Chapter Thirty-Five
The community room had been transformed.
The far wall of floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the iconic pool and was framed with red, pink, and teal tapestries.
What Leonard had managed to arrange in only a few weeks was astounding.
The ceiling was draped with more of the same tapestries and a disco ball hung from the center.
It felt like the inside of a jewelry box.
Rows of rented chairs faced his prized casket and along the back wall was an open bar.
Waiters in black pants, white shirts, and hot pink vests circulated with hors d’oeuvres.
According to Morgan, the room had been rented for anniversaries, birthday parties, and even a few weddings, but this was the first she’d heard of a living funeral.
Thankfully, the room was full enough—even if many attendees were there to assuage their curiosities—that any concerns I’d had over attendance quickly evaporated.
I was shocked to see Ruby sitting near the back with Gwen and Harvey.
“You look like a pinata,” she said as I sat down beside her after signing the guest book.
Gwen leaned forward. “I think you look nice.”
“Thank you, Gwen,” I said as I flung my cape back hard enough to hit Ruby on the shoulder.
Beside Gwen, Harvey bounced his foot aggressively. She placed a hand on his knee and then turned to me. “He’s not big on funerals.”
Ruby rolled her eyes. “Leonard isn’t even dead. And my granddaughter calls me dramatic.”
“I think it’s a nice idea, actually,” I told her. “And it was nice of you to come,” I whispered.
“Good exposure therapy for me,” Harvey said with his eyes trained on the ceiling.
“I’m here for the show.” Ruby glanced around with a mask of indifference.
“I haven’t seen her walk in yet,” Gwen whispered, and I inferred that her meant Hollis.
Someone tapped my shoulder, and I turned to find Morgan standing in the empty row behind us. “We have a runaway bride.”
“What?”
“Well, not quite runaway, but on the verge of running away.”
I shook my head, still not understanding her.
“Leonard has cold feet,” Ruby deadpanned.
“Well, I don’t know what to say to him,” I said.
“You’re the one who recommended he do this in the first place,” Morgan said with a huff.
I looked over to Ruby, the palms of my hands suddenly slick with sweat. Had this been a mistake? Did I push Leonard to do something he didn’t actually want to do?
“That old queen spent way too much money on all of this to miss his own party.” Ruby groaned. “Come on. I’ll go with you.”
I didn’t argue or point out that Ruby was probably the last person Leonard wanted to see as we followed Morgan to the office across the hallway that I’d never actually been inside of before.
We walked in to find a very beige space with ivory sofas, calming music, and lavender air fresheners.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“It’s the we’re-sorry-your-grandpa-died room,” Ruby said.
Morgan shrugged. “Well, today it’s Leonard’s dressing room, but on most days it’s the room we send mourning families to when a loved one has passed away. So yeah, it’s the dead-grandpa room.”
Leonard sat in an accent chair with his fingers digging into the armrests.
“I’m going to update the minister,” Morgan said as she slipped out of the room.
I sat down on the sofa to the left of Leonard and Ruby gingerly sat on the coffee table in front of him with her legs crossed so that Leonard couldn’t even look up without seeing her.
“What’s going on?” I asked Leonard. “The place looks great. And there are lots of people here too.”
“This was a bad idea.” He wore a lavender suit and a matching cowboy hat—both of which of course matched his cane.
“Okay, well, seeing as this was my idea, I’m going to have to disagree with you,” I told him.
Ruby sighed. “I should never have quit smoking.”
“I agree,” Leonard sneered. “You might not still be haunting this mortal plane if you hadn’t, and wouldn’t that be ideal at the moment.” He turned to me. “What is she doing here anyway?”
Well, shit.
“I’m here to tell you to stop being such a pussy and get out there,” Ruby told him.
I shot her a look.
She shrugged. What? she mouthed.
“Wow,” Leonard said. “I’m so inspired. You may leave now.”
I opened my mouth, but Ruby leaned forward and spoke first. “What are you so scared of, anyway? You’ve been obsessing over your goddamn funeral for the last three decades and suddenly it’s here and thanks to my genius granddaughter, you get to witness it yourself.”
My eyebrows shot up at the word genius, but Ruby didn’t skip a beat. “You’re all dressed up. Now, you just have to walk out there and sit through your own funeral. It’s your greatest dream realized. Congratulations.”
Leonard leaned back and looked to Ruby and then to me. “I don’t dream of dying. Obsessing over the details of my funeral is very different from attending it myself.”
“Just spit it out,” Ruby said. “What’s got your panties in a twist?”
“Ruby,” I said, quietly chastising her. I shouldn’t have let her come with me.
Leonard closed his eyes. I knew he was no young thing, but in this moment especially I noticed the near translucence of his skin and the way his breath softly rattled as he inhaled.
“All these people are here. Shockingly. But what if they have nothing to say? What if the minister does her little song and dance and I read the eulogy I wrote for myself and then people are invited to speak and then . . . ?”
“Don’t pretend like you’re not friends with rejection,” Ruby told him. “How many scripts of yours went into production?”
“Including the shows I worked on? At least a hundred.”
“And how many did you write that never made the cut or were started and never finished?”
He frowned, very clearly understanding where she was going and obviously annoyed by her sensible logic. “Too many to count.”
Ruby held her hand out for me to help her up from the coffee table.
I stood and gently pulled her up with me.
“I’ve said what I needed to say,” Ruby told him. “We’ll see you out there.”
I looked down to Leonard expectantly. “Will we?”
He nodded, his lip curled.
I reached for his hand and squeezed it. “I followed through with my end of the bargain. Now it’s your turn.”
In the hallway, Ruby looped her arm through mine and patted my forearm.
“You hate Leonard,” I said. “Why would you do that?”
“I’d never miss an opportunity to give Leonard a verbal kick in the ass.”
“At least it was for a good cause this time. Are you ever going to tell me what happened between you two?”
“Not likely.”
We sat back down and ten minutes later, Leonard walked in behind the minister as ABBA’s “Fernando” played.
Leonard sat down in the front row with who I guessed were a few of his nieces and nephews and some of their children.
For the most part, they all seemed unsure of how to navigate this situation or what their mood should be.
A little girl who couldn’t have been older than three wore pink cowboy boots and a sparkly dress.
She hopped up from her seat at the end of the row and wiggled in close to Leonard, and the tension slowly escaped his shoulders.
The minister was young and wore a rainbow stole over her clergy robes.
All the while, Eli lurked at the back of the room, stepping in and out occasionally.
The sermon was brief without any mentions of religion.
Instead, the discussion was about accepting that your mistakes are just as much a part of you as your successes.
I didn’t know if Leonard had a hand in picking the topic, but it felt like a personal attack on me.
When the time came for Leonard to give his own eulogy, he made the short trek to the podium and cleared his throat.
“Leonard Eugene Marvis came into this world on February 14, 1944. Despite being born on the universally acknowledged day of love, he never married. However, Leonard did father hundreds of scripts and was lucky enough to see many of them grow up to become TV shows and movies.”
The crowd chuckled at that.
“A workaholic through and through, Leonard did truly consider his work to be his baby and his coworkers to be his family. As the last living of his siblings, he was well loved by his nieces and nephews and their families. He is survived by his bird, Patrick, and an unwieldy collection of houseplants.”
There was a sniffle from the front row, and I felt my own throat tightening as the silence held for a minute to signify that the eulogy was over.
But before anyone could clap, Leonard folded his paper and looked up at the crowd.
“I think as a writer, there’s the expectation that I should come up here and give you all some nugget of wisdom—some indelible truth—that you can carry with you from this day on.
But the more words I write, the more I realize that words are at a surplus.
We talk so much. We say so much. There comes a time when we trick ourselves into believing that saying is doing.
But that’s not true, is it? So, I suppose my nugget of wisdom is this: Do.
Fail. And then do again. Words to live by are just that: words.
They mean nothing if you’re not waking up every morning and living.
I don’t say this because I mastered the art of living.
I say this because I didn’t. And hey”—he winked—“maybe after I’m gone from this earth, you will come a few steps closer than I ever did.
” He took a deep breath. “Oh! Always ask for a producer credit, never trust a plastic surgeon whose practice is in a strip mall, and sleep naked at least once a week.”
The applause was immediate and beside me Gwen murmured, “He’s not wrong about those last three.”
“Thank you, Leonard, for putting my sermon to shame,” the minister said.
“With pleasure!” Leonard barked back as he took his seat.
With a grin and a shake of her head, the minister continued. “At this time, I would like to open the podium up to those who might like to say a few words about Leonard.”
Leonard’s spine was rigid, his gaze trained straight ahead on his coffin.
A quiet moment passed, and I almost forced myself out of my seat. I had no idea what I would say, but someone had to say something.
Then, to my surprise, Ruby braced herself on my knee and stood up. It took her a moment to wriggle past the other residents, who were slow to move out of her way. “Allow me,” she said as she finally stepped into the aisle.
Leonard turned back, his face full of trepidation and just a pinch of relief.
The minister smiled at Ruby as she stepped behind the podium and readjusted the microphone to her liking.
She took in her audience, and I watched as she became that heightened version of herself. It was Ruby, but bigger. More confident. More sultry. It was the Ruby you would meet at an audition or in an interview, and it was the Ruby I hadn’t seen in quite some time.
“Let me be the first to say that Leonard is the second biggest asshole I’ve ever met.”
You could feel the oxygen being sucked out of the room. The minister froze.
Ruby leaned into the microphone, holding her pause for the perfect amount of time. “Second only to me.”
Then Leonard choked out a laugh and everyone else followed.
Ruby smiled. “Leonard and I have been in each other’s orbit for over fifty years. The first thirty or so years were great.” She turned to Leonard. “They really were.”
He nodded in agreement.
“And then there was a man. There’s always a goddamn man, isn’t there?”
Someone in the audience hooted.
“I won’t share the specifics, because I like being the center of gossip and if you all knew the truth, there wouldn’t be anything mysterious left to gossip about, but trust me when I say that the details are salacious.”
“Can’t let one of these fools sell the rights to our life story before we can,” Leonard called.
“Now, that’s the Leonard I have known and loved,” Ruby said.
She looked down at the podium for a minute before tilting her chin back up, her expression more serious now.
“Leonard and I put down our Starlight Palms deposits at the same time with big plans to be next-door neighbors. When I moved in and found that our long-forgotten request had been honored, I was prepared to hitchhike back to LA. I’d like to tell you this story has a happy ending, but it doesn’t.
Not yet, at least. Because since the moment I moved in, we have bickered and feuded for no other reason than to wreak havoc on each other’s lives.
At this point Leonard could water his plants and I would find a way for that son of a bitch to annoy me. ”
There were a few soft chuckles in the crowd.
“But the truth is that my friendship with Leonard was one of the longest-standing relationships in my life and I have spent many years wondering what would have happened if one of us had just let go of our astounding egos for long enough to mend the bridge.” Ruby shook her head.
“But we can’t change what’s done. And that has to be okay.
I can’t undo the past. None of us can. But the future is yet to come. ”
My throat was dry and my chest tight as the weight of time hit me like a boulder.
“Despite my and Leonard’s schism, I can say without a doubt that no one has ever been more willing to help a friend in need.
Leonard would help you hide a body just as quickly as he would offer to make some calls around town to find you a gig.
And honestly, I don’t know which of those is more of a hassle. ”
That got another knowing laugh from many of the residents.
Ruby held up her champagne glass. “To my dear friend Lenny and to not letting the past write the future.”
Leonard nodded and held his cocktail up. Glasses clinked and there were rumbles of agreement as Ruby moved toward the aisle. Leonard held out a hand to her and she stopped for a moment before coming to sit down beside me.
I glanced back to see Hollis clapping, her brow furrowed and her lips parted, like there were endless words on the tip of her tongue. At the back of the room, Eli nodded to himself and walked back out into the hallway.
As another person stepped up to the podium, I leaned over to Ruby. “That was good of you.”
She sighed. “It’s a start, and at our age, that’s the best we can hope for.”