Magic Hour Susan Isaacs (best books to read for self development txt) 📖

“Nothing. Bang, bang, and then absolute silence.’ He lifted his shirtfront and used it to clean his glasses.

“Let’s talk about Lindsay. Straight talk. Did she 364 / SUSAN ISAACS

know how bad things were with Sy, that he was getting ready to pop her?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know she was sleeping with Victor Santana?”

“Yes.” Tight lips. “Fifty-two years in the business, and you know what I finally realize? I hate the ones who make it.

Even the smartest of them are stupid. Stupid and arrogant.

They think they can do anything they want, no consequences.”

“You can’t do anything you want with a guy like Sy Spencer, can you?” I observed.

“No.”

“Do you think Sy had a clue that she was cheating on him?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you think so?”

“He told me. I was making my big pitch to keep her on Starry Night, and he said, ‘I can’t do it, Eddie. You’ve seen the dailies. She’s not putting out.’ He gave that cold laugh of his. It’s like being stabbed to death with an icicle. And then he said, ‘Excuse me. She is putting out—in Santana’s trailer.’”

“In your mind, if any of those actresses in L.A. would have fit the bill, would it have been all over for Lindsay?”

“Bottom line?”

“Bottom line.”

“Sure it would have been all over—except for the fact that it would have cost too much. Even if Sy could have hired a not-so-hot star for less money, it still would have cost him almost three million in salary and reshooting to start from scratch. He couldn’t have raised it outside; he’d already maxed out on financing. So unless it was worth it to him to ante up two-point-seven-five million of his own money to get rid of Lindsay, she would have stayed.”

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“Would it have been worth it to him?”

“I think he was considering it. But I’d been doing deals with Sy for ten years. I knew him. I knew what a tightwad he was. Look, it would have gotten real ugly, but in the long run the names above the title would have been Nicholas Monteleone—and Lindsay Keefe.”

“Did Lindsay know that too?”

“I told her.”

“Did she believe you?”

“I don’t know. She was scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of Sy Spencer.”

I can’t say Lynne was overcome with ecstasy when she answered her door, but she did look pleased. She stood in the doorway. Her beautiful dark-red hair fell over her shoulders. She wore a crisp white blouse and a polka-dot miniskirt. It took me a minute to grasp that she was waiting for me to kiss her. I did. Then she led me inside.

The house had a Sunday hush. Judy and Maddy, her two roommates, were at work, and Lynne had spread her folders over the living room coffee table. Well, not spread. I marveled at how they were in flawlessly symmetrical piles.

Her pens and colored highlighters were parallel and equidistant from each other and just the perfect distance from the curved edges of the light wood table so that, should one decide to roll, she could reach it before it fell to the floor.

“You’re my kind of girl.” I smiled at her. “In 2013, when I’m looking for my 1996 New York State tax return, you’ll be able to find it in three seconds.”

“You don’t think I’m compulsive?” Lynne asked. I sat down in a club chair. She squeezed in beside me. “Judy is always saying I’m compulsive. Just because I always put away my shoes with the toes facing out.

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She says if I could just throw my shoes on my closet floor I’d be more creative.”

“Look at it this way. Neither of us will probably ever write Hamlet, but we’ll never misplace a bank statement or a kid.

That’s reassuring.”

“It is.” She smiled. “Tell me, how is your case going?”

“We’re getting there,” I said.

“Good. There must be a lot of pressure, with all the publicity.”

“There is.” I glanced around the living room. Nothing really went with anything else. The leatherette chairs and the striped chairs, the 1950s Danish-modern coffee table, the massive brass floor lamp, the poster of a bowl of flowers from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, were castoffs from the families of three pretty, marriageable girls in their mid-twenties, all of whom would have husbands—and nice furniture that coordinated with tasteful rugs—long before they were thirty.

“How is your class for September?”

“I think it’s really going to be a challenge. I’m excited. Do you have time for me to go through the student list?”

“Can you do it in two minutes?”

Lynne snuggled against me. “That’s all you have?”

“Sorry.”

“Did you think about stuffed chicken breasts?”

I slipped my hand under the neckline of her blouse, around her bra. “These aren’t chicken breasts.”

“You know what I mean!”

I smiled, eased my hand out.

I had no desire for her.

“Going to the beach today?” I asked.

“Well, I’d like to, but I have to get my hair trimmed.” She seemed to think the news would upset me, so she added,

“Just a little bit off the ends.”

MAGIC HOUR / 367

“The ends look all right to me.” I was so bored, and so ashamed of myself for being bored.

I thought: I could be having this same exchange with Bonnie, about chicken breasts and hair ends, and okay, it wouldn’t be the world’s most enthralling conversation, or the most amusing, but I’d hang on every word.

Even if I’d had two months’ vacation, I wouldn’t want to hear about Lynne’s dyslexics and dysgraphics. And it wasn’t that I couldn’t get interested in that sort of stuff; it was that I couldn’t get interested in Lynne.

How could someone have the perfect résumé and not be right for the job? She was precisely what I should want. Why didn’t I want her? Other men did. We’d walk down the street, and heads—local guys, city guys—would turn. Turn?

Spin. Half the time her phone was ringing with old boyfriends, or guys she barely knew, none of them willing to believe she could actually consider marrying someone else before she listened to their fantastic, incredible