My Lucky Star by Joe Keenan Page B

Claire, her tone murderously cordial. Gilbert hung back, smiling nervously, but then, deciding we
     couldn’t dismember him in front of Miss Moscow, sat across from us.
    “Can I get you something?” asked Svetlana. “Coffee, water, soda?”
    Claire, shrewdly noting the lack of a coffee machine in the room, said she’d changed her mind and would love a coffee; could
     she warm the milk if there was a microwave on hand? Svetlana happily complied, disappearing into a small adjoining kitchen.
    “So, kids!” began Gilbert, jabbering a mile a minute. “There are a few things you should know about Bobby before we go in
     let me run them down for you real fast for starters —”
    “Can the flibuster!” barked Claire.
    “You could have warned us what a shitty book it was!”
    He regarded us with injured surprise.
    “You didn’t like it?”
    “You
did?
” snorted Claire.
    “Loved it! I laughed, I cried. Mostly cried of course. I thought you’d adore it too, but what can I say?
Chacun à son goût.
”
    “ ‘Goo’ is right!” snapped Claire.
    “Thank you. Anyway, don’t bad-mouth it in front of Bobby. I already told him you both loved it ’cause I honestly assumed you’d—”
    “Bullshit!” I hissed. “You knew we’d loathe it. That’s why you lied to us.”
    “When did I lie?” he asked, his tone less defensive than puzzled, as though he’d lost track.
    “You said it was a comedy!”
    “I said it had
room
for comedy. And I stand by that. Why, think what fun Coward got out of an impish ghost in
Blithe Spirit
. And it should be even easier for us, our ghost being a kid and all.”
    It was lucky for Gilbert that Svetlana chose this moment to return, as Claire and I had started advancing on him with defenestration
     uppermost in our thoughts. She gave Claire her coffee, said Bobby would see us now, and led us down a short hall.
    Bobby’s office was a striking, somewhat futuristic chamber with gray suede walls and a curved brushed-steel desk I recognized
     as a prop from the planet-saving hero’s spacecraft in his asteroid thriller,
Kingdom Come
. The room couldn’t have screamed “power” more loudly if it had had a platinum throne flanked by twin dynamos with bolts of
     electricity zapping between them.
    Bobby, seated at his command console, rose to greet us. It was immediately clear that he was not one of those cunning Hollywood
     potentates who like to confound expectations by affecting a schlubby or innocuous appearance. Just as our lady friend on the
     plane had striven to make it apparent to all that she was a once-famous actress, so Bobby’s costume and grooming loudly announced
     his profession and status within it. His black Dolce & Gabbana suit was
le dernier cri
in Italian tailoring, as was the black open-collared shirt he wore beneath it. His salt-and-pepper hair was combed back above
     his long wolfish face, which sported a Mephistophelian goatee. His smile was as crooked and smug as those of his bad-boy heroes
     and his gaze held a calculated hint of menace as though to say, “I like you at the moment but reserve the right to crush you.”
    “Bobbeee!” sang Gilbert, as though they’d been friends for years. “Love the suit.”
    “Come in! Sit!” said Bobby, gesturing to a gray boar-skin sofa. “It’s not every day I get three geniuses in here. Which one’s
     Philip and which one’s Claire? Kidding!”
    We laughed, piglets humoring the wolf, and seated ourselves. Bobby said he’d heard this was our first trip to LA and asked
     how we liked it. We replied, of course, that we liked it very much.
    “I took them to BU last night,” said Gilbert, not mentioning Max so as to imply he’d gotten us in on his own.
    “I
love
that place!” said Bobby with what struck me as unwarranted vehemence. I’d soon learn though that Bobby never made mere statements;
     he issued pronouncements, and no subject was too trivial to merit this stentorian intensity.
    “BU is like my
dining