Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  “Never heard of him.”

  “His last film was Grace Puts In Her Diaphragm. He’s going to be in New York for the Ridgewood Film Festival and wants to have coffee with you in Williamsburg.” Melora had gone from lunches at Sant Ambroeus in the Village to coffee in Williamsburg, all because of one bad movie.

  The night before, she had torn herself away from Ray’s art book and watched a few of Suderman’s films—Grace Puts In Her Diaphragm, Bottle Service, Tip Your Server—on Netflix Instant. They reminded her of home videos you might take if you came home drunk to find your ceiling had fallen in and you wanted proof to send to your insurance company. The dialogue was redundant and inarticulate. There was a lot of frontal nudity and flaccid penises, and every movie seemed to have a group bath.

  How had she gotten to the point of taking a meeting like this? A year and a half ago she’d thought she was on her way to another Oscar. Instead, Maggie Gyllenhaal had stolen her Atlantic Yards role and her award. Melora had booted Stuart from their condo in Julian Schnabel’s building, Palazzo Chupi, after they began work on Atlantic Yards and started fighting every day on set. He thought she wasn’t gritty enough for the role of Lucy, and she thought she was. She wanted rewrites that he refused to do. She tried to stick it out, reasoning that the role was more important than a harmonious marriage, but he went behind her back to get Maggie, then got Fox Searchlight to pay Melora her entire salary not to act in it. When Melora heard the news that she’d been replaced—on ET, no less—and he confirmed it, she kicked him out that night.

  When the movie came out, it yielded nominations for Maggie, Stuart (writer and director), his editor, sound designer, and cinematographer, all while Yellow Rosie was tanking at the BO. That awards season had been excruciating; Melora watched Stuart and Maggie do the red carpets on television while trying not to read her own grosses.

  On the Williamsburg Bridge, she called Orion, who was still in Truro with his father. Christine, Stuart’s Japanese nanny, picked up. “He’s in the middle of dinner,” she said.

  “I just want to say a quick hi.” She loved Orion most when he was far away.

  “What?” Orion asked dully.

  “I love you, sweetie. I can’t wait to see you.” He would be returning from Truro on Labor Day, a little over a week away. Melora’s nanny, Suzette, was coming back, too, from her camping trip to the Pacific Northwest. This year Orion would begin first grade at Saint Ann’s. Melora was anxious about his return, but he was getting older and easier, and Suzette would be there to help him through whatever new phase—Your Six-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant—he was in now.

  “I’m really sorry,” Christine said, coming back on the phone. “It’s been a long day. You know how he gets when he’s tired.”

  “I understand,” she said wearily. That bitch was such a mom-blocker. She felt like Stuart had advised her not to let Melora talk with Orion, to keep her at bay.

  She had Piotr park around the corner from the café. It was a small, well-lit joint with sandwiches and gamine waitresses who wore shmatas on their heads. Mitch Suderman turned out to be heavyset, with ruddy cheeks and stubble too long to be Don Johnsonesque and too short to be a beard.

  “Thanks so much for coming here today,” he said as she sat down. “I’m crashing with friends down the block, and I hate going into Manhattan when I don’t have to.” He cleared his throat and said, “So—have you seen any of my work?”

  “Yes, I have. You have a very original vision.” Why did she have to kiss up to this pisher?

  “I don’t know how much you’ve read about me or whatever, but I work from a pretty loose outline,” Mitch said. “I know what’s going to happen in my scenes, and from there it’s a really collaborative process with the actors. I believe that when actors say lines, it often sounds hokey. Anyway, this movie is about a guy who brings his girlfriend home to meet his parents, and then the girlfriend winds up falling in love with his mother.”

  “You mean the father.”

  “The mother. I’m the guy. The girl will be played by Lexi Lerman. I don’t know if you’ve heard of her. She’s worked with me a lot, and she’s doing a ton of Hollywood movies now. I’m interested in you for the role of my mother.”

  It was depressing to be thought of as someone who could play the mother of a twenty-five-year-old, but Molly Ringwald was making good money playing a grandmother on television. When you allowed yourself to be undignified, it opened doors. If Melora was failing miserably at Gwen, who was too young for her, maybe she could succeed at playing someone older. It would show that she wasn’t afraid of looking old.

  “I just feel like you were such a sex symbol,” he said, “for a certain kind of guy at a certain point in history, and it’s really going to resonate with my audience, which tends to skew pretty young. You remind me of that woman from Risky Business.”

  “Rebecca De Mornay?”

  “Yeah. Rebecca De Mornay.”

  Melora paused a moment before choking out, “Rebecca’s fifty.”

  “Well, you know what I mean. You are, for our generation, what she is for guys in—”

  “—my generation.”

  “Ezzactly.”

  It was unclear whether this was a speech impediment or affectation. “Sorry?” she said.

  “Ezzactly. So with each of my movies, I try to push myself in a new direction in the interest of authenticity, and I decided that for this movie, since so much of it is about relationships and sexuality and, kind of, blurred lines, all the sex scenes should be real.”

  “Real?”

  “Not simulated. I want this to be nonrated, and I want all the intercourse to be actual intercourse. So that the scenes really capture the feeling of actual, awkward sex. You would get to have sex with Lexi, which I can say with some confidence will make you the envy of a great number of men and women.”

  “When you say ‘have sex,’ you mean—”

  “That’s really going to have to come out in the scene. So often when lesbianism is done in movies, it’s from a man’s perspective. The women have long fingernails, for example. I want to get as far away from that as I can.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “What?”

  “Want to get away from long fingernails?”

  “Right. So is that something you would be open to?”

  She raised her coffee mug to her lips and kept it there to hide her expression. It was unclear which was worse: being forced to do theater to resurrect your career or having actual sex on camera for a movie that probably paid SAG minimum. “You know, I’m definitely going to think about it,” she said, “but I have to say that I’m not comfortable with that level of sexuality on camera. And I just—I worry my discomfort would read.”

  “I totally get that. It’s why I wanted to put it out there in advance. I want everyone I work with to feel good about the process.” She stood up. “The coffee’s on me,” he added.

  He thought he was generous because he was paying for her two-dollar coffee! This was a world she was too old to enter.

  Still, there was something earnest about the guy—he had purity of vision, even if the vision was terrible—and she felt a matronly desire to help him. “Now that I’m thinking about it,” she said, “I know someone who I think would be perfect. She hasn’t worked in a while because she had a family, but she might be interested in kind of turning her image on its head a little. And she’s definitely a sex symbol. Millions of young guys grew up wishing they could have sex with her.”

  “I’m on the edge of my seat,” he said.

  “Justine Bateman. From Family Ties.”

  A flicker passed over Mitch’s face. “That’s actually a really good idea,” he said. “I’m going to have my casting director look into that.” But she could tell the truth from his expression. He had already asked Justine, and she had passed. Melora had once been the most sought-after actress in Hollywood. She had been on the cover of Vanity Fair three times, and every major women’s magazine, a
nd the cover of Time when she was nine. There had been a period when she couldn’t step out of her apartment without being followed by paparazzi. Now the only offers coming in were for Justine Bateman’s porn mumblecore discards. Fifth of July had better be a hit.

  Rebecca

  Rebecca rolled off Theo in the cottage bedroom. Her body was still tingling, and her cheeks felt hot and pink. She had read somewhere that women wore makeup to simulate the visage after orgasm—shiny lips, pink cheeks, heavy-lidded eyes. Theo seemed to be glowing too, though he always had that healthy look, the gentile privilege of never looking sallow. “You were so good,” she said. He didn’t respond, and she worried he hadn’t enjoyed it as much as she had. “I loved you.”

  “I loved you, too.”

  It was a running joke between them. He would say, “I just wanted to tell you how much I loved you,” and she would say, “You mean you don’t love me anymore?” He would insist that his version was grammatically correct, and they would argue half jokingly, an undercurrent of seriousness beneath.

  When they first met, she had been his project, the center of his world. She felt he had been waiting to love someone as much as he loved her. Then Abbie was born, and she became invisible. Now she had Benny, so they were no longer a triangle, but she still missed Theo; he hadn’t come back to her all the way. He was focused on the children, work, and then her. Once, she had come first. Now, she came third.

  In the days since the party on Ocean View Drive, something had shifted between them. On the car ride home, she had asked if he’d been smoking pot. He’d said no, but she wasn’t sure she believed him. “Why didn’t you rescue me out there?” she had asked him of her faux pas in front of CC. “A husband’s supposed to.”

  “I tried to. You didn’t see.”

  “How was I supposed to know you hadn’t told her?” she said.

  “Because most people wouldn’t tell something like that.” He had been silent the rest of the way, as the children slept in the backseat.

  Back at the cottage, Rebecca had given him a blow job, wanting him to forgive her and also know that he was lucky to have her. She put more energy into it than usual, utilizing a trick a girlfriend had taught her at Barnard, where you swallowed while you sucked to pull it in deeper. He seemed to moan extra loudly when he came, but she was still nervous about the attention Joanne and CC had given him at the party.

  They had made love every day since then, in the mornings before the children were up, or in the middle of the night. One afternoon they told the Gottliebs they needed to “nap,” planted Abbie and Benny in front of the television with the boys, and escaped downstairs for a quickie. She was trying to remind him that she was a good wife. And she sensed newfound interest on his part, brought on by what, she wasn’t sure. She realized she was going to miss him when he went back to New York.

  Benny was crying from the kids’ bedroom next door. Abbie was still napping, so Rebecca fetched him quickly and brought him into their bedroom. She tried to nurse, but he didn’t want the breast. He seemed to be weaning himself. He spotted Theo’s phone on the bed, sat up, and went for it.

  “Don’t touch my phone,” Theo said, grabbing it.

  Benny’s face went red. He slid off the bed and picked up Rebecca’s heeled sandal. “Don’t do it,” Theo said. Before the words were out of his mouth, Benny had lobbed it at Theo. It caught him on the face, and he rubbed his cheek. “Jesus Christ!”

  “What is wrong with you?” Rebecca said, grabbing Benny and holding him firmly by the arms. “Don’t throw shoes at Daddy!”

  Theo shook his head and said, “That is not my son. That is your son!” The statement hung in the air.

  “What time is your flight again?” she asked. It was Sunday. He was flying back to the city from Provincetown that afternoon. He would stay for the workweek and return Friday night to spend Labor Day weekend with them.

  “Three-thirty.”

  “Leave something behind so I can smell it.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” he said, walking out of the room. Benny toddled behind him. She sneaked a shirt out of Theo’s suitcase, a light blue cotton guayabera. He’d worn it on the beach, and when she had complimented him on it, he’d said he got it at a men’s shop on the Lower East Side. She hid it under the pillow, wondering when he started shopping at men’s boutiques on the Lower East Side.

  • • •

  Wednesday night square dancing on the Wellfleet pier was a town tradition. The same dance caller had done it for something like fifty years, but then he retired and a young married couple had taken over. CC said they weren’t as good as the old guy and played too many 1970s songs.

  Rebecca and CC left Harry and Benny at the rental with Gottlieb and took Sam and Abbie since they were old enough to enjoy themselves. Rebecca had also invited Marco, Enrique, and the new baby, Jason. She had gone to their cottage to visit for a couple of hours, and Marco had seemed overwhelmed. Rebecca was horrified that Todd had abandoned him with a newborn, but Marco kept saying, “He makes more money than I do. He had to go.”

  She and CC snagged a table at Mac’s, the outdoor restaurant by the pier, a coup akin to getting into Studio 54 in 1974. They cracked open the chardonnay they had brought along. It didn’t take long for CC to begin complaining about Gottlieb’s trip to Los Angeles. “I just don’t know how I’m going to manage it alone with school starting, all by myself. It’s just a week, but it could go longer.”

  Marco arrived, the baby in a sling, Enrique running ahead of him in the parking lot. “Congratulations!” CC said, getting up to look at the baby. “He’s gorgeous.”

  Rebecca stood up, kissed Enrique, and said, “Besito.” Marco collapsed onto the picnic bench. “How’s it going so far?” CC asked.

  “I’m in hell. I can’t believe I’m doing this alone. I told Todd he owes me a dozen blow jobs.”

  “You guys do the blow-job thing, too?” Rebecca said. “I owe Theo thirty-seven.”

  “Really?” he said. “Todd delivers on his promises. But I always owe him money.”

  A toddler-aged girl stopped to regard the children at the table. Enrique put his face against hers, contorted it into a grimace, and roared, “AAGHHHHHH!” The girl burst into tears, and the mother snatched her away.

  CC went up to the window to order food. They all ate hungrily, the women chasing their fish and chips with chardonnay. Marco barely touched his meal, spending most of the time chastising Enrique and bottle-feeding the baby. Rebecca began to suspect that Jason was a crack baby. CC must have been thinking the same thing because she said, “Where’s he from again?”

  “Guatemala,” Marco answered.

  “He looks Jewish,” CC said. “With that curly hair and olive skin.”

  “Todd and I think the mother’s husband isn’t the real father,” Marco said. “They were living apart when Jason was born. I think it’s some other guy. We saw pictures of her other sons, and they’re, like, seven shades darker.”

  Rebecca glared at him. Marco knew she hated it when conversations went in this direction, when someone mentioned Martin Amis’s surprise daughter, or Liv Tyler, who thought Todd Rundgren was her dad until she was a teen. People in Rebecca’s circle talked about false paternity like it was an exotic problem, belonging to celebrities or poor people.

  “He’ll probably get darker as he gets older,” CC said. “Kids change. Sam and Harry looked more Asian at birth. Now they look so white that people think I’m the nanny. The Chinese nanny.”

  When they all finished eating, and when the children had devoured the ice cream that made Mac’s so crowded, they walked down to the newly built pier for square-dancing. The callers were onstage wearing small, seemingly high-tech microphones attached to their heads like in Rent. The first song, “Bingo,” involved standing in circles with strangers and going in at the same time. Rebecca and the others joined a big group of kids and grown-ups in Yankees hats and Wellfleet Oyster shirts.

  At the end of the song the male
caller announced, “We’re going to do ‘The Unicorn Song,’ and I’d like some volunteers to come onstage.” Sam, Enrique, and Abbie ran up with the others. The man began miming all the gestures in the song—alligators, geese, humpty-backed camels. While attempting to master the whiskers for “rats,” Rebecca noticed a striking Asian boy on the stage next to Abbie. He had a thick head of hair cut in a jagged rocker style.

  The song began, and the Shel Silverstein verses went on about Noah’s Ark and how the unicorns had been left behind. “Isn’t that Orion Leigh-Ashby?” CC asked.

  It was. The Vietnamese boy Melora had adopted before she met Stuart. The most famous celebrity spawn in the world, the one who had set off a national craze for Mohawks in boys too young to spell.

  “Oh, shit,” Rebecca said. She glanced around the blacktop but saw only the familiar faces from the beaches and ponds. Then, across the pier, she spotted him. His red hair stood out, as it always had. He was with a pretty, petite Asian woman in her twenties, both of them clapping to the song.

  His girlfriend? Who was she? Of all the second-rate vacation spots in all the towns in the Northeast . . . “What is Stuart Ashby doing in Wellfleet?” Rebecca asked as Marco glanced over at Stuart, too. He wasn’t supposed to be in Wellfleet. The Stuart Ashbys of the world went to Wainscott or Woodstock with Lauders or Thurmans. It was like that movie What About Bob?, about the patient who followed his therapist on vacation. For someone so wealthy to come to the Cape, that took slumming too far.

  It had been at least a month since she’d masturbated to Stuart’s image. It was a hot July afternoon on Carroll Street when the children were blessedly double-napping. She mentally summoned him as an experiment to see if her body responded, but the image of herself fellating him under the dining table of the mansion on Prospect Park West did not stick, and when she replaced it with one involving herself as a flight attendant on the Hooters plane and this image did, she viewed it as an emotional and not merely physiological triumph.