Elizabeth the First Wife Page 24

  WHAT TO SKIP: A noted anti-Catholic, she imprisoned and executed her sister, Mary Queen of Scots, as well as many others, on the basis of religion.

  HER WORDS TO LIVE BY: “Though the sex to which I belong is considered weak, you will nevertheless find me a rock that bends to no wind.”

  GIRLS’ WEEKEND: Vegas with Angela Merkel and Betty White.

  CHAPTER 24

  “So, Elizabeth, who are you taking as your date on the big night?” The question came from Candy McKenna but inspired a roomful of well-accessorized women to turn their eyes on me. Like so many times before, my sister jumped in before I had a chance to answer. This time I was grateful for the surrogate. My anxiety level about the “big night” was sky high, thanks to questions about my date, my dress, and my speech, in that order.

  “Yes, who are you taking as your date? Must be someone special—those are fresh highlights,” Bumble said as we stood around the island in her Pasadena kitchen after the final committee meeting before the Summer with Shakespeare benefit. We were surrounded by a dozen members of the newly formed Elizabethan Guild, the auxiliary to the foundation charged with throwing parties and raising money for my worthy cause. Bumble winked at the collective brain trust. “Elizabeth’s been holed up for months working on her book and the selection process. We’ve barely seen her. Maybe she has a new guy she’s been hiding.”

  “Hardly.” I laughed off the accusation. In the six months since the SWS had come into being, I’d found myself in a lot of first-time situations, not the least of which was being part of the inner circle of the Elizabethan Guild. Add to the list finishing a book proposal currently being shopped to publishers by Melissa Bergstrom-Bennett and teaching an enthusiastic classroom filled to capacity with students, thanks to the fact that I was integrating all the new pop-culture research into my classroom lectures. (How had I not thought of a Twilight versus Romeo & Juliet character-analysis mashup before? An educational breakthrough.) My new kitchen was being painted a smoky sage in homage to the summer cottage, and I had indeed recently gotten highlights, but I wasn’t ready for full disclosure with the Elizabethan Guild.

  My mother, who’d been on a sabbatical from volunteer work, hatched the idea of an auxiliary group, even coming up with the double-entendre name, declaring, “It may be the only public acknowledgment you get in this lifetime, so I’d take it.” Well, when you put it that way. The Girls gave it their stamp of approval, so I caved to the cuteness, provided that Bumble took the lead assembling the guild. “Why do I even have to be involved in this? I’m picking the students for the program, not the caterer for the gala,” I’d snapped when Bumble invited me way back in September.

  At the time, Bumble heartily agreed, imagining the ineffective and unconnected groups of locals that I might invite. “Yes, please, you stick to Shakespeare, because your people can barely organize a potluck,” she said, invoking the memory of my thirtieth birthday and the eight vats of spinach-artichoke dip but no crackers. “I’ll bring the movers and shakers, but to get the members to care and to join, you have to report on what’s happening in your classroom, how your students are responding to the idea. Your job is to get these women invested emotionally, and I’ll get them invested in other ways. The Elizabethan Guild will be the new charity to work on here in Pasadena. I’m only asking fun, smart women who won’t spend every meeting talking about their hormone-pellet regimen.”

  Speaking of hormones, Bumble was awash in estrogen, nearing her last trimester of pregnancy and enjoying the full benefit of the surge with glowing skin and lush hair that was beautifully set off by her deep raspberry Rosie Pope maternity dress. Fortunately for me, she had exercised a rare bit of caution, holding back the details of the miracle conception, except for that fact that she and Ted were going to name the baby, boy or girl, “Ashland,” so I felt like I had all the insider information I really needed.

  Bumble did look beautiful. She and Ted, now officially in the race for governor of California, were thrilled at the prospect of a new baby in the house just as Maddie was heading off to Wesleyan. (Yes, FX had used his powers of persuasion to convince Maddie that our alma mater, not some place in the middle of Pennsylvania, was the right school for her. The admissions office had agreed, accepting her early decision.) In fact, Bumble had been so distracted by the baby, the campaign, and the benefit that she’d barely mocked my love life at all lately, so I was a little surprised she was asking now. I sidestepped the question as best I could. “Oh, I’m still working on a date. I’m more nervous about the speech.”

  Bumble opened another bottle of seltzer water with ease. “I hope you don’t resort to bringing one of those divorced sitcom writers. This town is crawling with them, and those guys are such downers.”

  The Elizabethan Guild collectively howled and shook their blown-out heads in agreement. After months of planning, a star-studded evening of theater, fundraising, and photo ops was to take place Saturday night at the famed Pasadena Playhouse. The event had been timed to highlight FX’s recent Oscar nomination and to take advantage of all the actors in town for the Golden Globes. (It would no doubt be the largest collection of town cars to ever head from LA’s celebrity-filled westside to celebrity-free Pasadena.) With help from Agent Hank and Taz, who also called in all their professional favors, FX had lined up a serious who’s who of stars to perform, from SNL comics to members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, to perform material from Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo & Juliet, The Tempest, and, of course, Midsummer. In between the performances, Congressman Ted and FX would co-host, and Maddie would speak about her experience. Near the end, I’d be called upon to provide what Hank called a “Stand and Deliver/Dead Poets Society moment” by introducing several of the students going to Ashland this summer. Finally, the evening would end with a spectacular live auction, the centerpiece item being a chance to appear onstage at opening night of Taz Buchanan’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Lincoln Center. Winner take all: a part in the chorus, your name in the program, and a dressing room next to FX Fahey and his as-yet-unnamed co-star.

  The evening was so far beyond anything I’d ever been a part of, putting me in the big leagues with Bumble and Congressman Ted, or perhaps even my father in Stockholm. Okay, maybe it wasn’t Nobel Prize level, but I was following Patrick Stewart onstage. And panic was starting to creep into every cell of my being. I’d been a behind-the-scenes sort of person for my entire life, not the star. I wasn’t even the star of my own life most days. “Oh, don’t worry,” Agent Hank assured me after running down the confirmed performers and guests from FX’s list. “These people love to love teachers. It makes them feel normal. Look at you, you’re so real.”

  It will be real all right. A real letdown after Sir Patrick Stewart brings down the house with Prospero’s big speech. Yes indeed, we are such stuff as dreams are made of, except of course, if you’re the one following Captain Jean-Luc Picard, then it’s the stuff nightmares are made of. I never got nervous speaking to a classroom, but the stakes seemed very high for this event. I remembered my father before his Stockholm speech, reaching out to me for advice. I needed someone like that, someone to talk me down off the cliff, to run my material by, to be there that night.

  It was hard to explain the depth of my terror to the Elizabethan Guild, so I stuck with the topic of my mystery date and my dress. “Don’t worry, I have a no-sitcom-writer rule in effect for the whole month of January,” I assured them. “But what do you think I should wear?”

  I needed to redirect the conversation, and wardrobe seemed like a sure bet with this crowd. After hours of discussion, the Elizabethan Guild, or the “Lizzies” as Candy had started to call them, decided to include the words “Festive Attire” on the invitations, a bold step forward in the area of party wear in Pasadena. It was a risky move to abandon “Cocktail Attire” for something a little more interpretive to appeal to the theater crowd. But the Lizzies were fearless.

  If any good had come out of my brief sojo
urn into Bumble’s world, it’s that I knew once and for all that I didn’t want to be Bumble. Give me my books, my cramped office, and my underpaid colleagues in their oversize sweaters. I’d rather prepare a dozen lectures on sexual slang in Shakespeare than have one more discussion about the color of the typeface on the invitations. Not that they weren’t lovely women doing lovely things for deserving students, but I was much happier in my bubble than theirs. For the last decade, my status as unmarried and childless had disqualified me from so many local traditions, like the high-stakes preschool application process and the mandatory charity work, that I often wondered what I was missing. Now I knew.

  When Bumble sensed my discontent a few months ago, she’d warned, “Do not disparage these ladies. When all those fancy friends of FX tire of this cause, and they will, these are the ground troops who will keep the foundation afloat with their work and their money. Watch and learn. These women are fundraising killers.”

  Bumble had used the pregnancy and the campaign as worthy excuses to bring in two of Pasadena’s most notorious social assassins to plan the event, Candy McKenna and Zizi Rinaldi. Zizi, a lithe, raven-haired local legend, was heiress to a chain of auto-supply stores. Zizi’s job in the family business was to spread the wealth among the area charities, and when she took a personal interest in your cause, like she had with SWS, watch out—she could grind sponsorship dollars out of a stone. If her violet eyes didn’t manage to mesmerize potential donors, then a few shakes of her well-done chest certainly would. Men were powerless and women were scared. It was rumored that her entire garage was filled with silent auction items that she had not only donated but also bought back in order to get the money rolling. “She even has spare yellow lab puppies in there,” Bumble had whispered during a previous meeting. There was no doubt that Zizi Rinaldi was going to be onstage at Lincoln Center, snagging the ultimate auction item. The only question was how much she would pay for the privilege. After all, the license plate on her Jag read GOTCHEX.

  Normally a media celebrity like Candy would have stayed on the sidelines for such an event, preferring to report for candysdish.com than actually get her hands dirty with planning decisions, but this was such a rare and delicious mix of Hollywood, politics, and old Pasadena money that even Candy couldn’t resist. “Plus, I think that thing FX had with Scarlet Josephson is over, so he’s available. I think maybe I have a shot with him. We’ve established a certain rapport. You don’t mind, do you, Elizabeth?”

  I didn’t mind, but it wasn’t over with Ms. Josephson. FX was on location in Prague with ScarJo filming a CIA thriller and had become my new text buddy, as he was completely oblivious to the cost of international messaging. Most of our contact was about the foundation and the event, but he occasionally let some relationship intelligence slip, like: Off to Paris with S. Adieu. But I didn’t want to burst Candy’s bubble. No one knew better than me how slim the pickings were in town, so I let her think she had a shot with FX. Anything to make the event a success, a trick I’d learned from Bumble.

  Candy had brought her people to the Lizzies: a whip smart lawyer/life coach by the name of Tina Chau-Swenson, whom I discovered had a photographic memory and a contact list that covered all the best zip codes in Southern California; and the much-whispered-about Helen Fairchild, a widow who’d become a modern-day heroine around town when she replaced her philandering husband, unfortunately plowed over by a Rose Parade float while sexting his mistress, with a handsome archaeology professor. Helen was the producer of a TV show called The Dirty Archaeologist and managed to live in Pasadena in the winter and on the coast of Turkey in the summer, lucky girl. She was a frustrated academic who was working on a book herself, some historical fiction about Troy. I liked Helen, and we’d actually made plans to have coffee once the madness was over so I could reveal everything I knew about the book world, which was almost nothing.

  Rounding out the committee were the assorted wives of bankers and business owners who themselves were bankers and business owners and somehow managed to work by day, raise honor-roll-worthy children by night, and spend their spare time stuffing envelopes and filling gift bags. Bumble was right, I had come to appreciate their work ethic, even if I could never live up to their grooming standards and shopping expertise, as evidenced by the fact that it took Tina Chau-Swenson about three seconds to come up with a solution to my faux fashion dilemma: “Missoni! Vintage! Floral!” She whipped out her tablet, brought up an Etsy page (I knew I liked Tina), and pointed right at the perfect dress, a muted floral-print maxi with V-straps and a touch of metallic. “I almost bought this for me, but it’s so much better for you. You’re young, hip, and have really nice collarbones. And look, you can move in it, maybe even sit down. It says, ‘I teach but I have style.’ Click here,” she ordered, leaving me almost no choice. Fortunately, it was beautiful.

  “Trust her. Tina knows what she’s talking about,” Helen said. “It’s pathological.”

  A chorus of agreement encouraged me to find my credit card for what would be my last splurge. The remodel had tapped out every dime I’d made last summer, and now it was back to my regularly scheduled modest lifestyle. The dress was worth it, though. It meant at least one aspect of the evening was a known quantity.

  That Saturday, the texts started coming in at about four in the afternoon, as I was sitting in the salon getting the hair and makeup that Bumble had insisted on. “You need your face to last for hours on a night like tonight, and the only way that’s going to happen is if you have Lenore spray paint it on. Just shellac that foundation right on. I’ll treat.” So I was in the chair having my eyelids airbrushed with color when the first one popped up: Meeting over. SFO fogged in. Plane late.

  An hour later, I was slipping into my binding underwear and my fabulous dress that was (thank you, Tina) exactly right when the next one came in: Delayed again. I showed the text to Puck, who threw himself back down on the hardwood floor with a sigh. I felt the same way. “I know, little guy, me too.”

  And I was standing in the courtyard of the Pasadena Playhouse, nursing a glass of chardonnay and making conversation with a group of locals who’d spent five hundred dollars a ticket to get a glimpse of FX and his pals, when the last text arrived: Think we’re taking off.

  Please get here, I thought as I surveyed the tented courtyard, marveling that all these people were here because of my idea. The Lizzies were the very definition of festive—no tasteful sequined T-shirt was spared. Candy, Helen, and Tina were being photographed by Look Out Pasadena! while Zizi, needless to say, was posing/auditioning for FX and Taz for some higher-profile publication.

  I spotted my parents holding hands and chatting with the Girls and Pierce DeVine, resplendent in a midnight-blue velvet blazer. Earlier in the evening, my mother had weighed in with a trademark comment: “I wasn’t too sure of that dress when you described it earlier, but it works on you.” Ted and Bumble were holding court with a cabal of well-suited Friends of Hank, using the event to secure new supporters. Sarah and Steven observed from the corner; they’d brought Hope and Honor, because Elle Fanning was performing the Romeo & Juliet balcony scene with one of the boys from One Direction, and for that the twins were willing to sit through “some guy named Jude” doing the St. Crispin’s Day speech.

  Even Maddie was paired up, introducing Dylan, a surprise guest, to the Emmas, whose parents had thrown down the cash to get their daughters on the guest list—the next generation of the Elizabethan Guild. Dylan, on the other hand, was there courtesy of FX, who’d paid for his ticket and encouraged him to join Maddie onstage to speak about his summer experience. (“Ever since Portlandia, everyone loves people from Oregon,” Hank had assured me in a conference call when he told me the secret plan.)

  Oh well, I thought, chances are that no one even notices I’m solo, because I usually am at social events. Besides, my immediate issue was stage fright, not singledom.

  “You ready?” FX tapped me on the shoulder.

  I turned my ashen face to
my ex-husband and started to speak but couldn’t get much out. “I’m a little nervous. …”

  Now it was FX’s turn to be my cheerleader. Or to get revenge. He pecked me on the cheek, took both my hands in his, and mimicked, “Oh for God’s sakes, Elizabeth, it’s hardly Hamlet.” Then he broke into his Oscar-nominated grin.

  “Thank you. That’s very helpful.” FX was still holding my hands, warmly and gently, without the slightest hint of anything more, like an old friend. Which, I guess, he was now.

  “You’ll be great,” he said, looking right at me, then letting his eyes drift around the room. “This is great. Right? You should have no worries. You’re in the right spot. We’re in the right spot.”

  I teared up slightly, realizing that never in a million years did I think I’d get here, we’d get here. To the right spot. I pulled myself together and nodded. “Yup.”

  “Showtime.”

  Backstage was a reunion of sorts, with Taz embracing me like a long-lost lover and Lulu following suit and gushing over my Missoni. Drunk Puck was there to reprise his role and, yes, he was slightly drunk. I waved to the young lighting director and the costumer from Taz’s crew who were catching up with Dylan and Maddie. I searched for Sabrina, only to discover that she’d been replaced in the Titania/Hippolyta role by Scarlet. Yes, that Scarlet. I guess she hadn’t bothered with the pre-party out front, rubbing shoulders with strangers. She’d slipped in the back and was in her dressing room. “Their chemistry is insane! Rehearsal blew my mind,” Lulu told me. “I think she’s committed to Lincoln Center, too.” Poor Candy. At least the extensive dermabrasion had taken five years off her face, even if it wasn’t going to lead to FX.

  I felt bad for poor Sabrina, jilted for the bigger name. But, of course, Lulu had the scoop. “Sabrina’s fine. FX got her an audition for a TV pilot and she got it. Some doctor-lawyer show. I think she actually plays a character that’s both a doctor and a lawyer. That’s all she ever wanted from FX anyway. A new agent and a shot at a pilot.”