by Owen Thomas
Milton drank his wine and wiped the rim of his glass with his napkin, letting each of his words land on the table like dark accusing birds. Blood gushed into my cheeks.
In that instant, I saw not Milton Chenowith, but my own father, sitting at the end of our dinner table, rubbing the rim of his wine glass like a talisman.
I am omniscient in this memory. I see him from above, from the vantage point of the staircase ascending above the dining room in the days before the big remodel.
I am in my nighty, gripping the white wooden stiles, listening to my father lay into my brother for Inga Van Susteran’s broken window, and the massacre of her exotic fish, and the soaking destruction of her carpeted basement.
The lecture is about trust and actions and consequences. They do not know I am watching. I am not part of the conversation. But, again, I am omniscient in this memory. I can hear my father’s thoughts. I can feel his heart in my own.
David tells him about the football. He lies to my father straight in the face; lying like I didn’t know anybody could lie. He makes it all about the football. Knowing nothing, he is ready to take the bullet. My father pounds the table with the flat of his hand rattling the plates and the silverware and it is like a gunshot going off in my head.
Suddenly I am screaming at him. Pointing. Accusing. My father looks up at me suddenly, his eyes locking on my own. Those eyes know the truth. They see into me as mine see into him. Those eyes know what David cannot possibly explain, even as he takes the blame. Those eyes know my guilt like it is written on my forehead.
“Is this about getting paid?” I asked Milton sharply, indignation surging into my tone. I pivoted from Milton to Simon, who had been replaced by a pallid, lifeless replica fit for a storefront window, his eyes wide and unblinking. “Are you really concerned that I’m going to make an entire movie behind your back?”
“My concern,” said Milton calmly, “is not about the money. CTR is entitled to its commission whether we find you the work or someone else finds you the work, even if that someone else is you. Money is the very least of my concern, I assure you.”
“Then…”
“CTR sets very high standards for itself and it has very high standards for its clients. Any two-bit floozy with nice legs and aspirations of stardom can get a talent agent. They’re a dime a dozen. CTR is all about long-term relationships with quality artists. And that means trust, Tilly. If I can’t trust you, then CTR doesn’t want you.”
“So you’re firing me? You suddenly, out of the fucking blue, don’t trust me and you’re cutting me loose?”
“Now, now. I’m not saying that. No need to get dramatic. All I’m saying, is that for this business relationship to work, we need to have an understanding between us about the importance of trust. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request. Do you?”
“Of course not. I have been honest.”
“Then explain to me why you didn’t simply tell me, when we met in my office, that you had re-auditioned for Blair’s little literary movie.”
“I…I don’t know. I didn’t even think of it. I guess I thought … I guess I thought that I’d never get the part anyway. Even if I did get the part, I’d never give them the satisfaction of actually going through with it. I mean, what is the big deal?”
“So you’re saying that if you got the part you were going to turn them down?” His baritone dripped incredulity.
“It was a distinct possibility. I was pissed. I’m still pissed. I knocked myself out for that part. I was good. When they pulled the plug, I wanted to move on. I told you that. Others were suing. I didn’t want to sue. I wanted to move on. But I couldn’t. I wanted to prove that I was the best person for that role. So I did their stupid little paper audition. But that doesn’t mean I would have taken it. I guess I didn’t see the point of telling you under those circumstances. I was moving on. The audition was for me, not Blair Gaines.”
Milton looked at me hard for what seemed like a long time. Then he emptied his glass and nodded his head as if he had resolved something in his own mind.
“I had not considered that, Tilly. I hadn’t considered that your motivations might be so…complicated. I apologize if my little lecture offended you. You’re young. You’re a pup, and so much of this is new. So much of it is personal and too little of it is strictly business. It needs to be about business, but it takes time. I need to remind myself of that. It takes time.” He took a dramatically long breath. “I’d like to start again, if that’s alright with you. I’d like to keep moving you forward and upward.”
We looked at each other.
“We have great confidence in your future,” breathed Simon, filling the silence.
“Well! Simon!” boomed Milton. “Are you still here? I thought you left hours ago.” Milton swatted Simon on the shoulder and laughed his best Ed McMahon laugh. Simon smiled meekly, looking a little sick. Milton turned back, now his old affable self.
“So then I take it CTR has your permission to tell Mr. Gaines what he can do with his little lion screenplay.”
I nodded. Suddenly feeling a little sick myself.
“Good. Simon, get on that first thing this afternoon. Let’s nip this in the bud. Then let’s find this kid some work, shall we? I want a good short list of leads by Friday.”
Simon nodded repeatedly at these commands like a lab waiting for a tennis ball. Milton looked at his watch.
“Well, I’m late. I’m going to ditch out on the bill and let Simon walk you out.”
He stood, bowed, kissed my hand.
“I’m glad we did this, my dear. I feel like we’re a team again. I’ll look after you like you were my own daughter.”
I nodded and smiled, not knowing my own feelings. He smiled back, confirming our new, extra-honest relationship. He winked at Simon and turned to leave but then turned sharply back.
“I ever tell you about Marlon Brando and Mario Puzo’s goat? No? That one’s a gut-buster. Next time. Next time.”
Milton waved and shambled out. Simon flagged the server and paid the bill. By the time we were back on the street blinking in the midday sun, he had found his voice.
“Well, that was quite the meeting, wasn’t it, Tills? You’re not terribly miffed I hope? Milton speaks his mind. I never saw that coming. I promise.”
“I should have told him the truth,” I said. “I wasn’t really thinking I guess.”
“So, I’ll go back to the office and call Gaines and tell him we’re passing, yeah?”
I nodded.
“Good. Ta’ then, Tills. We’ll be talking. I’m meeting with one of Darnell Lewis’ people next week. They’re already talking about a Pryce Point sequel. Fingers crossed!”
We waved and I watched him cross the street, darting traffic to his car. I yelled after him before I could control the impulse.
“Simon!”
“Yeah?”
“I want to read The Lion Tree script anyway!”
Simon cocked his head, not comprehending. I shrugged.
“Insomnia!”
* * *
I should have followed him back to his office and taken possession of the script that afternoon. Instead, Simon had shouted that he would pop it in the mail and, stupidly, I had nodded, waved and let him go. It arrived two days later.
I opened the envelope immediately, but read not a word. For most of that night, the script sat on my kitchen table beneath a mostly empty carton of lo mein, a sticky pair of chopsticks, two cellophane wrappers, and two fortune cookies that were strewn across the stack of paper in yellowing shards of broken dough.
In my travels to and from the refrigerator, in and out of the kitchen, I glanced furtively at the buried sheaf of paper, reminding myself that since the white rectangle was literally beneath garbage, it must not be very important in the grander scheme of my life.
I pretended to watch the news, absorbing none of it. Not the parade of statistics in the run up to the two-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Not the tr
illion-dollar price tag for the Iraq War. Not the resignation of the scandal-plagued Attorney General. Not the nightly-list of my SAG card-carrying colleagues throwing down for Barak Obama’s presidential bid, or the end of actor Fred Thompson’s short-lived run for the White House. Not even the one billion dollar offer to Governor Schwarzenegger from a coalition of California marijuana growers and dealers to solve the state budget crisis in exchange for pot legalization. None of it was enough to cut through the static in my head.
I turned off the television. Behind me, the kitchen table burned. I could feel the heat on the back of my neck.
I knew that by then, Simon’s news to Blair was over two days old. I also knew that since Blair had not called to try and change my mind, he had given up and relayed the news on to Angus. Blair’s people had no doubt already left messages for and arranged meetings with Ivanova Number Two and her agents. I imagined that since Blair had not gotten his wish with me, he was busy plying Angus with booze and trying every other trick in the book to regain some of the authority he had bargained away.
I felt life moving on.
I had forced myself to delay; to let the kitchen table burn; to let the time pass. Subconsciously, I had probably hoped that Simon would mail me the script rather than handing it to me just so that I could take some time off the clock. I had forced myself to let that part of the world roll on without me.
Milton Chenowith had been playing the game long enough to recognize a bad idea when he saw one. He was right and I knew he was right. I knew that when Blair’s production collapsed all over again and Ivanova Number Two inevitably filed her lawsuit, I would be glad that I had let it go. I would be glad I had been thrown clear of Blair; glad that fate or dumb luck had extricated me from his needs and from my guilt for increasingly loathing the sight of him. I would be glad I had sidestepped the mutually demeaning indignity of Angus Mann and I trading pleasantries on the set, as if I had no idea how much he increasingly loathed the sight of me. I would be glad I had avoided having to take cinematic direction simultaneously from two men, one who loved or needed me too much to restrain his emotions, and one who disliked me too much to be honest, neither of whom were sufficiently detached to provide direction.
I finally gave in a little before eleven, tired of pretending that I did not care but sufficiently convinced that it was too late – no matter what I thought of the script – to go backwards. Forwards and upwards, as Milton had said. Forwards and upwards.
I read the first page standing at the kitchen table, with the only light behind me in the hallway, as though casually leafing through the last of the newspaper before throwing it away. By the second page I was sitting. By the third page I was floating across the threshold of a world that felt like an old dream that had somehow been enhanced and restored. I was thirsty and uncomfortable. The light was too dim and I could feel the headache coming. But I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I was transfixed.
All of the elements were there on the page, type-written, not processed as though words were a kind of chickpea that could be blended and spread like an indiscriminate mash on a piece of bread. I recognized the half-moon periods that ended every sentence. The bashful h’s and the broken j’s.
He had reincorporated everything that made the original short story such a marvel. All of the original plot. All of the characters. All of the pathos. And yet, the sameness was somehow different. It was like the opposite of seeing a ghost, a mere apparition of someone you once knew. Instead, The Lion Tree of my memory was the ghost and suddenly, before me, I found that it had taken real and substantive form.
The entire story had been scrubbed clean of Hollywood’s fingerprints. Gone was the tin foil pandering ornamentation soldered on by Blair’s erstwhile screenwriting team. The spate of wittily teasing repartee. The camera’s unquestioned bias for physicality in the depiction of love and longing. The gratuitous subtext of menace and danger, as though Lieutenant Miller just might be psychopathic. The “montage of tedium and hair maintenance,” as Angus had once called it, to show the ungodly time it takes to cover any expanse of interstellar space. All of that was gone.
Gone too were all of Blair’s well meaning but clumsy fixes, narrative bridges, flashbacks, voice-overs, and work-arounds. It was all Angus now, from the first to the last. From the fecundity of old Africa to the sterility of Rhuton-Baker. From one abandonment to the next, one love to the next, one regret to the next. It was all Angus.
To be sure, the screenplay was a translation. But it was a beautiful translation into something new. A new medium, yes, but something else as well. Something as good or better than the story itself. Angus had restored The Lion Tree to a seamless and simple piece of storytelling, with clean thematic arcs and spartanic, streamlined dialogue. So many words were gone. Eradicated. He had massacred them, mowing them down by the hundreds and thousands. Angus was a writer for whom words were precious and therefore few. For his characters, words were merely weightless spores blown about by emotion, as far apart from each other as planets. The drama lay not in the words themselves but in the journey across empty space from one word to the next. Cinematically, words were merely pivot points for the far more supple and elegant language of the human face. Thematically, the words were a handful of small, smooth stones that Angus had skipped across the surface of nothingness showing, purely by contrast, what ripples and splashes in the empty spaces of the interstellar heart feel like and the unbearable toll the sound of those disturbances can take.
It was impossible for me not to see the finished product in my head as my eyes passed over the scaffolding of Angus’ words. The story I had read so many times, beginning so long ago, unspooled in the dim space above my kitchen table in a kind of slow-motion, cinematic poetry of light and image and sound. Like something large and slow and aquatic swimming effortlessly in moonlight. It positively gleamed.
Most rewarding of all was to hear Ivanova’s voice in my head. It felt like it had been a very long time. I had grown used to hearing the voice of Sienna Pryce every morning, month in and month out, her plucky perfection and razor wit, her fetish for the double-entendre, and a wink in every other syllable, pushing Ivanova deeper and deeper back into the cottony darkness of my memory. But upon reading her first few words, Ivanova came back powerfully and somewhere in that cottony darkness the lights flickered on.
I wanted her.
The thought came to me, in scene after scene, like a heartbeat pushing out through my fingertips.
She was mine. She was me.
The very thought of someone else, anyone else, speaking her words made my stomach collapse into itself.
Then I remembered that Elena Ivanova was no longer mine to have. Simon Hunter, at the bidding of Milton Chenowith and with my own cowardly consent, had given her away. My heart sank, aching as it fell.
I considered whether I could simply call Simon in the morning and tell him I had changed my mind. I could tell him to tell Blair that we had gotten our wires crossed. What would be the harm?
Simon would hesitate. He would call Milton. Milton would stall and then he would call me to talk me out of it. I told myself that over the past three days, Angus and Blair had moved on. Ivanova Number Two was already working her way through a second hi-lighter and the agents were firming things up. Hands had been shaken.
All of which may well have been true, although, in my heart of hearts, I knew that the real reason I could not call Milton had less to do with it being too late to try than it did with my fear that it was not too late at all and that Milton – he of the silver tongue and impeccable business logic – would actually succeed in talking me out of The Lion Tree all over again.
I imagined the conversation. Milton would dangle a unique opportunity, one that no sane actor in my position would pass up, but one that presented an obligation that absolutely conflicted with Blair’s new production schedule. Milton would present me with a choice at the proverbial fork: one road led forward and upward and the other road, the road to The Lion
Tree, ended in cinematic oblivion. That road, he would say, led backwards and downwards. It meant more headache and less money for everyone. He would smile kindly and place his tremulous hand on mine and give me the line again about spotting the sharks and the charlatans and about looking out for me as if I was his own daughter. He would make it a test of my true character, reading me at eye level for signs of self-deception and naïve, wrong-headed thinking. He would praise me for coming to him first this time, so that he might give me the benefit of his honest advice, but only to make it abundantly clear that if I rejected that advice I was a fool. A fool in whose actions and character he would be very, very disappointed.
I stood up and grabbed the phone from the kitchen wall, dialing from memory.
“Blair.”
“Wha…who…Tillyjohn?” He was slow. Disoriented.
“Yeah.”
“It’s … Christ. It’s past three in the morning. What’s wrong?”
“I want the part.”
“You want…I talked to Simon Hunter just…”
“Fuck Simon Hunter. And Milton too. I want Ivanova.”
A woman’s voice is in the background, distant and groggy.
“Tilly…we’re already talking with another gal. I thought you were passing.”
“That’s not her next to you is it?”
“Who? No. Fuck. What’s it to you anyway…”
“Because it would be a whole lot faster if you could just roll over and tell her that she doesn’t have the part.”
