by Ben Bova
Frowning and shaking his head, the expatriate said, “Yeah, but he can’t even speak English.”
Gabriel almost fell off his chair. “What? What’s he speak, French?”
“Nope. Neanderthal.”
Not knowing whether it was a joke or not, Gabriel climbed off his perch and sat down. The crowd settled down, too, as Finger nudged Dulaq to the microphone.
“I wancha t’know,” Dulaq said, “dat I’ll t’row evert’ing I got into dis job… jus’ like I t’rew dem. body checks inta dem Chinks last May!”
They all roared again. Gabriel sank his head down onto his arms and tried to keep from crying.
At precisely two a.m. Gabriel’s phone buzzed.
He wasn’t sleeping. His trusty suitcase was open on the bed, half filled with his clothes. Since the end of the dinner, Gabriel had spent the night phoning Finger, Montpelier, Brenda, Sam Lipid and anyone else who would listen, telling them that if Dulaq was the male star of the show, they could get themselves another chief writer.
They all argued with him. They cited contracts and clauses. They spoke glowingly of Dulaq’s magnetic personality and star quality and sex appeal. They promised voice coaching and speech therapy and soundtrack dubbing. Still, Gabriel packed his suitcase as he fought with them.
Then his phone buzzed.
Gabriel leaned across the bed and flipped the switch that turned it on. Rita Yearling’s incredibly lovely face appeared on the phone’s screen.
“Hi,” she breathed.
Gabriel hung suspended, stretched across the bed with one foot in his suitcase, tangled in his dirty underwear.
“Hello yourself,” he managed.
Her eyes seemed to widen as she noticed the open suitcase. “You’re not leaving?”
Gabriel nodded. He couldn’t talk.
“Don’t you care about the show?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Don’t you care about me?”
With an effort, Gabriel said, “I care a lot. Too much to watch you ruin your career before it really starts. That hockey puck of a leading man is going to destroy this show.”
She dimpled at him. “You’re jealous!”
“No,” he said. “Just fed up.”
“Oh, Ron…” Her face pulled together slightly in a small frown.
“I can’t take it anymore,” Gabriel said. “It’s just one battle after another… like fighting with a Hydra. Every time I chop off one head, seven more pop up.”
But she wasn’t listening. “Ron… you poor sweet boy. Come out onto your balcony. I’ve got a surprise for you.”
“On the balcony?”
“Go out and see,” Rita cooed.
Untangling himself from the suitcase, Gabriel padded barefoot to the balcony. He was wearing nothing but his knee-length dashiki and the chill night air cut into him the instant he opened the sliding glass door.
“Surprise!” he heard from over his head.
Looking up, he saw Rita smiling lusciously down at him. She was on the balcony one floor up and one room over from his own. She stood there smiling down at him, clothed in a luminous wisp of a gown that billowed softly in the breeze.
“I took this room for the weekend. I wanted to get away from the suite where B.F. is,” she said.
Ron’s knees went weak. “It is the east,” he murmured, “and Juliet is the sun.”
“This is a lot more fun than talking over the phone, isn’t it?” Rita gave a girlish wriggle. “Like, it’s more romantic, huh?”
Without even thinking about it, Gabriel leaped up on the railing of his own balcony. He stretched and his fingertips barely grazed the bottom of Rita’s balcony.
“Hey! Be careful!”
Gabriel glanced below. Ten floors down, the street lamps glowed softly in the cold night air. Wind whipped at his dashiki and his butt suddenly felt terribly exposed.
“What are you doing?” Rita called, delighted.
He jumped for her balcony. His fingers clutched at the cold cement, then he reached, straining, and grabbed a fistful of one of the metal posts supporting the railing.
His feet dangled in empty air and his dashiki billowed in the wind. Somewhere far back in his mind, Gabriel realized what a ridiculous picture this would present to anyone passing below. But that didn’t matter.
Beads of cold sweat popped out all over his body as he strained, muscles agonized by the unaccustomed effort, hand over hand to the edge of the balcony’s railing. His bare toes found a hold on the balcony’s cement floor at last and he heaved himself, puffing and trembling wtih exertion, over the railing to collapse at Rita’s feet.
She dropped to her knees beside him. “Ron, darling, are you all right?”
He smiled weakly up at her. “Hiya kid.” It wasn’t Shakespeare, he knew, but it was the best he could manage under the conditions.
They went arm in arm into her hotel room. Rita’s gown was a see-through and Gabriel was busily looking into it.
She sat him down on the edge of the bed. “Ron,” she said, very seriously, “you can’t leave the show.”
“There’s no reason for me to stay,” he said.
“Yes there is.”
“What?”
She lowered her eyelids demurely. “There’s me.”
10: THE DIRECTOR
Mitch Westerly sat scowling to himself behind his archaic dark glasses. The other passengers on the jet airliner shuffled past him, down the narrow aisle, overcoats flopping in their arms and hand baggage banging against the seats and each other.
Westerly ignored them all, just as he had ignored the stewardesses who had recognized him and asked for his autograph. They were up forward now, smiling their mechanical “Have a good day” at the outgoing passengers and sneaking glances at him.
I should never have come back, he thought. This is going to be a bad scene. I can feel it in my karma.
He was neither tall nor particularly handsome, but since puberty he had somehow attracted women without even trying. His face was rugged, weatherbeaten, the face of an oldtime cowboy or mountaineer, even though he had spent most of his life in movie sound stages-and even in Nepal, where he had been for the past two years, he had seen the Himalayas only through very well-insulated windows. His body was broad shouldered, solid, stocky, the kind that goes to fat when you reach forty. But Westerly had always eaten very sparingly and hardly ever drank at all; there was no fat on him.
He wore his standard outfit, a trademark that never changed no matter what the current fashion might be: a pullover sweater, faded denims, boots, the dark shades and a pair of soft leather race driver’s gloves. He had started wearing the gloves many years earlier, when he had been second-unit director on a racing car TV series. The gloves kept him from biting his fingernails, and he rarely took them off. It ruined his image to be seen biting his fingernails.
Finally, all the passengers had left. The plane was empty except for the three stewardesses. The tallest one, who also seemed to be the boss stew, strode briskly toward him, her microskirt flouncing prettily and revealing her flowered underpants.
“End of the line, I’m sorry to say,” she told him.
“Hate to leave,” Westerly said. His voice was as soft as the leather of his gloves.
“I hope you enjoyed the flight.”
“Yeah. Sure did.” And the offers of free booze, the names and numbers your two assistants scribbled on my lunch tray and the note you slipped under the washroom door.
He slowly pulled himself out of the plush seat, while the stewardess reached up into the overhead rack and pulled out his sheepskin jacket.
“Will you be in Toronto for long?” she asked, as they started up the aisle together, with him in the lead.
“Directing a TV series here,” Westerly said, over his shoulder.
“Oh really?” Her voice said How exciting! without using the words. “Will you be staying at the Disney Hilton? That’s where we stay for our layovers.”
That
dump. Not even the fleas go there anymore. “Nope. They’ve got us at one of the older places—Inn on the Park.”
“Ohhh. That’s beautiful. A… friend, he took me to dinner there once.”
They were at the hatch now. The other two stews were smiling glitteringly at him. With his Himalayan-honed senses he could almost hear them saying, Put me in your TV series. Make me famous. I’ll do anything for that. Glamour, glamour, romance and glamour.
He hesitated at the hatch and made a smile for them. They shuddered visibly. “Y’all come out to the studio when you get a chance. Meet the TV people. Just ask for me at the gate. Anytime.”
“Ohh. We will!”
His smile self-destructed as soon as he turned his back on them and trudged down the connecting tunnel that led into the airport terminal building.
They were at the gate area waiting for him. The photographers, the media newshounds, the newspaper reporters, the lank-haired droopy-mouthed emaciated young women who covered Special Events for the local TV stations and show business magazines, the public relations Oaks for Titanic and Badger and Shiva knows who else. They all looked alike, from Bhutan to Brooklyn.
They might be the same people who were at the airport in Delhi… and in Rome… and in London, Westerly realized with a thrill of horror. My own personal set of devils hounding me wherever I go. Eternally. Hell is an airport terminal!
He kept his head down and refused even to listen to their shouting, pleading questions until the PR flaks—Why are they always balding and desperate faced?—steered him to one of those private rooms with unmarked doors that line the long impersonal corridors of every airport terminal in the world.
The room inside had been set up for a press conference. A table near the door was groaning with bottles of liquor and trays of hors d’oeuvres. A battery of microphones studded a small podium at the front of the room. Folding chairs were neatly arranged in rows.
Inside of three minutes, Westerly was standing at the podium (which bore the stylized trademark of Titanic Productions, a rakishly angled “T” in which the cross piece was a pair of wings), the hors d’oeuvres were totally demolished, half the booze was gone, the chairs were scattered as if by a tsunami and the PR men were smiling with self-satisfaction.
One of the lank-haired young women was asking, “When you left Hollywood two years ago, you vowed you’d never return. What changed your mind?”
Westerly fiddled with his glasses for a moment. “Haven’t changed my mind,” he said slowly, with just a trace of fashionable West Virginia accent. “Didn’t go back to Hollywood. This is Toronto, isn’t it?”
The news people laughed. But the scrawny girl refused to be embarrassed.
“You said you were finished with commercial films and you were going to seek inner peace; now you’re back. Why?”
Because inner peace comes at eleven-fifty a week at the Katmandu-Sheraton, baby. “I spent two years absorbing the wisdom of the East in the Himalayas,” Westerly replied aloud. “One of the most important things the lamas taught me is that a man should use his inborn talents and use them wisely. My talent is making movies and television shows. It’s my karma… my destiny.”
“Didn’t you make a movie in Tibet last year?” asked an overweight, mustachioed reporter.
“Surely did,” said Westerly. “But that was purely for self-expression… to help release my soul from its bondage. That film will never be released for commercial viewing.” Not that bomb. Never make that mistake again—hash and high altitudes just don’t mix.
One of the media interviewers, his videotape camera strapped securely to the side of his head, asked, “You left the States right after the Academy Awards dinner, with no explanations at all except that you had to—quote, find yourself, end quote. Why did you turn down the Oscar?”
“Didn’t think I deserved it. A director shouldn’t get an Oscar for his first feature film. There were many other directors who had amassed a substantial body of work who deserved to get an Oscar before Mitch Westerly did.” And the IRS and the Narcs were getting too close; it was no time to show up at a prearranged affair.
“Do you still consider yourself the Boy Genius of Hollywood?”
“Never been a boy.” Pushing forty and running scared.
“Why have you come here to Toronto, instead of going back to Hollywood?”
Taxes, pushers, alimony… take your pick. “Gregory Earnest convinced me that ‘The Starcrossed’ was a vehicle worthy of my Krishna-given talents.”
“Have you met the people who’ll be working for you on ‘The Starcrossed’?”
“Not yet.”
“Have you read any of the scripts?”
I gagged over the first six pages. “Looked over some of the scripts and read the general concept of the show. Looks great.”
“Do you think Shakespeare and science fiction can be mixed?”
“Why not? If Will were alive today, he’d be writing science fiction.”
“What do you think is the best film you’ve ever directed?”
Without an instant’s hesitation, Westerly replied, “The one I’m working on now. In this case, the entire series, ‘The Starcrossed.’”
But in his mind, his life flashed before his consciousness like a videotape spun at dizzying, blurring speed. He knew the best film he had done; everyone in the room knew it; the one original piece of work he had been able to do, the first major job he had tackled, as a senior back at UCLA: The Reawakening. The hours, the weeks, the months he had spent. First as a volunteer worker at the mental hospital, then convincing them to let him bring his tiny pocket camera in. Following Virginia, sallow, pathetic, schizophrenic Virginia through the drug therapy, the primal sessions, the EEGs, the engram reversals. Doctors, skinny fidgety nurses who didn’t trust him at first, Virginia’s parents tight and suspicious, angry at her for the dream world they had thrust her into,’ the psychotechs and their weird machines that mapped the brain and put the mind on a viewscreen. Virginia’s gradual awakening to the real world, her understanding that the parents who said they loved her actually wanted nothing to do with her, her acceptance of adulthood, of maturity, of her own individuality and the fact that she was a lovely, desirable woman. Mitch’s wild hopeless love for her and that heart-stopping instant when she smiled and told him in a voice so low that he could barely hear it that she loved him too. That was his best film; his life and hers recorded in magnetic swirls on long reels of tape. Truth frozen into place so that people could see it and understand and cry and laugh over it.
He had never done anything so fine again. He became successful. He directed “True to Life” TV shows and made money and fame. He married Virginia while they were both still growing and changing. Unlike the magnetic patterns on video tape, they did not stay frozen in place forever. They split, slowly and sadly at first, then with the wild burning anger of betrayal and hate. By the time he directed his first major production and was nominated for an Oscar, his world had already crashed around him.
“Do you really think ‘The Starcrossed’ is award-winning material?”
The question snapped him back to this small stuffy overcrowded room, with the news people playing their part in the eternal charade. So he went back to playing his.
“‘The Starcrossed’ has the potential of an award-winning series. It won’t be eligible for an Oscar because it’s not a one-time production. But it should be in contention for an Emmy as Best Dramatic Series.”
Satisfied that they had put his neck in the noose, the news people murmured their thanks and headed on to their next assignments.
Westerly went straight to the studio, while two of the PR Oaks took his luggage to the hotel. He almost asked why it took a pair of them to escort his one flight bag to the hotel, but thought better of it. If he raised a question about it, Westerly knew, they’d wind up assigning a third PR man to supervise the first two.
Gregory Earnest met him at the studio, looking somber in a dark gray jumpsuit. His face w
as as deeply hidden by bushy beard and tangled mane as ever, but since Westerly had seen him last—many months earlier, in Nepal— Earnest’s face had subtly changed, improved. His nose seemed slightly different, somehow.
“I’m glad you’re finally here,” Earnest said, with great seriousness. “Now maybe we can start to bring some order out of this chaos.”
He showed Westerly around the sets that had been built in the huge studio. The place was empty and quiet, except for a small group of people off to one side who were working on some kind of aerial rigging. Westerly ignored them and studied the sets.
“This is impossible,” he said at last.
“What?” Earnest’s eyebrows disappeared into his bushy forelocks. “What do you mean?”
“These sets.” Westerly stood in the middle of the starship bridge, surrounded by complicated-looking cardboard consoles. “They’re too deep. How’re we going to move cameras in and out around all this junk? It’ll take hours to make a single shot!”
Earnest sighed with relief. “Oh that. You’ve never directed a three-doe show before, have you?”
“No, but…”
“Well, one of the things audiences like is a lot of depth in each scene. We don’t put all the props against the walls anymore… we scatter them around the floor. Makes a better three-dimensional effect.”
“But the cameras…”
“They’re small enough to move through the standing props. We measured all the tolerances…”
“But I thought three-dee cameras were big awkward mothers.”
Earnest cast a rare smile at him. It was not a pleasant thing to see. “That was two years ago. Time marches on. A lot of transistors have flown under the bridge. You’re not in the Mystic East anymore.”
Westerly pushed his glasses up against the bridge of his nose. “I see,” he said.
“Hey! There you are!” A shout came echoing across the big, nearly empty room.
Earnest and Westerly turned to see a stubby little guy dashing toward them. He wore a Starcrossed tee shirt and a pair of old-fashioned sailor’s bell-bottoms, complete with a thirteen-button trapdoor in front.