by Mary Robison
He says, “We need a better verb.”
“Wades through,” I say.
He won’t look at me.
“Marches through,” I say. “Or, moves.”
He says nothing. His fingers are stopped, frozen in the air over his keyboard.
I say, “She lugs herself. Drags herself. Kicks through. Pounds. Tramps. Traverses. Treks? She journeys. Advances through. Treads. Marches. No, hikes. She pushes her way. Shoves. Rambles. Roams. Wanders through. Backpacks? Ranges? Strides! Paces! Stomps! Walks! On her fucking feet! Through the fucking snow!”
202
There isn’t a right word. I can sit here doing this until my periods cease. And I can keep in mind that Penny’s the easiest person in show business. Especially compared to Belinda, who’s coming up next.
203
“What was that name you told me this morning?” I ask her.
“Yesterday. You mean yesterday,” Belinda says. “And it was Renquist. I’ll get you a goddamn pencil.”
“No, no. No need for that,” Penny says.
There’s a pause as we wait to see who’ll win this tiny point. “I’ll remember,” I say, although that is not likely. It would do to keep things bopping along.
204
What I’d like is a brandy, heated and served in a snifter. I’d like it brought to my table in the corner booth at Joey’s in Fair, Alabama.
205
These scenes are set in the Chugach Mountains and in the Independence Mine State Historical Park, where there are gold mines still, and people panning for gold.
“Could you look up the term for what they’re doing?” Belinda asks me. “Before you scratch ‘panning’ into the script?”
“Ah, I beg your pardon?” Penny says. “Belinda? Our character is a nurse practitioner? What interest might she have in gold?”
“Audiences like it,” Belinda says.
“I don’t,” I say, because I don’t want to look up panning, and because I hate Belinda, and I must just want to get the sack.
“That ish show totally out of character,” Penny says.
Ask to Speak to Whoever’s in Charge
I telephone Hollis, who promised to look after my place.
He answers the phone with two words: “Dryer’s broken.”
He says, “Not to worry. I took everything out and hung it on the line.”
“How can that be?” I say. “I don’t have a clothesline.”
“No shit,” he says. “You don’t even have a rope. It’s all right, it’s fine. I just unplugged some things and strung their extension cords together. That did great, for all the fucking trouble it was.”
I say, “I might be heading home soon. I’m right next to getting the boot.”
There’s a pause from his end. When Hollis speaks his voice is low and muffled. He says, “I hoped you’d give me a little warning.”
I don’t ask why. With all that could happen between here and there, I may never need to know.
207
A leaf-green cab streaks out of the traffic and, just beyond the studio gates, slows up for me. I’m running.
208
Each and every tire squeal reminds me I lost my cat.
209
I don’t ever tell Paulie, “I’ll take care of you.” He’s heard that one. He heard it from me, my parents, his sister, from each ex, from his friends, his doctors, his church, his school, his employers, the neighborhood, the police, the mayor, the state and the federal governments. It wasn’t true.
Everybody, Step to the Right
This bungalow has a gargantuan television and Peter Pan is the movie on Home Box Office. I’m watching along when the film’s narrator announces that the Tinkerbell character’s fading. To prevent that, the guy says, I should clap my hands.
I watch all the way through to the end, without clapping. Tink’s resurrection is just one of the lies that movie’s full of.
211
Now, about this child telling the eleven o’clock news, why did they shear its hair off and make it wear brown lipstick?
212
The bungalow has a phone system and the Boyfriend calls me on it. I answer and pretend I don’t know him at all.
“Certainly sounds like you,” he says.
“Well, I am like me,” I say.
213
I feel around in my handbag, extract something, use it, and put it back. Later on I might need something else. This is my life, what my life is really made of.
214
Radio on or off, I hear it.
215
I say to myself, “Almost four hours ago, you got that pill caught in your throat. You’ll want to catch another one in your throat in five minutes.”
216
Now I don’t remember anything. Nothing. Well, I remember bits of this and that but not much.
And sleep was when?
217
There’s an anemic moon out there, milked over, hanging low in the low green sky.
That couple in the heated pool. How do they, I wonder, figure into things?
In here there is Danish Modern furniture, lampshades that look Western. It’s all like it’s for a hunting lodge, not a nice one. Rubbery drapes that’ve halfway derailed from their crappy rods.
218
It isn’t anything but as I’m writing my notes for tomorrow I fill up a page and don’t turn to a new page. I just press down hard with my pen and write over top of what I’ve already written.
I’m going to kick that fucking TV into the road.
219
I can fit the palm of my hand between Paulie’s eyes. I know what it feels like to do that.
That man hanged him. For one thing. Had him hanging. By the neck.
Chapter Seven
Where Are You Taking Me
We’re into the third hour of this meeting. Belinda’s speaking, gobble, gobble. Maybe I haven’t heard every word.
I’m dead tired, dead stupid, I can barely talk, so if she calls on me I’ll just fill in with something authoritative and use like a radio announcer’s voice. She does call on me. I say, “Sixty-two degrees and there’s traffic.” Laughter from the folks around the room. Not from Belinda. The others, though, shifting positions and some taking seats on the carpeting now, as if they were watching a little fireworks display.
221
She hands me an outline of her many, many changes. She says, “We’ll need the revision done tonight.”
I say, “Tonight?” and she shushes me.
I say, “You mean tonight?” and she grabs the thing back.
222
She has me moved out of the ugly bungalow and over to the Hollywood Patio Hotel, which is a lot worse as it’s nowhere and it’s certainly not in Hollywood.
She sends messengers to the door every couple hours. They’re all heavy drinkers of, I would guess, wine. Named Elton and Cyril and some other name. They’re to spy on me and make sure I’m working, to repeat Belinda’s commands and make sure I’m alone.
223
The hotel is near nothing, and when I’ve complained about that almost enough, Belinda has the messengers deliver tubs of food.
But this food is from EST or it’s for Reverend Moon’s followers—great huge buckets of chips, pretzels, inch-thick sugar cookies.
Immediately, the diet has me rethinking things and reevaluating some of my attitudes. For instance, all people are nice, if you give them half a chance. And I should be more disposed to obey the will of others.
Kick That to the Curb
Belinda catches me as I enter the vast lobby at Mercury Brothers. The floor here is black marble. The glass lampshades, pink. She’s seated on a plump suede settee. Around her is the latest class of note-taking interns and assistants she’s ridd
en and driven blunt.
She keeps me standing and gazes at me, her one eyebrow raised, the other frowning.
She rises, saying to her group, “I must set something up with Deiter. Hold your places, everybody.” And, as she brushes past me, says, “I’ve had a very angry call from Ian Anderloche. Which you and I will need to discuss.”
I’m sure the interns heard this. They’re miserable now. They don’t know where to look. I’m standing over them, anticipating that one might want to ask me about something. But no, it’s unlikely that any of them will.
Somewhere near, a loose window frame keeps dropping and every bang makes the interns clutch and startle like they’ve been shot.
I bum one of their pens and a slip of paper so I can leave a note of explanation for Belinda.
“Dear Faithless Back-Stabbing Ingrate Mongrel Whore,” my message would read, if I had legibly written it.
225
O.K., there’s Valium. That is one fine drug.
226
The studio has assigned me a car and a driver who’s nicknamed Tick. That’s nothing he need fill me in on at all.
Tick has a second, lower-down job shampooing pets. Yet I don’t get the sense that his combined employment pays adequately, else why isn’t his car a color I can make out? Or heated? And why’s it got straw sticking up where the back seat was gouged and vandalized?
But none of that is my business or anything to cry about. Not like the repulsive fact that “We Won’t Give Up the Ship” is on autoreplay in my mind.
Shoes Dyed to Match the Bag
Ian Anderloche, the executive producer, is asking, “What were you up to here, Miss Breton? Can you tell me? Because no one ordered this scene change that they remember.” He’s raised out of his chair and leaning over his desk, holding the script open to me like it’s a wad of flowers I wilted.
He’ll get nothing from me.
He wags his head, falls back into his seat, puts a thumbnail between his teeth, sits looking at me and waiting.
“Lemme explain something,” he says at last. He swats the script around to where he can see it. He reads, turns a page, reads.
He’s maybe twenty-four. Wearing his hair buzzed. Wearing the khaki clothes of a photojournalist. He has his sleeves rolled on his arms, and there’s a pack of Kools in the breast pocket of his shirt. Not opened properly, that pack of smokes, though, as he ripped the whole top away.
“Unless someone orders a scene change there shouldn’t be a scene change,” he says. “Some one of my people. We don’t proceed that way unless one of them, orders a change. Don’t go by your opinion. Is that what you were doing? You weren’t hired for your opinion. We decide all that. We tell you when a scene is wrong. So don’t take it upon yourself. Don’t ever do that, if that’s what you did. If you, personally, didn’t think something was funny.”
“Wasn’t funny,” I say.
“We have three, different, media experts. Who’ve done viewer research and demographic studies. Have all their findings. They tell us precisely what’s funny, what’s sad, what hits home.”
“Neither did it hit home,” I say.
But I may’ve hurt the feelings of Ian Anderloche. He’s shoveling the script into an envelope. He’s enunciating. “Certain things, have been, established. Certain cultural truths, exist. Like it or not. Agree. Or not. We have learned. In our business.”
When learned? I wonder. He was playing with his Darth Vader doll when this old script came about.
228
“So . . . ,” Penny says. We’re over in B Building, in the reception area outside Belinda’s office. I’m sure I look pale and exactly like a beggar.
Penny nods at the envelope Anderloche gave me and says, “In there, the script you used to be working on.”
Ride Along with You
“Monica,” Belinda says, beside me in her limo. My real name’s Monica. Big fucking deal.
“What project will you go to? If you’re released from Bigfoot?”
But she’s already smearing the question out of the air. She says, “I’m silly to think you have a plan.”
I agree that Belinda is silly.
I say, “So, does that mean . . .”
“I don’t have that information. Stop asking me,” she says.
“You really, truly don’t?”
“What have I just told you?”
“Belinda, I need to know.”
“What were my words?” asks she.
“All right,” I say.
We ride. I turn my face to the window. I’m ashamed of myself for so very many things. I say, “Maybe Penny will have heard something.”
“You’ll have to take that up with him.”
“Although you were the one in touch with Anderloche.”
“I just detest you,” she says. “To the point that it’s almost invigorating.”
We slow and the driver steers onto a lot for a produce market. I’ve told him I want to be let out here. I need to supplement Belinda’s tubs of pointless food.
It’s half dark even though there’s a yellow sun through the leaves of the queen palms.
The limo steers off. Inside it, Belinda turns in her seat and gazes out at me.
Now Is Not the Time
I’m dumped into an orange armchair, back in my room at the Hollywood Patio. A couple of actors glide into view on the TV screen. They look like Paulie, or how Paulie used to look. The one in wide-wale corduroys especially. Curly hair. Pretty teeth. Dimples. “God damn you,” I tell the television before I smack it off.
What the hell kind of drug do I take to get out of this moment? I would go up, down, or sideways.
231
One thing to do in this grotesque hotel room is prop up on the bed pillows in the middle of the night and yam down a hundred stick doughnuts.
Keep in Mind
Penny’s voice message this a.m. is: “Itsh a mishtake to provoke theesh people. Shtill, the fact ish you have a point-shistum shtep contract. Beyond any one produsher’s authority, and, wishish, beshides that, not in Ian shintresh to dishpute . . .”
233
I get busy and decorate the script with Alaskan details. I put in Caribou people, the Aurora, Toutketna, the Iditarod. I have Justine wearing tattoos and a Mohawk. Going dog-mushing. Wearing gloves to disguise her black, frostbitten hands. I put Bigfoot in long johns and a short wool parka with a flannel hood. Show everybody smoking stubby cheroots.
Because this stuff adds to the script, I’m thinking. From now on, that’s all I’ll do. I won’t cut anything, I’ll just add.
234
“O.K., this isn’t working,” I say, slapping the thing shut. “Maybe reapproach this at another time.”
“Won’t work then either,” I say, switching off the desk lamp and climbing out of the chair.
I wander to the window, look out at the day.
“Never hurts to try,” I say.
I say, “Maybe not for some people. For me, yes, it does.”
“Learn to cope, Pattycake,” I say through a sigh.
Plenty of Time for That Later
The girlfriend of some ex told me, “You’ll find someone else. I know you’ll be able to. A person with all your energy?”
That is what she left in about me.
I thanked her!
She said I was welcome!
She asked, “What lies did he tell you about me?”
“All there are,” I replied.
Promise You Won’t Laugh
Now a meeting with Anderloche, Shumacher, Belinda, me, and a few others—Evan and two, I guess, assistant somethings, Janice and Jonas, and Crumley, who’s Belinda’s whatever-he-is—I can never remember and I’m barely here and the introduction process isn’t all that organized.
“Let us attempt
to define and hopefully answer the studio’s first concerns,” says Mr. Shumacher. “Shall we?”
Belinda leans forward in her seat. “Specifically,” she says, “they need to know, what is lovable about Bigfoot? If anyone can suggest. And next, how do we get that across?”
“Maybe he’s half Lancelot. The other half brute,” Crumley says.
Janice says. “I don’t know if this makes sense, but does anyone else picture him as an innocent? Like a boy who never grew up?”
“I think even if he strays, he really loves Justine,” says Evan.
“Even if his foot slips occasionally.”
“How is Marlon Brando a man?” Jonas asks.
Some of us look around at him. I do.
This could take days. Several, harrowing days. They need a phrase here. So they can think kindly of the script while I’m somewhere writing it, while they’re hiding in their offices not doing whatever their jobs are. “Oh, come on, he’s lovable,” I say. “He just doesn’t have any—” I’m squinting as if the rest of my sentence is far out in space and I’m straining to bring it in. “No Romantic Procedure.”
Whoa, do they like that.
They’re nodding around at one another.
Mr. Shumacher leans across the table and tweaks my nose. Ian Anderloche pats his palms on his thighs once. He and Belinda rise from their seats and hug.
But just when I’m thinking we’re a family, here’s Evan, walking off and giving me a cruddy look. I say, “Oh, don’t worry, mister, you don’t have to protect yourself. I’m about five hundred miles from fucking anyone.”
There’s More
Once I went to see my mom and Penny was there, visiting. His father and my mother were married at the time. For the very shortest time—a month—before they acknowledged their error. Nonetheless, for that little while, I was the great director’s stepsis.
And I was a good stepsister too, as Penny had brought along some dogshit Paramount script he was trying to rehab and I, really out of nowhere, did a bang-up job of doctoring that script.
Of course, there did follow forty or fifty scripts on which I didn’t always do a bang-up job.
238
Most of the studios have hired me at some point. Some moved me along. Some let me go. TriStar and Fox each let me go a couple times. But they were fair enough and had their reasons. Like they had to sit on me to get me to work.
