by Sally Mason
“She’s not going to relish this, Jane.”
“I know, but it’s unavoidable. Is it okay if I come over this evening and talk things through with Bitsy?”
“Of course. I’ll do my best to get her into Lizzie mode.”
“Thanks, Gordon.”
She’s gone and as Gordon rattles into town he is overtaken by the tour bus that besieged their house yesterday, hearing again the amplified voice of the tour guide, waxing lyrical about Viola Usher and Suzie Ballinger.
Gordon parks the Volvo outside the liquor store.
The best thing to do, he decides, is to get quietly but thoroughly hammered.
38
As Jane approaches the helicopter crouched on the pad at the East 34th Street Heliport a guy with a video camera on his shoulder appears before her, walking backward, the lens in danger of bruising her nose.
Embarrassed, she tries not to look at the camera.
She hears a voice bellowing from behind her: “She’s nobody! She’s nobody!”
Jane turns and sees a jockey-sized man with a bald head and a pencil mustache, dressed in a pinstripe suit and red T-shirt, his body festooned with so much bling that she fears the helicopter will plunge into the East River when it tries to ascend.
Yul Egorov, she presumes.
The director, his braying voice a cross between Minneapolis and Minsk, says: “You shoot only me and Raynebeau! Raynebeau and me! You hearing me?”
Jane is relieved when the camera swings from her and settles on the woman who totters after Egorov, a woman hobbled by high heeled boots, her famously enhanced breasts threatening the stitching of a tight scarlet blouse, her face obscured by a mane of blonde hair.
All Jane can see are giant sunglasses and a pair of lips frozen in a balloon-like pout.
Raynebeau Jones.
When Jane tries to introduce herself, Yul Egorov says, “Yeah, yeah, Bookgirl, get in the damn chopper, will ya?”
Jane ducks under the rotors and clambers aboard, finding herself strapped in opposite the vile couple.
The cameraman follows them on board, his lens consuming Raynebeau until she waves him away with a taloned hand.
With a scream of jets the helicopter lifts off and soars into the air, leaving Jane’s stomach somewhere on the FDR Drive.
Jane closes her eyes and tries to quell her queasiness.
She feels somebody shaking her knee.
Jane blinks and sees Egorov crouched over her leg like a terrier about to mount it.
“Hey, hey Bookgirl! Raynebeau’s talkin’ to ya!”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Jones,” Jane says. “Could you repeat that, please?”
“This book. This Ivy. You read it, right?” the actress asks.
“Well, yes, I’m the editor.”
“Okay. So is it, like, a biography?”
Yul Egorov says, “Auto.”
Raynebeau stares at him, chewing gum.
“Huh?”
“Autobiography.”
“Whatever. Is it?”
Jane composes herself.
“Well, in my experience, you get two kinds of writers: those like F. Scott Fitzgerald—”
“Who?”
Egorov says, “The Gatsby guy.”
“Okay. Cool.”
Jane says, “Those like Fitzgerald who use their own lives as material for their books, and those like Lizzie Rushworth who’re observers.”
Raynebeau stares at her, chewing.
“So she, like, didn’t do any of this sex stuff?”
“No,” Jane says.
“Bummer.”
“But she observed.”
“So she was, like, a . . . a voyager?”
Jane blinks in confusion.
“Voyeur,” Egorov says.
“Oh, right,” Jane says. “Well, in a manner of speaking. I think she reported what she saw.”
“Okay. So this girl, what’s her name . . . ?”
“Suzie. Suzie Ballinger.”
“Right, Suzie. Suzie. Suzie.” Raynebeau turns to the director. “I’m not lovin’ that name, Yul.”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not feeling very, you know, Suzie.”
“Hearing you, babe. Hearing you.”
“But Ballinger. Now I’m liking Ballinger. Sounds kinda like balling. Which is what she’s all about, right?
“Well, for part of the book,” Jane says. “But towards the end—”
Raynebeau halts Jane with a series of frantic zip-it gestures in the vicinity of her swollen mouth
“Hey, whoa, no spoilers!”
Jane stares at her.
“You haven’t finished Ivy?”
Raynebeau drops her sunglasses and raises her eyebrows.
“Hello, it’s, like, a book.”
Jane looks at her blankly.
“It’s, like, reading.”
Jane is still blank.
“It’s, like, time.”
Egorov says, “I’ve read it, though. Almost twice.”
“And what are your feelings,” Jane asks.
He wobbles his hand dismissively.
“Meh.” He shrugs. “Anyways, when I adapt I use the book only as a kinda trampoline to bounce off of.”
“I see,” Jane says.
“I’ve got to own that bitch,” Egorov says, underscoring his words with rapper-like arm movements. “Make it mine. Tear out its guts and hold them in my hand and then shove them back and stitch it up and do what I do the way I do it. You understand?”
Jane understands very little of this but she says, “Of course. You have your creative process.”
“Yul’s a genius,” Raynebeau says and kisses his bald head. “He’s the most, like, creative person I have ever met. Ev—uh!”
“Wonderful,” Jane says.
“No, seriously. He is.”
Jane nods like a doggy in the back of a car.
Feels that if she stops nodding she’ll scream.
Raynebeau says, “I have never met anybody more in touch with the, like, hidden artist within.”
Yul shrugs, taking this as no less than his due, his beringed hand delving into Raynebeau’s groin.
Jane looks away, down at the countryside, willing this flight to end.
Two hours later the helicopter lands in a field near an incongruously suburban-looking house. The mobile home Gordon told her about.
Jane follows Raynebeau and Yul out of the helicopter, the ever-present cameraman crouching and bobbing.
A retinue of flunkies appears, waiting to do their bidding.
Raynebeau looks at the woods surrounding them, the trees wearing their radiant plumage.
“What’s with that, like, color?” she asks.
“It’s Fall,” Jane says.
Raynebeau stares at her, shaking her head.
“The leaves are turning,” Jane says.
“Turning into what?”
“They’re dying, baby, they’re dying,” Yul says.
“Eew. Gross.”
“We’re gonna have to go digital with that,” Yul says, “since we’re shooting in spring. And we’ll be workin’ in New Mexico.”
“New Mexico?” Jane says.
“Yeah. Getting a wack of New Mexican money.”
“Isn’t New Mexico a little, well, dry?”
“I’m God,” he says.
Jane waits for the punch line.
It doesn’t come.
Yul just repeats: “I. Am. God.”
Then he grabs Raynebeau by the haunch and walks her into the mobile home.
Jane gets the keys to a rental car from one of the minions and drives off toward town and the Rushworths who will seem entirely sane and normal after this bizarre Hollywood power couple.
39
By the time the doorbell rings Gordon has been drinking solidly for hours but as he rises from an armchair and carefully negotiates his way across Bitsy’s living room, he convinces himself that he feels pleasantly relaxed rather than drunk.
Without thinking, he dips forward and kisses Jane on both cheeks.
She laughs and looks up at him quizzically.
“How continental of you, Gordon.”
“Oui, oui,” he says. “Entrer.”
“I didn’t know you spoke French.”
“I don’t, I speak Clouseau.”
“Oh, come on, don’t tell me an intellectual fellow like you has ever watched those movies?”
“The Blake Edwards-Peter Sellers collaborations were brilliant. My friend Suzie and I’d pig out on popcorn and hold our own VCR marathons. I still watch them again every year or so.”
“I’d do something similar with my dad. My mom, sadly, never got the joke.”
Gordon crosses to the sideboard.
“A glass of wine, Jane?”
“God, yes. I need one desperately.”
She sits.
“Where’s Bitsy?”
Handing Jane a glass, Gordon says, “Meditating. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear the clang of chakras aligning.”
Jane says in a whisper, “She’s really into all that stuff?”
He sits opposite her, leaning in close and talking softly.
“She has been for years, ever since she got dumped. Lately she’s fallen under the spell of some self-styled guru who peddles his Aquarian snake oil on a farm outside town.”
Jane gulps her wine.
“Well, I envy her, if it helps her to find peace.”
“Peace?” Gordon sniggers nastily. “She’s got a schoolgirl crush on this charlatan. It’s all just hormones tied up in a New Agey bow.”
Bitsy enters from her bedroom.
“Hello, Jane. Why are you two whispering?”
Gordon says, “We didn’t want to interrupt your levitating.”
Bitsy shakes her head.
“Gordon, I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Are you drunk?”
“Not at all. Merely expansive.”
Bitsy sits on the couch.
“How are you, Jane?”
“I’m well, Bitsy. Sorry to have to worry you with more publicity.”
“Oh well, it comes with the territory, I guess.”
Gordon says, “Jane, you’ve been with our showbiz friends?”
Jane empties her wine glass, nodding.
“I have, I’m afraid.”
She holds out her glass, allowing Gordon to top it up.
“What are they like?” Gordon asks. “And don’t be polite.”
“They’re vile. He’s a poison dwarf who has elevated the small man complex to an art form and she is the Valley Girl from hell.”
Gordon laughs but he sees the apprehension on Bitsy’s face.
“Oh come on, Bits,” he says. “Just think of it all as a joke.”
“Easy for you to say, Gordon. You’re not in the firing line.”
Jane reaches over and takes Bitsy’s hand.
“Look, by way of reassurance, I think they’re going to need very little time with you. They’re both egomaniacs and will want to hog the camera. I don’t anticipate that you’ll have to spend more than an hour with them tomorrow.”
“That’s a relief,” Bitsy says. “Does she have any particular take on the book?”
“She hasn’t even finished reading it.”
“You’re kidding?” Gordon says.
Jane shakes her head.
“I wish I were. Clearly reading a book is a little beyond her attention span. She’s obsessed with Suzie’s sexual exploits, though.”
“Oh dear,” Bitsy says.
“Don’t worry, just trot out your best deadpan, Bitsy,” Jane says. “That’s when you’re lethal. She’ll just bounce right off you.”
“Well, I’ll try.”
Bitsy looks distressed and Jane takes her hand again.
“You’ll be great, Bitsy.”
“I don’t know, Jane. It was one thing doing that publicity in New York City—it had the quality of a dream and I could just pretend that I was somebody else. But doing it here in my home? In the town where I’ve lived my whole life? I’m not sure I can pull it off.”
“Oh, come on Bitsy,” Gordon says, “you’re being silly.”
Jane shoots him a warning look and he shuts up, taking a slug of wine.
The agent gets up and sits next to Bitsy on the couch.
“I understand your apprehension.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I know you’re a very private person and this must seem very, well, intrusive.”
“It does. It feels like an invasion. And I feel very small town and out-gunned.”
“Do you know where I’m from, Bitsy?”
“New York?”
“No. Hicksville, Indiana. I’m not kidding: the town I grew up in really is called Hicksville.”
“That must look great on your resume,” Gordon says, laughing.
“Shut up, Gordy,” Bitsy says and Gordon shuts up.
Jane says, “When I arrived in New York from Indiana I suffered terribly from anxiety attacks. I found the city completely overwhelming, and was hopelessly intimidated by the publishing world. Everybody seemed so sophisticated and tough. Then another agent, an older woman who has now retired, took me aside and said, ‘Everybody’s from Hicksville.’ It took me a while to understand that she was telling me that everybody gets scared. Everybody is intimidated, especially when they’re starting out. And when I went into my next meeting I wasn’t nearly as nervous. Yul Egorov and Raynebeau Jones are like spoiled kids playing in a sandbox. They’re nothing to worry about.”
Bitsy smiles.
“Maybe I am being a bit of a coward.”
“No, you’re reacting like a normal person. This media stuff is tough to deal with. But it’s fueling your success, Bitsy. It’s an opportunity. See it that way.”
Bitsy nods.
“I’ll do my best. I promise.”
“Good,” Jane says, “Now why don’t I take the two of you out to dinner and we can talk strategy?”
Bitsy shakes her head.
“Will you think me terribly rude if I beg off? I want to compose myself for tomorrow. Why don’t you and Gordon go and he can brief me in the morning?”
Jane raises her eyebrows at Gordon.
“Are you up to having a meal with me?”
“I think I could just about stomach that.”
They stand.
“I’d better drive,” Jane says. “You look three sheets to the wind.”
“How quaintly nautical,” he says, as he heads for the door. “You have a nice night, Bitsy. Don’t get yourself into a knot about tomorrow.”
She waves him away and as he and Jane exit the door he sees his sister standing staring out into the gloom and for a moment—it must be the wine—Gordon feels the urge to go to her and embrace her.
Of course he does no such thing, just follows Jane to her sporty little rental car, a hint of her scent hanging in the air as he clips himself into the passenger seat.
He sees her hands on the wheel and the stick shift.
Quite lovely, slender hands he can’t help but notice, with long, neatly painted nails.
When he imagines those nails digging into the flesh of his back he has to look away, out at the fading light.
“Where are you taking me, Gordon?” Jane asks, watching the country road twist in the headlights, the town ten minutes behind them.
“It’s a surprise,” he says.
“I’m expecting the Headless Horseman to come galloping across the road.”
Gordon laughs and says, “Turn here,” pointing to a track that leads into the woods.
Jane does as he says, bumping along the gravel road that winds through the trees.
“My God,” she says, “we are in Sleepy Hollow!”
And it’s true.
There’s even a sign that says so: SLEEPY HOLLOW COUNTRY H
OUSE.
An 18th century double story, light blazing from the windows, appears through the trees.
Gordon says, “This place is run by a couple of refugees from Manhattan. You’ll like them. They serve pretty decent food and there’s a lot less wildlife than at the Sugar Maple Inn. I took the liberty of booking you in here. I hope you don’t mind?”
“Not at all,” Jane says, parking outside the house. “It looks kinda charming.”
Jane gets her overnight bag out of the trunk and they stroll into the lobby of the house where they’re met by a couple in their sixties. She has wild white hair gathered into a ponytail and he has a shaggy beard.
Jane has seen people exactly like them at book launches in Manhattan, guzzling wine and asking endless questions.
The woman says, “Welcome. I’m Fran and this is Ed. He cooks and I do pretty much everything else.”
“And never stops telling everybody about it,” Ed says, grinning at his wife.
“Just get in your butt into the kitchen and rattle those pots and pans, Chef Ramsay,” Fran says, “while I make our guests feel at home.”
Ed disappears and Fran shows them to a table, then she takes Jane’s bag.
“I’ll put this in your room while you two look at the menus.”
Gordon and Jane are alone in the small restaurant that looks like it was transported in a time machine from the 18th century.
Jane leans in close to Gordon.
“How do they make a living out here?”
“They are open only by appointment. They don’t need the money, it’s a hobby. I hear they made a fortune when they both worked on Madison Avenue.”
Gordon looks up and smiles as Fran approaches with their appetizers.
When the woman leaves, Gordon says, “So what’s the latest on Patrick Bateman?”
Jane, forking asparagus into her mouth, is blank for a moment then she says, “Oh, Tommy?”
“Yes.”
She takes a sip of wine.
“Well, there’s been a development.”
“Nothing violent, I hope?”
“No, but I had a squad of cops searching my apartment a few days ago.”
“Good God, are you serious?”
Jane leans in closer, speaking softly.
“Apparently Tommy had a little after hours gig going, supplying cocaine to his yuppie buddies.”
