by Owen King
The younger actor was, in every way, the antithesis of Booth. It was no accident, for instance, that professionally, Rick Savini specialized in reaction shots. He was a listener. If there was something he wasn’t, it was avid. While she talked, Rick watched her with those damp saurian eyes of his and never seemed to blink. Rick could sip ginger ale and listen to her play rags for hours. He was patient and curious and sad.
She enjoyed his quirks:
He held a grudge against the summer, hated the heat and the length of the days, and associated the season with serial killers: “People get sweaty and rashy, and the next thing you know, bodies are turning up in parks with their livers cut out and somebody’s writing letters to the police saying, ‘I won’t stop killing until the government stops pouring absinthe into the water supply.’ ” To identify his cookie-cutter Westchester McMansion, he kept potholes in the driveway. The actor’s great hobby was to shop from airplane catalogs, and he had a large room filled with the gadgets, toys, and decorations that he bought from them: a miniature solar-charged windmill, a LEGO Empire State Building, a row of scuffed plastic seats from a demolished baseball stadium, several metal detectors, leather-covered editions of famous books, fancy movie replicas, a knee-high robot that could perform a range of rigid dances, and a plethora of other marvelous ephemera.
Rick wanted Allie to fly around the world with him. They could drink champagne at forty thousand feet and order things from airplane catalogs. The two black-and-white cats who lived with him cycled quietly in and out of the McMansion’s rooms like maître d’s, checking to make sure the service was adequate.
But Rick was too sweet, somehow too giving, too much a reflector. She didn’t want to be the complicated one in a relationship, to play the Booth part.
“I’m used to loud, difficult people,” Allie said.
“I can be loud and difficult,” he replied, but she didn’t want that. She liked who he was.
“Booth’s more fun, isn’t he?” Rick asked.
A little bit, she admitted, and Rick, with a thin smile, conceded that he agreed.
Even Booth had been crestfallen by this last breakup. “Goddammit, Allie, what are you looking for? You can’t do better than Rick. He’s a nice man. He’s interesting. He’s wealthy. He gets cast in everything, the bastard. Is it all the gadgets and crap? I’ve warned him about that.”
“No, it’s not his toys.”
“Well. What possible excuse do you have, then?”
The café had been Booth’s idea. He wanted her to have something, and he wanted to hang on to the movie theater, and it came together very simply. What was apparent later—almost twenty years and a divorce later—was that Allie never cared about coffee or pastries or business, but she cared about Booth a lot, and wanted to make him happy, so she spent years working at something she didn’t care about. She still wanted Booth to be happy, but other priorities came first: Sam, always—and herself.
“I don’t need an excuse,” said Allie.
■ ■ ■
A gang of children, six blondes scattered between the ages of four and twelve, were yelling and chasing one another around the graveyard. Allie sat on the retaining wall beside their mother, a woman in her early fifties whose long gray hair was frizzy and uncombed.
“So today I took my kids to play in a graveyard,” said the mother.
Allie laughed. She told the woman that her son loved to play here when he was young.
“Did it make him eccentric?” asked the weary woman.
“No,” Allie reassured her, “I think that’s something we did to him ourselves. Can I share a theory with you?” Allie asked her, and the woman said, “Please do.” Allie explained how kids were the most incredible special effect of all. “They just go and go and go,” she finished.
The mother agreed that she might be on to something. “But have you seen that Titanic? Seriously, I’m not sure if it’s more incredible than kids, but it’s definitely close.”
It was almost hot in the sun that fell in an unbroken stream onto the wall. Allie closed her eyes and tipped her head back. She couldn’t get enough of the air. It burned the insides of her nostrils, and she loved it.
The woman put a hand on the small of her back; Allie was about to slip off the back of the wall. “Careful,” she said.
“Aw. Do I have to be?” asked Allie. The mother said yes.
■ ■ ■
Booth was more fun. Booth was the most fun. Booth was a monster of fun.
She recalled the visits she used to make to see him in California.
One time they drove to Sonora and drank too much and rode donkeys around a weedy field. Booth looked so funny sitting on a little donkey that she pissed herself at the sight, pissed all over her own poor donkey, and then cried because she felt so bad about what she’d done to the animal. Booth paid the donkey man extra, though.
On another trip, they went fishing and caught nothing but had memorable, sunburned sex on a boat.
Booth had a deranged landlady at the place he rented in Tarzana. She was obsessed with lemons. By the end of any trip to California, the mere mention of the word “lemon” was enough to send them into hysterics.
Allie went to sets with him a few times. The soundstages smelled like pot and ozone, and there were tentacles of ropy black cord everywhere, like some kind of alien infestation. Everyone seemed to get a kick out of Booth. They treated him like a star. He had his own little camp chair, the canvas backing labeled simply BOOTH.
If only, she thought, Sam could catch his father just right, trap him between the four walls of his camera. If only he could see Booth the way she saw him, from his good side.
At the end of their marriage, it had been, perversely, up to her to comfort him. Booth cried, and she soothed him. It wasn’t fair that it should be that way—he was the cheat—but that was how it was between them. She had made her peace.
Allie came to the sharp curve at the far end of their street; this was where she usually turned around. In the middle of the curve there was a turtle. The turtle was about the size of her largest mixing bowl; indeed, the animal looked like nothing so much as a dusty green mixing bowl with legs. It was a snapping turtle, and to judge by the pissed-off expression on its wrinkled bulb of a head, not a nice one. “Get off the road,” Allie said, and made sweeping gestures at the side of the street that the animal was facing.
The snapping turtle spat at her a couple of times and withdrew into its shell.
“You’re going to get squished,” she told the turtle.
There was an echoing hiss from inside the shell.
“Fine. Be that way.” Allie turned around, scattering pebbles of pavement as she scuffed along.
As she passed the graveyard, the gray-haired mother spotted her. “Can’t get enough of us?”
“No! I’m on the way home now!” Allie yelled, and comically threw up her hands. “There’s a suicidal turtle over there!”
“Oh, those are the worst kind!” the mother hollered back.
■ ■ ■
Sam had used the camera that Tom gave him to make a stop-motion film, The Unhappy Future of Mankind. It starred these creepy, maimed plastic figurines he collected—Nukies, they were called—and Sam spent weeks and weeks meticulously inching them around on his bedroom floor.
The final product had astonished Allie. The tiny people were so urgently striving and heroic and doomed. Sam’s bookshelves towered over them in otherworldly promontories, like the cliff faces in cowboy movies.
“Do you think you’ll make one with real people next?” she asked him.
Sam lifted his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug.
“I’d act for you,” Allie said. “If you wanted.”
“I don’t want to be disappointed in you,” he said, making it sound inevitable—which it was.
Disappointment was the real common cold. Allie’s students disappointed her when they didn’t practice. Her cooking disappointed her. People she didn’t know—pol
iticians, especially—disappointed her terribly. Award-winning films weren’t interesting. Surveys put you in the minority. Long-settled plans fell apart at the last second. Beloved sports teams were defeated in impossible ways. You forgot things that you cared about, and when you remembered them, they were gone. Machines couldn’t be relied on. Service was slapdash. Mostly, your friends came through, but there were those times when they didn’t. Parents never ceased to be your parents, which was both disappointing and frustrating. Sex was mostly just okay. It rained.
Disappointment was predictable and disappointing.
Allie could hear her semi-adult son’s response to this declaration. “Which means what? I should wallow in my dissatisfaction?” he’d ask. “Make friends with it? Feed it chicken?”
“No,” she’d reply, “it just means you should be less—you know—that thing you are sometimes.” At this, Sam would probably hurl himself onto the floor and lie there, six feet one of him in bare feet, as if her wisdom had literally bowled him over, the little shit—her little shit.
This was a person she had birthed. She had tended his shitty ass. He had bitten her and passed her hideous childhood sicknesses and kept her awake. Allie’s money had bought him books, tickets, sports equipment, trendy clothes, and disturbing figurines.
But Sam had had a propensity toward dourness for about as long as he’d had agency. For his second birthday, they visited a petting zoo. Sam frowned and pointed at a baby goat. “Our food,” he said. Sam didn’t look on the bright side. She had wanted a child and she had gotten one, and she was the furthest thing from sorry, but he wasn’t easy.
One afternoon, though, he had touched her cheek with his fingers.
No blockbuster’s fleet of spaceships, their thousand seamless gunmetal prows blotting the western sky, collective silhouette transforming the desert into an ocean floor, could have amazed her more than that—more than Sam’s fingers at her face that afternoon. The piano was wretchedly out of tune. Cars whipped past behind them. There was a char stink in the air and on everything. And her son comforted her. They turned into people, your kids. It wasn’t better than science fiction. It was science fiction.
Now if he could just get it through his head that Booth was Booth was Booth was Booth. Booth was a dreadful disappointment. Allie was sorry about that. He had not been much of a husband, either. The particulars had been established, and the record stood. Sam needed to let that be all right.
Sometimes you had to let yourself be absolved of every mistake and every resentment and every other fixation large and small, and breathe in and breathe out a few times, and say, “Okay, this isn’t the apocalypse—and so what if it is?” and take it from the top, fresh.
3.
Inside, Allie poured a glass of water and went to the table. The phone rang, and she let it go. On the fourth ring, the machine picked up.
“Allie, I have negotiated a cease-fire with the cell-phone people,” said Booth. “In so doing, I have discovered why our once great nation is in such a shambles. We still have the innovators, the creators, and the geniuses. What we don’t have are the ass breakers. The public sector lacks ass breakers, and it is because the cell-phone companies and the insurance companies have gobbled them all up. They have contracted all of our top ass breakers, and the nation is suffering. Additionally, this is why there are no good movies anymore. All of the great directors were ass breakers. Welles must have snapped a thousand asses over his mighty knee.”
Allie thought about standing up and getting the phone, but oftentimes it was as fun to listen to Booth as it was to speak with him. Another day she could tell her ex-husband how their son was the best special effect in the world.
“Anyway, I placated them, and here I am, my coccyx shattered but my cell phone restored, and I was thinking of you, and the many wonderful times we’ve had, and thought you might want to talk,” Booth went on. “Are you sure you’re not home, dear?”
“Should I go save that stupid turtle, Booth?” Allie asked, although he could not hear her. It was sitting out there in the middle of the road. She absently flexed her left hand—arthritis?
“Well, call me, darling. You are adored. Your attitude and your decency set a wonderful example for all of us, and I feel lucky to know you. Goodbye, Allie.”
Allie sighed. She sat up straight, stood, and left the house. This morning, life was a snapping turtle in the middle of the road. She had an example to set!
■ ■ ■
They were safe; a few seconds after Allie placed the turtle on the grass at the side of the road, a gray pickup truck passed around the curve, tools rattling in its bed. That thing would have punched your ticket, she tried to tell the turtle. The animal was a few feet from where she was lying, gazing at her with amber eyes. Allie didn’t remember falling down—perhaps she had passed out for a moment—but there was no pain, just a vague heaviness where the left side of her body used to be. She could smell the warm pavement.
The turtle hissed at her. It shuffled away, and she never saw it again.
You’re welcome, she tried, but couldn’t. She laughed, and it sounded like someone was crying.
Sam, she thought.
Before Allie, a small pothole at the edge of the street expanded into a wide and bottomless pit. A movie screen slid up from the tear in the earth, and there was no more turtle, road, or truck. There was just the movie screen and the circular darkness beneath it. A blocky credit appeared:
A Sam Dolan Picture
The Unhappy Future of Mankind
Her favorite! Bergman, eat your heart out!
I’m in the middle of a movie, she told herself, but knew it wasn’t true. She was on the side of the road. Something had happened to her—heart attack, stroke, fit—after she moved the stupid turtle, and now she was partly stone. A pavement smell was in her nose, and a movie screen was in the street.
The movie commenced:
A red man with a smile for a head, the grinning mouth shaped like a watermelon wedge and stuck atop a body in a trim business suit, stands at the foot of a column of other scarlet-colored individuals. They are grouped against a backdrop of gray rug in the vast oblong shadow of a humongous bed.
Various considerations bobbed and sank: Allie didn’t want Sam to be upset. She wanted to remind Booth to take care of his little girl. She had a lesson scheduled with Bea Nillson Monday morning, which would need to be rescheduled for eternity. A puppet string drew her right eyelid closed.
The man who has a smile for a head twitches forward. Row by row, the others—twisted, lumpy, and red—echo his movements. The bed’s shadow ripples across them.
It came to Allie then, very clearly, that she was not going to be watching this movie to the finish, and that was too bad. She liked what she had seen.
PART 4
THE LONG WEEKEND
(2011)
Saturday and Sunday
1.
At the Days Inn up the street from Russell, they shared a room. Tess chose the big chair in the corner, leaving Sam and Wesley to share the bed. It was dawn by the time they turned in, and Wesley went to great lengths to block out the band of light at the bottom of the long window, using the phone book, the Bible, and all the towels from the bathroom to plunge the room into darkness.
When Sam awoke, he felt around on the bedside table until his fingers found the digital clock. He thumbed the button to show the readout: 11:21 A.M.
“You’re awake.” Tess was somewhere to his left.
“How long have you been up?” he asked.
“Since eight.”
Sam blearily calculated that Tess had been awake for three hours. “Jesus. Why?”
“It’s my body clock. I have a job. They make you get up early for those.”
“That seems harsh.”
As his eyes adapted to the dark, he could somewhat make her out in the big chair, a cloud of dark hair over the edge of a blanket. He was amazed and, in the awareness of a new day, sharply embarrassed that she had
stuck around. He was glad, too—it would have been a punch in the stomach if she’d sneaked out—but on top of everything else that had passed between them, now she had met his family, too. Her continued company was making him feel increasingly naked.
“You really didn’t cry during E.T.?” she asked. “I still find that hard to believe. I was just trying to make a mental time line of all your lies, and I want to put that first.” He had expected her to ask him “What’s the deal with you and Polly?” or “Do people try to kill you often?” or even “Was your father in movies?,” so E.T. came from the left-field bleachers.
“What else did I lie about besides meeting you for a drink outside the Stables?”
“So you did lie about E.T.”
“Yes, I cried at E.T.,” Sam admitted. “But it made me mad, too.”
“Why?”
“Maybe it hit a little close to home,” he said.
“You were friends with a space alien when you were a kid, and the government tried to steal him for experiments? I think I understand you better all of a sudden.”
“My parents were divorced. My personal experience was more depressing than exciting. No space aliens. I never saved anyone, I never had any adventures, I didn’t have a cool big brother. We didn’t live in California. The movie made me intensely aware that my reality was disappointing and a lot more complex.”
“Yeah, but how was that the movie’s fault?” asked Tess. “That your reality was disappointing?”
Sam could see a little more of her now, the hollows of her eyes, the line of her jaw and neck. Tess couldn’t have clocked over 120 pounds at the outside, but her presence was weighty. He had no explanation for why it was E.T.’s fault that his childhood had been disappointing. It was kind of an obvious point, so obvious he couldn’t conceive of even a token defense. “I don’t know,” he said.
A duck call—the pitch starting low and rising to a poignant whine—came from his right. Like a thunderclap, the smell of Wesley’s fart was delayed for two or three seconds before it materialized into a palpable force. The stench was crappy and beery, with notes of fried meat.