Laugh Lines

by Ben Bova

  “Canada,” he said again.

  Fad’s office wasn’t very large, considering he was an executive producer on the rise. Merely a couple of leatherite couches, a few deep chairs scattered here and there across the fakefur rug, his own desk and keyboard terminal and a few holographic pictures where windows would normally be. Sheldon preferred the holographic views of Mt. Shasta, San Francisco’s Bay Bridge and Catalina Island to the view of a tinted smog that he could see through his window. He wasn’t high enough in Titanic’s hierarchy to be above the smog level.

  When his secretary told him that Gabriel and Morgan had arrived, Sheldon carefully clicked on the record button on Murray’s controls. A friendly blue light glowed steadily at him, from an angle that could be seen only from behind the desk. Sheldon felt as if he had a silent ally standing beside him.

  His visitors were ushered into the office by his secretary, who discreetly went no further than the door. But Gabriel was already jotting down her phone number in the little book he always carried. She was giving him her most dazzling smile; he had apparently already turned the full force of his charisma on her.

  Morgan was still wearing his same tired old red zipsuit; it had been out of style for a year or more. Gabriel, who was a style setter, wore tight black leather slacks and what looked like a genuine antique motorcycle jacket, complete with studs and chains.

  Sheldon got up and came around the desk, arms outstretched. “Fellaaas . . . how are you?”

  Morgan, who was tall enough to be a laughable contrast to the smaller, stockier Gabriel, backed away automatically. Gabriel aimed a mock punch at Sheldon’s stomach. They ended up shaking hands.

  “Isn’t it great to be starting something new?” Sheldon enthused. “This is going to be the best series Titanic has ever done. I just know it!”

  “Great. Great,” said Gabriel, with something of a scowl on his face. “Where’s Brenda? I thought she’d be here.”

  Retreating back to his desk chair, Sheldon answered, “Why no, she’s not part of this project. She works directly for B.F., you know.”

  Morgan had taken the nearest deepchair and started to say, “We got all the financial arrangements ironed out with Les Montpelier last week. He says the legal department is drawing up the contracts.”

  Sheldon nodded. “That’s entirely correct. Want some coffee? Juice? Anything?”

  Gabriel was prowling around the room, still scowling. “I thought Brenda was going to be here. She was in on the beginning of this idea . . . .”

  “Brenda,” said Sheldon patiently, “is B.F.‘s assistant She does not get involved in preproduction planning for a specific show.”

  “Lemme use your phone,” Gabriel said, heading for the desk.

  Sheldon quickly swivelled the phone around so that Gabriel could see the screen without coming around the desk and noticing Murray’s recording eye. Gabriel sat on a corner of the desk and started punching numbers on the phone’s keyboard.

  Sheldon had to push his chair over a bit and lean sidewise to see Morgan.

  “You and Les settled all the financial matters?” he asked, while Gabriel was saying:

  “Brenda Impanema . . . whattaya mean she’s not at this number? What number is she at? Screw information! You look it up, why dontcha?”

  Morgan seemed to be taking it all in stride, the eye of Gabriel’s hurricane. “There are a few minor matters that we’re not happy with, but I’ll straighten those out once the contracts are drawn up. Nothing to worry about. It’s not as much money as we expected, though.”

  Sheldon shrugged. “Money’s tight all over.”

  “Brenda! How the hell are you? Where’ve you been keeping yourself?”

  “If money’s so tight, how will this affect the production values on ‘The Starcrossed?’” Morgan asked.

  “That’s what I wanted to discuss with you. I know Ron thinks big and I agree with him, I really do—but . . . .”

  “Whattaya mean you think it’s best if we don’t see each other? Is this Finger’s idea of getting even with me?”

  “You know,” Morgan said, “I’ve seen a lot of shows with great potential fold up because the producers didn’t put enough backing into them.”

  “Yes, I know. But I think I’ve worked out a way to get the best production values and still keep the costs down . . . .”

  “I don’t care if Finger cancels the whole season!” Gabriel yelled at the phone. “I don’t want you pussyfooting around because you think it’ll make him sore if you see me. He can stick it . . . .”

  “How are you going to do that, Sheldon?”

  “Well, after an exhaustive computer analysis of the situation . . . .”

  “I know you’re doing it for me,” Gabriel was shouting now, “but I’d rather see you than win an Emmy. Yah, that’s exactly what I said.”

  “You were saying?”

  “Our analysis shows that the optimum choice for producing the show . . . .”

  “This is just a stall, isn’t it? What you’re really saying is that you can’t stand the sight of me! Right?”

  “ . . . would be outside the U.S., away from the high rates that all the unions here charge.”

  “Okay, kid. Maybe you’re protecting me. But I think it’s a Pearl Harbor job and I don’t like it!”

  “And where do you want to put it?”

  “Goodbye!”

  “In Canada.”

  “Canada?”

  “Canada!” Gabriel leaped off the desk corner. “Who the hell’s going to Canada?”

  “We are.”

  “You are?”

  “No, you are.”

  Morgan said calmly, “He wants to shoot the show in Canada.”

  Gabriel looked as if he was ready to lead a bayonet attack. “Canada! I can’t go to Canada! What in hell is there that you don’t have more of here? And better?”

  Sheldon sank back in his chair. It was going to be just as rough as he had feared. Only the friendly stare of Uncle Murray’s steady blue eye gave him the courage to go on.

  Two hours later, Sheldon was still in his desk chair. His jacket was crumpled on the floor and had Gabriel’s boot-prints all over it. His suppshirt was soaked with sweat. Morgan hadn’t moved at all during that time, nor hardly spoken; he still looked calm, relaxed, almost asleep.

  But the walls were still ringing with Gabriel’s rhetoric. Two chairs were overturned. Both couches had been kicked out of shape. One of the holographic pictures was sputtering badly, for reasons unknown. The Bay Bridge kept winking and shimmering . . . or maybe, thought Sheldon, it was merely cringing.

  “This is the dumbest asshole trick I’ve ever heard of!” Gabriel was screaming. “I don’t want to go to Canada! There’s nothing and nobody in Canada! All the good Canadian directors and actors are here, in California, for Chrissakes! We’ve got everything we need right here. Going to Canada is crazy! With a capital K!”

  He was heading for the phone again when Morgan lifted one hand a few centimeters off the armrest of his chair. “Ron,” he said quietly.

  Gabriel stopped in midstride.

  “Ron, the decision’s already been made. It’s a money decision and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  Gabriel frowned furiously at his agent.

  “That’s the way it is,” Morgan said blandly.

  “Then I want out,” Gabriel said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Morgan countered.

  “I’m walking.”

  “You can’t do that!” Sheldon protested.

  “No? Watch me!”

  Gabriel started for the door. Halfway there, he stopped and turned back toward Sheldon. “Tell you what,” he said. His face still looked like something that would stagger Attila the Hun. “If I have to go to Canada, I’m going first class.”

  Sheldon let his breath out a little. “Oh, of course. Top hotels. All the best.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “What then?”

  “I’m
not going to let this show get stuck out in the boondocks, with no pipeline back to the money and the decision makers.”

  “But I’ll be there with you,” Sheldon said.

  Gabriel made as if to spit. “I want personal representation from top management, right there on the set every goddamned day. I want one of Finger’s top assistants in Canada with us.”

  “Ohhh.” The clouds began to dissipate and Sheldon could see a Canadian sunrise. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I could get Les Montpelier . . . or Brenda Impanema . . . .”

  Gabriel pointed an index finger at him, pistol-like. “You’ve got the idea.”

  Nodding, Sheldon said, “I’ll ask B.F. tonight, at the party . . . .”

  “Party?”

  That was a mistake! Sheldon knew. Backtracking, “Oh, nothing spectacular. B.F.‘s just giving one of his little soirees . . . on the ship, you know . . . just a couple of hundred people . . . .” His voice trailed off weakly.

  “Party, huh?” was all that Gabriel said.

  After he and Morgan left the office, Sheldon went to his private John and took a quick needle shower. Toweling himself off, he yelled through the open door to Murray:

  “Well, what do you think of our star writer and creator?”

  The computer hummed to itself for a few moments, then the screen lit up:

  SUCH A KVETCH!

  5: The Decision Makers

  Sheldon was dressing for the party. It had been a long, exhausting day. And it wasn’t over yet. Bernard Finger’s parties were always something of a cross between a longdistance marathon and being dropped out of an airplane.

  After Gabriel and his agent had left, Sheldon spent the rest of the morning recuperating, popping tranquilizers and watching Murray run down lists of Canadian production companies. There weren’t very many. Then the computer system started tracking down freelance Canadian directors, cameramen, electricians and other crew personnel. Distressingly, most of them lived in the States. Most of them, in fact, lived in one state: California, southern, Los Angeles County.

  At a discreet lunch with Montpelier, Sheldon dropped the barest bint that he would have Titanic money to shoot the show in Canada. Montpelier scratched at his beard for a moment and then asked:

  “What about Gabriel? What’s he think of the idea?”

  “Loves it,” exaggerated Sheldon.

  Montpelier’s eyebrows went up. “He’s willing to leave that sex palace he’s got in Sherman Oaks to go to the Frozen North?”

  “He wants the show to be a success,” Sheldon explained, crossing his ankles underneath the table. “When I explained that we’d be able to make our limited budget go much farther in Canada, he agreed. He was reluctant at first, I admit. But he’s got a huge emotional commitment to this show. I know how to lever him around.”

  With a shrug, Montpelier said, “Fine by me. If Gabriel won’t screw up the works . . . .”

  “He, eh . . . he wants one favor from us.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not back breaking; don’t get worried.”

  Tell me about it.”

  “He wants Brenda up there with him.”

  Grinning, Montpelier asked, “Does she know about it?”

  “That Gabriel wants her?”

  “No. The Canada part.”

  “Not yet”

  “So if she doesn’t go, Gabriel doesn’t go.”

  Feeling somewhat annoyed at Montpelier’s smirk, Sheldon replied, “Yes, I suppose that’s so.”

  After a long silent moment, Montpelier finally said, “Well, I guess that means Brenda’s going to Canada.”

  Sheldon let his breath out. It was going to work!

  “I mean,” Montpelier justified, “if it’s vital to the company’s interests, she’ll just have to go to Canada.”

  “Right.”

  “Her relationship with Gabriel is her own business.”

  “Right,” Sheldon said again.

  “We’re not responsible for her private life, after all. She’s an adult. It’s not like we’re forcing her into Gabriel’s clutches.”

  “Right.” It was an important word to know.

  Their lunch went on for several hours while they discussed serious matters over tasteful wines and a bit of anticaloric food. Sheldon tried to suppress the nagging memory of a recent magazine article about the carcinogenic properties of anticaloric foods. Muckraking journalism, of course. Who could work in an industry where more business was conducted in restaurants and bars than in offices, without the calorie-destroying active enzyme artificial foods? Besides, the news from the National Institutes of Health was that a cure for cancer was due within another few years. For sure, this time.

  By the time lunch was over, Sheldon was too exhausted to go back to the office. So he drove home for a short nap, before getting ready for the party. Gloria was out when he got home and he gratefully jumped into the unoccupied bed and was asleep in seconds.

  She woke him when she returned, but it didn’t matter. She was already beginning to look slightly fuzzy at the edges, becoming transparent to Sheldon’s eyes. Not that he could see through her, so much as the fact that now he could look past her. Beyond her swollen belly and sarcastic mouth he could see lovely, pristine Canada.

  She whined about not going to the party, of course. Sheldon just stared at her bloated body and said, “Now really!” Instead of starting one of her scenes, she cried and retreated to the already rumpled bed.

  Sheldon didn’t tell her about Canada. He wanted to be barricaded in his office, with Murray at his side, when he popped that surprise. On the phone he could handle almost anything.

  Now he stood at the costumer’s, being cleverly made over into his Party Personality. While the two makeup men were building up his new plastic face, the viewscreen in front of Sheldon’s chair played a long series of film clips showing his Personality in action. It was an old film star named Gary Cooper and it seemed to Sheldon that all he had to do was to say “Yep” and “Nope” at the appropriate times. He concentrated on remembering those lines while the makeup men altered his face.

  As the sun sank into the sea—sank into the smog bank hovering over the line of drilling platforms out there, actually—Sheldon drove toward the harbor, where the party was already in progress.

  Bernard Finger almost always gave his parties on shipboard. It wasn’t that he could cruise outside the limits of U.S. and/or California law enforcement. After all, the nation claimed territorial rights out to the limits of the continental shelf and there were a few California legislators who claimed the whole ocean out as far as Hawaii.

  It’s just that a cruise ship relaxes people, Sheldon realized as he drove up to the pier. You forget your land-bound inhibitions once you pull away from the shore. And you can’t walk home.

  He parked his bubble-topped two seater in the lot on the pier and sprinted the fifty meters through smog to the air curtain that protected the main hatch of the ship. Out here, on the docks, the smog was neither perfumed nor tinted. It looked and smelled dirty.

  The ship was called the Adventurer, a name that Bernard Finger apparently thought apt. Titanic had bought it as a mammoth set for an ocean liner series they made a few years back. They had gotten it cheaply after the old Cunard Line had collapsed in economic ruin. For a while, Finger wanted to rename the ship Titanic, but a team of PR people had finally dissuaded him.

  Now Sheldon stepped through the curtain of blowing air that kept the shoreside smog out of the ship. He stood for a moment just inside the hatch, while the robot photographer—a stainless steel cylinder with optical lenses studding its knobby top—squeaked “Smile!” and clicked his picture.

  Sheldon smiled at the camera. Gary Cooper smiled back at him, from the elaborate mirrors behind the photographer. Dressed in buckskins, with a pearl-handled sixgun on his hip, lean, tanned, full of woodsy lore, Sheldon actually felt that he could conquer the West single handedly.

  John Wayne bumped into him from behind. “Well
, move it, fella,” he snarled. “This here wagon train’s gotta get through!”

  Feeling a little sheepish and more than a little awkward in his platform boots, Sheldon made room for John Wayne. The cowboy was taller than Sheldon. “Wait ‘til I get my hands on the costumers,” he muttered to himself. They had promised him that nobody would be taller than Gary Cooper.

  Maneuvering carefully up the stairway in his boots, Sheldon made his way up to the Main Lounge, It was decorated in authentic midcentury desperation: gummy-looking velvet couches and genuine formica cocktail tables. The windowless walls glittered with metal and imitation crystal.

  The party was already well underway. As he took the usual set of greenies from one live waiter and a tall drink from another to wash them down, Sheldon saw a sea of old movie stars: Welches, Hepburns, Gables, Monroes, Redfords, a pair of Siamese twins that looked like Newman and Woodward, Marx Brothers scuttling through the crowd, a few showoff Weismullers, one stunning Loren and the usual gaggle of Bogarts.

  No other Coopers. Good.

  Up on the stage, surrounded by Harlows and Wests, stood Bernard Finger. He was instantly recognizable because he wore practically no makeup at all. He looked like Cary Grant all the time and now he merely looked slightly more so. Sheldon didn’t have to look around to know that there were no other Cary Grants at the party.

  He drank and let the greenies put a pleasant buzz in his head. After a dance with a petite Debbie Reynolds, the ship’s whistle sounded and everybody rushed up to the main deck to watch them cast off.

  As the oil-slicked dock slid away and the ship throbbed with the power of its engines, everyone started back to the various bars sprinkled around the lower decks. Or to the staterooms.

  Sheldon turned from the glassed-in rail to go back to the Main Lounge, but a tall smoldering Lauren Bacall was slouching insolently in his path.

  She held a cigarette up in front of her face and asked casually, “Got a match?” Her voice was sultry enough to start a forest fire.

  Trying to keep his hands from trembling, Sheldon said, “Yep.” He rummaged through his buckskin outfit’s pockets and finally found a lighter. Bacall watched him bemusedly. He finally got it out and touched the spot that started the lighter glowing.