The Decent Proposal by Kemper Donovan Read Free Book Online Page B

or sleep together. They were each other’s first, and by senior year they were speaking casually about settling down together after graduation in their own place in L.A.
    Mike kicked it up a few notches on the StairMaster to deaden the impact of what came next: she was the one who broke it off. Before Richard, her world had been small and confining, and she knew it was thanks partly to him that there was so much now she wanted to do, but this didn’t change the fact that he was her first boyfriend, ever . As senior year wore on she began to panic. Was this it? Was she really going to move in with him and marry him, eventually have his children? He may as well have been a Korean Presbyterian. She took him out to dinner a few weeks before graduation and got as far as “sow our wild oats” before he cut her off:
    â€œI totally get it,” he insisted, draining the bottle of red wine he’d ordered for the two of them. “It’s totally cool.”
    Mike descended from the StairMaster and made her way to the mats for a grueling regimen of abdominal exercises. It was not totally cool. He didn’t speak to her for two months, and they moved separately to L.A. The first few weeks were torture, alone in the concrete wasteland of a crappy Mar Vista apartment she shouldn’t have rented online without seeing in person, and she waited as long as she could before reaching out to him:
    â€œWanna find the fountain that lights up when Cher realizes she’s in love with Josh?”
    This was the olive branch she extended to him, delivered over the phone one day with zero preamble, and when he paused she thought he was going to reject it, but he was as alone as she was, and of course he wanted to go find the fountain. Afterward they went to Hollywood in search of Angelyne, a living legend who became “famous for being famous” before anyone else. As a struggling actress/singer in the eighties and nineties, Angelyne paid for hundreds of billboards featuring her blond-bombshell, sex-kitten-from-Mars image to be plastered all over the city. Her traditional career never quite took off, and nowadays the billboards were gone, but she still drove around in her custom-made pink Corvette, and seeing her was just as big and L.A.-specific a thrill as spotting one of those mountain lions that occasionally roamed the same area. Even though they didn’t find her (and still hadn’t, seven years later), by the end of their first day together in L.A. their platonic friendship was sealed, the dynamic duo reunited. And side by side like old times, they rose together through the ranks of the entertainment industry.
    Mike became a literary manager—a more interesting, less hated version of an agent—who focused on her screenwriter clients’ creative process rather than the business side of things.A year ago, when she was named one of the Hollywood Reporter ’s top “35 Under 35” up-and-comers, Richard had framed the article and actually marched into her office with a hammer and nail to hang it behind her desk, much to her coworkers’ amusement. He had taken the plunge as an independent producer, leaping off the traditional path like some crazed adrenaline junkie. But Mike respected his audacity, and whenever he needed encouragement (which was more often lately), she told him it was only a matter of time before the risk paid off, even if she didn’t feel quite as confident as she sounded. The problem wasn’t Richard; she believed in him wholeheartedly; but everyone knew it had never been harder to make movies than it was today. Still, they knew all the same people and went to all the same parties. They were in this thing together, and on the rare occasion Mike ventured out alone, everyone’s first question was, “Where’s Richard?” When they were together, third parties became superfluous—an automatic fifth wheel—and they loved to have an audience