“Why would he? Why would anybody?”
“He got where he is by eating shit, is why. He worked for the worst people in this town, and that’s saying a lot. This is an industry that enjoys the sight of failure and likes to make it just a little worse, so all the people whose shit Granger was eating introduced him to their so-called friends, and they, or I should say we, all fed him some more shit. While he grinned and nodded and kept his ears open, read people’s email, rifled through file drawers, and made notes. By the time he aced Barry Zipken with that teenage fluff, he had stuff, lethal stuff, on everyone at Farscope. They had a choice: either they defended him in court or they got the rug pulled out from under them. These guys had mortgages the size of Manhattan, and they had big, fat, expensive asses, which they didn’t want to land on, so the lawyers appeared in a shower of glitter, Barry got fired, Jeremy skated, and—informally at first—he used all that info to take over. The ghost with all the power. And now he does just two things with his life: he makes movies that earn trainloads of money, and he gets even. With everyone. Guy’s probably saying maybe right now to twenty, thirty movies, just tying knots in people’s lives. Twenty-four hours a day, he gets even.”
“Turnaround.”
“Sorta benign sounding, isn’t it? Like a dance step. Like if they named leprosy lacyface.”
“But, Jake. Even if the movie never gets made, in the end you can sell paintings, one at a time, and sooner or later you’ll get paid for the streaming rights and you’ll wind up okay. I mean, come on, this is just another movie. Out of how many? Fourteen? Fifteen?”
“Seventeen. Total grosses more than two billion.” he said. “Nearly three billion, and those are the official figures, so God knows what the real ones are. But see, King Maybe, he’s operating in a new universe, a global universe, where the grosses are . . . well, it’s like there’s no gravity, okay? He’s been at it less than a decade, and he’s already pushing eight billion. There’s not as many movies now as there used to be, not so much competition, and there’s bigger audiences with Asia standing in line over there waving their yuan around, but that’s all just excuses. Makes me look like a pisher, is what it does.”
“Seventeen movies. What makes this one life-and-death?”
He got to his feet, and for a moment I thought he was heading back upstairs for a little elevation, but instead he went to the fireplace, grabbed a couple of wrist-thick branches, and tossed them in. “It’s an apology,” he said to the fire. “It’s my way to make up for all the zap-zap, kiss-kiss, boys-being-boys crapola I passed off as art all those years. It’s a movie that’s actually about something, something more important than The Rock’s pectoral muscles or the physics of warp speed when you’re wearing a tight sweater in outer space. Those movies were about movies, Junior. The world in them was pieces of other movies. This one is about life.” He turned to face me, ragged at the edges but still as imperially slim as Richard Cory just before he went home and put the bullet through his head. “It’s the last thing I want to do before I die.”
Okay, Jake was a huckster with decades of experience. He’d been making exorbitant claims for negligible movies ever since some of his early ones thrilled my little-boy pants off. I’d grown up with him giving ponderous interviews and making mythic claims in publications that should have known better—the New York Times, for example—about films that turned out, upon arrival, to be lighter than air and a lot smellier. High-concept, low-IQ. Zap-zap, kiss-kiss, like the man said. This was what he did, repackage shit as shea butter. It was part of his job description.
Except that I believed him.
Sort of.
I said, “What’s it called?”
He focused on a spot over my head, drew a couple of deep breaths, licked his lips, and said, “Ambient Violet.”
“Ambient—”
“Violet.” It was almost a snap.
“Not Stone and Steel, not Nickel and Dime not Scratch and Sniff?”
“That was a formula,” he said, as though that had never occurred to anyone. “I’m telling you, this one is different.” He raised a hand in a way that suggested I’d been poised to interrupt. “Just give me two minutes, okay? You can time me, I don’t give a fuck.”
“I’m listening.”
“I need a second.” He picked up the fire iron and messed around with the logs. It was a little stagey, but then I’m a cynic. “I’ve done it all,” he said. “I’ve had it all. However you measure it, there are wide lives—big lives—and there are small lives. And I think maybe I’ve—maybe we’ve all—been chasing the wrong one.”
He leaned the iron against the fireplace. “So I went for the big life, and I got it, bigger than almost anyone. Probably looked great from outside, and you know, Junior, for a long time I lived my life so it would look good from outside. For example, books. I never read shit, and when I did, it was junk, you know, the heartrending romance of the week and real-life crime and even those condensed books like they used to have—you know, ‘All the story in half the words’? But my bookshelves, they were all Tolstoy and the Greeks, poetry and Shakespeare, biographies of people I never heard of, but the guy I had buy my books for me, he said they were important. And the other thing he did, he wrote a couple paragraphs about each of them so I could talk about them and not sound like an idiot. ‘The theme of redemption in Tolstoy,’ you know what I’m saying?”
“I suppose. But I don’t have any idea where you’re taking it.”
“See, that’s why the movie is so important.” He pushed himself away from the fireplace and started to pace. “What I can say right now, just you and me in this room, is that I fell for it myself. The bigness was what I thought I wanted, and so I made it, I claimed all that space and then I filled it up with junk, and I believed it. Those books, this house, the Ferraris, my name on those theater marquees, me standing around at parties shooting the shit with Harrison Ford. Saying yes and no to the world. I bought it.”
By now he’d gotten far enough to my left that I was going to have to shift to keep him in my field of vision, and he turned, so it was pretty clear he was aware of his audience’s sight lines. “See, what happens in life, you try this and that, and if you’re lucky, you find something that pleases you, that satisfies you, makes you feel good about yourself. If you’re not lucky, you find things that hurt less than the other things do. So either way, what you do, you use that information to build a sort of house out of your life, does that make sense? As long as you stay inside those walls, in that floor plan, chances are you won’t get creamed.” He stretched out an arm, index finger extended, and indicated the rectangle of the room we were in. “Same rooms over and over again, but they’re safe. You’re trapped, but you’re safe. And, of course, the joke is that you have to get as old as I am to understand that I could have walked through those walls anytime. That I should have. Into someplace small and quiet. Someplace I could get my arms around.”
“The unexamined life,” I said.
He snapped his fingers and pointed a finger at me, pistol style. “That’s it, that’s exactly it. And listen, I know this isn’t the first time anybody ever thought about this, but now I look back at all that time I was given, that time I spent returning calls and jumping on planes and crossing oceans and getting hair implants and shtupping starlets, and you know what I see? I see that every day of my life I’ve been getting up in the morning and next to my bed there’s this, like, chalice, whatever a chalice is, and it’s full of these golden, glowing seeds. And every day I’ve reached in without a second’s thought and grabbed one at random and then never thought about it again, and that was my day. And it’s not until you get old,” he said, coming back to his chair and sitting on the arm closer to me, only a few feet away, “that you realize that the level of golden seeds in the chalice drops every time you take one out. Gets lower. And one day you look in and you realize you can almost count them, and what did
you do with the ones you pulled out? Did you breathe on them, roll them between your hands, try to feed that teeny golden fire just a little bit? Did you say thank you, did you explore them, or did you just pop the seed like an aspirin and forget about it, go make another million, schmooze some actor, buy another yard of books you won’t read?” He leaned back and slid the rest of the way into the chair. “Maybe, in your case, steal something that someone loved?”
“And what would have happened,” I said, “if you’d tried to feed the fire?”
“Who the fuck knows?” he said. He slapped his thighs with his open hands, the sound surprisingly loud. “That’s why it matters: you don’t know. Whatever kind of life it was, big and shiny like mine or tiny and awful like some street beggar’s in New Delhi, sooner or later it’s gone, and you didn’t explore it, you never went all the way to the borders, much less through them. I know, I know this sounds like white people’s problems, sounds like every old fart who ever lived, but maybe there’s some room in the world for something that suggests to people that they owe it to themselves to realize that the walls that they built yesterday, they can go through them today. If you built big, you can go small, if you built small . . . well, you know. You don’t have to be the person you started out to be. You can walk away from that person the way you’d blow off the bore at a party. Be something different. You can look at each of those little seeds and make the most of it. In my case, center in and go for something small.”
“Why small?”
He leaned back and regarded his lap for a moment. “Well, first, obviously, I’ve had big. But more than that, beyond that, there’s a kind of density to some small lives, you know? A kind of concentration. Emily Dickinson left a pretty deep scratch on the world for someone who hardly ever went outdoors, Jane Austen in her . . . what, her drawing room? I don’t know. How big was Jesus’s world? A couple hundred square miles?” He lifted his feet one at a time and brought them down onto the floor, making footsteps like a sound effect. “Covered mostly on foot? I still have a lot of energy, Junior. It’s wisdom I don’t have. Maybe looking very closely at one thing at a time for a while, learning every square inch of a small room, figuring out how to play the first six notes of ‘Clair de Lune’ on a violin perfectly is how you get to wisdom. Maybe I’ve got enough time left to make a start on that.”
“You’re going to work toward a small life by making a hundred-million-dollar movie.”
“It’s what I know how to do.” He peeled himself from the fire and headed toward the stairs, but it was movement for movement’s sake, and he turned halfway and came back toward me, stopping eight or ten feet from my chair. Raised both hands, palms outward, telling me to sit there and listen. “At this time in my life, I need to say something. I need to try to tell people the things I’m beginning to figure out, in a way they won’t forget. A movie, okay? And at the same time, it’ll be my discipline. No more ten things at once. One movie, word by word, idea by idea, inch by inch. Image by image. Like scrimshaw.” He made it to his chair and did something that was midway between sitting down and collapsing. “Like how a face ages, one slow wrinkle at a time. Pulling it out of my soul, if I can find my soul.”
“Ambient Violet,” I said.
He leaned forward in the chair, very quickly. “Laugh at me, I’ll kick your face in.”
“Then don’t amuse me.”
“The whole thing, the whole movie, it takes place in the moments between the time someone—an old woman—breathes in for the last time and the time she breathes out. The opening shot is a wall, just a rough, blank, whitewashed wall, somewhere in the Third World, with a crack running down it. And we get a quick glimpse of her face with her eyes wide open, staring at the wall—maybe fifteen, twenty frames, just enough to register her—and then we’re back to the wall, and we hear her inhale deeply, a little raggedly, the sound slowed way down, and the camera moves inch by inch toward the crack, and almost imperceptibly the crack widens and turns blue, and we do a tilt-shift, and it’s a river with some trees over it, and it’s the thing she knew best in her life. And then she’s a young girl at the edge of a river, and we’re there with her.”
“In her memory.”
“In her life. And her life, it’s nothing. It’s nothing anyone would ever write down. She lives, she falls in love, she has a couple of children and one dies, she gets old and sick, she finally breathes out, she passes away, and nobody remembers her. And the river is still there, the crack on the wall is still there, and they don’t remember her either.”
I said nothing.
“And that was the whole world,” he said. “That was all of life, all of time, that was everything everyone has ever wanted or needed or been afraid of, and she didn’t go anywhere, she didn’t do anything. She didn’t get painted, she didn’t get filmed, she didn’t get rich. She lived, she loved her kids, she died. The history of the world, in close-up. What would I mean to her? What would you mean to her? We’d be a streak on the horizon, a blemish on the stars. She wouldn’t give us a thought. She had—she had, like that girl in there watching Lawrence of Arabia—she had fires to build. People to keep warm. Then she was gone. The end.”
“Why violet?”
He looked embarrassed, as though he’d been hoping I wouldn’t ask. “Violet is the color of memory. To me, I mean.”
“Got it.” I sat back in the chair, distancing myself from his intensity as I might pull away from a space heater. “You think you can make that movie?”
“I don’t know,” he said, tight-lipped. “I’d have to become somebody else to do it, wouldn’t I?”
“I asked if you thought you could make it.”
“I think I have to try.”
“Well, shit,” I said. It was my turn to get up, even though there was nowhere I wanted to go. “If I say no, you’ll kill me, so what do you need me to do?”
Outside, the wind rattled the windows.
12
Tired of Being Dead
“So you want to be an actress,” I said. We were crossing Santa Monica, heading north into Hollywood. It was late afternoon, still hot and windy. The trees were waving their arms around, and their shadows stretched themselves all the way across the street. The shadowscape felt premature, with daylight saving time gone for only a week.
“Jake told you, didn’t he?” she said accusingly. “Bet I know how he made that sound.”
“Jake doesn’t matter. You want to act, right?”
“Who doesn’t?” she said. “Especially when you’re out on the Texas panhandle, just you and the wind, and the only color you got is what’s on the teevee.” She was looking down at her lap, and I could see why; the neighborhood through which we were driving was the absolute ass end of Hollywood, street after street of buildings neither old enough to be interesting nor new enough to look clean.
As though reading my mind, she glanced up for a second, just a Where are we? check, and said, “When I first got here? I looked at all these crappy soda-cracker buildings and I felt like they was just—sorry, they were just—inviting earthquakes, daring them, saying, ‘Come on in and shake.’ It reminded me of trailer parks in the South, just hollering up to the sky for a big fat tornado: ‘Git your ass down here and blow me all to shit.’ Yeah, I wanted to be an actress. Me and every other semi-pretty chick in Texas.”
“Don’t short yourself. So you sat around and watched TV and thought about coming out here?”
“Right at the next turn,” she said. “Yeah. It looked easy. Learn the words and let them get you all made up, and there you are, going out with some Jonas brother. It’s funny, when you’re in that gear, wanting it so much, you don’t notice how bad some of them are, the girls on TV. If you did, you’d probably consider, ‘Hey, maybe it’s harder than I think.’”
“Bad actresses,” I said.
I made the turn. She said, “Was that the complete thought?”
>
“No. Did you watch a show called Dead Eye?”
“The zombie thing, few years back? That chick, I mean, she was fine-looking, even if she had kind of early-bloomer fifteen-year-old looks, but she was hopeless. She talked like a machine, like Siri on the iPhone, on a bad day And I mean she actually looked at the camera sometimes.”
“Somebody Dawn?” I said.
“Tasha,” she said. “Tasha Dawn. We used to have contests, like imitating her, in junior high. She had this little wee helium voice? ‘I am so tired of bein’ dead,’ she said once in a while. I guess it was supposed to build her character or something. We used to say it in Mr. Winslow’s social-studies class. He’d say something extra dull with like a hundred dates in it, and a dozen girls would say, ‘I am so tired of bein’ dead.’ But, you know, out there on the panhandle I looked at her and thought, ‘If she can make it, I can.’”
“She married it,” I said.
“So I learned. El queso grande, the big cheese himself. Some girls have all the luck.”
“I’m not sure she’s as lucky as all that.”
“Well, she’s not living here,” Casey said. “Right here, just pull over. Mi casa, on the right.”
Casey’s building was a nondescript three-story apartment house, one of hundreds stamped out of a mold: just a big concrete lower-Hollywood shoe box with pathetic little balconies, all of eight inches deep, protruding below the windows like a patient unenthusiastically showing the doctor her tongue. Casey waited a moment after I pulled up to the curb, looking at me sort of expectantly with one foot tapping, and then she said, “Buy me a drink sometime? I’ll tell you some Texas stories.”
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