by Susan Braudy
“What? No way.”
“She asked a lot of mean questions.” Rosemary was smearing spearmint chapstick on her lips.
I was surprised she was still obsessing. “Like what?”
“She asked me if I had any weird jobs. Or if I was ever in trouble.”
“Try punching her first,” I told Rosemary while we looked down the empty street for the rest of the parade. “Ask her what’s wrong as soon as you see her. Get her defensive.”
The saxophone faded. I heard restless chatter from the crowd and car horns. My fingertips numbed with cold.
A black boy asked Rosemary incredulously, “That’s it, that’s the whole parade?”
I was picturing Michael smoothing his sleek hair as he searched the New York airport lobby for his driver. I could outwit him—I just had to concentrate. A trumpet player splashed into a New Orleans funeral dirge. The solitary musician marched toward us. His tune was as pure as an Irish love song. He looked about ninety-three, gaunt, and stooped over, and he carried a small cardboard sign: “Montgomery Misses Martin.”
Then he laid down his sign and his trumpet on the street, turned toward the crowd, and began slowly applauding us. My eyes smarted. Rosemary hit my elbow. “Martin Luther King was your era,” she said.
A wave of feelings hit me. God, my life had changed since I took a bus down and marched on Washington and sat on the grass holding the little movie camera and listening to loudspeakers blasting Dr. King’s voice. It was twenty years since I cried over his passionate speech. He was a brave modern hero. I felt superior to my parents because their enthusiasm for him was qualified, uneasy. A few years later I remember opening Time magazine to a picture of him in a cutaway receiving the Nobel Prize. I was proud of him, a rich black American minister who sacrificed the easy life for justice. He loved his people. I found one wool glove smashed in the bottom of my raccoon coat, and put it on. Rosemary handed me a folded Kleenex. Why had I identified with him back when I was flying high on a liberal education and no life experience? I hadn’t thought about him in years. Lately my causes have been selfish. Don’t forget, I said silently, you’re fighting to finish a movie about Jesus, the standard-bearer for altruism.
But Jesus wouldn’t take a shine to studio politics. And maybe my fixation on the movie was just simple ambition. Boy, when I was younger I sure was different. I hadn’t even noticed myself changing either.
Rosemary pointed across the street. Among the crowd of spectators stood Ivy, our receptionist, with her children. Ivy was pushing a handkerchief under her small green eyeglasses. She was my age. We had our memories.
Then Ivy waved her handkerchief and Rosemary and I joined the rhythmic clapping.
“I’m glad we’re here,” I said.
“What was so great about Martin Luther King?” Rosemary asked.
“He was a Christ figure. He went pretty far out of his way for his fellow human beings,” I said, watching the old black man pick up his Montgomery sign and march away down the street.
We walked three blocks to the government passport office. Outsmarting Michael Finley required a hit of kryptonite. Rosemary hummed happily. It was a Thanksgiving hymn I recognized from elementary school.
Four
Flash cut hands trying on fancy rings. Under big crystal chandeliers.
Michael Finley bent over a Tiffany’s counter at gleaming emeralds in thick yellow gold. There were fresh comb lines in his hair, slicked straight back like an Italian gigolo. “You like that one?” He tapped a manicured fingernail on the glass. I sensed a trap. To me they all looked the same.
“Sure, why not?”
“I hate it.” He smoothed his cashmere lapels. I balled my hands into fists. I was still unhinged by his arrival. When Rosemary and I returned from the passport office at four-thirty, there he was, sitting at my spot on my couch, smiling proudly at my shock.
“What a surprise,” I lied, kissing him robustly on the cheek. He smelled from new lime cologne. Without answering, he’d dragged me out shopping. Deeply insecure and always competing with somebody, the man lived for buying the best things, dropping famous names, grooming himself, playing power games, preferably on girls (this was the closest he came to extramarital sex). Since he’d worked abroad, he prided himself on looking more stylish than his Malibu neighbors. He wore English tweeds like a country squire. In fact he was Irish.
“Hold that emerald in your hair,” he commanded.
I obeyed. He scrutinized the jewelry, and sneezed twice. I handed him a tissue. “How’s your allergy?”
“Terrible, it acts up on planes.” He smiled gratefully as he squeezed the chunky emerald in one palm.
There is a certain kind of man who knew love first as nursing from an anxious mother. For the rest of his life he flirts with women by showing his ailments.
“You see Arnie much?” He loved courting the big local agent.
“Once a week.” I leaned my thigh against the glass counter. We were in for a lengthy purchase.
“Twice a week,” Michael Finley said firmly. “He like you.”
“He likes me well enough.” I didn’t say the man had offered to keep me once. We were having our weekly lunch of borscht and blinis at the Russian Tea Room. “I’ll come over Friday nights and I won’t bother you much. I’ll feed you my best clients.” He had depressed and flattered me.
“Men are drawn to you,” Michael said, flushing. I knew Michael had hired me because he had a crush. This was true of all the women he hired. He liked having me along at dinners when his wife stayed home in Los Angeles. I was his business courtesan.
“Anita might switch to Arnie,” I said, fishing bravely. Michael loves gossip, and so far neither of us had mentioned my movie.
“What’s with Anita?” he asked in an ominous purr, holding the emerald to his eyeball.
“Never been better.” I kept smiling. I was Method acting. Trying to remember what I liked about Michael Finley. I loved the ringing “yes” he shouted when I asked him to spend thousands of dollars on an idea I wanted to buy. I liked his wife, whom he obeyed when she ordered him to stop asking questions about my sex life at dinner. She was a former beauty contestant from Oregon with strong calves who converted to Catholicism before he proposed. These days she ran with him barefoot by the Pacific Ocean despite chronic back pain. I also liked Michael’s cleanliness. He seemed above the ordinary problems of the flesh like hangnails, body odor, and flab. Besides his daily manicure, the man ran twice a day and showered three times. He often stopped at a cleaner’s before a big meeting to press his suit. I liked when Michael Finley took a rare drink and cracked Jack Benny jokes he claimed his dad had written.
Unfortunately I dislike his sprees at Tiffany’s and Gucci’s. I am tired of watching him buy and return watches and shoes.
Suddenly I wanted to get away from him. I couldn’t think straight.
“Where are you going?” He raised his voice.
“To comb my hair.”
“Don’t be such a girl.”
“I’m not going to press my suit,” I said shortly.
“Okay, okay.”
I dashed past the crowds of rich out-of-towners to the ladies’ room. Michael Finley had been a huge adjustment. Five years ago, he’d hired me and asked if I wanted to succeed on the job.
“Oh, yes.”
“Then just make sure I like you.”
Now I stood by the bathroom mirror and smeared colorless lipstick on my mouth, trying to look less worried.
My second week on the job I had a nightmare that I torched his curving Italian couch while he sat on my bed in my apartment stroking my hair. I hoped to God I didn’t harbor a sick attraction to his cruel authority.
Some days nothing I did was right. Michael criticized my clothing before our meetings. He made me dial his calls in front of his cronies and joked with them about my secretarial skills until I spoke up. In good moods he warned me he’d given me my big break by hiring me away from the newspaper. In great m
oods he bragged to his colleagues about my fancy degrees.
Back at the emerald counter, he had narrowed his selection down to two green hunks. The tension was killing me. I wondered when he was going to hit me over the head with Anita’s disappearance.
“What do you think?”
I had had it with emeralds. “They look ostentatious or fake.”
He blinked. “She’s right, we’re going to pass,” he told the salesgirl. “How do you like Vicky?” I was following him as he made a beeline for the watch counter. “Nice chest, no?” To him women employees were walking dirty jokes, but progressive corporate policy. I watched him watch my fingers while I tucked some stray hairs behind my ears. I knew he pictured jumping into bed with me. I know one of my assets with powerful men is the fact they find me attractive. I play on it, but hypocritically. I dress in loose dark clothing and I talk like a library training student.
“Vicky’s my kind of person, a smart girl,” I said firmly.
He looked disappointed, and I knew why. He liked his subordinates fighting. It gave him more control.
He slipped a thin black sport watch over his tan wrist. Then he faced me. I felt suddenly as if a siren had gone off. My neck muscles knotted. His face flushed as he thundered, “I’m flying to Israel tomorrow night to fire that girlfriend of yours, and then I just may come back and fire you.”
My stomach contracted and rose up into my chest. “That would be incredibly self-destructive. There’s interest in the movie for Cannes and we’re twenty days away from a wrap.”
“Don’t lie to me.” His lips moved over clenched teeth.
“No, never—”
“I got a call from somebody very important on location.” His small dark eyes bore into mine.
My heart sank. Of course, Jack Hanscomb woke him up too.
Michael pulled the watch off. “Your director disappears and you don’t report it to me?”
“She didn’t disappear, I know exactly where she is.” I lied.
He shoved the watch across the counter to the startled salesman. “Jack had me on the phone for hours,” he said proudly. “Jack has had it with her. And what Jack wants, Jack gets.”
He spotted a bigger black watch in the case. “That’s it,” he said. My mind whirled. If he flew to Israel, he’d miss his fancy black-tie five-hundred-dollars-a-plate dinner where they were honoring him in two days as humanitarian of the year.
“What’s Jack’s problem?” I asked crisply.
“She’s toying with him, making him stand by while she shoots the baby getting circumcised.” He slapped his American Express card on the counter. I bet he’d return this watch. He had two just like it.
“Then Jack confronts her and she walks off to sulk. She’s throwing sixty thousand dollars of my money down the toilet every day.”
“Michael, he’s fine, I spoke to him, it’s under control.”
He cracked the knuckles of both hands. “You are in defiance of your studio. You have lost touch with your picture.”
“She’ll be back,” I said. “I know her as well as I know myself.”
“She is back.” He clenched his teeth. He smoothed his flattened hair; not a strand moved. “You don’t know what the hell is going on. Jack called me an hour ago. He told me she limped back into camp with a very sore hip.”
He had me there.
He extended his wrist, admiring the new black watch. Then he counted my offenses on his fingers. “She ran away, you failed to report it, she’s back and you don’t know it. Not much of a supervising executive.”
I tried to look smug while I lied. “Oh, don’t be silly, I knew exactly where she was. Nobody disappeared. There was nothing to tell you. She went to an artists’ retreat near the King David Hotel to write a few more women into the script.”
I put on my sunglasses to hide the fright in my eyes.
“Don’t cry.” He shook his head. “This is why I don’t work with women.”
I whipped off the sunglasses. “I have nothing to cry about.”
He slipped his American Express card into his lizard wallet. “I’m flying over to fire her. She’s a million over budget, she’s shot two hundred thousand feet, and she’s got only half the film in the can.” He was spitting his t’s like little threats. “She keeps a fucking superstar waiting for weeks and refuses to shoot his face.”
“Michael, I see dailies, they’re great. Jack’s just frightened because he’s stretching as an artist.”
“You forced this project on me,” he said, putting a full second of time between each word. “You got the idea, you pushed your pal Anita into it, you never thought about it from the studio’s position. You got too much ego in it. Anita never directed a big star before—and I warned you, I never wanted to make this film.”
“You never want to make any film,” I snapped.
“You’re out of line,” he said coolly. “I’d make The Exorcist tomorrow.”
“They already made it, and they made the money too.”
He marched for the door, a little shopping bag over one wrist. “I’m closing her down,” he told me over his shoulder. “Jack won’t work with her, he’s the money. I’m not subsidizing the Sistine Chapel. All I want is a commercial movie, and she’s gone nuts.”
I caught up with him at the revolving door. “Who’s slated to take over?”
“Sam Falco.”
I couldn’t believe it. “He’s all wrong!” I cried. “He’ll make it a horror film with everybody good or evil. He has a fundamentalist view of the Bible. It’ll cost a fortune, he’ll reshoot everything bloody, and he’s even anti-Semitic.”
“We shook hands on it,” Michael said.
“Is he signed?” I gulped.
“Yeah.”
But I saw the nervous dance of his pupils. He was lying. He couldn’t move that fast. My mind jumped ahead. Without Anita nobody needed me. Michael would fire me to prove to his boss he’d eliminated the source of his problems. He’d also be showing Jack Hanscomb things were going his way. The movie would never be made the way I dreamed. Sam is a genius but he throws blood all over his lens. He’s a serious Catholic and he always hated my idea of Jesus as the sensitive Jewish radical.
Out on the cold street he waved to his limousine to follow us and pushed past tourists carrying shopping bags and gaping at Tiffany’s stone façade. I said calmly, “What a shame.”
Michael checked out a man’s Italian kidskin briefcase. He intoned, “I’m sorry you’re a weak administrator. Now I got to save the day, and get that picture finished on schedule.”
I waited until his head swiveled back from the briefcase. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry you’re going to miss that fancy dinner at the Waldorf. Who’s going to pick up your humanitarian-of-the-year award?” I tried to sound mournful.
I stopped in the middle of a crowd waiting patiently for the red light on Fifth Avenue. Michael turned, his eyes flashing at me. When the light changed, the crowd surged forward, but Michael waited, fingering the knot of his navy-blue silk tie. I shivered and tried to look nonchalant. He had been bragging for months about the award dinner. I had heard him say “five hundred dollars a plate” about eighty times.
We crossed Fifth Avenue shoulder to shoulder, each of us silently building bombs. Michael stopped to watch three giggling fashion models with short pageboys, long fur coats, and huge slim portfolios under their arms. At Bergdorf’s I cleared my throat. “I’d volunteer to deliver the bad news, but—”
“But what?”
“I’m pretty shook up,” I said tremulously.
He was chewing the inside of his cheek. “It’s your job,” he snapped. “Clean up the mess you made.”
I felt an explosion in my brain. I wanted to jump up and click my heels. “Oh, God, no,” I said. I dabbed at my dry eyes under my sunglasses.
“It’s your duty,” he said, slowing down to look inside Bergdorf’s. He squared his shoulders. Michael was exactly my height. He looked depressed. “You tricked Jack
into the package, you went out on a limb, now you take a plane and prepare her so I can fire her, I don’t need her hysteria.”
I had a flash of pure joy. I would go to Israel, ignore his orders, and make Anita behave. “I’ll dictate a couple things to tell her.” His voice was high-pitched. “She destroyed the morale on the set. I hear she was screwing Jack.”
“She’s a professional.” My whole face twitched. I had trouble maintaining my composure just thinking about the two of them together.
“Professionals fuck,” said Michael.
“Not on company time,” I said, watching him step into the middle of the busy street, raising his arm to flag his car in a Hitler-like salute.
Twenty minutes later Michael Finley rushed for the bathroom while I sat on my coat and sipped warm club soda from a room-service cart in his living room at the Carlyle. An overeager decorator had color-coordinated all the moldings around the windows to match the black-and-beige Coromandel screen that stretched behind the black couch.
“Call down to room service for three cold glasses and a bottle of Moët,” Michael yelled out from the john. That meant a big meeting.
I pressed the phone buttons, my mind counting the hours before I had to jump on a plane. My favorite old loose dungarees needed washing, but I’d wear them anyway. They’re my travel uniform. I’d take my own pillow, a trick I got from reading Margaret Mead’s memoir.
The door chimes rang and Michael Finley rushed out to answer, drying his face on a white towel. I heard the door unbolting. “Howyadoin’, Sammy?”
Sam. I felt something melting between my heart and my stomach. Then Sam Falco stood poised in a huge down coat at the entrance to the living room. I had a flood of feelings. It was great to see his shining blond beard, the huge smile glowing over his face as he unbuttoned his big coat.
“How’s it going?” He covered the living room in several huge strides and enveloped me in a big hug.
I smelled soap in his beard. A minute later he sat next to me on the couch balancing a coffee cup and saucer. He was a manic and gleeful movie genius, and he reminded me of a huge yellow bear who’d tamed himself down for rare human interaction. We almost murdered each other during the time we lived together. He was the only man I’d lived with since my ex-husband.
