The Hanging

Chapter 10

I drove Mom back to her apartment, helped her change and settle down for a nap, though, even as exhausted as she was, I doubted she would be able to close her eyes again-she had slept all the way home. When I left her, she was playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2 on her CD player, the piece her new friend would be performing with the Philharmonic that evening.

It was late afternoon before I got home. The house Mike and I bought a few years before he got sick was near the top of a steep-sided canyon wall, part of a small enclave of houses that stuck like a thumb into the public holdings of Malibu Creek State Park, about halfway between the glitzy beaches of Malibu and the always jammed 101 freeway that bisects the San Fernando and Conejo Valleys, and a million miles from both.

Clark Gable had once owned a hunting lodge across the street-a rustic but charming place-and Charlie Sheen had lived for a while in a huge and strange stucco bunker at the top of the ridge opposite ours. Our neighbors were TV and movie folk like me and our next-door neighbor Early Drummond, and old hippies who grew pot in the gullies on their properties, and various folks, like Mike, who wanted a refuge from the hurly-burly of the urban community from which they drew their livelihood.

The road up into the canyon where I lived was narrow and full of wicked hairpin turns. Even though I knew every curve and pothole, I always had to be on the alert for random mudslides and boulders that could come crashing down the mountain toward me or had already blocked the road on the far side of a blind curve; the unstable Santa Monicas are always shedding debris.

The concentration it took to navigate the road was almost like meditating, especially after a rainstorm when slides were not just common, they were the norm. I had to let go of everything that was on my mind and pay attention, to be ready for anything. For Mike and me, that short trip up into our canyon was like crossing a moat that kept the events of the world down below from invading the life we shared.

Though the house still felt empty without Mike, I always felt a beautiful surge of well-being whenever I pulled up into our drive.

First chore when I got home, after changing into old jeans and pulling on knee-high Wellies, was feeding the horses. We had three: Duke, Mike’s big gelding; Rover, my sturdy quarter horse; and Red, my neighbor Early’s sorrel. They were all rescued pets. Times were tough, and horses are expensive to maintain, so there were plenty of them around in need of rescue.

Not one of our beasts would win a beauty contest, but they were all loyal, easygoing mounts, and comedians, every one.

We shared the rail-fenced horse enclosure with Early, a co-worker at the network that canceled my show. And we shared horse-tending duties. Because it worked for our schedules, Early usually took the morning shift, and I the later. But Early was out of town for the weekend, so I was doing double duty.

The horses had plenty of room to roam in their half-acre enclosure, but they hadn’t been walked since the rain started on Monday. They were restless and needy and demanding of attention, and generally made pests of themselves while I did my chores.

They had churned their enclosure into a giant, muddy pit. I led the horses out to the little lawn next to their feed and tack shed and left them there while I cleaned up their house.

We kept a little John Deere Gator in the shed. I drove it out, attached a chain drag to the back and leveled out the worst of the holes and mounds in the enclosure so no one would get hurt. More rain was predicted for the week ahead, so I’d be doing this chore regularly for a while yet.

Next I raked muck out of their stalls and raked fresh straw in. With the three of them kibitzing every step of the way, I filled their feeders and drained and refilled the old claw-foot bathtub we used as a trough.

Each horse got hosed off, wiped down, and each got a quick brushing, which they loved. By the time I was finished, they were shiny and proud, and I was a muddy, sopping-wet mess.

No one was around, so I left them pulling up dandelions in the lawn while I stripped off my wet shirt and wiped my arms and face with it. I was just pulling on a clean one I had stashed in the shed when a familiar sleek black Mercedes pulled into my driveway. Smoothing the shirt into the top of my jeans, I walked over to meet Jean-Paul.

“What a nice surprise,” I said, tucking some damp hair behind my ear.

“I should have called,” he said, emerging from his car wearing the same beautiful suit he had worn to the reception. “Forgive me.”

I plucked at my wet, muddy jeans. “If I’d known…”

He laughed softly. “I suppose you don’t get many drop-in guests.”

“Not many, no,” I said. I was too filthy to offer cheeks to kiss or a hand to shake. “So, you were in the neighborhood?”

“You told me how much you enjoyed the wine, and your mother remarked on the pâté,” he said. “There were some-how do I say this delicately-party leftovers. So I thought I might bring some to you.”

He cocked his head and gave me a shy smile. “Since I was in the neighborhood.”

He popped his trunk. I counted three cases of wine and a shrink-wrapped flat with a dozen tins of pâté.

The horses were making a fuss-they wanted to go for a walk. I turned, raised a finger, and told them, “Later.”

But horses don’t understand later. They were clean, they were fed, the sun was still shining, I was home, and they were ready to go for a ramble up into the Santa Monicas, drop-in company or not, right now.

“Oh dear, I have interrupted something,” Jean-Paul said.

“They’re expecting to go up on the trail.”

He looked over my shoulder, where he could see the trail as it came around a bend along a green hillside speckled with flowers. “So beautiful.”

Then he looked down at his suit with the same sort of ill-ease I felt standing there in my filthy Levis and rubber boots. He shrugged and raised both palms in a gesture that meant either too bad or oh damn.

“Maybe another time, I could join you?” he said.

“I hope you do. It’ll be muddy up on the mountain, but so beautiful after the rain.”

He picked up a case of wine and asked where he should take it. I picked up a second case and led the way to the garage.

Mike and I used a cupboard in the garage for wine storage because, with two floors above it and a canyon face abutting the wall behind it, the garage was always about the same temperature as the dungeon of a medieval castle, the room the experts had in mind when they advised storing wine at room temperature.

I punched the code into the electronic lock and the garage door rolled open. Jean-Paul saw Mike’s big F250 pickup truck and his eyes grew wide.

“Beautiful,” he said, running an appreciative hand along the top edge of the truck bed. “You have this for the horses, yes?”

“It’s handy for picking up hay,” I said. “But that truck was my husband’s pride and joy. When he wasn’t driving a police car, he drove that truck.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t mind if we took it for a little drive sometime?”

“He wouldn’t mind at all.”

The garage was full of Mike’s things. There were shelves stacked with boxes marked MIKE. His clothes, some mementoes, old notebooks, his corny country music, much of it on vinyl LPs. I didn’t know what to do with most of it. It seemed morbid to keep his personal things around the house where I would see them and touch them in the course of an ordinary day, so friends had helped me box it and store it down here. Most of it had been important only to Mike and had no real utility. Except his clothes. I had been intending to take his clothes to the VA, but just never could quite bring myself to do it. Silly, hanging on to things someone could make good use of. What would Comrade Dad say?

“Jean-Paul,” I said, as we set the wine cases on a shelf in the cupboard, “if you would like to come for a ride today, I can find you the right clothes.”

I knew he had noticed the boxes. He asked, “Your husband’s?”

“Yes.”

Because he hesitated, I added, “I don’t mind, if you don’t.”

He gave a little toss of the head, smiled, which, because he was French, turned downward.

“Then yes, of course.”

When he was still healthy, Mike was bigger than Jean-Paul. But I found a box with jeans I had bought after his first round of chemo, lifted out a couple of pairs, and handed them to Jean-Paul. Next, out of other boxes, a T-shirt and a sweatshirt.

I looked at his feet. “Mike wore a ten-and-a-half.”

“The trainers I wear at the gym are in my car. Would they offend the horses?”

“Around here, people ride barefoot wearing bikinis.”

“Well then.”

With just an hour of daylight left, we rode up Bulldog Trail, Jean-Paul in front on Duke, and me behind on Rover, leading Red on a line. The first quarter mile of the trail was a grueling uphill slog. Duke kept turning his head, as if trying to get a good look at the man in his saddle. Maybe he smelled Mike’s jeans, or maybe it was simply a new rider, a new weight, and new voice. But Jean-Paul knew how to handle a horse. He talked easily to Duke, used a light hand on the reins except when Duke tested him by suddenly dropping his head to snack on the spring flowers emerging between ruts in the trail. By the time we came out on top where the narrow trail opened onto a broad, flat meadow, Jean-Paul was clearly in charge of his mount and Duke was his happy companion.

The early evening light was soft, full of lush pink tones. A doe and two fawns leaped out of a thicket to graze on the meadow. They looked up, saw us, and decided we were no threat. I pulled a little digital camera out of my pocket and stopped to take some pictures.

Jean-Paul rode up beside me. Watching the deer, he said, “It is so wonderful here. We could be anywhere in the world, except Los Angeles.”

I held up the camera, and asked, “May I?”

He put his right hand flat on his chest and folded some sweatshirt over it, and with a properly serious expression on his face, posed like Napoleon. LAPD BUNCO-FORGERY ANNUAL STEAK-FRY was emblazoned across the front of his shirt.

“Très débonnaire,” I said.

When he relaxed his pose and laughed, I took another shot.

We headed up a trail that wound around a knob and came out with a great view of the valley below. There were estate-size homes along both sides of the narrow valley. One of the recent landscaping fads in the area was planting rows of trellised wine grapes, so the area looked very much like Provence.

Jean-Paul surveyed the view and said, again, “Anywhere but Los Angeles.”

“We should get back down before dark,” I said.

Jean-Paul helped me get the horses rubbed down and settled for the night. We put the tack in the shed and changed out of the Wellies we slipped on for the clean-up. I looked at him as he sat on a bale of alfalfa hay to tie the laces of his trainers. He had mud on his chin. I wiped it off with a clean horse towel.

He reached up for the towel and took my hand with it.

“I planned to ask you to dinner,” he said as he spread our arms wide and assessed the mud we wore. “But…”

“I stopped by the market on my way home and picked up some nice-looking sea bass,” I said. “How about, we get cleaned up and eat here?”

He thought that was a fine idea. He got his gym bag from his car, some essentials, he said, and carried it upstairs to the guest room where he had changed earlier. Twenty minutes later, both of us showered and hair freshly brushed, we met in the kitchen. He wore his suit pants and a V-neck cashmere sweater over a white T-shirt. I had pulled on sweats and tube socks.

The telephone rang. Caller ID listed Early, my neighbor, so I picked up.

“Yes, Early.”

“I just had a call from Ida,” he said, referring to the producer of the evening news broadcast where he worked as a technical director. “Thought I’d give you a heads-up.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “She wanted to know if I’d told you anything about Park Holloway.”

“She wanted to know if I knew where you were. She said you weren’t answering your phone.”

I glanced at the phone’s message light and saw that there had been ten calls made to the house between the time I went out to feed the horses until now, but no one left messages. I pushed the incoming call log button and two familiar numbers, each repeated several times, scrolled across the ID screen. Ida, from network news, and Lana Howard, my former executive producer-the network boss who had given me my walking papers-had taken turns trying to reach me for the last few hours. There were probably messages on my mobile phone as well; I had left it upstairs.

“Thanks,” I told Early. “Sorry she interrupted your weekend.”

I put the phone in its base and turned to Jean-Paul. “Sorry about that.”

“A problem?”

“Not for me. Looks like folks at my former network think I have something to tell them about that poor man last night. But I don’t.”

He shrugged; such is the way of things.

I said, “Let’s see what we can find to eat.”

Because we were having fish, we chose a Pinot Gris to drink. Holding glasses of wine, we stood in front of the open refrigerator and talked about putting together a meal from the contents. He volunteered to make risotto with grilled asparagus, and that left me to take care of salad and fish.

I picked up the wrapped fish and weighed it in my hands.

“I still don’t know how to cook for one person,” I said. “There’s probably enough here to feed half the neighborhood.”

“Were you married for a long time?” He was bending down, checking the height of the flame under the sauté pan he’d chosen. He dropped butter into the pan to melt.

“Legally married, not very long,” I said, washing salad greens. “But we were together for a long time before we got around to the legalities.”

I put the grater attachment in the food processor and dropped in the chunk of Parmesan he needed for his risotto.

“When we met, Mike was already talking about retirement, and I wasn’t. Wasn’t even close.”

I whirled the cheese. “He’d bought land way up on the north coast and built a little house, getting ready. A couple more years, he said, and he was going. But I couldn’t work from up there, and I had to work. He thought we should marry, but I told him we couldn’t until we figured out the geography. So we just stayed happily together in the meantime.”

“But you did marry,” he said, pouring Arborio rice into the melted butter.

“We got married the day the doctors told him he had cancer.”

“So that you could take care of him?”

“So that we could take care of each other.” I started slicing avocado. “And you? Were you married for a long time?”

“I knew Marian all of my life,” he said, stirring white wine into the browned rice. “We grew up together; she was my best friend. From the time we were children, we knew-everyone knew-that we would always be together.”

He looked up at me. “She was the first girl I ever kissed.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“Aneurysm,” he said. “She was fine one minute, the next she was gone. Someone at her office heard her say, ‘Oh!’ and that was all.”

For a long moment, we were both quiet. He had his back to me, adding hot chicken stock a bit at a time while he stirred the rice. I went over and stood behind him, put a hand on his shoulder. When he turned, he had the same shy smile that I had seen earlier.

“I have a terrible confession for a Frenchman to make,” he said. “May I tell you?”

“If you think it’s necessary.”

“Yes, I think that it might be,” he said. He took a sip of wine.

“This is an excellent wine,” he said. “And I hope to enjoy a bit more of it. But, when I consider driving back home down that crazy road I drove up on, I think it would be a good idea to say something now, instead of later, when it might be too late. A little too much wine and I might never get home again.”

“Then I’d better hear your confession.”

“Everyone expects French men to be magnificent lovers.”

“Are you saying you’re not?”

“No, no. Not that.” He chuckled. “My wife never complained. In fact, she was quite enthusiastic.”

“But?”

“I told you she was the first girl I ever kissed?” When I nodded, he said, “And she was the only woman I have ever slept with.”

He watched for my reaction. The only thing I could think to do or say was to refill his wineglass. That seemed to be sufficient answer for him.

It was a sweet moment, until the telephone rang.

I glanced at the caller ID screen: Lana Howard, my former boss.

“Damn,” I muttered.

“Them again?”

“Yes, them.”

“Do you need to take the call?”

I reached for the phone. “Only to put a stop to it.”

I didn’t bother with hello.

“So, Lana, what’s up?”

“I wasn’t sure you’d take my call, Maggie.”

“I thought probably the only way to get you and Ida to stop calling was to see what’s on your mind.”

“What does Ida want?” she snapped.

“Ask Ida.”

“Well honey,” she started, and then unwound some platitudes-we all miss you, you have every right to be upset-the full laundry list. I interrupted her mid-sentence.

“Lana, I’m in the middle of dinner.”

“Shall I call later?”

“Please don’t. Let’s hear what you have to say and be done with it.”

“I want you to do a film for me,” she said.

“About the late Park Holloway.”

“Yes. Who better than you, Maggie dear?”

“You have balls, Lana,” I said. I glanced at Jean-Paul and caught him grinning as he eavesdropped. I winked at him.

“Think about it, Maggie,” she said. “You can try to get backing to do it on your own. But if you make the film for me you’ll have full access to all of the resources the network can offer, and you know they are significant. We both know this story is ripe, and we both know that there are probably half a hundred hungry folks out there ready to pluck it. But I want you. What will it take to bring you home?”

Home? I wanted to tell Lana to go to hell. I had worked in television for a long time and knew very well that shows get canceled and people get dumped all the time; it had happened to me more than once. Between network gigs, I had also worked as an independent filmmaker and knew that being out there alone was an even dicier way to earn a living. But the ragged way Lana handled the cancellation still left me feeling raw three months later.

On that particular afternoon, I had gone up to Lana’s office with Uncle Max, who was my agent as well as my attorney, expecting to sign the new contract that he, Lana and the network had drafted just the week before, with raises for my crew as part of the package; an early Christmas present. Instead, I got the ax and was left to tell my co-workers that they were laid off. When I walked in to deliver the bad news, they had been icing celebratory champagne, waiting to hear their raises were coming.

That crew was the only reason I didn’t immediately hang up on Lana. Fergie was in financial extremis and I couldn’t carry her, Guido was out huckstering, looking for free-lance jobs. The others were in similar straits. So, I took a sip of wine, and took a deep breath.

“I will consider doing the film through the network, but only on the condition that you hire back my production team at the pay rate that was established in the contract you reneged on in December.”

“I’ll call Max and we’ll get started on the contracts right away.”

“You are right about the topic being ripe, Lana,” I said. “I already have Fergie doing research. So keep this in mind: yours isn’t the only call I’ve had today. From you I learned that handshake agreements mean nothing, so you would be advised not to dick around about getting contracts drafted and signed, because I will take the first offer that meets my conditions, whether it’s your offer or someone else’s.”

“We’ll get it done, honey,” she said. “Have I ever let you down?”

“I hope you aren’t expecting an answer to that. Good-bye.” I ended the call.

Jean-Paul seemed thoroughly amused.

“Another quick call,” I said to him, dialing. “And then I’m turning off the phones.” I reached out and touched his cheek, he took my hand and kissed my palm. “For the rest of the night.”

I dialed a number that went directly to Max’s message system. Saves a lot of time. I told him Lana would call him, if she hadn’t already, and told him my terms to sign with her. Then I turned off the phones.

“Remind me never to argue with you,” Jean-Paul said, with a wry smile, a little shrug.

“Might be worth it,” I said. “There’s a lot to be said for making up afterward.”