Almost Royalty: A Romantic Comedy...of Sorts Page 2

  “What’s he painting?” said Elizabeth.

  “Some lawn trolls. We’re painting and selling those Hummel figure lawn trolls. And then he’s in charge of driving them to Pasadena, where we’re having the fundraiser.”

  Pasadena. Forty-five minutes away if there’s no traffic—which is never.

  “It’s important that your husband be respectful of your projects, Laura, if he’s going to be present within the relationship,” said Elizabeth. “My therapist tells me that I give everything to my husband and my children—that I don’t do anything for myself.”

  “Mine too,” said June.

  “So I’ve decided to hire a cook,” said Elizabeth. “I’ve found someone who will do it for a reasonable price.”

  “Don’t tell me you cook every meal,” said Renata.

  “Well no,” said Elizabeth. “I’m in charge of dinner on Monday and Wednesday. My husband has Tuesday and Thursday. And the nannies—our weekday and weekend—handle all other meals.”

  As if she even knew where the kitchen was.

  “You’ve got to be careful about those cooks,” said Renata. “Some of them don’t know how to, well, you follow The Zone, right?”

  “Of course,” said Elizabeth.

  “Well, you have to be sure that they don’t put sauce or cheese on everything… unless you’re following Atkins.”

  “May I have some water?” I asked.

  “In the back—at the breakfast nook,” said Elizabeth pointing to the back of the house. “I don’t know where my husband thinks we’re going to get the money to decorate the house. The back yard was so expensive—he has to get that bonus. I mean, there’s the mortgage, the nannies, the kids’ tuition at Crossroads, and those endless donations which you must give…”

  “Don’t get me started on private schools,” said Bettina. “I mean, how do you get a recommendation to Thorton Hall?”

  Dead silence in the room.

  For five seconds.

  I walked to the back of the house—the breakfast nook—something that looked like a laundry room or other odd-shaped leftover space at the back of the house that the builders had no idea what to do with, where there was a table, a half pitcher of the strawberry daiquiri-type drink, some bottled water, crackers, cheeses, and cookies set up for the book group’s break. I looked out the window at the back yard.

  Elizabeth had taken the postage stamp of space between the back door and the property line and obviously hired professional landscapers to plant wild pink roses, lavender mums, a purple-blue azalea that had exploded throughout the greater Brentwood metropolis, and some three-foot-tall white flower thing that looked to be a cross between a weed and a hydrangea, something which had obviously been engineered to populate the gardens and fuel the resulting garden wars. Oh no. This was Elizabeth’s faux English garden.

  In the middle of it was something that looked like a horse trough.

  “Isn’t it amazing,” said Leslee, who had wandered out to get some water.

  “What on earth is that?” I said.

  “What?”

  “That white thing out there. Is that a horse trough?”

  “You idiot,” said Leslee. “That’s a bathtub.”

  “A bathtub? Why does she need a bathtub in her back yard?”

  “So she can take baths in the moonlight.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t be so common. Elizabeth likes to take nude moonlight baths in the back yard.”

  “Oh.”

  We looked out at the horse trough/‌bathtub.

  “I think I’m going to go home now,” I said.

  I walked to the family room.

  “With my free evenings, I think that I’ll take a course or two at the Learning Annex or UCLA extension. I’d kind of like to be a therapist,” said Elizabeth.

  “You’d make a great therapist,” said Renata.

  “Thanks,” said Elizabeth. “I think I could really help people—women—take charge of their lives. And you know the first thing I’d recommend? What I’m going to do. As soon as the cook is in place, I’m going to get an assistant.”

  “That is such a great idea,” said June. “It’s so hard to keep track of the nannies, the gardeners, the cook, and the kids.”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth, “you just need someone to make sure that everyone is on track, in case something—like a car pool—should fall through the cracks.”

  “Ah…” I said, “thanks for inviting me. It was really fun, but I have to go. It’s a school night.”

  “You work?” said Elizabeth.

  “She’s not married,” whispered Bettina, “she broke up with her fiancé six months ago—he wouldn’t set a date.”

  “She’s an attorney… but she doesn’t work in a firm,” said Leslee.

  June frowned and slightly shook her head right-left, right-left, right-left. She turned her head away from me.

  “She’s a sole practitioner with her own practice?” Leslee whispered.

  “Ohhhhh,” said Elizabeth, Renata, Laura, June, and Patty.

  “Bye,” I said.

  I slowly walked to my Honda, my paid-for Honda, and looked through the neighborhood. I passed another Russian Embassy, a house that looked like a three-story A-frame mountain cabin with two Japanese maples, a koi pond, and a Zen garden in front, and another place that aspired to be Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House on a lot that was meant for a 2-bedroom, 1500-square-foot home.

  Since the day of my high school graduation to the present moment, an awareness of age-appropriate behavior and age-appropriate circumstances had evolved from some unknown source.

  There was a time to be an undergraduate and there was a time to leave your childhood behind.

  There was a time to have a year abroad—preferably in France or any other highly westernized country that was known for importable culture—and there was a time to come home.

  There was a time to go to graduate school and a time to move on.

  There was a time to work.

  I knew that this was a pivotal moment. It knew that it was right in front of me. I knew if there was someone other than myself who was keeping score, that I had fallen behind.

  I knew this because as I walked out of Elizabeth’s family room, I’m almost sure that I heard someone say, “There’s a cautionary tale.”

  PART 1

  March 2007

  (9 Months Earlier)

  1

  Ruined By Therapy

  Dinner at The Copper Pan always found me maxing out a credit card to pay for a meal that my mother would have served on a Wednesday night. Was it really necessary to pay $34 for crab cakes and a side of fries? But there I was, waiting for meatloaf and mashed potatoes in the very same restaurant where I dumped my last fiancé not three years ago.

  I was listening to my current fiancé, Frank, reveal his pain. He was nearly 35 years old and he was angry—still—so angry with his father for putting a second mortgage on the house 20 years ago so that he could send his son to Phillips-Andover—the best prep school in the country. After an hour of sharing, Frank synthesized his torment in a phrase that put his entire essence into perspective: “I could have gotten laid during high school.” And then it hit me: My competence had come back to haunt me.

  I knew that by agreeing to marry him, I was looking at a lifetime of supporting a guy whose social circle consisted of low-impact buddies who felt comfortable letting their girlfriends/‌wives support them while they trashed their professional careers as attorneys, investment bankers, or accountants to pursue never-gonna-happen careers as screenwriters, film directors, or sous-chefs. “We men are tired,” he said. “It’s your turn to take over.”

  And I had agreed to this because I thought that I could do everything. And so far, I always had. And he knew it.

  “Why are you doing this?” said my best friend, Jennifer. “You’re marrying a piece of furniture, a lump, an energy-draining parasite.” She should talk. Her college boyfriend, Tom, wa
s such a dolt that he made her fill out all of his applications to every business school in the country that he never, ever would have the grades or scores to get into. Harvard. Wharton. Stanford. Chicago. Yale. He started his quest for admittance to “the elite” the year we applied for law school. When Jennifer and I graduated from law school, I heard that Tom was still buying into that nonsense and still applying.

  I thought about it. I would have to support both of us, and not just in any manner, but in a way which would ensure that we could maintain a fashionable Westside Los Angeles lifestyle, complete with acceptable cars—Range Rovers, Lexus Hybrids, and a Prius or two—and a home in the acceptable area—Brentwood, Santa Monica above Wilshire, make that Montana, and Pacific Palisades. Naturally, this would mean that I would have to continue in my practice as an attorney, a career which had much to say for itself: Bone-crushing. Always-Hit-the-Ground-Running. TMJ, “a grinder” at 28. Easily excitable, high-blood pressure at 33. Weight issues and fertility problems at 38. Divorce (if I could even find a committed relationship) and high cholesterol at 45. That, combined with the reality of having less than a 20 percent chance of ever becoming a partner, was a lot to look forward to.

  This was not going to happen. I loved litigation, my chosen area of the law—on TV. In real life, I was usually buried under a tsunami of paper while stuck in a 100-degree document facility in an isolated industrial park. I wanted to punch most of my clients for even bothering to consult an attorney with their idiotic cases. The judges that I practiced before were so embittered that they dreamt of their golf games and didn’t hear a word that you said. And I had a sneaking suspicion that the red-faced, screaming litigators with whom I practiced were the very same knuckleheads who attempted to appear cool during law school by attending endless raves, taking X, and selling drugs.

  The support obligation was going to be one thing, I was also going to have to be the cook. Somewhere after Martha Stewart, celebrity chefs, and the Food Network, cooking had taken on an entirely new dimension. Start-from-scratch. Free range. Grow your own herbs. Wine knowledgeable. Gourmet coffee or coffees. Whole wheat pasta and bread—La Brea Bakery, a must. Shop only at Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or—if you’re really the bomb—the endless farmers’ markets that surrounded L.A. Compost. And of course, recycle—mandatory.

  What a laugh. To begin with, I liked Velveeta. No—I loved Velveeta. I demanded that my local upscale grocers carry it and campaigned for a display case to showcase my treasure. My secret ingredient: more mushroom soup, in everything. I regularly urged my hide-your-middle-class-background friends to drop the faux pretension of an “official-preppie-background” and RETURN TO THEIR ROOTS by making me a dish that included hamburger, Velveeta, mushroom soup, and taco shells, chased with a tri-colored Jell-O creation.

  And then there were my interior decorator obligations. I would have to rid myself of the early ’90s white-on-white Southwest environment and embrace the faux French Provincial grandma’s over-stuffed sofa look. All wood would be oak or walnut. All sofas so soft that you could drown yourself in them. Dried flowers would cascade over the armoire, fresh flowers would adorn every room. Cold white walls would suddenly be painted Vanilla Bean, Champagne Gold or Sea Shell Green, with border prints at the crease where the wall met the ceiling. God, I could kill Martha Stewart and her latter-day by-product—the fashionafia—those gay and female friends who felt it was their self-appointed duty to give you advice on how to dress, whom to date, and how to decorate.

  My personal interior design philosophy was that of a tornado—me being it. When I went into a room, everything physically left its place of order and was strewn in a dozen little piles. I had chosen to help my box-challenged cat, Abyss, with not one but two litter boxes, approximately ten feet apart. And this was in a one-bedroom apartment. My furniture was best described as “post-graduate”—a combination of Mom’s leftover Danish modern, IKEA, and the pieces that a boyfriend had made during some revolutionary make-your-own-furniture phase. And I had cottage cheese ceilings to boot.

  I guess you could say that I was not anyone’s version of a perfect wife. But I, Courtney Hamilton, a woman who was a genetic mutation of the blond Californian looks of my San Marino, California-born Episcopalian father, and the searing ambition and overwhelming assimilation desires of my Brookline, Massachusetts-born Jewish mother, reluctantly acknowledged that I knew what I was getting into.

  There were also going to be social obligations, as in, I was going to have to be the bonder with his difficult family, especially his father’s second wife, a woman with a taste for outfits that included studded blue jeans and white patent leather heels, worn together. She was not more than 30 years younger than his father, nor two years older than Frank. His father described her as “a leader among women” because she religiously followed the advice of the female anchor on Good Morning America and once a year organized the Upper Cape Cod Home Craft Fair. And Frank detested her, especially after she did the unpardonable: she had a baby, a step-brother who was 31 years younger than he was.

  The food arrived, and Frank wheezed forth. “You know, if I had stayed at my public high school and wasn’t up against everyone from Andover, I could have gotten into Harvard.” It was maybe the sixty-eighth time that I had heard this.

  And then I knew—this wasn’t going anywhere.

  We had been together for two years. At the time that we had gotten together, I had been dating an artist named George who drove a ’70s model Porsche and lived in an area of town where the windows and doors were covered with bars. Every time we went out we each paid for ourselves, and if I happened to eat, say, a couple of his fries, he would average out the cost of the fry and make me pay for it. “If we both pay for ourselves, I can go out with you more,” he said. I almost bought into it until he did this in front of Jennifer at Cantor’s Deli. That’s when I met Frank, and he invited me to be his date at the Emmys.

  “Let me see,” said Jennifer, “the way I see it, you can pay for yourself with George at Cantor’s, or you can go with Frank to the Emmys.” Best friends are good for this. They often have a miraculous ability to make you see the obvious. I stopped returning George’s phone calls after he left a message in which he screamed that he “wasn’t seeing enough of me.” I considered his statement and then decided—unless I was looking for an ugly fight—that I really didn’t want to call him back that evening. The next day he left five messages on my voice mail and three messages taped to my door. And then he started blasting me with emails.

  100 REASONS THAT I LOVE YOU. Interesting. Wonderful though I may be I was pretty sure that there were not 100 reasons to love me, at least not 100 apparent reasons. It was difficult for me to believe that he had taken the time to write this down. JUST CALL ME, ALL I WANT TO DO IS TALK WITH YOU. Sure. This was a running narrative of how he had fallen asleep with the phone cradled in his arms after I didn’t return his call. WE ARE CO-DEPENDENTS. How could this be? I was trying to get away from him. Maybe he depended on me to make him feel awful.

  After one email in which George stated that he had joined some co-dependents group, he stopped calling and taping notes to my door. I figured that he had found someone in one of the co-dependent groups to go Dutch with him at Cantor’s.

  But then there was Frank. We had known each other during my college days when I attended an arts institution at which Frank’s father, an accomplished painter, taught, or should I say, was the dean of the art school. Frank attended this school because he didn’t know what to do with his life after graduating from Andover. After his father told him that he could get him a full scholarship because he was his son, it was a plan. There was just one catch: Frank had to get in.

  On his first try Frank’s application was rejected because his portfolio didn’t compare with the other applicants’ portfolios. In a rare turn of events, the school’s admissions committee decided to reconsider Frank’s portfolio. Frank was then granted admission to the school, with full scholarship, for entran
ce into the very same class to which he had previously been rejected. I later learned that it was Frank’s father who had strongly suggested to the admissions committee that he would really appreciate it if they would reconsider his son’s portfolio.

  We didn’t date during college because I was too busy chasing pretty boys with faces like Botticelli cherubs who took speed and smoked unfiltered Camels. According to my friend Marcie, Frank was nowhere near my level on the L.A. Eco-Chain of Dating. “Date him,” she said, “and it’s nothing but Relationship Terrorism.”

  Later, after I had denounced my artistic past and attempted to establish credentials as a corporate attorney, I met him in the most unlikely of places.

  I hadn’t seen him for ten years. When he walked in, I thought he was his father. But then I found out. It wasn’t his dad. It was the adult Frank.

  At a few months shy of 36, Frank looked like they had ridden him hard and put him away wet. He was long past relaxed-fit, and had gone from eat-drink-anything-anywhere-you-want to a high-blood-pressure-cholesterol-producing machine that was gaining somewhere on the average of 15 to 20 pounds per year. In short, his youthful athletic beauty was going to require planning and hard work to maintain and it was too late for him to develop the discipline to do it. Besides, due to the fact that he was sporadically employed as a sound editor, he thought that he didn’t need to. He considered himself “a catch” for the ladies of Los Angeles.

  He wasn’t a catch even by L.A. standards, which allow that if you don’t have any recent felonies, have kicked the addiction over three months ago, and can name your illegitimate children, you’re dateable, as long as you’re “cute.” He was, however, the current standard of what my friends had come to expect in a boyfriend—someone who was going to be there. And that’s it. When I met him again, Roberta, a woman who had the audacity to counsel single people with their dating/‌relationship problems in the new millennium, despite having married her high school sweetheart in the late ’70s, had finally gotten me to join the ultimate self-improvement setting: Group Therapy.