Living in a Foreign Language Read Free Page B

to pass this information on to him—or Him, I guess I should say. She wouldn’t even have to tell Him because she
was
Him for the moment—or He was her—or whatever.
    â€œYou will move to a house with a circle of pines outside your bedroom window.”
    Now this was a little better—an actual prediction, something we could document.
    â€œSounds wonderful,” said Jill, still beaming.
    This chitchat went on for a while. Whenever we tried to pin him down to specifics, he reminded us that “Life has its own plan” or “Your path will present itself in unexpected ways.” I don’t recall any other flat-on predictions like the circle of pines, but in general, he seemed to think we were headed in the right direction. Our journey had already begun and that, according to Jesus, was a good thing.
    Exactly how far along we were on this journey didn’t reveal itself until the following evening in the makeshift pressroom at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. There was a TV monitor on the table next to us carrying the affiliates’ meeting from the ballroom down the hall. And as I sat there, sopping up second-rate wine, brooding on the vicissitudes of fame, snarling at the perfidy of our publicist, I became aware of Don Ohlmeyer speaking on the TV about the coming season—about how NBC was going to deliver a whopping audience to all the local eleven o’clock news shows every night. Ohlmeyer had recently moved over from the sports department and had been made head of NBC West Coast or some such thing. NBC had more heads than it knew how to feed.
    â€œ. . . And the most important announcement of theevening is that we’re going to finally retire that old warhorse,
L.A. Law
, and put her out to pasture where she belongs. We have a new show in the works that will make ten o’clock on Thursday nights the most watched hour in television.”
    I don’t think I actually heard it when he said it—they say you never hear the one that gets you. Jill and I flicked a look to each other and then quickly flicked away—as if we instantaneously agreed to deny what we’d just heard. Then, as he droned on with the particulars, the reality dripped into my body—like an IV with a lethal injection.
    Drip. The bitterest truth of all—he was right. The show
was
old and tired. We had played out all the stories and then gone back around and played them again. Time to put it out of its misery.
    Drip. Rejection—right into the heart. It wasn’t just the show they were tired of—it was us. They’d seen our shtick; it worked for a while, now it was time for someone new.
    Drip. The money. Oh my God, the money. We were about to take the biggest salary cut in the history of the world. My world, at least. Did I save enough? Can you ever save enough?
    Drip. The money again. Did I play it wrong? Did I try to cash in on our fame so much that people developed contempt for us? Yeah, I did. They did.
    Drip. Drip. Dead.
    So, what now? We could hold on like hell; I know people who have parlayed their diminishing fame into years of celebrity—decades. Just by traveling to smaller and smaller cities. You may not be able to get a seat at Spago but they’ll throw a fucking parade for you in Pittsburgh.
    Or we could return to the relative purity of our life in the theater. Recycled TV stars were all the rage in New York.
    I looked at Jill again—really looked this time. Her eyes were blue and deep. They were more worried for me than for her. She didn’t care all that much about money and fame—she never had. She slipped me a smile that said, “Don’t worry, we’ll be all right.” But I didn’t feel all right. Anger was bubbling up—my typical response to fear.
    â€œWho is this
Wide World of Sports
hack talking about us like we’re an old bag of shit?” I wanted to say. “We carried NBC for eight years—we
invented
Thursday