Eugene removed the foil from the neck of the bottle and began to untwist the wire that caged the cork.
Hilary frowned at Wally. “You must really have bad news for me.”
“What makes you say that?”
“A hundred-dollar bottle of champagne….” Hilary looked at him thoughtfully. “It’s supposed to soothe my hurt feelings, cauterize my wounds.”
The cork popped. Eugene did his job well; very little of the precious liquid foamed out of the bottle.
“You’re such a pessimist,” Wally said.
“A realist,” she said.
“Most people would have said, ‘Ah, champagne. What are we celebrating?’ But not Hilary Thomas.”
Eugene poured a sample of Dom Perignon. Wally tasted it and nodded approval.
“Are we celebrating?” Hilary asked. The possibility really had not occurred to her, and she suddenly felt weak as she considered it.
“In fact, we are,” Wally said.
Eugene slowly filled both glasses and slowly screwed the bottle into the shaved ice in the silver bucket. Clearly, he wanted to stick around long enough to hear what they were celebrating.
It was also obvious that Wally wanted the captain to hear the news and spread it. Grinning like Cary Grant, he leaned toward Hilary and said, “We’ve got the deal with Warner Brothers.”
She stared, blinked, opened her mouth to speak, didn’t know what to say. Finally: “We don’t.”
“We do.”
“We can’t.”
“We can.”
“Nothing’s that easy.”
“I tell you, we’ve got it.”
“They won’t let me direct.”
“Oh, yes.”
“They won’t give me final cut.”
“Yes, they will.”
“My God.”
She was stunned. Felt numb.
Eugene offered his congratulations and slipped away.
Wally laughed, shook his head. “You know, you could have played that a lot better for Eugene’s benefit. Pretty soon, people are going to see us celebrating, and they’ll ask Eugene what it’s about, and he’ll tell them. Let the world think you always knew you’d get exactly what you wanted. Never show doubt or fear when you’re swimming with sharks.”
“You’re not kidding about this? We’ve actually got what we wanted?”
Raising his glass, Wally said, “A toast. To my sweetest client, with the hope she’ll eventually learn there are some clouds with silver linings and that a lot of apples don’t have worms in them.”
They clinked glasses.
She said, “The studio must have added a lot of tough conditions to the deal. A bottom of the barrel budget. Salary at scale. No participation in the gross rentals. Stuff like that.”
“Stop looking for rusty nails in your soup,” he said exasperatedly.
“I’m not eating soup.”
“Don’t get cute.”
“I’m drinking champagne.”
“You know what I mean.”
She stared at the bubbles bursting in her glass of Dom Perignon.
She felt as if hundreds of bubbles were rising within her, too, chains of tiny, bright bubbles of joy: but a part of her acted like a cork to contain the effervescent emotion, to keep it securely under pressure, bottled up, safely contained. She was afraid of being too happy. She didn’t want to tempt fate.
“I just don’t get it,” Wally said. “You look as if the deal fell through. You did hear me all right, didn’t you?”
She smiled. “I’m sorry. It’s just that … when I was a little girl, I learned to expect the worst every day. That way, I was never disappointed. It’s the best outlook you can have when you live with a couple of bitter, violent alcoholics.”
His eyes were kind.
“Your parents are gone,” he said, quietly, tenderly. “Dead. Both of them. They can’t touch you, Hilary. They can’t hurt you ever again.”
“I’ve spent most of the past twelve years trying to convince myself of that.”
“Ever consider analysis?”
“I went through two years of it.”
“Didn’t help?”
“Not much.”
“Maybe a different doctor–”
“Wouldn’t matter,” Hilary said. “There’s a flaw in Freudian theory. Psychiatrists believe that as soon as you fully remember and understand the childhood traumas that made you into a neurotic adult, you can change. They think finding the key is the hard part, and that once you have it you can open the door in a minute. But it’s not that easy.”
“You have to want to change,” he said.