8/28/2011 The Constant Guest

I’m in L.A. trying to get a commitment from a director for one of my screenplays, and while I’m waiting for the script, delivered that afternoon to my latest prospect, to be read, I’m at the Cat and Fiddle dealing with split-screen lesbian Pygmalions.  The first, Barbel, is a San Franciscan restaurant owner who, up until just recently, was tormenting the woman I’m having drinks with out on the patio, Wendy, an actress now living in Santa Monica.  The second, Christine, is a French teacher in Manhattan who, up until recently, was tormenting an actress I had met in New York, Maureen, now, coincidentally enough, living in Santa Monica. 

You see why I’m easily distracted?  When my mental focus suddenly divides into two coinciding images, one in the present, the other in the past, and these images share similar characteristics, viz., actresses of the same age experiencing big city life for the first time dominated by older more established women of the same age who end up, out of jealousy, driving them away, it all seems uncanny to me, people I know, at different times, cutting the same patterns so that if they were merged, they would fit the same stencil. 

Of course a lot can seem supernatural after three beers on a balmy Los Angeles evening, but what I was hearing about Wendy in San Francisco had a familiar ring that kept sending me back to Manhattan and The Duchess where Maureen had, after finishing her French final, hooked up with her teacher, Christine.  They had gone back to Christine’s apartment nearby right off of Christopher.  It was a nice address in an expensive part of the Village, part of the settlement of Christine’s divorce from her husband who was an executive for some bank.  She shared custody of their son, Pierre, a five-year-old who was with his dad when Christine invited Maureen over for a nightcap.  Maureen told me that they had gone to bed together and that it was, if Christine was to be believed, the first gay tumble for both of them. 

“But I didn’t believe her,” Maureen said to me later.  “It’s all new to her like it is to me, but she had certain moves.  I think Serenity seduced her.”  Maureen smiled at the thought.  “In fact I know she seduced her.  I could smell the snake shit on the floor.”

“Do snakes shit?”

“Of course snakes shit.  Everything shits.  Even flies.”

New as all this might have been for Christine, she rapidly took charge of the relationship.  She dictated the times they could meet, the nights Maureen could stay over.  “She has to,” Maureen claimed in her defense, “Her ex doesn’t know about us and Christine is worried that if he finds out it will screw up the custody agreement.”

“He can really do that in this day and age?” I objected.

“She doesn’t have he money he has to get legal,” Maureen explained.

“But sooner or later…”

“We’re just seeing each other, Grubb, we’re not living together.”

And it was true that Maureen still went out with other men.  She had a job working for a catering company.  Most of the serving staff were actors, and after a society page event, opera singers at the Dakota, Wall Street mavens in New Rochelle, they would finish off the champagne and cognac and end up in other’s beds.  Maureen was discreet about these one-nighters, and never mentioned anything to Christine.  But it was obvious Christine knew, because, risk of her ex finding out about them or not, she took up more and more of Maureen’s free time. 

This meant that later, after I had moved and was commuting back and forth from Albuquerque to New York for my production of my plays, I was a constant guest at Christine’s for dinner.  Her ploy was to invite me over for a meal with Maureen so that her son, Pierre, wouldn’t report back to his dad that Christine had a girlfriend.  When dinner was done, usually a slow-food affair with a lot of wine and cheese, Pierre would have fallen asleep and I left Maureen and Christine together somehow assured he wouldn’t wake up.

A lot of times I was invited to be there just for the hors d oeuvres, a decoy for the baby sitter to observe before Christine spent the evening at Maureen’s.  I had gone from sharing Pygmalion duties to becoming the beard.  But since my travels to New York were infrequent, their relationship couldn’t rely on this dodge for long.