“That sounds like a sound hypothesis,” Nerdly said with a nod.
“Then we agree that our hard ceiling is thirty percent?” asked Celia, contributing to the discussion for the first time.
“That’s correct,” Pauline said. “Not a single dime more than thirty percent of wholesale rate. If all bids are higher than that, we walk.”
After dinner, Jake asked Obie and Greg if they wanted to join him for a little cognac and a cigar out on the deck. Greg was all for it. Obie, on the other hand, refused, since he couldn’t have the cognac and since a cigar wouldn’t taste right without either cognac or scotch to sip with it.
“Oh ... I see,” Jake said, feeling nervous at the thought of being alone with Greg. “Well ... how about you, Nerdly? Care to join us?”
Nerdly wrinkled his face in disgust. “You know that simply smelling those cigars sets off my asthma,” he said. “And now you’re actually asking me to smoke one? Are you attempting to unlawfully profit from a surreptitious life insurance policy you’ve taken out on me?”
Greg chuckled at this and clapped Jake on the back. “He’s on to your plot, Jake,” he told him.
“I guess so,” Jake said sourly.
“Looks like it’s you and me,” Greg said. “Lead the way.”
Suppressing a sigh, Jake led him over to the bar, where he first poured two healthy snifters of his best cognac and then opened his humidor to pull out two of his finest illegally obtained Cuban cigars. He then led the actor out onto the deck, where the sun had now set and the city lights of LA were shining brightly in the brisk air.
They sat in the chairs and prepped their cigars before firing them up with a lighter Jake kept out here just for that purpose. They puffed away for a few minutes, sipping from their snifters every now and then. Just as Jake was starting to feel that the silence was awkward, Greg asked him how Laura was doing these days.
“She’s in Santiago, Chile,” Jake told him. “They’re doing three shows there and then moving on to La Paz in Bolivia for six shows.”
“Are they flying her from venue to venue, or is she riding on that horrid tour bus?”
“The band is flying,” he said. “The roadies and the equipment are moving by truck and bus. She says that she’d almost rather travel by ground though. Some of those aircraft they fly her on are pretty primitive by American standards.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, taking a long puff. “She told me she got in one plane to fly between cities in Peru and as they’re bouncing and banging along through a pass in the mountains, she looked out at the wing and saw that part of the flap assembly was being held together with duct tape.”
“Duct tape?” Greg asked, astonished.
“Ain’t that some shit?” Jake asked.
“Indeed,” he said, shaking his head. “When does she come home?”
“The tour will finish up in Sau Paulo on March 15,” Jake said. “She should be home by March 17.”
“That will be a happy day for you, huh?”
“You have no idea,” Jake said.
“Actually, I do,” Greg said. “I just went through a similar separation, remember?”
“Oh ... yeah, I guess you did,” Jake said awkwardly. How about we turn this conversation in another direction? he thought.
Before he could do that, however, Greg exponentially upped the level of awkwardness. “Celia told me what happened that night in Portland,” he said.
Jake’s hand tightened on his cognac glass. She fucking told him? his mind screamed angrily, with disbelief. She told him what happened in Portland? What the fuck happened to ‘we’ll never speak of this again, even to each other’?
“Uh...” Jake stammered, unsure what to say. “She ... uh ... she told you?”
“That’s right,” Greg said seriously, twirling his cognac around and around. “She said you two got stranded there when your plane was broke and had to share a suite and that ... she was upset with me ... and ... and she had a few drinks, and then she ... she told you about what happened between me and that makeup girl.”
Jake licked his lips slowly and then gave his own cognac a little swirl. “Yeah...” he said slowly. “That did happen.” He swallowed slowly. “Did she ... uh ... tell you anything else?”
“Anything else?” Greg asked, raising his eyebrows a bit. “Is there more than that to tell?”
Jake shook his head rapidly. “No, nothing at all,” he assured the actor. “She was just ... you know ... pretty emotional that night.”
Greg nodded sadly. “My fault completely. I’m still kicking myself in the ass for doing that. I was weak. I know a lot of these Hollywood marriages are rife with infidelity—they cheat on each other routinely, without even a first thought, let alone a second one—but Celia and I have always had something special.” He sighed. “Or at least we did until I let my Johnson do the thinking for me one night.”
“I can relate to that,” Jake said honestly.
“Yeah,” Greg said with a nod. “You’ve performed your share of indiscretion over the years, haven’t you?”
You have no fucking idea, Jake thought guiltily. “I like to think I’m getting over that these days,” he said, feeling like a hypocrite even as the words left his mouth.
“I admire you, actually,” Greg said. “You haven’t seen Laura in how long now?”
“Not since October when I went to visit for a week out on her tour,” Jake told him.
“That’s almost as long as Celia and I were apart, yet somehow you managed to keep your dick in your pants, right?”
“Uh ... right,” Jake said softly. “It ... uh ... hasn’t been easy though.”
“Not easy, but you did it. You know the funny thing about all this is that fucking makeup girl meant nothing to me, nothing at all but someone to flirt with. And she wasn’t nearly as attractive as Celia is, not even close. I didn’t even enjoy it while we were doing it, all I kept thinking about was how wrong it was, how I’d just taken something special that Celia and I had going and smashed it against a wall.”
“You made a mistake, Greg,” Jake told him. “It happens. As I said, I can relate quite well. What I’m wondering however, is do you really think confessing what you’d done to Celia was the right thing to do?”
“The guilt was overwhelming,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anything else but how I’d betrayed her. I had to confess, Jake. It was the only way I could put it behind me.”
“Well ... maybe you were able to put it behind you, but by doing that, you put it in front of Celia. And it’s still there, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “It’s still there. She was cold as ice to me when she got home today. Hasn’t said more than a dozen words to me. She’s refused to talk about it. To be quite honest, I’m not sure where we’re going to go from here.”
Jake reached over and patted the man on his shoulder. “Keep the faith, Greg,” he told him. “She’s got a lot on her mind that’s unrelated to her problems with you. We have our meetings with the big four and then we’ll have negotiations after that. Let her get through tomorrow and then maybe she’ll be more open to communication.”
Greg nodded. “I suppose,” he said. “Things always look better in the morning, don’t they?”
“That’s what they say,” Jake agreed, completely unaware that tomorrow was going to be a most interesting day for them all and for an entirely unforeseen reason.
And their day was going to start much earlier than planned.
It was 4:30 AM when it happened. Jake was sound asleep in his bed in the master bedroom, wearing only a pair of black boxer briefs, the sheets and comforter pulled tight around his body, the ceiling fan spinning along on high. Elsa was asleep in her bedroom as well. The sun was still more than ninety minutes away from broaching the eastern horizon.