A Stranger Like You

by Elizabeth Brundage

  On impulse, you drive down the boulevard and cross over into your neighborhood and turn onto Lomita Avenue and pull up in front of your house. It is a typical Spanish bungalow with a clay roof. If you owned it, you would completely redo it—but it is only temporary, and as soon as the renovation of your villa is finished you will be moving out. Your life will change. Still, you have liked living here. You will miss it.

  It begins to rain again and now the sky is getting dark. You pull out and start back to the old man’s house. By the time you get there, you have decided to buy the car.

  5

  The car makes you happy. Everybody notices it. Even the guards at the studio gate make a fuss about it. It is a marvelous car and handles the road like a dream. You look for excuses to drive it. You make visits to your villa out in Malibu, an arduous journey in traffic, but you don’t mind it. Instead, you admire the sunshine, the glittering ocean, the beach. The villa is a wreck; you got a deal on it. Other, more particular buyers didn’t like the fact that it had been home to an iconoclastic woman with seventeen dogs. She was the reclusive daughter of a Swiss actress who’d been killed in a terrible accident. The daughter’s dogs had been in several movies, beginning with Laddy, the famous yellow Labrador, in the early seventies—the show had been syndicated and you could still see it sometimes on Nickelodeon—once you’d even seen it in Tokyo, dubbed in Japanese. Unfortunately, the old villa still has a slightly doggish odor, and several of the once magnificent bamboo floors have been destroyed, but the view is spectacular. The windows are tall, the rooms full of light. There are narrow walkways down to the beach, overgrown with roses. Whenever you walk the property you can’t help wondering where all the dogs are now, and whatever happened to the daughter. You had met her once, at the closing—she was a white-haired woman in her sixties in a mangy old fur coat who smoked Tiparillo cigarettes and asked the lawyer if he might provide her with a glass of chocolate milk.

  In truth, when you’d bought the place, you felt a little embarrassed. It was something you had to focus on with your therapist. And yet, compared to some of the homes you’ve been to parties at, unbelievable homes overlooking the beach, yours is modest. Even Harold’s house in Beverly Hills looks like a wedding cake and has a swimming pool fit for a community center. You feel a surge of pride—you’d earned your money—you have nothing to apologize for! And yet this guilt persists. “Is it so wrong to live nicely?” you’d asked your therapist, a spiky-haired woman with a pierced nose, and she’d just looked at you, blankly, and said nothing. It dawned on you that, like your modest psychiatrist parents, your therapist made far less of an income than most of her patients, including you, so it wasn’t really a fair question. It wasn’t one she could answer. You have to decide for yourself. Sometimes when you drive through certain undesirable sections of the city, you regret your success. Sometimes you think: It’s not my fault I have so much.

  Of course you didn’t always have it. You started out with nothing like everybody else. After the conservatory, you’d had a string of fragmented industry jobs that kept you going for years: production assistant, wardrobe assistant, script supervisor, secretary, reader, assistant story editor, story editor, development executive, assistant producer, producer. When you’d finally made it to Gladiator you were still something of an innocent, a starry-eyed optimist with big dreams that were gradually disintegrating. Until then, you’d been working for Maura Holt at Fox, developing the Kingpin series based on the graphic novels, having foolishly assumed that working for a woman would be better for your career, that a woman would be more understanding and sensitive about the movies she made—not true—she was like a Titan goddess, wielding her powers like a javelin. Your life took on the characteristics of the films themselves, a kind of strange, grainy, apocalyptic reality. You rarely slept and were continually plugged into indispensable gadgets. Of course you had a million excuses for not living like an actual human being; you were addicted to the possibility that you would get something for all your trouble—for taking so much abuse; for existing in some hybrid plastic sycophantic whirlwind that promised you a future. You had heard Cory Rogers had died—Harold Unger was looking—but in truth you weren’t that interested. Gladiator Films had a reputation for being sexist, not only because of the movies they made, hard-core thrillers and gangster movies that raked it in at the box office, but because none of their top people were female. When Unger called you, explaining that his good friend Leo Zaklos had suggested you to him, you decided that the job was an opportunity. You sensed that you and Harold would work well together, that he’d understand you and, at the very least, appreciate your history—you shared aspects of being marginally accepted in certain circles—nothing you could say to his face—but you sensed that he had experienced things in life that had shaped his perspective in a way other men, straight men, could not absorb.

  During your first month with the company, sequestered in your second-floor office, your bird’s nest as you liked to think of it, with leafy, pendulous avocado branches pressing up against the windows, you spent whole days cleaning out Cory Rogers’ junk (there was a poster of Tracy Lords over his private toilet—it was signed), reading over the scripts he had bought and developed, most of them awful, one of which was slated to go into production the following year. It was a thriller called The Adjuster, written by somebody you’d never heard of, a client of Miles Beck’s, an agent you generally avoided. It was the most disturbing script you’d ever read. The protagonist, an insurance adjuster, abducts a coworker who has refused his advances. He drugs her, puts her in the trunk of his car and parks it at the airport, leaves the keys in the ignition. The car gets stolen by a group of thugs who go for a joyride. From inside the trunk, the woman hears the thugs getting high; the pulsing music; a girl getting raped—she waits in terror, praying they won’t open the trunk—of course they do. After reading a few more scenes, you felt physically ill. You went into Harold’s office and threatened to quit. “Maybe you should find somebody else,” you told him. “I can’t make films like this.”

  Harold smiled knowingly and flipped through the script. “I admire the fact that you have a conscience,” he said. “That’s a rare commodity. It’s why I hired you.”

  Then he took out his lighter and set fire to it. You stood there watching it burn. He dumped the burning pages into the trash can.

  “Happy now?”

  You nodded, somewhat embarrassed, and walked out.

  You had no delusions that you were a creative genius; there were few of those in your business. But you were something of a snob. It was your pedigree, being a member of the Ivy League. And yet, months later, after the release of your first movie, The Hold Up, which was a box-office hit, you had little trouble rationalizing the fact that you were not making Great Works of Art.

  The work was demanding, consuming. At the end of the day, you’d find Harold in his office, his feet up on the desk, his shirt unbuttoned, smoking a cigar, gazing thoughtfully out the picture window. He’d invite you in for what he called “a confidential,” and you’d sit on his Chippendale sofa drinking martinis, confiding too much about your pathetic social life. For a man in his sixties, he had progressive ideas about sex. “People should be having more of it,” he was fond of saying. Rumor had it that when he’d first come out to Hollywood he’d been married—it wasn’t until he’d met Mitchell that he’d come out. You saw in him a man who had come to terms with himself. The struggle had been difficult, but it had informed his professional life. He knew people; he knew how to talk to people. He was like a psychic or a priest. He could look at you and know what you were thinking. As a result, the good people admired and trusted him, and the bad people avoided him. For a stocky, hairy-chested schlepadik from Brooklyn he packaged a hell of a product, and he had the numbers to prove it. But he had a dark side. When he broke out his temper, you didn’t want to be around. When he got his teeth into something he did not let go, not for anything. “It’s the way I was raised,” he tol
d you. “You don’t give up.”

  “You are how you live,” he told you once, and you had silently scoffed, but now, after months of seeing Harold in action, you have come to believe it to be true. What it says about you is another story. Unlike your harried, generic office that reveals as little as possible about you, Harold’s office is comfortable and inviting—the furniture an odd mix of Windsor and Eames chairs, his desk an eighteenth-century gateleg table; the floors covered with kilims. A Joan Mitchell painting hangs on the wall like a dream of summer leaves.

  Once, after a half dozen mint juleps at Vern Rudnick’s famous Kentucky Derby party, he admitted to you that he’d been married. “I did it for my mother,” he told you. “It was a mistake. You can’t do favors like that for people.” He told you he had a daughter named Ruby who wouldn’t speak to him. “You kind of look like her,” he said.

  One Friday afternoon in October, Harold invited you into his office for a glass of wine. “You’re a Jew, right?”

  “Theoretically,” you said, a little put off.

  “Here,” he tossed you some matches. “You’re a woman. Light the candles.”

  It was something you hadn’t done in years. Striking the match, you realized you were nervous, but you remembered the blessing perfectly. For some reason it made you proud and he smiled, pleased at your happiness. “Don’t get excited. I’m not very religious,” you clarified.

  “It’s not really about religion. It’s about ritual. Celebration.” He raised his glass. “La’chaim. Shabbat shalom.”

  “La’chaim.”

  “Rituals are important,” he said. “They’re like the adjectives in a sentence, they keep people engaged.”

  “They’re also dangerous. Look at Iraq; Afghanistan. Look at Israel. Cultures where rituals cause violence, and then violence becomes ritual.”

  “Yes, this is true. Some are healthier than others. But I don’t think people could survive without them.”

  Your only ritual was your nightly glass of vodka. And you couldn’t remember the last time you celebrated anything.

  “I actually minored in biblical studies,” Harold said. “I was considering becoming a rabbi.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded deliberately, one of his endearing characteristics. “But then I realized that it was the stories I liked so much, not the religion—they’d even written special effects into the text.” He laughed. “Good stories. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it? That’s why we’re doing this.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Money has become too much of a factor. Money and art.” He shook his head. “Not a good combination. You have to decide which side you’re on. Me, I’ve made my peace with it. It took me a while, but I’ve finally accepted the fact that entertainment takes precedence over art. You saw Sullivan’s Travels.”

  “Yes, of course, one of my favorites.”

  “I’m making films for the common folk, just like Shakespeare.”

  You smile, even though it is not enough and you both know it.

  “Anyway, it always comes back to Story. Sometimes you have to look back to move forward. You have to go back to when stories were told out loud—great legends,” he says dramatically. “You have to reread people like Homer and Dante and Shakespeare—of course everybody steals from Shakespeare. But I don’t think a pure story exists anymore, do you?”

  “Not in this town.”

  “Everything’s derivative on some level. Ask me how many times I’ve seen King Lear?” Harold reached behind him and held up a rumpled paperback edition of The Odyssey. “Have you read it?”

  “In high school.”

  “They make you read all this great stuff in high school when you don’t appreciate it.” He tossed you the book. “It’s a great story. A masterpiece.”

  “Now that’s what I call good poster copy.”

  You put the book in your bag, but you had no intention of reading it. Instead, you would be reading screenplays that were like airbrushed versions of great paintings. They were like the velvet reproductions they sold out near the airport, furry versions of Van Gogh’s Starry Night displayed on a chain-link fence. Apparently people bought them. They took them home and hung them up in their living rooms. You wondered if they’d ever even seen the original painting or, for that matter, even knew of its existence.

  Harold’s cell phone beeped with an incoming text message. He glanced at it then looked at you again. “We’ve become a culture of sound bites. It’s tragic, really. Have you ever noticed how many sounds there are? These beeps everywhere. It’s maddening.” He looked at you wearily. “It occurs to me that I’m starting to sound like an old man.”

  “The question is, with all our portals of communication, are we actually communicating? I’m the first to admit I’d be lost without my BlackBerry. It’s alarming, actually, how much time I spend typing out these incredibly cryptic messages. The truth is: I don’t want to talk to anyone. I really don’t.”

  As if on cue, his cell phone rang. “I need to take this.”

  “Go.”

  You drank your wine, something knocking around in your brain. Over Harold’s desk was a lithograph bearing the company logo with the word GLADIATOR in large black letters at the bottom. The Gladiator, great muscled warrior, the hero in the arena, unprotected, willing to risk everything to win. To survive. The gory spectacle of it, the carnage. You thought Odysseus. You thought army; marines. You thought suicide bombers, Blackwater mercenaries.

  Harold had gotten up and was standing at the window, nodding his head as he listened to the person on the other end of the conversation. You drank your wine and considered the books on his shelves. There was fiction, poetry, philosophy, books about art and film. Harold had gone to City College. It was unusual to see bookshelves that actually had books on them, as opposed to DVD boxes. Books, epic masterpieces, that’s what had gotten you into this business in the first place—the fat, glorious books you’d read as a kid, great love stories like Anna Karenina and Gone with the Wind. Filmmakers like D. W. Griffith, Billy Wilder, Hitchcock. You couldn’t help wondering what they would have thought of The Hold Up. Was it even possible to turn out movies like theirs anymore? The world was different now. Maybe the people were different, too.

  You could tell from Harold’s placating, mildly ingratiating tone that he was talking to Bobby Darling about the new Braden Quinn film that Gladiator was going to make. A disruption at the window caught your eye. Bobolinks flashed behind the leaves of the avocado tree. The sky was pink.

  “The wine is nice,” you said when he hung up.

  “A good way to end the week.” He finished his glass and stood up, pulling on his blazer. “You got plans tonight?”

  “A little light reading. I have a stack of scripts in my office.”

  “Maybe you need to get out more.” He smiled at you. “Come, take a ride with me.”

  In his hundred-thousand-dollar Mercedes with the top down you submitted to Harold’s itinerary. “I always go to services on Friday night. I’m very superstitious, I never miss.”

  “I haven’t stepped foot in a synagogue in years.”

  “If nothing else you might meet someone. Take it from me; there are some very cute guys in here. And what could be better, they’re all Jewish.”

  “Ha, ha. You sound like my mother.”

  “Anyway, it’s Sukot. It’s a good time. Festive. You’ll enjoy it.”

  The synagogue had a ceiling with a gold dome. Harold put on his tallis and kippah, then took your arm and like an old married couple you walked down the aisle looking for a place to sit. A man got up and stepped aside to let you into the pew. The rabbi was young, passionate, a recent graduate of rabbinical school. You found yourself admiring him. Aside from the fact that it was a little strange being there with your boss, being there period, you tried to relax. You tried to be open to it. You were not a person who could easily submit; perhaps you were a cynic. Any kind of group where there was a focused bel
ief system made you nervous. It was cultlike, creepy. You were not willing to give in to God, to be His servant. You were not necessarily willing to worship Him. What had He done, really, for peace? The world was evil; chaos. The idea of some higher power was too abstract for your literal mind. It wasn’t for you. Instead, even at an early age, you learned to intellectualize, packing your delicate beliefs into a little box to store up in your closet along with your little Torah, your little white bible upon which your name had been inscribed in gold letters. Spirituality made you queasy. And yet, sitting there, hearing the prayers of Sukot, you felt an almost uncanny sense of joy. Even the smell of the air reminded you of autumn back home. You thought about your conversation earlier with Harold, what he’d said about rituals, and you found yourself thinking it was true. Rituals were like landmarks, reliable symbols that gave people a reason to get up every morning.

  You were like a foreigner from a strange land. You had no home, really. Your life felt temporary, ungrounded. It was hard being in L.A. Underneath your capable exterior, you were impossibly fragile—always the first in line to stand in your own way, to defer to someone else. Your sensitivity was both a gift and your nemesis.

  After the service you explored the sukkah, a wood structure designed to commemorate the harvest. There were tables laden with vegetables and fruits, pumpkins and squash. Children ran in and out, laughing. You held a lemon in your hands like a baby bird.