by Alina Simone
2
Thirty-seven is not the end, Anna decided. No, forty-three is more like the end. Strike that. Forty … six. Or maybe the end just kept zooming away from you the older you got, like the outer bounds of the universe expanding from the blastula where hope was first born? Of course, there were always exceptions; she’d read once that the Marquis de Sade didn’t really get his perv on until he was fifty-one. Still, ignoring the outliers, Anna had only, let’s face it, ten years max to get her shit together. The clock was ticking. Many different clocks were ticking, in fact, if she really stopped to consider it. But stopping to consider the orchestra of ticking clocks was pointless and only paralyzed her. Still, there was a reason that store was called Forever 21, not Forever 37. Maybe she had already pissed away her quotient of potential. Who else was a late bloomer? Well, there was always Grandma Moses. And some people said Jesus didn’t do his best work until after he was dead.
Anna and Leslie had decided to wrap up their life-coaching session early. Anna had made enough progress for one day, and besides, Leslie had to pick Dora up somewhere or drop Dora off somewhere, and everyone knows that as soon as someone mentions their child that’s the end of it. They absolve you of all social responsibility, children do. Like cancer, or church. But Anna hadn’t particularly wanted to go right back to Sunset Park after Café Gowanus, to the back issues of InStyle scattered on the sofa where she’d fallen asleep last night and the refrigerator full of dubious bodega produce. The walk back to the subway was a dismal one—Third Avenue wasn’t much to look at—yet surprisingly it was here, in the long shadow of a Dunkin Donuts that simultaneously managed to be a Pizza Hut and also a Taco Bell, that the idea struck her: What if I wrote a book about women who were late bloomers?
From there, the plan unfolded quickly. If she used the rest of her savings, the severance, the money from Aunt Clara, her tax refund, she could take a trip around the country, or even the world. She would find and interview the heroic women late of bloom—unlikely political candidates, entrepreneurs, madams, all those makers of organic kimchi and knitters of artisanal tampons fleeing unhappy jobs at hedge funds. She could picture herself sharing confidences with these women in taxicabs, on Vermont porches, in ashrams, touring a factory floor in matching hard hats. They would remain friends after that first initial interview, so touched and flattered would the women be at having been elevated to exemplar status. And, of course, as a late-blooming woman herself (nowhere near forty-six, of course, but still…), there was a beautifully seamless logic to Anna taking on such a project. She would bloom late while documenting late bloomers. It would be so meta. This fit her Core Competencies perfectly, and if Leslie were still here, Anna would tell her, yeah, go for it, change her Vision Statement or stick it in her fucking Spheres, whatever. She was ready for Process and Learning!
The feeling lasted until Anna got home and checked Amazon only to find there was already a book about women who were late bloomers. It was called Late Bloomers and—this killed her—it was written by a man. A man who was clearly already in full bloom (this was his fifth book) and could just as easily have written about human beatboxers or ironic leitmotifs in London street art or heirloom fucking melons. This man, whose name was Lars Stråtchuk, with a little circle above the a (he wasn’t even American!), had quite literally stolen her future. A future Anna had already inhabited for two sparkling hours, where she moved purposely through each day and her work had weight and meaning. She did not want to go back. Already she felt the apartment closing in on her, the late-afternoon light muddying the corners, the drapes and the stained IKEA carpet letting go of the day’s heat, filling the air with their stale breath, making her tired. But first there would be a comfort snack. A tub of Sabra hummus and pita chips. Or a pint of blueberries with cottage cheese. She would eat with her mother’s familiar remonstrations ping-ponging around her head.
Eating that will only make you hungry.
Fruit has more calories than chocolate.
I guarantee those nuts will taste better if you eat just one.
Anything you eat after six o’clock turns right to fat.
No, Anna decided, she wasn’t going to do it. No couch. No snacks. Since Pinter, Chinski and Harms let her go five weeks ago, she’d spent the bulk of her time couching and snacking. Surfing the Web, actually. Presumably looking for jobs, but not really. Occasionally looking for love. Mostly just reading stuff. The day began with the refreshing of three tabs: The Daily Beast, New York magazine, and Gawker. From there, a kaleidoscope of options opened up, like snowmelt cutting innumerable channels down the side of a mountain. Hours later, she could end up anywhere: Deadline Hollywood, Art Fag City, or just somebody’s Tumblr, reading about that new underwear that prevents cameltoe. Meanwhile, she couldn’t help but notice, the things she always said she would do once she finally left Pinter weren’t getting done. They’d been crushed by freedom. Her freedom. The sheer quantity of time at her disposal and the weighty responsibility of her own untapped potential made doing any one thing impossible.
She woke up in the mornings already exhausted by the possibilities. And, of course, the question arose of whether it was depression or merely situational. Leslie didn’t think it was depression. Leslie’s own postpartum depression had been serious, life-threatening. She knew all about the drugs and the research, the ins and outs of serotonin uptake, the interaction effects of different kinds of therapy, and she’d discussed all these things with Anna. Admittedly, Anna was kind of into the idea of it being depression. Then none of it would be her fault. She remembered something about her gap insurance covering mental health, and, of course, there would be the reassuring routine of regular appointments someplace uptown, which would get her out of the house. But gap insurance probably covered only a few months of sessions. Plus the medicine made you fat, didn’t it? It destroyed your sex drive. One was faced with a miserable choice between sad, sexed up, and thin or fat, sexless, and happy. Of course, Anna was already fat, definitely sexless, and probably sad. But taking the drugs would rob her of hope. They would slap a cruel ceiling on her Aspirational Future. If she could never be thin, and would always be sexless, how could she ever be happy? It was a thicket of catch-22 situations. But if the two hours she had spent in the future, working on late bloomers, had taught her anything, it was that living in hope is a beautiful thing. There was no better feeling. In fact, the feeling was even better than the doing, because when she stopped to think about it, Anna had to admit she didn’t much like to write. Ergo the unwritten thesis. And the thought of writing an entire book, ass-to-chair, day after day, sounded lonely. Worse than lonely, actually. It sounded fucking miserable. But being on the cusp of writing a book—or, better still, having already written a book—was something else. She’d gotten such a charge picturing herself telling Leslie, changing her Facebook status, moderating her lively new blog on LateBloomers.com as she crowdsourced suggestions for Late Bloomers, Volume II …
Without quite realizing it, Anna was surfing. She had sorted the Amazon comments for Stråtchuk’s Late Bloomers so that the one-star reviews came up first, and a link in one of those comments had led her to another website about late bloomers, which was called Kurinji, after (the header announced) a rare Indian shrub that takes up to twelve years to bloom. Now Anna started reading the home page Q&A with Paul Gilman, a filmmaker from Los Angeles, who, at age forty-six(!), had become an impresario of the microcinema scene before going on to bigger and better things. Anna read through his bio and—no surprise—learned that the first forty-five years of Gilman’s life had been noticeably devoid of promise: a ho-hum upbringing in the exurbs of Kansas City (he didn’t even bother to clarify which one), a so-so college career, a drift from one forgettable white-collar job to another, an unsurprising failure to start a family. Now Gilman had a house in Brentwood. He had recently married a young actress (they’d met during his fellowship at Cannes) and was expecting twins.
K: You are known for your improvisational style.
GILMAN: I never use scripts. A script only imposes moral constraints on the actor. What I’m interested in is the uninhibited id. I take the actors and put them in a box. Then it’s up to them to break out of the box. Sometimes literally.
K: Up until recently, you didn’t exactly work with actors in the technical sense.
GILMAN: Right. Nonprofessionals.
K: How did you find them?
GILMAN: Craigslist. I would put up an ad for actors, no experience needed. I didn’t care about age or size or race. I didn’t ask for headshots. This was back when I still lived in Kansas City. It’s not like Los Angeles, where you put something like that out and—
K: Everyone’s straight from the Formica factory.
GILMAN (laughs): Right. These were real people. Actuaries. Teachers. Cooks. Whatever. People who needed the extra cash. I paid fifty a session. Sometimes I’d go to their house. Sometimes I’d tell them to meet me somewhere. The pay phone in front of the Cash America pawn. Or the loading dock behind the rug warehouse downtown. I’d drive over with my camera and see them waiting for me on the street. Then I’d drive around the block a couple of times, figuring out how they’d fit into the scene. After that, I’d make up a story on the spot.
K: Both Calista at the Cum ’n’ Go and Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop have this really visceral, really frenetic quality. How did you edit those movies?
GILMAN: I edited all of my films in-camera.
K: Just record, then stop?
GILMAN: Exactly. Stop or pause. It is what it is. And since I’d never met the actors before, anything could happen. My one rule is that while I’m shooting, I won’t talk. This one woman I hired, she worked at the hospital and came to meet me straight from work, still in her scrubs. I told her, “Here’s the story: you’re an EMT and you just responded to a call about a car accident that involved your husband. His back was broken in two places. He sustained internal injuries and the doctors have no idea whether he’s going to live. You leave the hospital. You’re on your way back to your car and you can’t remember where you left it. You’re lost in the parking lot”—we were in a parking lot—“and you call your mother on your cell to tell her what happened. Action!”
K: This sounds like Clean Rite Meltdown.
GILMAN: It ended up that way—
K: Spoiler alert.
GILMAN (laughs): Right. The woman wouldn’t do the scene. She wouldn’t do any of it. She just started screaming at me that she didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. Her face right up in the camera, calling me every kind of name. Went on about how she knew “the scam I was running” and her boyfriend had my license plate number, blah blah. Amazing stuff. The whole movie turned out to be just that one continuous shot of her face—
K: Clean Rite showed at Sundance?
GILMAN: It did. It’s in MoMA’s permanent collection now.
K: You’ve certainly come a long way. Can you say something about working with Johnny Depp?
GILMAN: Johnny is just an amazingly brilliant guy. Amazingly brilliant.
K: Any last words for aspiring filmmakers?
GILMAN: Get a camera. Let the rest take care of itself.
When Anna finished reading, she noticed it was dark. It was dark and now she was hungry. She got herself a bag of rice cakes and a tub of salsa and went back to the computer, where she searched Gilman on IMDb, and read the Variety reviews for Calista at the Cum ’n’ Go and Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop and Clean Rite Meltdown. When the rice cakes were gone, Anna switched to vegetable chips (baked, not fried) and googled Gilman’s wife for no reason. And when her roommate, Brie, came home from kickball practice, it was well after six and Anna’s food was turning into fat. She was watching Can’t They Always Make More? on YouTube and still hadn’t turned the lights on.
“Hey,” Brie said. She threw her cleats in the corner, setting off a small dirt-clod explosion. “Can you believe all I had for dinner was a glass of Merlot?”
“Good practice?” Anna said.
“Gotta poop.”
“The postkickball poop!” Anna said, laughing nervously as though this were a perfectly normal thing for her to say. Something one of Brie’s much-younger friends might say.
“Uh-huh,” Brie said, breezing past Anna on her way to the bathroom.
Anna hit pause, got up, and turned the lights on. She threw away the plastic bag from the rice cakes and wiped the salsa ring on the table. She checked inside the bag of veggie chips. How many had she eaten? From the hallway, she could hear a flush and the sound of running water. Then Brie was back, wiping her hands on the butt of her shorts.
“What are you watching?” Brie said, head already in the refrigerator.
“This movie, Can’t They Always Make More?”
“I didn’t know you were into Gilman.”
“I love Gilman,” Anna found herself saying, unsure of whether she really loved Gilman or whether she was just happy to have something to talk about with Brie.
“You know that one, Rurik at the Drive-In?”
“Rurik, Rurik, Traffic Cop?”
“Yeah. Totally craptastic!”
“I know, right?” Anna said uncertainly. She always had trouble getting a read on Brie. Even when she wanted to kiss her ass, she could never predict where exactly Brie’s ass was going to be. It’s like she was always running around the room, lips at ass level, chasing after her. Maybe it was just the fact that Brie was still young enough to make declarative statements. She could still put periods, even exclamation marks, at the end of a sentence, whereas Anna had already changed her mind so many times about so many things it was all question marks and ellipses for her from here on in.
“But in a good way,” Brie said, reaching into the refrigerator for a cold quesadilla. “I love how he’s not afraid to just, like, let his movies be bad, you know?”
“It’s a style,” Anna said, pushing the bag of chips toward Brie.
“I love that one with the candy hearts. Oh, wait. I think I’m thinking of the girl.” She dipped the edge of the stiff quesadilla into Anna’s salsa. “You know, the other one? Who makes the movies on her cell phone?”
“I don’t think so.”
“They all hang out together,” Brie said. “God, what’s their name?”
Anna didn’t know.
“Shit. I feel like I just read about them on Daily Intel the other day. This is going to kill me,” Brie said. “I should text Rishi.” Brie went over to her bag and started unzipping various pockets.
“I just love the way, with his movies, it just is what it is, you know?” Anna said, feeling like she was finally finding her groove in this conversation. “He just lets things happen.”
But Brie wasn’t listening. “Shit,” she said, zipping and unzipping. “Where’s my cell phone?”
“Did you bring a jacket?” Anna said, standing up.
“Shit.” Brie was pulling things out of her bag, throwing them on the floor.
Anna made an effort to look concerned. “Should I check the bathroom?” she said.
“No. Fuck. It’s either on the bus or back at the park.”
“You’ll find it…,” Anna said, hoping she wouldn’t have to offer to go back to McCarren Park with Brie to hunt around in the dark grass for her cell phone.
“I can’t believe this,” Brie said, shaking her bag empty over the floor. Crumbs, bobby pins, pennies, receipts, pen caps, one of those inexplicable plastic Japanese toys with a head that was all teeth, a chewed-off thumbnail. Chinese fortunes—too many to count—drifted down like parade streamers.
“I’ll be back,” Brie said, standing up. She grabbed her wallet from the pile on the floor. “Can you stick this back in the fridge for me?” She nodded at the half-eaten quesadilla she’d set down on the couch.
Anna took the quesadilla, opening the door for Brie.
“If Rishi calls the landline, tell him what happened,” said Brie. Before the door eased shut behind her, she passed a reflexive hand over the l
ight switch, leaving Anna in the dark once more.
3
Anna felt her way back across the room toward the laptop glow. She yanked the cord out of the wall, letting it drag behind her as she made her way down the hall. Even though Brie was gone, Anna still made sure the bedroom door was closed before pulling off her pants. She slid her bra out from under her T-shirt and dropped it on the pile on the floor. The bra didn’t have far to fall; the pile was almost as high as the bureau. Taking care of the pile was “on the list,” though the list itself was a kind of bureau-high pile, wasn’t it? Anna lay down on top of the comforter, pulled the laptop onto her bare thighs, and finger-typed Gilman into Hulu. Of course, Clean Rite Meltdown came up first, followed by Rurik and the film she’d just seen. But here was another one she hadn’t watched yet, Age of Consent.
Anna clicked on the title. And as the movie loaded, she wondered how Gilman made any money when everything was always free, right here, on the Internet. How did anyone make any money on the Internet when even Anna had never clicked on a banner ad in her life? Except that one time, for the free pair of Uggs. And in return for filling out some endless form about her customer preferences, what did she get? Nothing but aggressive, filter-eluding spam—not the kind worth collecting—for mortgage refinancing and “authentic quality pharmaceuticals.” Never again, she thought, and hit PLAY.
There were no credits. No theme music. A black screen with the title faded in and faded out too fast. Then there was a man, sitting on a bed, with a paper bag over his head. The man had on khaki shorts and a bright blue T-shirt. The words Sun Microsystems stretched across the roll of fat in his lap in huge white letters. Daylight struggled against the shades, which were pulled all the way down. A lamp with a crooked shade tossed a warped football of light across the wall. The room reminded Anna of one of those shabby motor inns where you drive right up to the door and all the windows face the parking lot. Other than the lamp, the only decorations were the radiator and a potted ivy on the windowsill that may have been plastic.
