our workday, I was painfully replaying my night at the Natural Fudge. My feelings were raw; Mike Trowbridge’s reassurances had been a temporary cushion I fell against after the bad dream of my performance, but that pillow had quickly been yanked away. And my friends weren’t exactly slathering me with the balm of sympathy.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t ask us to go,” said Ed.

“Yeah, way to freeze us out,” said Maeve.

“I didn’t freeze you out. I just wanted to see how an unbiased audience would react.”

“Bullhooey,” said Maeve. “You just didn’t want to share the experience.”

“And now I’m glad I didn’t. Because I bombed.”

“Which is why you should have had friends with you,” said Ed, examining a patch of peeling skin on his shoulder.

“Yeah, who’d want to go through something like that alone? Ed, ick—don’t pick at that,” said Maeve, leaning over to swat his fingers. She waved her hand then, as if considering swatting me, too. “So here’s how it’s done, Candy: you tell your friends what’s going on in your life, so they can share it. Which is why—whether I bomb or not—you two better be cheering me on Saturday night.”

I
T
WAS
A
TONIC
FOR
me to be an audience member and watch a performance that had nothing—intentionally—to do with comedy.

A banner draped across the stage of the Toluca Lake Junior High School read, Welcome, Valley Vixens! and Ed and I were among a group of about fifty spectators on the folding chairs set up on the polished wood gym floor.

The man seated next to me broke a peanut shell with a quick twist of his fingers.

“You lift weights?” he asked, giving me the once-over.

“No.”

“Maybe you should think about it,” he said, popping the peanuts into his mouth.

Next to me, Ed snickered.

“Okay, I thought about it,” I said to my goober-loving neighbor as he thumbed open another shell.

“And?”

“And I think I’d rather stick to my black belt karate.”

“Whoa. No kidding?”

I chopped the air with my hands.

“These babies are insured for a hundred thousand each.”

The peanut eater whistled, or tried to.

In the audience, there were a couple of people who looked like they knew their way around a weight room, but the majority had muscles that looked unchallenged by sit-ups, curls, rows, and extensions.

The atmosphere was definitely more sports arena than opera house. Some, like the man next to me, had brought snacks. One woman nursed a baby hidden under a bunny-printed blanket. The older couple next to Ed explained that their daughter had been lifting weights since she saw Raquel Welch in the movie
One Million Years B.C.

“We tried to tell her—Kath, weights aren’t going to help you get what she’s got,” said the man, holding his cupped hands in front of his chest.

“But Kathy’s always been strong willed,” said the woman. “And Sy and I realized it’s a lot easier to say, ‘Okay, honey,’ and just go along for the ride.”

A thin guitarist, whose droopy mustache matched the slope of his shoulders, plugged an electric blue Telecaster into a pig nose amp and without acknowledging the audience ripped into “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” heavy on the tremolo.

“Maurice Chevalier as played by Jimi Hendrix,” Ed whispered.

Judges—a bodybuilder and two normal-sized ones—set themselves and their clipboards at a table across from the guitarist. The royal blue curtain parted and a deeply tanned man with a gray brush cut strode out on the stage.

“Welcome, people, welcome!” he said, clapping his hands. “This is so outta sight! The Valley Vixen Women’s Bodybuilders Competition! Who wouldn’t want to be a Valley Vixen, man?”

The audience responded with hoots and hollers.

“My name’s Ricardo Jones, yeah, that Ricardo Jones”—here he pushed up the sleeve of his Hawaiian shirt and flexed an arm to display a softball-sized bicep—“1968 Mr. Greater Orange County, and it is my beyond-groovatational honor to be hosting tonight’s competition because, really, man, isn’t it time for the ladies to show off what they’ve got?”

Cheers rose from the audience; even the peanut eater had reclaimed enough saliva to offer a wolf whistle.

“So let’s not waste time—let’s bring out the parade, man! Hit it, Kevin!”

The guitarist shrugged his droopy shoulders and as he launched into the Miss America theme song (heavy on the wah-wah pedal), the procession of bodybuilders began.

“Oh my God,” whispered Ed, which was my sentiment exactly.

The woman leading the procession had short red hair and a scowl on her face, not an expression commonly worn by a pageant contestant. She had on a bikini that matched her hair color, and before striking her first pose she adjusted, with a determined yank, the triangles of fabric covering her small breasts.

“Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Susie the Strong from Reseda! Susie enjoys sunrises—especially Tequila ones, right, Suze?—James Bond movies, and riding Harleys with her husband, Lyle! Vroom, vroom, baby!”

“That’s my neighbor,” said the peanut eater. “Sweetest gal you’d ever want to meet, although she’s not the sharpest tack on the bulletin board.”

“Next,” said the emcee, “from Van Nuys, let’s meet Bonnie the Buff.”

“More like Bob the Bulky,” I whispered to Ed of the masculine-looking contestant. “Or Biff the Brawny.”

“Bonnie likes Chinese food,” the emcee was saying of the woman whose oiled muscles were the biggest I’d ever seen on a person sharing my gender, “board games like Risk and Stratego—but only if she wins—and the novels of Jacqueline Susann.”

“Check out her mustache,” Ed said.

“That’s from the steroids.”

Tears had welled up in Maeve’s eyes when I had confessed to her that when I first met her, I thought her build was due to drugs.

“This is all blood, sweat, and tears,” she had told me. “I fight fair and I body-build fair.”

That particular code of ethics didn’t seem embraced by Bonnie the Buff or several other entrants whose musculature was as threatening as their facial hair.

When Ricardo Jones introduced the fifth contestant as Mustang Maeve, Ed and I whistled like we were calling a pack of dogs scattered over three states. She was wearing a lime green bikini and enough oil to toss a banquet of salads.

“Maeve enjoys speaking German—hey, ve got a schmartie here!—the music of Tom and Jack Jones—sounds like she’s got a jones for Joneses!—and reading poetry. Roses are red, Maeve!”

While the crowd enjoyed the wit and wisdom of the emcee, Mustang Maeve seemed oblivious to it. She didn’t try to tamp down her stage fright with a sneer, like Susie the Strong, but instead wore a smile frozen at half-mast, and she walked as if she were afraid her very footsteps might cause damage to the stage floor.

After the dozen contestants were introduced in the pectoral parade, they posed as a group and then in individual routines. It was obvious that some had been lifting weights much longer than others; Kath the Convex from Ventura had stick straight legs and only a slight rise to her biceps. North Hollywood’s Winona the Wild was muscular, but she was also fat, which hid a lot of definition.

During the judges’ deliberation, Kevin played “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” and when Ricardo Jones was given the results envelope, the guitarist played the low E note up and down the fret board and gave full play to his whammy bar and wah-wah pedal.

“Ladies and gentleman, third place honors go to . . . Mustang Maeve from Hollywood! And second place goes to . . . Reseda’s Susie the Strong!”

It was exciting to watch people who didn’t win first prize act like they did. Both Maeve and Susie bounced up and down, clutching one another’s arms and when the anticlimatic announcement came, “Which means this year’s Valley Vixen is Bonnie the Buff from Van Nuys!” they didn’t just embrace the victor but hoisted her into the air.

“You don’t see that too often in a beauty pageant,” I said to Ed, and repeated the sentiment when we were all in Maeve’s car, on the way to her mother’s house in the Hollywood Hills.

“How many times do I have to tell you?” said Maeve. “It isn’t a beauty pageant. If it’s anything, it’s an art exhibit, celebrating the bodybuilder as an artist, a sculptor.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“And she is right,” said Ed from the backseat. “I mean, you don’t consider a male bodybuilder contest a beauty pageant, do you?”

Maeve brightened. “Yeah! You don’t consider a male bodybuilder contest a beauty pageant, do you, Candy?”

I decided not to let on that I considered any bodybuilder contest as sort of weird. Still, I didn’t want to let Maeve off the hook completely.

“But didn’t you think it was strange that the emcee guy only introduced you by those dumb titles? I mean, what was that about?”

“They have us come up with names like that to make it harder for the creeps—Bonnie said she had a fan who called her over fifty times a day—to track us down. But yeah, I did feel kind of stupid coming up with mine.”

“That was your idea?”

“Did you name it after your car?” asked Ed.

“Oh, I get it,” I said, tracing the little mustang logo on the glove compartment.

“I couldn’t think of anything else that began with an M!” said Maeve.

She turned left and into a short driveway.

“Well, here we are,” she said, jamming the gearshift into park. “Now remember, I’m not responsible for anything my mother may or may not do.”

22

T
ARYN
P
OWELL’S
FAMOUS
VOICE
rose from the hot tub as we passed through the high wooden gate and entered the candlelit patio.

“Hail the conquering heroine, everyone,” she said, “the new Valley Vixen!”

“I didn’t exactly win the title, Ma,” said Maeve, “but I did come in third!”

“Well, come on in and celebrate! The water’s fine.”

“We don’t have suits, Ma.”

“Well, neither do we,” said the TV star sweetly.

“Taryn, you’re terrible!” said a man whose silver goatee and mustache were the only hair on his head. He looked at Maeve. “We’ve all got suits on, hon. At least we did when we got in.”

Taryn lifted her hand out of the bubbling water and twirled a bikini top.

“That was then, Derek. This is now!”

“Yeah!” said an auburn-haired woman, tossing a tiny swimsuit bottom over the edge of the hot tub. “It’s about time we got this party started!”

Ed’s elbow dug into my side, a gesture I knew asked the question,
Do you see who that is?
My nudge back assured him that I did; the person joining Taryn in the underwater striptease was Sharla West, the actress who played her diabolical daughter-in-law on
Summit Hill.

“Yee-haw!” said a man with a golden mane of shoulder-length waves, getting into the act and throwing his swim trunks out of the tub.

“Oh, great, so you’re throwing an orgy,” said Maeve.

Taryn reached for her champagne flute in one of the slight recesses that had been built specifically to hold drinks in the hot tub’s ledge.

“It’s not an orgy,” she said and took a sip. “Yet.”

The quartet in the pool snickered.

“We’ll be inside,” said Maeve, turning away.

As Taryn urged us to join them—“The water’s fine!”—Ed and I offered feeble waves and followed Maeve into the house.

“Dang,” whispered Ed, “I could have sat in a hot tub with Sharla West.”

“A nude Sharla West,” I said, sprinkling salt into the wound.

After we’d entered her mother’s huge white living room, Maeve turned around, hands on hips.

“Hey, you guys are welcome to join the free-for-all. Don’t let me hold you back.”

Her lips were pinched and she wore her injured-party look.

“No, no, I’m fine,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Ed, but I could tell if he had his druthers, his would place him in that vat of churning bubbles, squarely between Taryn and Sharla.

“It’s just so humiliating!” said Maeve, as tears, the usual accompaniment to her breakdowns, glittered in her eyes.

Ed and I sat down on an immense U-shaped white leather couch in the sunken conversation pit as Maeve began pacing in front of the fireplace.

“She loves acting like she’s the racy daughter and I’m the uptight mother! Ewww! How would you guys like to jump in a hot tub with your naked mother and her friends?”

From the look on Ed’s face, I could tell her question conjured a picture he didn’t want to visualize. As for me, I would have jumped into anything with my mother, naked or not. Still, I understood her point.

“Should we go then?” asked Ed gently.

“No, stay,” said Taryn, knotting the tie of her terrycloth robe after she rolled open the sliding glass door and came into the living room. “Maeve, hon, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Standing by the fireplace, Maeve considered her fingernails. “Maybe not, but I don’t think you tried very hard not to upset me.”

The actress opened a silver box on the marble coffee table and took out a cigarette.

Scrambling, Ed reached for the round crystal lighter.

“Do you think I’m a terrible mother?” asked Taryn, after she’d exhaled out her nose, like a dragon.

“Mom!” said Maeve, drawing out the word in two syllables.

“Well, we’re not blood-related,” said Sharla, entering the living room, “but I will say you absolutely stink as a mother-in-law.”

“Sharla,” said Maeve evenly. “We were discussing my real mother, not your fake TV husband’s one.”

“By the way, Taryn,” said Sharla, ignoring Maeve. “Derek and Jon are leaving.”

“Why? It’s still early! Why is everyone leaving?”

“Because some of us have a six a.m. call,” said Derek, a towel wrapped around his waist. He was followed by the wavy-haired guy, also half-dressed in terrycloth.

“Sharla and I have tomorrow off,” explained Taryn. “But Derek’s got to shoot some action scenes out in Simi Valley and Jon’ll be jumping out of a burning barn.”

“I’m a stuntman,” said the wavy-haired guy helpfully.

After their departure, Taryn called for her maid to open another bottle of champagne and suggested it was time to get back into the hot tub.

“Maeve, get suits for everyone, and I promise Sharla and I will keep ours on.”

Ed and I looked at each other.

“Uh, I’ve got to work tomorrow,” I said.

“And I’ve got to teach,” he said.

“I’ll write you both notes,” said the actress. “Now, Mother of God, please, prove to me that youth isn’t wasted on the young.”

C
LIMBING
INTO
THE
HOT
TUB,
I could see the embarrassment on Ed’s face. He was tall and lanky but slightly flabby, and he crossed his arms, trying to cover the soft roll above his waistline. When he sank neck-deep into the water, relief calmed his features.

“So, Ted,” said Sharla, “you’re a teacher?”

“Uh, it’s Ed. And yes, yes I am.”

“No kidding,” said Sharla, leaning toward him and I saw Ed’s Adam’s apple bulge as he swallowed. “What do you teach?”

“All kinds of things, but mostly history. Geography sometimes. Occasionally English. Once, art. I don’t like to remember that class.” He looked at me panicked, silently pleading to help him.

I smiled gamely at Sharla. “He’s a substitute.”

“And a fine one, I’m sure,” said Taryn. “But we simply must talk about you now, Maeve. You say you came in fourth place?”

“Third,” said Maeve.

“And she was robbed,” I said. “If the whole thing wasn’t rigged, she would have won Valley Vixen.”

Maeve’s big jaw pulled down as she tried to hide her smile.

“She sure had the best-looking legs of all of them,” said Ed, and pleasure washed over Maeve’s face.

“Gee, I wonder who she gets those from?” said Taryn in a baby voice, lifting a leg out of the water and toward the sky.

“I don’t know, Maeve,” said Sharla in the same cutesy voice. “I think I could give you some competition, too.”

She offered one of her legs up for view, and the two stars of
Summit Hill
spent a long moment pointing their toes and rotating their ankles this way and that.

“Anyway, Mother,” said Maeve, “it wasn’t first prize, but I didn’t expect to be in the top three at all, so it was quite an honor.”

Both women drew their legs back into the hot, churning water.

“I’m sure it was, sweetie. You know I would have been there if I could have.” Taryn arranged her features into a look of concern and said, “I just didn’t want to cause a stir. All eyes should have been on you tonight.”

“Or Bonnie the Buff,” I added, making Maeve laugh.

“Do you like girls like Maeve?” Sharla asked Ed. “Or do you prefer your women a little . . . softer?”

The heat and steam were making all of our faces red, but Ed’s took the color to a whole new level.

“I . . . uh—”

“—Ed,” said Taryn, coming to his rescue. “Would you be a good boy and pour me some more champagne?”

“Me, too!” said Sharla, as Ed reached for the bottle chilling in the bucket.

Leaning back, I averted my eyes from the stars in the hot tub and looked up at the stars in the sky, or where they would have been if not obscured by haze and the lights of the city. Turning my head to the left, I saw a kidney-shaped pool illuminated by lamps that were nestled in the gardens and lining the stone paths. Turning my head right, I saw fat lemons hanging from a tree just feet away and limes from another, and the smell of citrus mingled with eucalyptus and what had become my favorite smell—night blooming jasmine. If Minneapolis’s unofficial expression was brrr, Los Angeles’s had to be ahhh (with a little smog-induced cough at the end).

“So Candy,” said Taryn, butting into my reverie, “how’s the comedy career going?”

I tried not to flinch, not prepared to tell anyone outside my inner circle about my inauspicious debut.

“I am dying to do a romantic comedy,” said Sharla saving me. “
Summit
Hill
’s great, but it’s so serious. I want to do something a little frothy.” She did a little shimmy, in Ed’s direction.

“My second movie was a comedy,” said Taryn. “
FiFi’s Collar
—any of you see it?”

She pushed her lower lip out in a child’s pout when only Maeve nodded.

“It was actually quite good. I played Lizette, the French neighbor of a couple who had this crazy poodle named FiFi; my costars were Jean-Paul—”

“—that’s my goal,” Sharla said, “to do a comedy during hiatus.” She leaned into Ed again, this time more aggressively, smooshing one breast against his arm. “Don’t you think I’d be good in a comedy, Eddie?”

I surveyed my friend, on whose pink and sweating face was an odd mix of glee, lust, and horror.

“I, uh—”

“—and my fourth movie; yeah, I think it was my fourth,” said Taryn, counting on her fingers, “my fourth movie was a comedy called
Herr Professor and Christine.
I was nominated for a Golden Globe award by the way, playing Christine’s best friend, Cookie. We shot it in Munich of all places—that’s where I met Maeve’s father—at the Hofbräuhaus! He had just come from Yale and was working on his doctorate and—”

“—my agent says there’s no reason I couldn’t be the next Lucille Ball,” said Sharla. “I mean we both have red hair, well, mine’s auburn, and—”

“—I met Desi Arnaz once,” said Taryn. “This was when he was still married to Lucille, and oh my God, the charm that oozed out of that man—”

“—do you like
I Love Lucy
?” Sharla asked Ed. “My mother and I did, but my dad said it was stupid—he much preferred shows like
Car 54
and—”

“—is anyone hungry?” asked Taryn. “Because I can have Verna make some sandwiches and—”

“—I’ve got to go home,” said Sharla, slowly rising out of the steaming water. “Eduardo, can I give you a lift?

Ed’s eyes bulged at the invitation.

“But I came with—”

Sharla posed, water dripping off the camera-ready curves of her body.

“I’ll be waiting in the driveway,” she said. “In the baby blue T-Bird convertible.”

“
S
O
YOU
THINK
LIL’
M
ISS
Arizona and Ed will get it on tonight?” asked Maeve, tossing our swimsuits into the dryer of the fanciest laundry room I’d ever been in.

“Is that what she was? Miss Arizona?”

Maeve shrugged. “Some state that begins with an A.”

“Asslandia,” I offered. “And no, I think Ed only went home with her because he was too much of gentleman to say no.”

We laughed. It had been Taryn and not Maeve who had been in a bad mood after the actress and substitute teacher left, announcing she had a sudden headache and was going to bed.

She didn’t even bother seeing us out, which, according to her daughter, wasn’t atypical.

“I love her,” Maeve said. A soft whirr sounded as she turned on the dryer. “But she can be a little temperamental—especially when she doesn’t get what she wants.”

“What do you suppose she wanted?”

“Oh, more attention, probably. Or someone to assure her that she’s just as attractive as Sharla West—even though she’s old enough to be her mother. Sheesh. Did you notice how they had to outdo one another—how our presence was sort of immaterial to them?”

“Ed’s wasn’t to Sharla.”

Now in the car, making our way down the windy road, I asked my friend, “Come on, didn’t it bother you when he left with her?”

Chuckling, Maeve expertly negotiated a hairpin turn.

“What, do you think I’m jealous?”

“Well, you like him, don’t you?”

“I’d go out with him, sure. But Ed’s convinced me that’s not going to happen, so I guess I’ll have to settle for having him as a friend. From watching my mother, believe me: I’ve learned the danger of hanging on when it’s time to let go.”

Gasping, Maeve braked hard, holding her arm out to protect me from making contact with the windshield, even as I was wearing my seat belt.

Her headlights shone on a yellow lab racing across the narrow road, pursued by a terrier, and we watched them disappear into a yard, yapping and barking.

“Lot of bitches out tonight,” mused Maeve.

Her joke surprised both of us, and we laughed all the way down the hill.