You Lost Me There

by Rosecrans Baldwin

Not a shred of reluctance to hold me back.

  At two in the morning, I walked laps along the property line. The night was quiet and brittle, then down near the southeast corner it snapped. I heard a loud smacking noise. In an envelope of yellow light a quarter-mile away, out past the marsh, a shadow leaped around. The sound repeated itself, finishing as soon as it started, like someone being slapped, but it was louder, like a gunshot.

  Another one. Then another.

  During college I would dream about Ben, the worst nightmares of my life. They’d have me waking shivering, some nights spastically. In the dream, he’d walk me through each step, holding my hand, showing me what he was doing while loading the gun and putting it into his mouth. He’d explain to me what he planned to do next, but I wouldn’t be able to understand him. “You’ve got a gun in your mouth,” I said. I woke up after he fired.

  My roommate eventually insisted I visit the health clinic; he was sick of waking up with me screaming.

  “Where do you think they come from?” the counselor asked.

  I didn’t have an answer. “I want to know how it happened,” I said.

  “You’ll never get that,” he said. “The good news is, that’s not what you’re really looking for.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  He looked surprised. “You want to know the reason why he killed himself.”

  On the fourth shot, I jerked around, then I was able to place it: just someone playing basketball.

  four

  And here, number four, if I don’t know where to start, should I begin? Is it a change of direction this time, or just another step in the way we’re headed?

  Or perhaps is this THE ONE change of direction, is what I’m really thinking. And if it is THE ONE, is it too big for these cards? These aids that help me return to bed and say everything is all right, go back to sleep?

  I can’t be in the same bed with him. I feel betrayed. Humiliated.

  You’re a fluke, always have been, Victor said in so many words.

  I don’t know where to start. But sure, start with the story, start with the get-up-and-go. Change of direction number four, and it’s only just occurred.

  “I did not mean to start a fight,” he said. “Now, please sit down. You’re being hysterical.”

  “I can assure you, this is not hysterical,” I said.

  “He” in this instance was not Victor, he was “Toad,” hosting us this evening for dinner. “Obviously people have lied to you,” said Toad, grinning at me. “Victor has lied to you.”

  I tried to work today. I fiddled with some half-baked drafts for two hours, some touch-up work I’ve taken on recently for the hell of it, until once again I realized it was soulless flab. I sent and received e-mails. I was called in for my thoughts about new digital features for a Blu-Ray release of The Hook-Up’s DVD. I went to yoga, I watched an old episode of Moonlighting. On the kitchen calendar was penned, “Dinner with Toad, 83 Sargent Drive, Northeast.” Toad being Dr. Low, Victor’s boss.

  They call him Toad because he’s fat with a hunchback and has bumpy eyes. Some federal committee Victor wants to join is in Dr. Low’s hands, in terms of handing out appointments, and Victor’s worried, believing Toad has it in for him. We’ve met before at faculty functions, me and the Toad, back when Victor was being recruited to Soborg, but he never remembers my name. Personally I find him charming. Victor warned me I would, perhaps was afraid that I would. He reminds me of Uncle Bill. Each time we meet, I think, Ah, yes, the gentleman sailor with a gin problem.

  Victor was already standing there in the foyer under a Tiffany chandelier. His face was tight, but he relaxed when he saw me. At crucial moments, I thought, I’m a good crutch for him.

  “Just be yourself,” Victor said.

  When he’s nervous, his voice is far-flung , emerging from a cave.

  “It’s going to be fine,” I said, rubbing his arm. “You’ll get the appointment.”

  “Not tonight.” He looked over my head down the hall. “Tonight he wants Hollywood. You’re the reason he invited us. He told me on the phone.”

  “That’s why we’re here?”

  “Practically speaking, I may as well go home.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, “I’ll do the floor show, maybe afterward he’ll give you that chair.” Then I tried to move him down the hallway, but Victor was stuck. He paused before a mirror and fixed his shirt. I noticed the scuffed hems on his khakis, thinking, I should replace those tomorrow. Realizing those pants are ten years old. He hasn’t changed an inch. The same man I met in Macy’s, my own Jimmy Stewart, and I’m complaining he never altered, never grew?

  Who ever wanted Jimmy Stewart to change one bit?

  So you see, I began the evening in good humor.

  Toad was sitting in a white, book-lined parlor by a fireplace, surrounded by ferns and orchids. I thought, They got the nickname wrong, he looks like a garden turtle, shrunk into its house.

  “Now, I don’t see why they call you Toad at all,” I said when we were shaking hands.

  “What? Victor, is that true?” Toad’s head swiveled on his shell, and poor Victor didn’t know where to look. Toad scowled for a moment, then started laughing. “Oh, look at Victor,” he said to me, chuckling. “God, man, have a drink. Now, I like you,” he said, taking my hand, “not many gals have guts. You know, there’s still a prince here waiting for the right girl.”

  “We’ve met before, actually.”

  “Is that right? I’m sure I’d remember you.”

  The room could have been a greenhouse. Victor excused himself, removed his jacket, and went to the sideboard to make drinks. Toad motioned toward a chair for me. He was still clutching my fingers.

  So pause there while we’re holding hands, Victor rolling up his sleeves, already sweating, rummaging around with tongs in an ice bucket, and let me get this right, but with the smallest preamble. This season has been pretty shitty. I want to say this up front, that I’m among the culpable here, right up to the moment I parked in the cul-de-sac. That it’s me whom we should keep an eye on. For weeks this fall I’ve played the bitch, instigated arguments about nothing. Fights over toothpaste rolls. Something Victor’s done for ages suddenly becomes too much one evening (how he splatters water on the mirror when he brushes his teeth, or how he loads the dishwasher like it’s a gym bag), and I explode. Now I know the cause on my end—this endless block is finally coming to a head—but when Victor doesn’t fight back, it’s so much worse, when a fight’s exactly what I crave. When I wish he’d clamp me down, scream how much he can’t take me anymore, and instead he does nothing or says he’s sorry, and once again I’m the only one who’s pissed off. Feeling guilty for being angry, as though being mad is a sign of madness, of anti-wellness among those of us who don’t swim our laps every morning.

  No, all this new Victor wants is to retreat. To put further distance between us when already we’re far apart. To apologize when he’s done nothing wrong so he can be mighty and take more weight upon his shoulders—as though he’s been carrying me these thirty years, so it seems—and abscond. The new remote, reluctant Victor, scuttling back to his desk like a crab, his shell forming since around the time Woman Hits Forty went onstage and slowly hardening ever since.

  I remember, before I was successful, at least Victor would tell me what to do. Be a man as I desired a man. When we moved down to New York from Cambridge, when he was nervous but so inflamed, how I loved that sight of him, risk-taking, hoping to make a difference. And there was hope once again when we moved up to Bar Harbor and Victor got his own lab; we re-fell in love, and there was that active, old yearning. But it faded away. Now he demurely remains hands-off. Should I mention sex? Like I’m a special artistic case to be accommodated. To be indulged, petted, cared for by its handler.

  And would I have my old Victor back in this late chapter? Would I, my controlling, didactic Svengali? Would I?

  The Toad bore a head of white straw, two black button eyes, and a
tie from the Pot & Kettle Club. Uncle Bill in a nutshell. Toad also appeared to have a big appetite for Entertainment Tonight when every time I tried to steer the conversation toward Soborg or federal research committees, he took us right back to film. For an hour in the steam room he quizzed me about all the gossip. He was a movie buff and we breezed right through the checkpoints, Hawks and Hitch-cock and Some Like It Hot. Victor, meanwhile, sweated through his shirt, watching us talk and drinking whiskey.

  “Now, tell me about your family, Sara,” Toad said on our way into dinner. “You’re saying Betsy Gardner is your aunt?”

  A cold breeze blew through the dining room. A window was open somewhere. We ate a roast served by Toad’s housekeeper and discussed local news. After dinner, beckoned back, we returned to the sitting room for cordials. We’d drunk quite a bit by that point. I was tired and wanted to go home, I think Victor did, too, but Toad wasn’t having it.

  “So you wrote The Hook-Up,” he said, passing around tiny glasses of cognac. I threw back mine and requested another, seeing where this was going.

  “My wife, the celebrity,” said Victor, and winked. He was fiddling with the stereo, trying to spike an LP on the record player.

  “Did you see it?” I asked Toad.

  “Just recently. Didn’t like it much, I’m afraid.” Toad laughed, so we all laughed. “No, not very much. Probably it wasn’t my style, as they say.”

  I gave him my rich smile. “Darling, let’s adopt him,” I said, “for those nights when I need a quick boost of confidence.”

  “See, here is my question,” said Toad, “my line of thinking all night. Can and should. What’s the real role of cinema? Now, those are two separate questions.”

  “Try me,” I said. I was thinking, Will he put Victor on the goddamned committee if I play along?

  Toad twirled one of his eyebrows between his fingers. “Well, cinema shouldn’t be waste, to start. Obviously it can be, obviously it’s very easy for movies to be terrible, the sewage we accept based on the classics that came first. The studio pieces, the million-dollar monsters.”

  “Does The Hook-Up qualify?”

  “Well, probably. Why not?” He smiled. “It was a bit of a monster, wasn’t it? But I apologize. I shouldn’t say monster.”

  “A fluke,” Victor piped up, staring down at a record jacket.

  “ What?”

  Honestly I thought I’d misheard him. Victor looked at me and rolled his eyes.

  “Now, by ‘monster,’ I mean at the box office, of course. You see the grosses right there in the paper these days.” Toad removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “But as to quality, well, it was perfectly watchable, which perhaps is what all movies should aspire to. It’s ninety-five percent of the industry. For example, take Greed. Entertaining, of course, but that doesn’t equal great.”

  “Darling , I just meant,” Victor said, “it’s not like we anticipated that kind of success.”

  “Aha,” I said.

  “It was ‘the little movie that could.’ You said so yourself. Tell him how many others you wrote.”

  “But you said fluke,” I said. The Toad was watching us, he appeared peeved to be excluded. “Like it wasn’t deserved.”

  Then Victor gave me a look that said I’d drunk too much, which was true, though so had he, and I threw the look back, extra-strength.

  “That’s not what I meant. We were very, very lucky—”

  “You mean I was very lucky.”

  Part of me was cold. Most of me was thinking, Finally, let’s do this, who cares if it’s in your boss’s sitting room.

  Victor paused. “Fine. You were lucky.”

  “And aside from luck?”

  “Will someone tell me what you both are talking about?” asked Toad.

  Victor spun on his toes. He didn’t know where to look. “Dr. Low, I apologize. If you’ll excuse us—”

  “I’ll excuse nothing. I am not in need of pampering , thank you. I believe your wife asked you a question.”

  “Yes, Victor,” I said, “about this luck.”

  Victor squeezed his nostrils and closed his eyes. It’s the same look when he’s on the phone with customer-service people. “For argument’s sake, then, no, probably there wasn’t much going on besides luck if—and it’s an essential if—we’re going by ticket sales alone, and nothing else. I’m only relating here what you’ve said before, Sara, many times. That commercial success never relates to what’s written down. Now those are your words. That it’s the director’s and the editor’s vision, the studio’s plan—never mind whatever the audience wants, which nobody knows!”

  Victor laughed and glanced at his boss, and rubbed a hole through the moisture on the window with his sleeve. “Think about it,” Victor said, peering out. “Going by tickets sold, you really want to be compared to Moonstruck?”

  “Ha!” yelped Toad. “Olympia Dukakis.” He fixed his glasses. “And that singer, too.”

  “Cher,” Victor said.

  I was about to speak, then I lost my train of thought. “Now, let me remember,” Toad said. “Your movie, Sara, is about an actress, once upon a time a star. In the present day, though, she’s a has-been. An old amphibian like me.”

  He dropped his glasses. He bent forward and wiggled his piggy fingers. I jerked out of my seat to pick them up.

  “Thank you. Then she falls in love with a young film director. I saw it on television recently, that’s why you’re here, of course. I thought the next morning, I must invite that woman to dinner. Sara, tell us, what did you set out to create?”

  “It’s a romantic comedy,” I said.

  “A comedy,” said Toad after a moment.

  “You didn’t laugh, I take it.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, my dear.” He laughed now.

  “It’s an homage to Billy Wilder,” Victor said, as though he’d said this a thousand times before; it was the first time I’d heard it. “A pastiche.”

  “Is that right?” I said.

  Victor tilted back his head.

  “Exactly!” snorted Toad. “But then all art is homage, isn’t it? It can’t help itself. Don’t tell me that you didn’t set out, Sara, at least unconsciously, to pay tribute to Sunset Boulevard. That’s Wilder, isn’t it? I knew it the moment the credits rolled.”

  “Well, not pay tribute,” said Victor. He was staring at some picture book he’d taken out from the bookcase, with a lighthouse on the cover.

  “Rewrite. No, I don’t mean rewrite,” Toad said. “Improve upon. As in research, for example, we take what’s put forth, then search for improvements. It’s not the best film anyway.”

  “Sunset Boulevard,” Victor mused.

  “Without the pool.”

  “Right, Sunset Boulevard without the pool,” Victor said, laughing.

  “Can I get a word in here sometime?”

  Then silence. As if I’d wandered into the men’s room.

  “Oh, Sara,” said Toad, flapping toward Victor, “my dear, excuse us.”

  “So a Wilder homage. Minus the pool.”

  “Sara, he’s only joking—”

  “Well, if you look to the masters you’ll find—” started Toad, but I interrupted him: “So if I did anything here, it was to repackage a classic, is what you’re saying? The success wasn’t really mine. It probably had more to do with Wilder, or some marketing person at Sony, is that right?”

  “There’s nothing wrong , per se, with Sunset Boulevard,” said Toad.

  “Sara, be reasonable,” Victor said.

  Now it wasn’t humid anymore. Toad was blindly smiling, staring at me with blotto eyes.

  “I think I’m ready to go,” I said, getting up.

  “ What?”

  “Unless there are other flukes to cover. Woman Hits Forty. My menopausal masses. My career of chance.”

  “Sara, my dear, slow down,” said Toad. “We are but simple scientists. We spend our lives chipping away at a stone. How one prepares for luck, how hard one work
s for it, we don’t appreciate. You see, we don’t understand how to give it credit.”

  Victor was exasperated, fidgeting by the window as if he wanted to grab me, hug me, scream at me. He did none of the these things. “Come on, tell him,” Victor said, losing his hands in his pockets, “how many screenplays you wrote before The Hook-Up. I mean, why weren’t they picked up?”

  “Well, they weren’t any good,” I said, pausing.

  “What?”

  “Weren’t good,” I said.

  “Sure they were.”

  “My dear, my dear,” Toad said, now all the way out on the edge of his chair, “I did not mean to start a fight. Please sit down, you’re being hysterical.”

  Finally I could laugh.

  “I can assure you, this is not hysterical,” I said when I had my breath back, though honestly, I did feel hysterical, but only for that second. Then everything was hardening to a single sharp prow.

  “Sara, I see you believe what you say. Obviously people have lied to you. Victor has lied to you. However, I do not lie. And I will tell you, I didn’t like your movie much, but I’m sure its success was hard earned and hard fought.”

  The housekeeper appeared. If no one needed anything else, she’d excuse herself. We saw ourselves out. The Toad moved chairs around and peered at us through the window. In the driveway between our cars, Victor said, “Look, you lost me back there.”

  “You’re right.” It was the quietest thing I’d said all evening.

  “What do you mean?”

  I met his eye. “Really, you don’t know?”

  Truly, I don’t think he did. I was the first one down the driveway. I wondered, driving home with Victor’s headlights in my mirror, perhaps our longevity is a fluke, too. An accident three-decades running.

  Right now I can’t write any more.

  UPDATE: This is not to change what I’ve written. Rather, it’s to say I have seen the most wonderful movie, and it’s connected to all this, I don’t know how. For the moment. I’ve just come in the front door, here I am clanging around inside. I have to get this down.

  The university started a film festival on the island a couple years ago. This year they asked me to chair a panel on screenplays. Fine. It was held under a tent on the square downtown, and there were exactly thirty people and they had two questions at the end: what type of software do I use, and do I know any agents who read unsolicited manuscripts. Afterward they held a panel on short films, and they opened with something I’d never seen before. The Perfect Human. Released 1967. In Danish: Det perfekle menneske. Black and white, about ten minutes long. But revolutionary. Like I’d never seen a movie before. The smallest, most perfect thing.