The Island Dwellers

by Jen Silverman

  * * *

  —

  MAUREEN IS SOMEONE WHO HAS a lot of ideas. This is something I learn early on. Her ideas do not always go in the same direction, and they don’t always build on each other, but they are numerous and seemingly endless. Her boyfriend, I learn, owns a yacht in Connecticut, and eventually his ideas start filtering into the mix as well. By the second day of my employment, Maureen has called me three times. The first time is to tell me she’s sent a list of new ideas for me to consider. The second time is because she remembered a dream she thought would be helpful for me to mull over, in addition to the list. The third time is because she and her boyfriend were on the yacht, and her boyfriend remembered a dream, and it felt like something that might be in conversation with where we’re going artistically.

  “You gotta cut this off now,” Ev says. He’s sitting on the couch in his boxers, Sunday morning, eight A.M., and I’ve just played Maureen’s three-minute-and-twenty-six-second voicemail on speakerphone.

  “I can’t,” I say. “She’s rich.”

  “She’s calling you about her dreams and you’ve been doing this for less than forty-eight hours.”

  “She likes to, uh, collaborate?” I try to remember some of what Maureen said at the office on Friday. All I can remember is how Zara smelled like balsam. “She likes to really get in on the ground level with a, a writer, and sort of—like, let the writer handle the text, but let the ideas sort of, uh…originate authentically from shared experiences and conversations?”

  “And her boyfriend’s dreams?” Ev scratches the back of his knee. It’s hairier than it used to be, which Ev says means the T is working. “That yacht must make for some great sleeping.”

  “She’s either crazy or she’s a genius?” I suggest hopefully.

  “She’s definitely crazy,” Ev says. “She may turn out to be a genius.”

  “She said I could make thirty thou off this.”

  “Uh,” Ev says, “maybe.”

  “I think she’ll be fine,” I say, deleting her voicemail. “She’s just excited to get started.”

  “Yeah,” Ev shrugs, “okay.”

  * * *

  —

  MAUREEN IS EXCITED TO GET started, but she’s nervous about moving past the starting line. Any decision set in stone is a decision that could have been the wrong one. I learn this after the fourth time that Maureen calls me after receiving a set of pages, and suggests that we “reexamine the concept.” During this phone call, she suggests that I come meet her so we can talk about it in person—“It’s really important to start the right way,” she says, her voice languid and wispy. “And I just feel like maybe this isn’t the right protagonist? And also can there be a sort of a love story that starts earlier, like maybe the first image is a slow pullback from these two people in bed? I feel like what if there was a guy, and he was in love with the girl, and the girl was the one we were following?”

  “Instead of the robot,” I clarify, scratching notes across the back of an envelope.

  “The girl could be the robot?” Maureen considers this for a moment. “The girl could be the robot but we wouldn’t know it.”

  “Is that sort of…?” I’m not sure how to phrase this, but: “Has that sort of…been done?”

  A note of impatience is injected into the wisp. “Everything has been done. The point is how you do it.”

  “Right,” I say, as if that’s something I knew already. “No, yeah.”

  “Anyway,” says Maureen, already moving on, “I just feel like, before you start writing, let’s get really focused and specific about the approach. I’m not in the office today, but if you want to come meet me in Chelsea, we can kind of just get down to brass tacks.”

  I’m torn between the desire to remind Maureen that I already started writing four beginnings ago, and the question that I end up voicing: “What’s in Chelsea?”

  “Oh,” Maureen says, “I just moved.” She sighs. “Moving is really stressful.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “wow. Sure.” A moment. “Are you…um, are you shopping in Chelsea, or…?”

  “My new place,” Maureen sighs again, “my new place is in Chelsea. I’ll text you the address, just come meet me and we can—I mean I don’t have any furniture yet? Or groceries. But we can just—well, there’s Seamless. And we can sit on crates. And I just think if we’re in the same place we can make some great decisions.”

  “Great,” I echo. “That sounds great. I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  —

  MAUREEN’S BUILDING IS A GIANT cage of glass and steel filigree. Her apartment has an upstairs and a downstairs, which I didn’t even know was possible in New York, and a roof-deck that seems to belong only to her apartment. Boxes sit around the open kitchen/dining space, untouched. Maureen is curled disconsolately in a deck chair when the doors to her private elevator open and deposit me in the hallway. She brightens immediately.

  “I don’t have any furniture,” she announces. “I think I’m getting a cold? I ordered a juice, do you want a juice? I already ordered mine, but you could get one.”

  “I’m good,” I say, “thank you.” Today I’m wearing one of Ev’s sweaters that got shrunk in the dryer—salmon, corded—and the same jeans I wore to our risotto dinner. I look like a tiny gay frat boy.

  “I got my cards read,” Maureen says, still from her deck chair. She takes a sip of a light green juice. “They told me there’s a lot of change coming.”

  “You mean like moving?”

  Maureen shrugs. “I was like, ‘I just moved and I’m making a movie, do you mean those sorts of change?’ The lady was like, ‘Worse.’ ”

  “Oh no,” I say, genuinely a little alarmed.

  “I feel like that’s something we could put in the movie,” Maureen says, not reacting to my alarm. “I feel like that could be a scene, where the protagonist gets her cards read, and the lady tells her change is coming, and she’s like, she asks if it’s something good, and the lady just says, ‘No.’ She could look at the protagonist and just say, ‘No.’ ”

  “The robot?” I ask, clarifying.

  Maureen looks at me blankly. “What robot?”

  “You—this morning, when we talked…? The girl and the boy and the…a love story with a robot?” Maureen’s face isn’t changing expression, and I’m getting increasingly flustered. I briefly wonder if I hallucinated this last phone call. Maybe Maureen has penetrated my dreams. Maybe I am dreaming that she is calling me to tell me about her dreams.

  “Oh,” Maureen says. “Well. That was just an idea.”

  “Right,” I say, “no, sure.”

  “It’s sort of been done though,” Maureen says, a little reprovingly. She shouldn’t have to tell me these things—if I’m writing her first film, I should already know this.

  “No yeah, totally.”

  A moment. Maureen climbs off her deck chair. She walks a circle in the open kitchen, framed under the light pouring down from the glass ceiling. She touches the counter, the fridge, the teakettle, and finishes up back at the deck chair, as if she’s pulled off some private ritual.

  “I’ve been so anxious,” she says. “I mean not in any sort of weird—but I just feel like everything is so tenuous right now.”

  “Oh.” I’m unsure what to say. I wait for her to suggest that the protagonist of our movie, whether human or robot, might also struggle with anxiety—but she doesn’t.

  “I think Joshua is getting tired of this,” she says, in that same tone. I try to remember if she’s named the protagonist Joshua, if we’ve agreed on a Joshua—and then she says, “My boyfriend.”

  “Oh,” I repeat. “Tired…?”

  “Of this.” Maureen makes an encompassing gesture, and at first I wonder what’s wrong with walls and ceilings made out of glass, hardwood floors the color of warm honey, an apa
rtment with two levels and a wraparound balcony. Then I realize that her little hand, with its rose-dust manicure, has returned to land on her buttoned cardigan. She’s talking about herself.

  She sits back on the deck chair. Silence waxes and wanes between us. Then she says, as if we never switched subjects at all, “I just think it’s important to think of this as a feminist movie, from a feminist viewpoint, and I have some notes about the, the sort of male characters that you’re sort of inserting.”

  “There don’t need to be male characters,” I say promptly, agreeably. I made a list last night about what I will do with the first thousand dollars, when I receive it. The first five hundred dollars are about food. But then I thought I should probably give five hundred to Ev, to offset his rent and apologize for the square footage of his apartment that I have occupied. That still leaves twenty-nine thousand dollars with which to dream.

  Maureen is staring out the window. She looks both expressionless and somehow crushed. I wonder if I went too far. Maybe there should be one male character. Maybe the male character can be a feminist.

  “His ex-girlfriend was in real estate,” Maureen says to the window. “She was probably a lot less complex, because she wasn’t an artist.” She turns from the window to me. “We,” she says, “are artists. And that makes us complex.” And then she pulls her phone out of her pocket and announces, “It’s time to Seamless. I’ll place the order, you can just give me cash.”

  * * *

  —

  ZARA IS IN THE OFFICE when I arrive, pages clutched in my hand. I’ve been reading and revising on the subway, trying to anticipate whatever concerns Maureen might have—or whatever new directions she might want to go in. There are twenty-five pages, which is more than enough to establish a beginning, set up characters and hint at themes, and is also the furthest we’ve ever gotten.

  When Zara sees me, she says, “Have you been sleeping?”

  This is not exactly what I have fantasized about Zara saying to me. If I have thought of Zara over the past week, it may have involved scenarios in which I’m wearing Dead Poet glasses, and she says, “I stayed up all night reading your screenplay after Maureen left, I couldn’t put it down.” Or ones in which she says, “There was something distinguished about you from the beginning, I’ve never known Maureen to have such good taste.” Or she says, “I guess I always assumed I was straight, but I just can’t stop thinking about you.”

  “You look terrible,” real-Zara says. “Coffee’s over there.”

  I make myself a cup of Keurig, trying not to think about the immense environmental waste. Instead, I think about the slender lines of Zara’s bra, which are visible through her thin navy T-shirt.

  “I’ve had some late nights,” I say casually, as if they’re common in my profession.

  “Yeah,” Zara says, “I bet you have.” She lowers her voice, after glancing over our shoulders to make sure we’re alone. This moment has also figured in whatever fantasies I may have had…but not what she says next. “Is she leaving you the voicemails? Like, two A.M., three A.M.? All the voicemails?”

  The “she” in this sentence is unmistakable. “She’s left me a few voicemails,” I say, “but mostly between eight A.M. and midnight?”

  “Oh,” Zara says. “Man. Okay. Just wait.”

  “I mean…it’s fine?” I say. I’m not sure if this is a test. “Just like…general thoughts about the pages?” Maybe Maureen is listening? Maybe she’s having Zara report back to her what I say? Or maybe this is just a conversation, a confidential conversation between two people who are gently negotiating what kind of future relationship they might have, but maybe Zara doesn’t like whiners, maybe she’s not attracted to people who complain, so either way: “It’s not too bad,” I say.

  Zara shrugs. The shrug is world-weary. It says Okay, chump. Maybe Zara doesn’t like people who are too naïve, who never complain, who get walked all over.

  “I mean,” I say, “it can get kinda…you know.”

  “Oh believe me,” Zara tells me, “I know.” A moment in which I see her try to decide if she wants to say something or not. And then she leans forward, her voice sinking to a hush, her breath brushing my cheek, and she whispers, “The thing is, if you aren’t careful—”

  “Oh hi,” says Maureen’s tiny voice behind us. Zara pulls away from me as if she’s spring-loaded.

  “She couldn’t figure out the Keurig,” Zara says, with cool disdain.

  “I couldn’t figure out the Keurig,” I say, and make a face.

  Maureen ignores both of us, and nods toward the pages in my hand. “I’ve had some ideas,” she says, “that I’m excited to share with you, before we go ahead and read those.”

  * * *

  —

  THE KIND OF CALLS THAT Zara was talking about start two weeks later. We’ve reached thirty-three pages, although in the days leading up to the first call, Maureen mentions a number of times that we can’t get locked in before having landed on the best possible idea, which implies that all thirty-three could get torpedoed. We have a woman and we have a man (Maureen felt that two women as protagonists might seem “strident”), there are no robots (they were never mentioned again), someone is a graffiti artist in a dystopian world (Maureen has asked me to write a set of pages in which the graffiti artist is a man, and a different set in which it is a woman, so we can see which feels “authentic”), and the scenes with both characters are interspersed with vivid dream sequences taken from Maureen’s own dreams. She records them in a tiny blue notebook and in the morning she leaves me voicemails in which she describes the dreams, and I transcribe them faithfully. This has fallen into a pattern normal enough that, when the phone rings at one A.M. and it is Maureen, I’m actually surprised.

  Ev ordered in a date from Grindr, and the two of them have been eating Thai food and fucking in his bedroom, so I’m not exactly asleep. But I’m also not ready to reopen the question of whether we have the right “central idea.”

  Maureen, however, is not calling about the screenplay.

  “Do you know how to poach an egg?” she asks.

  “An egg?”

  “I’m trying to poach eggs and they keep falling apart.”

  “Oh,” I say, “well. Uh. How much vinegar are you using?”

  “…Vinegar?”

  I talk Maureen through the three steps of poaching an egg, the second of which involves copious amounts of vinegar. Eventually I have to ask, “Why are you poaching eggs right now?”

  “Joshua is staying over,” Maureen says. She sounds distracted and a little flustered.

  “Oh.”

  “And I haven’t seen him in a little while and I felt like…it would be nice to sort of…after we…sort of a midnight, late-night snack.”

  “Oh.”

  “And then all the eggs fell apart.” Maureen’s voice soars by a few octaves, even though she’s keeping it tight and low. If this were anyone else, I would think she was crying. It’s hard for me to imagine Maureen in a cardigan, with her rose-dust manicure, clutching her cell phone and whisper-crying in the kitchen. And yet…my heart goes out to her.

  “I think you’ve got it now,” I say.

  I go over to the office the next day. It’s not that I think we’ll suddenly be best friends, but I imagine a certain warmth between us—a shared joke, maybe—I’m ready to ask Maureen how the poached eggs turned out. But she’s as cool and distant as ever, and she begins right away: “I think the man should have a drug problem. He’s bipolar and he does drugs, maybe heroin or crack or something, and the drugs aggravate his bipolar disorder, and he goes crazy.”

  “Oh,” I say, switching gears. Maureen hands me a blue Bic pen since I’m not taking one out fast enough.

  “I think maybe the girl falls in love with him because he’s so crazy, and she thinks he’s a genius. But actually maybe he isn’t a g
enius, he’s just crazy.” This is similar enough to my conversation with Ev about Maureen that I shoot her a look, but she’s wrapped up in the pages, margins covered in her tiny precise handwriting. “And I think we should try the man being the graffiti artist, but the girl is like—an art history major? She really likes art. So that’s a point of connection between them, and there can be a scene where she goes to his apartment and the walls are covered with index cards, just covered with shit, and she has a realization that he’s crazy.”

  “Is that sort of…Did A Beautiful Mind sort of do that?” I ask, as mildly as possible. Maureen falls silent. She just looks at me. I feel the misstep immediately. “But I guess we’d do it better,” I say. “I mean, the whole point I guess is that everything has been done before, but it’s how you do it.”

  “What do you think of Zara?” Maureen asks.

  I blink at her, taken completely aback. “Zara…?”

  “I don’t know…” Maureen wrinkles her little nose, somewhere between a grimace and a shrug. “I just don’t know if she’s committed to this company.”

  “She’s always seemed pretty committed to me?” I’m aware of the eggshells, and I tread as carefully as I can. “I mean…you know her better than I do, but…”

  “Yeah.” Maureen lets the silence hang and then she says politely, “Thank you,” and I’m aware that I’ve been dismissed.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN MAUREEN CALLS AGAIN, IT’S two A.M., and she doesn’t wait for me to say much more than “Hello?” before she launches in.

  “I’m having a sharp pain,” she says.

  “Where is it?”

  “In my abdomen? No, in sort of…under my ribs. But kind of in my abdomen.”

  “What side is it on?”

  “Left? But sort of…but I guess, no, it’s mostly on the left.”

  I bring WebMD up on my phone. “Nausea? Fever? Vomiting?”