Something New Under the Sun

by Alexandra Kleeman

  “I guess you could say that,” Patrick responds, though he doesn’t really follow.

  “Do you watch a lot of horror?” Dillon asks, but before Patrick can reply, or even register the question, the girl saving Cassidy’s seat raises her hand.

  “Um, Jay? Brenda? I don’t think Cassidy’s going to make it today,” she says, her arm outstretched, holding her phone. Brenda takes the phone, glances at it, and hands it back. She takes out her own phone and begins tapping on it at a furious rate. Over Dillon’s shoulder, Patrick sneaks a peek at the girl’s screen. It’s a photo of Cassidy Carter, posted this morning, showing her beaming in the back seat of a cream-colored convertible, her arms outstretched and head tilted back triumphantly. In the background are a tangle of neon signs and shimmering buildings, all bathed in the rose-gold glow of sunrise. “There’s nothing like Vegas at sunrise!!! YO TE QUIERO L.V.! #droveallnight #blessed #vegas #lasvegas,” reads the caption. To have arrived in Las Vegas at sunrise, she would have left late last night, after quail and tequila, after telling all three of them how much she loved going to bed early and getting a full night’s sleep and then waking up naturally with the first light of morning, which Cassidy had claimed was made of special wavelengths that actually caused the body to generate more collagen. “It’s why women who farm, in Greece or Bulgaria, never even need plastic surgery,” she had said. “They wake up with the first light of dawn and really soak in that light like a serum. If you could unleash all the energy of the sun to heal your physical body, you might never age. Think about it.”

  “Listen, everyone, I think we’d better get started,” says Brenda, pushing her red eyeglasses up the bridge of her nose. “It seems like Cassidy won’t be able to make it today, but she’ll be with us bright and early for her fitting and then for principal photography next week.” She pauses, and looks at Patrick quizzically. “Weren’t you supposed to pick her up today?”

  Jay jumps in. “We have Dillon Davies here, which is incredible, let’s have a round of applause for Dillon.”

  Applause eases out mildly, as from a faucet.

  “I’ve said it before, but I have to say it again, your work in House of the Rising Blood was—really, though—captivating,” Jay adds. He has a way of talking, thinks Patrick, as if people are always trying to interrupt him, but they’re not. “So let’s just run through it from the top. Dillon, obviously you’re Jacob. Brenda, could you fill in for Cassidy? And, Hela, you’re the mother.” A slender, light-haired woman in her late forties nods.

  Patrick opens the script to the first page and begins reading silently to himself, as all around him the movie people say the lines loudly in stolid, theatrical tones. The names are the same, but the story isn’t as he remembered. In his novel, a young man named Jacob sees brief and wordless glimpses of his dead father, which cause him guilt and alienate him from his mother and his beautiful ex-girlfriend Libby, who never left town but has waited patiently for him to return through years of college and grad school. Eventually, he begins acting out, and starts a bar fight with his new stepfather, in the course of which an innocent local boy is killed. This script, on the other hand, seems to be some sort of scary ghost movie, where Jacob comes home after his father’s death and discovers that everyone he knows has changed in some eerie, ill-defined way. At night, when Jacob lies awake in his foreshortened teenage bed, re-examining the day’s events, he peers into his mother’s bedroom and finds her asleep, tossing and turning, on the ceiling. She’s a ghost, and so is his best friend—even sweet Libby, an ideal love object in every other respect, has become a sort of reluctant demon. Other ghosts do scary things, particularly the stepfather, who, it becomes clear, is turning the people of the town into supernatural baddies and has his eyes set on Jacob—this seems to be more of a vampire thing, Patrick notes, and doesn’t really make sense. At the end of the script, Jacob is forced to set fire to all of the other main characters, at which point his dead father’s spirit appears to him, nodding approvingly and gesturing that he did a good job.

  Patrick had begun writing Elsinore Lane, his first novel, when he was only twenty-six—grouchy and half impassioned, about to quit a Ph.D. program in English at Tulane, where he had proposed a dissertation on Shakespearean influences in early North American literature of the South, because he knew a lot about Shakespeare and knew that the program he was applying to was in the South. Toward the end of his second semester in the program, his father had died of a heart attack in the garage while trying to move several large boxes of stored clothing and obsolete appliances in order to get the lawnmower out. Patrick flew back for the funeral, then back to Louisiana to write the final papers for his seminars. That summer, he stayed away from Massachusetts, braised himself for three months in his own sweat in the shaggy heat of his screened-in apartment porch, looking out at the drooping trees. He felt that great scholarship came from the unexpected intersection of leisurely, careful reading and intense feeling, but even though he had lots of time and many reasons to feel, he didn’t think anything about literature that summer that he hadn’t already thought of before. He rubbed ice cubes all over his face and let the melting liquid drip down, salty, into the corners of his mouth. He knew that his father was no longer in the world, but the world didn’t seem much different to him when he looked at it. The weather was the same, the university was the same, the patterns of chatter on the radio as he drove to campus were the same, though they came footnoted by loss. He wondered if some people had a more authentic relationship to reality than he did.

  The next summer, he went back to Newton to stay with his mother for three weeks. He had known that she was dating a man now, but was disturbed to discover how real, how material, how invasive the stranger’s presence was. His mother’s new boyfriend was unlike his father in innumerable ways: He was loud and chatty and made simple, predictable jokes. He was frank about his love for his two college-age daughters but seemed to know almost nothing about their studies, their interests. His every anecdote ended before any sort of punch line was unfurled, and he watched repeats of sitcoms that had long gone off the air and laughed as if the jokes were brand-new—as his mother dozed off next to him on the couch, just as she had done when his father was alive. It was degrading to bike around a town where he had once biked around as a skinny angry teen, depressing to go to the familiar bookstore-café and be recognized or not be recognized; either way it was like being sucked backward into a life too small that had already been lived once before. But what hurt him the most was how naturally his mother seemed to forget that his father had lived at all, and in this same house, with the same couch and refrigerator. His father’s death was most real to him when he watched his mother ignore it.

  This was not to say that his father was a hard person to forget. That he was easy to forget made it more painful that he had been forgotten, by his wife in particular. His father had always had a beige personality; if it were given a shape, it would be something like a beanbag chair. Patrick sometimes wondered if he had chosen to turn his father into a ghost in the novel, an absent figure appearing in visions to the son and gesturing or mouthing words he could not speak, in order to avoid having to make up a character for him to be. Patrick hated the convention of flashback and backstory as a way to pretend that characters were deeper and richer than they appeared to be in the moment—but if he hadn’t hated the convention, he might have included more of his own memories of his father, most of which were ambient and cyclical, things his father tended to do rather than specific things his father had done.

  For example, though his father rarely expressed emotion directly, Patrick often thought that he had a deeper, rarer emotionality than almost anybody else he had ever known. He witnessed his father’s depth of feeling as an observer, almost a spy, and though these memories of his father feeling things blurred together, they all contained the image of his father in profile or three-quarters view, a remembrance of looking at someone w
ho was looking somewhere else. When he was sitting next to his father, they would gaze silently at whatever was on the TV screen together. They liked episodic TV, detective procedurals where a murder would occur, get investigated, and end up solved within the course of a single hour, and movies about people trying to do big or risky things. His father teared up during plotlines in which an ex-wife returned to her husband and asked for forgiveness, or an estranged father and son reconciled—emotions that Patrick knew were not displayed in order for him to see them, but which he thought were related to him in some way or another.

  Patrick remembered watching a movie with his father about an airline pilot who crash-landed a plane safely in a risky body of water. Though the pilot was celebrated as a hero, the airline decided to sue him, arguing that he had made a dangerous and unnecessary decision to land the plane in water rather than turning it around and heading back to an airport landing strip. The pilot defended himself vigorously and nobly in court. When the court ruled in his favor, he received a standing ovation from the judge and jurors and onlookers—he walked through the cheering crowd and out of the courtroom, modestly nodding his thanks. Patrick turned to his left. Tears were wetting the cheeks of his father, his father wiping at them distractedly. “Dad?” he asked. “What’s wrong?” His father turned to him with eyes pink-rimmed and watery. “It’s so wonderful,” he said. “So, so wonderful. He stuck to his guns and told them all how it really happened. He shoved it all in their fucking faces.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  At the bottom of a dry swimming pool in the hills north of Malibu, Cassidy Carter wakes from a shallow sleep, wincing into the sun. She reaches up, her face tender and warm, but not burnt. An inflatable pool-float in the shape of a flamingo squeals softly beneath her tan, angular little body. In other backyards all over this gated community, cerulean swimming pools are filled to the brim with thick, cold, bluish WAT-R, piped in from tankers and endlessly refilled from cisterns in the basements, so that the slow, thick liquid will slosh unceasing against the tiled rims of aqua-colored rectangles, ovals, and edgeless infinity strips. A man with a browned, chiseled face pulls his polo shirt over his head, revealing a body covered in snowy white twists of hair. Children splash one another near the pool steps, as fat, panicked bumblebees drown in the deep end.

  But Cassidy’s pool is a vacant hole, hard-sided and dangerous, sloped so nothing that falls in stands a chance of getting out on its own. She’s woken up to find lame geese resting, head under wing, in an inch of standing water, remnant of last week’s anemic rain, and baby squirrels trapped and dehydrated, concealing their small bodies under a scattering of dead leaf matter. Despite all this, she likes the empty pool. A swimming pool was the first thing she told June she was going to buy for them, the day she signed the contract for Camp Do-What-Ya-Wanna. It has what her first manager would have called “sentimental value,” like the hand-painted good-luck sneakers June made her for her first big movie audition that he made her throw away in the parking-lot trash can because she looked “hicksville” in them. And the paradise-blue paint on the empty trough reminds her of the town she grew up in, where people painted their homes aspirational colors, colors that reminded them of vacations they never took. As long as she stays on the shallower end, where the faded turquoise paint still clings to the walls, there are fewer puddles and dead bugs.

  Patrick pushes open the heavy Spanish-style door at the entrance to her house and steps into the cool of the foyer. The interior is all light, coldly gleaming—dove-gray stucco on the walls, pale oak for the floors, glacier-colored cushions on an eggshell linen couch—the surfaces unmarked and unloved. At the same time, with thick velveteen curtains drawn across all the windows, the dominant impression is of a vast and unyielding grayness, like a snowy plain viewed on a moonless night. Here by the front door, the house feels unused: in the living room, the plush furniture is staged with empty vases; and in the dining room to the left, twelve dining chairs upholstered in driftwood gray surround a long, empty table. The first feeling that moves through him is relief. He had expected to feel small in a movie star’s home, but this expensive, lonesome space inspires as much sympathy as envy. Patrick presses in, past increasingly dark and disordered rooms—a second living room with a single couch in it, a large laundry room disheveled by brightly colored, balled-up clothes, a double-sized kitchen with two ranges and two refrigerators, chilly marble and stainless steel. A lighter and a scatter of light-colored powder on the coffee table. When he gets to the back of the house, he calls Cassidy’s name, then opens the sliding glass door and calls again.

  “I’m in the pool,” comes the muffled reply, nearby and far away at the same time.

  Patrick walks over and stares down into the trough at Cassidy Carter in her cobalt-blue one-piece, reclining amidst empty cans of Diet Coke and fallen bougainvillea. At one end of the drained pool, someone has abandoned a mural: flat figures of men and women with unnaturally pink skin dance across a span of pool wall, outlined but not filled in. At the deep end, a soccer ball rolls around in the breeze.

  “You’re late,” she says.

  “You aren’t even ready?” says Patrick with a frantic note in his voice. “I told Brenda and Jay I’d have you at the fitting in twenty minutes, and it took an hour and a half just to get here.”

  “I hope they wait for me before they start my fitting,” she says with mock earnestness.

  “Get dressed,” he commands. He almost shouts it.

  “I don’t think you understand the power dynamic here,” says Cassidy. She picks a damp tee shirt up off the painted cement and drapes it over her face. “Come and get me in five. You can help yourself to a soda.”

  Patrick stalks off toward the house and then stops; he turns toward the pool and away again. His fists are tight white knots. He pulls out his phone, but after a moment he puts it back in his pocket. What was it Jay had said late that night, as they left their now untidy restaurant table and walked out to their cars, Cassidy and Brenda with their arms around each other, walking far ahead? “You’re the only person for the job, Patrick. No, really. There’s something about you, I think, that bores her a little. Tranquilizes her. Listen, we need someone like you to keep her in line. Smart, experienced, not just some green kid. A dad. I imagine she’ll interest you, as a character. It’s unusual, sure, but I have a good feeling about you two.” Patrick curses Jay silently. Then he walks back to the pool. He doesn’t see how she got down there, or how anyone could ever find their way out: the pool goes from deep end to deeper, one side about six feet deep and the other about ten. Each side has a small, chrome ladder and he imagines himself hanging from it, dropping down onto the hard concrete below, and cleaving his ankle in two. He walks around to the shallower side and tests the rungs, then turns and descends one step at a time, the metal slippery against his sweaty palms. When he gets to the part where he should jump off, he waits, easing one foot down as far as it can go, then draws it back up with effort. A swimmy, vertiginous feeling as his bulk begins to pull him downward, the fear that something in his psyche might lean into the fall.

  He looks behind him, and sees Cassidy clinging to the ladder, hoisting herself out of the pool, agile and light and skinny-armed like a lemur. As she slams the back door, he can hear the glass rattle a little within its frame.

  When Patrick bursts into the house, he hears that Cassidy’s already on the phone.

  “Yeah, chasing me and threatening me,” she says to whoever is on the line. She glances at Patrick and holds her index finger up, as if to say “One minute.”

  He waits, his entire face tensed.

  “Brenda, what is this? Is this a film? Or is this a kidnapping? Do I deserve to be manhandled in my own home? Does that seem right to you?”

  She pauses, listens.

  “Of course it disturbs me,” she says, sounding unusually professional. “I’m shaken up. I could hardly even
hold the phone in my hand to call you. Yes, I know there’s voice-activated command—I’m making a point.”

  Patrick lurches forward, about to do or say something, but she signals, again, that he should stop. Groaning, he collapses on the white leather couch in the second living room, clutching his head between his hands.

  “Well, Brenda, I think it’s an important time to revisit the terms of my payment, which seem even more essential now under these really traumatizing conditions. You know that I don’t fault you for the situation. At the same time, it’s definitely your legal responsibility.” She nods solemnly and listens for a bit before interrupting. “Just what I asked for originally. I want to be paid every day, incrementally. We signed a contract for sixty contiguous days of shooting, so one-sixtieth per day should be fine. Overtime is double.” She listens, then responds: “Well, we’ll need something to transport it in, maybe a van or some kind of small truck. Blankets and padding and such, so nothing tips over or breaks.” Patrick listens as a new warmth seeps into her voice: she must have gotten what she wanted. “Thank you so much for understanding,” she says, her delivery innocent and sincere, her voice growing sunny. “It’s really a weight off my chest, I don’t know how to explain it. You know that I haven’t always had much stability in my life, growing up under the industry’s thumb. Well, a good friend once told me a couple of years back that I should recenter myself from time to time by doing a little breathwork and meditating on the reason why I do all this, what drives me, what makes it worth it. In my case, that’s payment. It just gives me a sense of calmness and, well, mental health, when I can focus on my earnings, sitting safely in my home. It’s almost meditative! Plus, you know, they can’t freeze your funds when they’re in a duffel under your bed. I should put some sort of video lesson together about this technique; I think I could really help people.”