The truth was, she liked him. She thought about him, looked at his card quite a few times, and on Sunday she called. She told him, then, that it wasn’t what he thought: the man at the airport hadn’t been her husband, although she was committed to him. He told her the situation wasn’t what she thought: he had been attracted to her, and so sure she wouldn’t share a cab with him that he had made up the story about his father. His father lived in Arizona. They agreed to see each other on Wednesday. The next morning she did the cowardly thing and wrote him a note saying that she had made a mistake to call him. Much to her surprise, he didn’t respond. More than a week later, when Andrew was due in Boston, she got drunk during the afternoon and called Evan. “What do you want me to do?” he said. “If that’s the way you want it, there’s nothing I can say.” She was embarrassed, and they hung up. But that only fascinated her more: there was never, ever, a time when Andrew didn’t have something to say. When they were having good conversations, he would run out of the room and come back with the recorder, to help him with dialogue later. He wanted them to be very close, so whenever they had a disagreement, he would later say out loud what he intuited that she felt. It was scary; he would become her — when he spoke from what he thought to be her mind, even his face took on her likeness. It made her hate every thought she had, rational or irrational. She did know that he loved her madly. She had said that they would live together. So she tried to forget about Evan and what he might do. Anita called Evan “cocky” for what he had done; she didn’t believe that his response had been sincere, and she told Lillian to stay posted.
Then Andrew drove to Boston. There was much celebration because they had gotten the apartment and could move into it in August. Meanwhile, he would stay with her. The first night he was there, he picked up the phone and whoever it was hung up. It happened again the next morning. The next time the phone rang, Lillian picked it up. It was a literary agent; Andrew had given her Lillian’s number so that she could call if she was willing to take him on. One of the deciding factors — in fact, she was so sure of Andrew that she had already made the commitment, although she did not tell him this — was that she felt he would be the perfect man to write the novelization of Passionate Intensity. She was proud of herself for sounding so enthusiastic on the phone when she reached Andrew, for pointing out that the novelization would be published around the same time his real novel came out. She said that she was surprised that he had never heard of Nicole Nelson (one of the agents she worked with had filled her in about who she was). The next day, she Federal Expressed to him cassettes of four shows and a photocopy of the People magazine interview with the cast, plus a bio sheet on everyone. Lillian called Anita, and they arranged to go to her boyfriend Howley’s house in Cambridge, while he and Anita were seeing a movie at Coolidge Corner, to watch the shows on Howley’s Betamax.
“It’s real,” Andrew said. “You know what I mean? It’s almost primitive. Like tom-toms beaten before the kill. It’s just prolonged, made dramatic. So much happens. I see why this has captured people’s attention.”
“I’ve never heard of anybody who watches it,” Lillian said.
“It’s like General Hospital.”
“I’ve heard of plenty of people who watch General Hospital. I’ve never heard anybody talk about this show.”
“Don’t misunderstand me,” Lillian said. “I think you should take the money and run.”
He looked at her. “It isn’t a question of that,” he said. “It’s a way to stimulate my own thinking.”
“About what? Abused children and promiscuous doctors? Don’t you think everybody thinks the same things about those clichés?”
“Lillian — there are many layers to everything. Subtleties.”
On the TV, Stephanie Sykes was locked in a bathroom, drinking from a flask. She was crying and disheveled, her eyes owllike with sadness. She heard a noise and raised the top of the toilet tank and dropped the flask in.
“Stephanie?” Gerald said. “Your mother has called from the hospital. She can’t take you to the rehearsal today, but when she gets home at midnight, she wants to go over your part with you. Stephanie — your real mother is going to be in the audience on Saturday. There is no way that … that Cora can stop it. Your real mother is in a prison hospital now, darling. And the patients who are well enough are going to come to the performance. Do you … what shall I say to Cora?”
The music came up, sudden and loud enough to explain, by itself, why Stephanie, at that moment, collapsed in the bathroom.
“You must know, darling,” Gerald said to the unconscious body on the other side of the door, “that Cora and I believe in you. We believe that you will go on to be a great dancer. Darling, you must know that … we are your real family.”
More music. Lillian looked at Andrew.
“Why doesn’t the person who writes the dialogue write the novel?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but you should never look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“This isn’t a gift horse — this is an albatross.”
Andrew looked shocked. Then his face lit up. “What a brilliant way of putting it,” he said. He put his arms around her and kissed her. “There’s no one like you,” he said. “When my agent sells Buzz and I get the money for this novelization, we’re going to have the most splendid wedding in the world.”
He put on the next cassette. Apparently, his agent had not sent four consecutive programs, but an assortment. In this one, some doctor was kissing Cora’s toes and nuzzling her ankle. They were in an office at the hospital, and suddenly a nurse walked in. That would never happen that way. In real hospitals, what was going on was always so shocking that everyone knew enough not to open doors. It simply wasn’t done, without knocking. Jane Austen’s characters would have been perfectly comfortable in Mass. General. Lillian said this.
“You mean so much to me,” Andrew said. “I worship that strange, wonderful mind. I missed you so much when we were apart. A writer’s life is so lonely, and to have found a soulmate …”
When Anita and Howley came home, they were still watching.
“Another goddamn plodding movie about some guy that’s obsessed,” Howley said. “He’s driving around, listening to crap on the radio, and thinking about this woman, and outside the car there are magnificent, snow-covered mountains, and he’s so out of it, he’s just whizzing by, going to meet this woman for two seconds just to have a look at her … I paid good money to see that?”
Howley stood in front of Lillian, blocking her view. “What the hell is this?” Howley said.
“Passionate Intensity,” Andrew said.
“What in the hell is happening in this world?” Howley said. “This thing looks like a soap opera.”
“It is a soap opera, Howley,” Anita said.
“It’s like General Hospital,” Andrew said.
“Yeah?” Howley said, kicking the footstool away from the chair and sitting on it. “Famous people do cameos?”
“Is this the show that had Elizabeth Taylor?” Anita said, sitting on the floor, next to Howley.
“I don’t know,” Andrew said.
“That was General Hospital. I don’t think she was on two of them,” Lillian said.
“Make us drinks, baby,” Howley said. “I’d do it just to seem liberated, but it breaks my heart to put as much ice in a glass as you like. You’d better make them.”