Molly Bit

by Dan Bevacqua

  “No way,” Molly said. “Romance is dead. There’s nothing funny about it. As soon as they mention love, you’re ruined. You’re doomed.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  “I mean, I can understand why you’d feel that way,” Diane said, and pitched her gaze out to sea.

  Molly inspected her friend, her assistant, her whatever. Diane could get terribly morose. She was a vulnerable person. About her own feelings, Diane was honest to a fault. She was often surprised when other people didn’t respect this about her. It was one of the reasons Molly loved her—this vulnerability—but it also drove her insane. Diane was too sweet to be so open. Only the cruel can afford to be totally honest, Molly knew. The rest of us have to lie.

  “What’s going on with you?”

  “We need to figure out this money,” Diane said. “We can go to forty with OK!. Anything after that, I don’t know.”

  As the boat entered the lagoon, the wind ripped apart the canopy. The captain tacked against it, but the wind persisted. It blew Molly’s chignon out. Her hair went everywhere.

  “Call Victoria!” she yelled.

  They docked the boat near the tourist and commuter ferries. Victoria boarded. “This is what I mean,” she said, combing out the tangles. “The wind, the sea, the sun, the air. The goddamn elements. The world hates women.”

  “Time,” Molly said.

  “Fucking time,” Victoria said. “You should see some of these faces I work on. I mean up close. I did a seventeen-year-old last month who gets horse sperm injected into her lips. I couldn’t understand a single word she said to me.”

  “Who?”

  “She’s not famous,” Victoria said. “She’s nobody.”

  “What about Kate Uppley?” Molly asked. “You ever work on her?”

  “No,” Victoria said. A hardness reconfigured her voice. “But I know her.”

  Molly looked over at Diane, who’d stopped tapping into her phone.

  “My brother parties with her,” Victoria said. “He’s emotionally disturbed, but I love him. I’ve met Kate a couple of times. She makes him seem normal.”

  “This sounds like gossip,” Diane said.

  “It is.”

  “Don’t let us stop you.”

  Victoria’s brother was on the scene. He was the image of Hollywood as witnessed from a passing car. Outside unmarked club doors, he smoked cigarettes among his cohort: C-listers, the inebriated children of television stars, “producers.” He hovered at the edges of pure excess, and swooped in from time to time, as if heeding its call.

  “The one time I really met her,” Victoria said, “like really, was at the Chateau Marmont. It was five in the morning or something, in one of the bungalows. You can imagine what was going on. Scott Weiland was there. Kate Uppley is like—What is she like? She’s like someone you look at and think, ‘What the hell happened to this person? Who hurt her?’ She’s weird looking, too. In person, I mean. Her head is enormous.”

  Victoria, her brother, Basel, and Kate Uppley sat on a couch. At some point in between lines, Victoria noticed there were a number of teenage boys in attendance. They had long, skater-boy hair, and terrible skin. Kate Uppley ordered them around. “ ‘Get me a juice, stupid. Bring me a cigarette, you little moron.’ It was weird,” Victoria said. “I thought it was pretty obviously some kind of sex thing, and then I didn’t, but then I did again, because I saw they weren’t wearing any pants or underwear.”

  “They were naked?” Molly asked.

  “No. They wore shirts. They just didn’t have pants on,” Victoria said. “They also had little tails.”

  Nobody had to ask.

  “Yeah, tails,” Victoria said. “They were hanging down between their legs. When I asked Kate about it, she said, ‘Oh, those are anal beads. Aren’t they great?’ ”

  They stepped off the boat to join the others. At the end of the short wood dock were fifteen police officers. They wore tight blue uniforms and had brown eyes. Twenty feet beyond them were the paparazzi. Some were undoubtedly the same as from before. A few aimed their cameras at Molly and took practice shots. She showed her teeth to Diane.

  “Is this a smile?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She relaxed, tried again.

  “How about this?”

  “Even worse.”

  They walked around the corner of a nine-hundred-year-old building to find the square flooded with a foot of seawater.

  “Why wasn’t I notified about this?” Paula screamed into her phone.

  Zen took Molly’s hand and led her down a raised walkway. The basilica was to the right, hovering above its own reflection. Molly admired the building. They skirted by tourists, some of whom noticed her and gave off little gasps. They made their “oh my” faces. Pigeons swooped around like tiny aerialists. Set back inside the arches, the storefronts lit up the gloom. A cloud front had moved back through.

  The store was in the northwest corner. As they stepped off the walkway, they met a crowd of fans, mostly young women, lined up in tight rows of fours and fives. The human length of them stretched back eighty yards starting from the boutique entrance. Like someone able to build and start a fire in the pouring rain, Molly gathered her natural forces and threw herself into the edge of them. She posed for photographs, she shook hands, and hugged, and did it all as if in a trance, or like someone under hypnosis. She felt only the pure energy of giving herself away. She forgot every moment as soon as it was over.

  The boutique was practically empty. Whatever looped ambient music that normally played had been turned off. The store rep, Auggie, a short and slim Marc Jacobs clone, handed her a towel.

  “For your feet,” he said, in a thick accent. “They are wet.”

  Molly looked down. She hadn’t even noticed.

  Molly sat at the table. At any signing there was a one-to-one ratio of weird to acceptable. Molly found it strange that she should be signing posters with her airbrushed face and body on them; old headshots that sellers extorted people for on the internet; action-figure boxes; video games; magazine covers that announced her engagement; a paperback tell-all that told exactly nothing; DVDs; an old issue of Entertainment Weekly; a stand-alone film festival info sheet for Lowlife.

  She hated audiences. She said she loved them, but she hated them. Her role in Lowlife was a minor supporting one. She’d agreed to the part because without her the movie wouldn’t have been made. The attached lead was her friend Angela, who, even though she’d starred as Diana Ross in a bio-pic that netted eighty-five million dollars, and had played Denzel’s strong, no-nonsense wife in not one, but two movies, couldn’t get a studio to pony up. Waiving her fee, Molly signed on as the beleaguered common-law wife of a white supremacist, and suddenly it was a go.

  The next couple of fans were nice. With a Sharpie, she signed the necks of two fourteen-year old Parisiennes. She held a Polish woman’s infant son. An American woman, a brunette with a pleasant face like cut-glass, stepped up.

  “I dated your high school boyfriend for a while,” she said. “At UVM. We were there together. You remember him?”

  Molly tapped her right hand twice on the table. It was the sign for Get this person out of here.

  “Of course I remember Luke.”

  “He was all broken up about you,” the woman said. “It was a problem.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine now.”

  “He isn’t.”

  Auggie came out of nowhere.

  “This way, miss.”

  British husbands heeled a foot behind their wives.

  They let the preauthorized photographers in and herded them behind a rope. “Look here, Molly! Molly! Look here!”

  A German woman asked, “Have you ever been to Kazakhstan? You must shoot a movie in Kazakhstan! You must! You must!”

  Near the end, she tried signing with her right hand, but it wouldn’t work.

  “Anal beads?” she whispered to Diane.

  In Italian fi
rst, and then in English, Auggie announced, “Allora. Thank you for coming. This concludes our event. Miss Bit has a press conference. We thank you, Molly!”

  The information passed back through the line, and then returned as seven hundred moans. She smiled her fake smile at them, the condescending one. Molly sat down in a chair, and it was like falling through a hole in time. For a moment, no one spoke or looked at her. The fans turned their backs in silence, as if honoring a pact. She felt the constant threat of love, or, worse, its absence, drain away, seep out into the flooded square, and mix among the particles of filth in the Adriatic. To hell with all of it, Molly thought. For one entire second, she felt calm. And then one more. Molly blanked out on it. It was like a drug. But then someone tapped her shoulder—who? who was it? who was there?—and it was time to go.

  * * *

  Diane stood on the Guggenheim boat landing. Out here, away from the city, the water was shot through with light. The color was like a translucent key lime. The waves thwa-thwapped against the palazzo foundation and sprayed into the tall hedgerows. Earlier, the gondolier had said, “There’s four hundred bridges, one hundred and seventy canals. It’s a maze,” and Diane had felt, gliding through the shadows, the extraordinariness of her life. She had sensed, as if a girl again, that it was a remarkable thing to be alive, to feel the light pass between two buildings and warm your face, to smell the soaked world. This feeling bloomed in her. It expanded. She’d been happy. On the landing, she searched it out again. She tried to call it up out of herself, or see it in Venice. She did deep yoga breaths where she imagined her diaphragm was the center of the world. She wanted to know exactly where the stress was in her body. Was it in her stomach? Her hips? Her shoulders? Could it be everywhere? Was it possible to be more stress than body? What would her therapist say to that?

  “Taking a moment?” Paula asked her.

  She didn’t want to dislike Paula. It was occupying too much room. She’d taken to rehearsing angry monologues directed at the publicist. Hate was exhausting.

  “Sort of,” Diane said.

  They each turned and looked into the Guggenheim courtyard, where Molly sat on a stone bench with the writer. The two women were engaged in what seemed to be a serious conversation. Molly’s hands waved in the air. They did karate chops and pirouettes. They conducted.

  “She seems off today,” Paula said. “I wish she had let me cancel. We could have done it tomorrow.”

  “She’s done a thousand of these,” Diane said.

  “A writer can turn on you,” Paula said. “Intellectuals don’t know what they want from other people. It’s why they’re always disappointed.”

  “Molly’s got the whole world wrapped around her finger.”

  “That’s the problem,” Paula said. “A writer is a person with a grudge.”

  “Against who?”

  “Everybody,” Paula said.

  They watched as Zen appeared from around the corner of the museum. He stood beside the dog tomb and scanned the horizon. Diane guessed she understood the appeal.

  “She’s completely fine,” Diane said.

  “Is she worried about the movie?”

  “No.”

  “Not even a little?”

  “Maybe,” Diane said. “I don’t know.”

  Paula thrived on stress. She was one of those women who live forever, who keep their ships tight, who openly say they’re right all the time. She was the kind of strong, confident woman other women loved at first but then grew to hate. The affair, the whatever-you-would-call-this-idiotic-thing-Andrew-was-doing would have pleased her. Paula didn’t like the look of Lowlife. It wasn’t sympathetic. She plays a racist? Did Molly think she was Edward Norton? Did she think—like they did with men—audiences could separate fact and fiction when it came to her? Who would see this thing anyway? The New Yorker article had been arranged to get the all-important art angle out there. Remember, people, Paula was saying via the press, Molly thinks she’s an artist. Ar-tiste. We have to forgive her for that.

  Diane knew exactly what Paula would think of the photo. For her, it would be a tool. It would even the field. It would inspire great heaps of sympathy. It would excuse Molly’s character-actor turn.

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” Diane said. “Everything’s tip-top.”

  “Tip-top?”

  “Tip-top,” Diane said. “I have to make a phone call.”

  She walked in the direction of Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree, a large olive tree covered in scraps of paper, and called the new assistant, Tiff. This was the third time Diane had called Tiff, and once again there wasn’t any answer. In the salt-air breeze, Diane heard the writer laughing. What grudge? she wondered. The woman had seemed kind. She could have used a haircut, a blow-dry, something, but she was otherwise very nice looking—beautiful, actually. She’d apparently written a novel. Diane wondered if she knew Greg Watson, Molly’s old college friend. Diane had his novel, The Last Century, in her tote bag. Molly claimed there was a feature in it, but Diane didn’t know.

  She called her girlfriend, Stephanie.

  “I’m at work,” Stephanie said.

  “Okay.” Diane said. “Hi to you too.”

  “I’m really busy.”

  “I just wanted to say hello.”

  “Hello,” Stephanie said.

  It was exhausting. The whole thing was exhausting. Diane was exhausted.

  “What time is it there?”

  “Who cares?” Stephanie said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Yes,” Diane said. “What’s the matter?”

  She could picture Stephanie moving down one of the production office’s hallways, any number of muted gray colors surrounding her, swallowing her—her short, quick stride tapping out against the carpet.

  “I had to put fifteen thousand dollars into your boss’s bank account last night is what’s the matter,” Stephanie said.

  “It’s not your money,” Diane said.

  “It’s our account.”

  “But it’s not your money.”

  Diane listened to Stephanie compose herself. She was a small person, with a sexy, frantic quality. The way she moved had always suggested excitement, a kind of welcome recklessness, but of late Diane had felt otherwise. She understood it now as a pointless, nervous energy. It was oppressive.

  “What kind of a movie star is she?” Stephanie asked. “Who borrows fifteen thousand dollars from their personal assistant?”

  “It’s complicated,” Diane said. “The money’s tied up.”

  “What the hell does that mean? She’s using you. They’re all the same, Diane. I’m sick of it.”

  Diane spun around and took in the Guggenheim. A bat flew out from under one of the museum’s eaves. She saw its screeching, hideous face. She had only wanted to say hello. She’d meant that.

  “I asked you to do one thing,” Diane said. “I put your name on the account so you could buy a car. I helped you. I’m helping her. It’s difficult over here right now. There’s a bodyguard. There’s everything with Andrew.”

  “I don’t care about the bodyguard,” Stephanie said. “I don’t care about who’s sleeping with who. These people are deranged. All they do are horrible things to one another. It’s making me physically sick. I’m ill. She’s your whole life. I don’t want her to be mine.”

  “What does that mean?” Diane asked. There was a call trying to come through.

  “What does what mean?” Stephanie asked.

  “Can I call you right back?”

  “No,” Stephanie said. “I’m working.”

  Diane hit Accept. The OK! woman’s name was Bronwen. She was a terrible human being.

  “There’s an offer at sixty.”

  “From who?” Diane asked.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Bronwen said. “I’ve said that already. Why are you asking me that? What do you say to sixty?”

  Diane heard a London street scene in
the background. In her head, it was like a science fiction novel as written by Virginia Woolf. A double-decker bus passed by in a cartoon flash of red. All of the pedestrians walked in straight lines. They had deeply serious and bureaucratic faces. The city buzzed with their consciousness. Souls flew about, having taken the form of pigeons.

  “I say I hate your accent,” Diane said, and hung up.

  She’d spent half her life in the Coachella Valley, where her father was the custodian/full-time resident at any number of meditation retreats. Her parents had never been married. Her father was too far down the road of his own journey to entertain the idea. Because of that—because he loved her and listened to her and absorbed her as much as he could into the wandering quality of his life—she had never held it against him. It was simply how he was.

  Sometimes, on long weekend visits, he would borrow one of the retreats’ permanent cars, and they would drive southwest through the fertile, Mexican-worked plains until they reached the Salton Sea. Her father would rent a cabin for something like twenty-five dollars a night, and at dusk they would walk along the low tide edge of the sea, the bones of ten thousand fish cracking and splintering under their shoes, the salt smell gag-worthy at first, before their noses shut themselves off to it. The next day they would rent a boat and fish. It was perfectly safe, her father would say. It was only salt. And because he said this Diane believed it too. The boat moved slowly in the sodium-rich water; they would let their lines drag and pull the fish in all day long. Once she caught a fish that had three eyes and her father threw it back. They grilled out at night. The fish were always delicious.

  In the mornings, her father would meditate for three hours, and Diane would explore on her own. The sunlight was a blinding experience. There was no shadow. It was only the white light of the sea and its edges and the rocks and shells and fish bones. The temperature was perfect enough to feel like nothing at all. Diane walked alone in the all-white blankness, and it would seem to her after awhile that maybe she had forgotten all about color, and that she would never again see red or green or blue, and even though she knew this thought was a kind of daydream, it filled her with panic. It was only on these trips with her father that it occurred to Diane a person could go crazy and stay that way forever. She didn’t know why this was so—he had yet to go mad. She only knew this happened to people sometimes. She only knew she was afraid for him. When this particular thought hit, she always ran back to the rented cabin as fast as she could. The fish bones would explode up all around her like shrapnel. She’d enter into the calm daylight of the cabin’s interior. Indian-style, she would sit on the floor across from her father and quietly wait for him to open his eyes.