Contrary Motion

by Andy Mozina

  I press the buzzer, footsteps skip down the stairs, and Adam opens the tall wooden door. When he notices my car on the sidewalk, he steps all the way outside.

  “Brother man!” he shouts, with an indeterminate amount of irony in his voice, but he greets me with a fairly convincing embrace.

  “Dude!” I thump his back a few resonant times.

  He’s grown a bit bearish and his dark eyes are tired, but he’s still got long sideburns and all of his thick hair combed back off his high forehead in a borderline pompadour.

  “How was the drive?”

  “I loved the Soviet-era vibe of the Penn Turnpike, with all those state-sponsored service plazas.” I feel an enormous duty to be funny and clever and punctuate this sentence with an ingratiating laugh.

  “That’s very nice,” he says. “Is that your car?”

  “Yeah, and I couldn’t find a place to park.”

  “Well, you can’t park there.”

  “I know, I know.”

  And thus follows a discussion of how to handle parking: larcenous garage versus absurd space-finding odds and street-cleaning protocols. He also mentions that he has several locations in mind for his breakup scenes, and the first we’ll shoot tomorrow is a few blocks away. It’s clear that the unwieldiness of the harp has not figured prominently in his plans, or in mine, but we decide to worry about other locations later. I can’t leave my concert grand in a car parked on a street, so we unload the instrument and carry it up to his duplex.

  “God, this thing is heavy,” he exclaims.

  The apartment looks completely rehabbed, with sleek and boxy leather-and-chrome furniture, track lighting, blond hardwood floors, and art on the walls between built-in bookcases. I smell coffee. We put the harp in the living room, where there’s a fireplace with a polished oak mantel and a brick skirt—the only sign of how old the building is. Through a half-opened door into an office, I spy a slice of wall crammed with glossy photos, and a distressed brown leather sofa chair. The space gives off a certain heat; it’s the boiler room of his ego. The rest of this level seems strangely un-lived-in.

  “Nice view,” I say, looking out the living room window, unable to shake ass-kissing mode. The lit-up top quarter of the Empire State is visible.

  “Better be nice—it probably cost me an extra quarter of a million dollars.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “No, yes, I don’t know.” He waves his hands. “Let’s move your car somewhere before it gets towed.”

  I hustle downstairs and take another fifteen-minute tour of the neighborhood, finding a just-opening spot only four blocks over with no street cleaning until Friday. We toast this small victory—beer for me and bourbon for the Lord of the Manor.

  In the living room, ensconced in black leather that gives off new-car smell, I finally tell him that my father has died.

  He freezes in his armchair, holding his half-raised glass in the air. This is his code for extreme shock.

  “Matt, I’m very sorry,” he finally says. “Sudden?”

  “Yes.”

  I tell him about the heart attack, the meditation CD. My small wry smile brings no smile from him.

  He asks for a more in-depth Milwaukee report, which I give, including details about my brother George the felonious inside trader, whom Adam has met and taken an interest in.

  “Totally bald and beardless,” I say.

  Adam whistles. “I love that,” he says.

  “So what are you up to? I rarely watch TV or go to movies—I have no idea.”

  “That’s very supportive, Matt. Well, Scary Movie Quatro did fine, so there’s going to be a Cinco, but not right away.”

  Trying to be loose and breezy, I’ve insulted him. “Of course,” I say.

  “Then, you know,” Adam goes on, “there are things that I know I’m being considered for, and things I’m auditioning for. We’ll see. The good news is, tomorrow you’re going to meet some fabulous actresses.”

  “And you’re going to break up with all of them?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “People do love a good relationship meltdown,” I muse. It occurs to me that these scenes might have some personal practical value.

  Adam explains that we’ll be working with a director named Hugh Gallagher.

  “He’s great,” Adam says. “He’s a Groundlings guy. I did my massage talk show with him. Listen,” he adds, “are you okay improvising? Everything is going to be improv tomorrow, including the music.”

  “Sure,” I say.

  In fact, I am not okay improvising; the idea of responding musically, in the moment, terrifies me.

  “Tomorrow’s going to be intense, brother man, and I’m fading fast,” Adam says, a bit abruptly, clapping his palms to his knees. He does look exhausted. “Let me get you some fabulous towels spun from the butt cotton of baby lambs.”

  Fifteen minutes later, lying on my back in the downy guest bed with its bazillion-thread-count sheets and surprisingly homey fabric softener scent, I press a remote control button and the skylight shade unfurls and locks into place, blocking out a leering moon. I kick myself for not asking Adam exactly how this was going to work ahead of time, and mentally run through riffs that might work for when a couple is talking, moves composers make when they’re heightening tension or accentuating dissonance, pop tunes that could be commentary. In short, I lie awake for several hours, trying to wring as much improv out of tomorrow as possible.

  —

  Midmorning, Hugh Gallagher shows up. He is a surprisingly serious man, clearly over sixty but trying to pass for forty, with a tan, taut, varnished face and a pie wedge of short thinning hair pointing down his forehead to his Roman nose.

  After Hugh and Adam huddle in the kitchen, talking in low voices over coffee and a huge breakfast pineapple, Hugh wants to hear me play my theme music ideas: “Julia” by the Beatles (“John wrote that about his mom,” Hugh says scathingly); “Sometimes When We Touch” (he bites a fingernail); and a very plinky New Agey song I made up with some badly deformed notes. It’s my on-the-verge-of-a-seizure masterpiece.

  “That one,” Hugh says.

  At a tiny park a few blocks away, we meet the sound-and-lights guys and Adam’s scene partner, Celeste, an acting grad student at NYU. She has long, center-parted brown hair, the smallest and most narrow nose I have ever seen, and a little red pyramid of a mouth. Enormous circular sunglasses dominate her face like eyes on a fly. It’s absurdly difficult not to look at her.

  She and Adam start the scene with some babble about nurturing their relationship “no matter what it costs,” but soon it emerges that Adam’s character has been flamboyantly unfaithful, something he can’t quite admit though she punctures absurd lie after absurd lie.

  Musically, I’m a bit off at all times, like the English dub of a kung fu movie.

  Celeste storms off; Adam is duly crestfallen; Hugh calls, “Scene!”

  And then Hugh wants to know how everyone feels.

  Adam’s mouth prunes for an instant before he puts his game face back on.

  “Celeste?” Hugh asks.

  “Meh,” she says.

  “If he’s been cheating,” Hugh says, “you need to be more upset from the beginning.”

  “I know, I know,” she says peevishly.

  “No, it’s good,” Hugh says. “We found something good.”

  Something in the tone of this exchange suddenly makes me wonder if I’m the only one getting paid here.

  I get up and intercept Adam’s pacing. “Sorry, I was fucking clueless,” I say.

  He closes his eyes and waves a hand rapidly back and forth. I can’t tell if he’s pissed at me because of my playing or because I’m breaking his focus. I go back and sit down at the harp. Adam and Hugh talk for a minute, and then we try again.

  —

  In the afternoon, we shoot in Washington Square Park with a different actress, which goes a bit better for all of us. And after some rerecording of me alone for us
e in editing, Adam says we’re going to have dinner with a “special friend.” Adam has dated people like Helen Hunt and Amy Adams, so I’m curious.

  Walking to the restaurant, Adam says, “You remember Mindy Sheperd, don’t you?”

  Mindy was also a theater major at Northwestern, a year behind us. She was part of the theater gang that I sometimes hung around with because of Adam, but she and I were not close. Adam says she’s been living in New York since graduation, doing mostly stage stuff as well as the occasional TV commercial, and it turns out we’re having dinner with her.

  When we walk into the restaurant, Mindy is already at a table by the window.

  “Hey, Matt,” she says, getting up for a quick hug. “It’s been a while.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Wow, you’re looking great.”

  And in fact she is looking great in a black cardigan over a black-and-white flower-print dress. Her dark hair drapes in tousled waves around her pale face and sad brown eyes. Her upper lip swells over prominent choppers, which I find sexy, though when she smiles fully, she reveals a career-limiting amount of gums and tragically short teeth. I wonder if her old designs on Adam are in play again—or if they’re dating. I remember Adam making an odd reference to licking someone’s gums in today’s first scene and wonder.

  I was expecting Adam to choose some place trendy and swank, but the restaurant is old-school Italian, with worn wooden tables covered with sheets of brown butcher paper jammed into an open room. The tessellated white tile floor looks chewed through in spots.

  I ask Adam and Mindy a lot of questions about their lives as actors and they name-drop and trade war stories. I grill Adam about his Conan appearance, and, with the air of a cruel father disabusing his son about Santa Claus, he tells me that everything that gets said on those shows is prepared ahead of time.

  I listen intently, nod, enlightened though not surprised. The ache to be successful gathers enormous pressure into my head, but it’s not clear how the harp could ever take me from where I am to there, even if I win the audition. In fact, just moving to a place like St. Louis, for whatever reason, would look like failure to these people.

  We’re on our third bottle of wine and finished with our entrees when Mindy starts asking about me. I don’t mention my father but talk about the upcoming audition and about how I’ve been playing harp for dying people.

  “It’s pretty weird,” I say.

  “What’s weird?” she asks.

  “Playing for dying people.”

  “You should come live out here,” Adam insists. “Chicago is a pussy city.”

  “It is not!” I say.

  “All right, it isn’t, but it is—you know what I mean?”

  “Listen to you, ‘pussy city,’ ” Mindy mock-scolds Adam. Then she turns back to me, leaning in. “How’s Milena doing?”

  “We got divorced about a year and a half ago,” I say evenly.

  Her face becomes a perfect mask of tragedy. “Oh, Matt, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Well…” I look out the window. “I don’t know,” I say aimlessly.

  “She never had a lot to say, that Milena Ceban,” Mindy adds, looking at Adam as if for backup.

  “She was sweet,” I say. “She is sweet.” I should add that she is shy with most people, that she doesn’t crave attention.

  “If by ‘sweet’ you mean a great piece of ass,” Mindy says with a smile.

  “No, Mindy, you’re a great piece of ass,” I say, smiling back. “Milena is sweet.”

  “ ‘Officer and a Gentleman is the best movie I’ve ever seen!’ ” Mindy says, imitating Milena disturbingly well.

  “What she’s trying to say,” Adam jumps in, “is that, as your friends, we were concerned when you set out in your little dinghy for the tropical island of Idios, and we’ve been dying to tell you for almost twenty years.”

  I of course knew that some of my friends thought that Milena wasn’t the brightest person, and, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve had my own versions of these thoughts.

  “What is that?” I say to Adam. “Why do you think you can say stuff like that to me? You’re basically calling her an idiot. Seriously. What the hell is wrong with you?” My voice ends much louder than it began, much louder than I wanted.

  “All right, brother man,” Adam says. “Easy now. The truth is painful, and yet we must embrace it and French-kiss it.”

  “What about Lucy Varnum and what’s-her-name, the alcoholic soprano?” I practically shout. “And that girl with the harem pants!”

  “I didn’t marry those women.”

  “Of course not,” I say, trying to get Mindy on my side.

  “Ah,” says Mindy. “I’m thinking your ex is not as ex as we thought.”

  “That’s nowhere near the point,” I say. “It’s just rude to insult her like that.”

  “All right, bronco,” Adam says, hands raised. “Mea culpa, if you insist.”

  I stare at the candle flickering in the white paper bag in the center of the table. Suddenly, I can’t bear the idea that I’ve ruined things here, even though I don’t particularly like Mindy.

  “Look, it’s all right,” I say miserably, trying to nice up the situation. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  —

  When we’re back in Adam’s living room, drinks in hand, I still feel twisted up about the incident at dinner. On the drive out, I actually considered talking to Adam about getting back with Milena and had vaguely hoped for some support.

  I try to act as if everything’s cool. “How do you think the scenes went today?”

  “You mean when you blew up at the restaurant or earlier?” He puts his stockinged feet up on the coffee table and holds his drink in two hands on his stomach. I remember this pose from our room freshman year. I can’t help but think that we stood together at the same starting line twenty years ago. I get the sick sense that my failure is being fixed right now, even though the audition is still over a month away.

  “Dude, sorry I got that defensive, but give me a break.”

  “No, I get it,” Adam says quietly.

  This catches me off guard and I don’t say anything.

  Adam sighs. “It’s so awkward when I’m sincere.” He takes a swig and returns his glass to his lap. “We made some usable stuff,” he ventures. “I guess I’ll really know when we edit it.”

  “I’m amazed you guys did improv all day today.”

  “Well, you did, too.”

  “And I totally dicked it. How do you deal with just winging it?”

  “I like that anything can happen,” he says, and shrugs.

  “Like you could just run off a cliff. I mean, there were times today when I was just twisting in the wind.”

  He pulls his feet off the coffee table and leans forward. His eyes bear in on me; he looks pissed. “Don’t let fear become a problem. Don’t run away from it. Just walk along next to it and you’ll be fine. You’ve got to be confident.”

  “Yeah, but how can you be confident if you’re afraid?”

  “Listen, motherfucker,” he says, “confidence is a choice. That’s what they beat into our heads at Second City. It’s got nothing to do with talent. It’s a fucking choice. And it’s totally on you.”

  The phrase “confidence is a choice” falls into my arms like a child jumping out the window of a burning house. I catch the child, because I must, but the impact hurts. There is suddenly one less excuse in the world. It makes me think of my father, on whose impatience and sharp critical eye I have occasionally let myself blame my obsession with failure, when I should have known and accepted it was on me.

  “Makes sense,” I say, which is the easiest, truest, and possibly only thing I can manage to say right now.

  Adam retreats to his slouching position, like a genie sucked back into its bottle.

  “I thought that maybe you and Mindy were dating,” I say, to change the subject. I drink from my beer.

  “Now, why would we do that?”


  “Ask Mindy.”

  He takes a swig of his drink. “I’m single—for the moment.”

  He sounds more morose about this than I would expect. “A man of your fame and means…” I say, marveling, encouraging.

  “A man who loves women, a man with a horse cock, a great sense of humor, a willingness to commit, to love, to love passionately, and yet I tend to fuck things up.”

  “I’m surprised,” I say.

  “Come on, haven’t you ever seen a biopic?”

  “Not having success or money doesn’t exactly help, either,” I say.

  “There’s really no escape. It’s not just me. I see it all the time. People I know, people who are huge, as famous and as successful as you can get, and…If you’re a drug addict or clinically depressed or a soulless manipulative fuck, you’re still that shit even after your movie grosses a billion. If you’ve got a problem with your girlfriend, that problem is still there after you’ve been onstage. You may be able to forget about it for a while, but it’s still there. Actually, what really fucks with you is how the good shit convinces you that the problem is really with the other person, because you’re getting unbelievably intense validation. Trust me on this, motherfucker.”

  “I know you’re saying it in the nicest possible way, but please, ease up on the ‘motherfuckers’ with me. I’m a fragile individual.”

  “You’re not fragile,” he says in his simplest voice. “Stupid and self-defeating, yes, but not fragile. I know you, you neurotic motherfucker.”

  16

  WHILE AUDREY DEVOTES herself to a slice of cheese pizza and an orange soda, I ply her with questions about first grade that she quickly answers. I stay silent to let her say something—nothing doing. I point to people walking past the window of Big Tony’s and ask what she imagines they’re thinking, and she shrugs.

  Is she sad? Is she troubled? Her eyes don’t seem to focus on anything. She swings her feet forward and back under her chair. She chews lazily, with her mouth half-open, but I don’t correct her. I want to ask what she saw, if anything, between Milena and me on the lower level of Steve’s house. Instead, I ball up our greasy napkins, sweep our crumbs onto our paper plates, and announce in my friendly-Russian-giant voice: “We go home now!”