by John Irving
Lawrence was "unencumbered" at lunch, Emma observed; he was just a liar who was out of a job. Morton's--the enduring and expensive celebrity hangout on Melrose, in West Hollywood--was not a place where you wanted to be eating lunch alone. No deals were going down for Lawrence, Emma concluded; maybe that's why he got a little crude with her. "Do you still claim you're not banging your boyfriend?" he asked, meaning Jack. "Does Jack go on dates as a girl?"
Emma knew she could kick the crap out of him, but she let it pass. "You're such a loser, Lawrence," was all she said. It was sufficiently gratifying to her that Lawrence didn't seem to know he was in one of the least prestigious booths.
Emma had resigned from her studio job as a script reader a couple of months before The Slush-Pile Reader was published. "Screenplay development just isn't for me," she'd told them, but one of the studio execs got hold of a set of her galleys. There was a kind of code in Hollywood, too vague and virulently denied to be a rule: you were not supposed to call an asshole an asshole, not in writing. It was the dim understanding of this studio exec that Emma had violated the code. To punish her, the exec copied Emma's script notes and distributed them to the rejected writers' agents. But the punishment backfired: once you start making copies, everyone sees them. The execs at other studios read Emma's notes; after all, many of the screenplays in question were still making the rounds.
A few of those scripts were now films in production; a couple were in post-production, meaning they'd miraculously been shot, and one had recently been released, to tepid reviews. Naturally, the reviews weren't as insightful or well-written as Emma's notes on an earlier draft of the screenplay. Even the rejected writers' agents liked Emma's notes--two of them offered her a job.
A celebrity talk-show host at an L.A. radio station asked Emma's permission to read some of her script notes on the air. "Sure," Emma said. "Everyone else has read them." (More publicity for The Slush-Pile Reader--not that Emma needed it.)
This didn't win Emma many friends among screenwriters, but what really insulted the industry was that Emma said she wasn't interested in writing a screenplay herself--especially not an adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader. In the novel, she'd already made the point that the story was one third porn film; no one would attempt to make a serious movie out of that material. To virtually assure herself that no one would, Emma entangled the film rights to her novel with the kind of approvals never granted to writers--not to first novelists, anyway. She again asserted that she had no interest in adapting The Slush-Pile Reader herself, yet she insisted on retaining script approval, should anyone else be enough of a fool to write a screenplay, and she insisted on having cast approval and director approval--even final cut. The Slush-Pile Reader couldn't be made as a movie under those outrageous terms.
When Emma showed up at all the usual places--she took Jack with her, more and more--it was widely assumed that she was doing research for another Hollywood novel, but Jack didn't know (at the time) that this was the case. He thought she just liked to eat and drink. But Emma saw herself as a specter sent to remind the studio execs that there was such a thing as a script reader who could write.
In the movie business, they were already speaking admiringly of The Slush-Pile Reader as "not makable," which could be quite a compliment in the industry--provided you didn't make a habit of it.
Jack worried about Emma. She had bought the house they'd been renting in Santa Monica, for no good reason. The move from Venice had irritated her; she said she didn't want to move again. But if the house in Santa Monica was no prize to rent, it was just plain stupid to buy it.
It was a two-story, three-bedroom house on the downhill end of Entrada Drive--near where Entrada ran into the Pacific Coast Highway. You could hear the drone of traffic on the PCH over the air-conditioning. Furthermore, as if Emma and Jack were permanently drawn to the perfume of restaurant Dumpsters, the driveway of the house intersected the alley behind an Italian restaurant. It wasn't sushi they smelled--it was more like old eggplant parmigiana.
But they were living on Entrada Drive when Emma's first novel was published, and she became what she called (with no small amount of pride) "a self-supporting novelist." Her revenge on having wasted her time as a film major was complete; she had made it in the industry's hometown by writing, of all things, a novel. Staying in the house on Entrada, even buying the stupid place, was another way of thumbing her nose at the industry. Emma had come to L.A. as an outsider; it meant a lot to her to stay an outsider.
"I'm not moving to Beverly Hills, baby cakes."
"Yeah, well--we sure do a lot of eating there," Jack reminded her.
It was a lot of late-night eating, for the most part. Jack didn't drink, so he was always the driver. Emma could drink a bottle of red wine by herself--usually before she finished her dinner. She had a special fondness for Kate Mantilini in Beverly Hills.
"Kate Mantilini is quite a distance to travel for a steak sandwich and mashed potatoes," Jack complained; he didn't eat bread, not to mention mashed potatoes. But Emma loved to eat at the long bar that ran the length of the restaurant. The industry crowd all knew her and asked her how the new novel was coming.
"It's coming," was all Emma would say. "Have you met my roommate, Jack Burns? He was the chick in My Last Hitchhiker--I mean the hot one."
"I was the hitchhiker," Jack would explain. Despite Myra Ascheim telling him to lose the stubble, he was usually growing a little something on his face--anything that might mitigate his androgynous first impression.
Monday nights, Emma and Jack went to Dan Tana's in West Hollywood. You could watch Monday Night Football on the TV at the bar, yet the waiters wore tuxedos. There was a mostly hip Hollywood crowd--people in the biz, or trying to be, but in the curious company of assorted gangsters and hookers. There were red-vinyl booths and red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, and the items on the menu were named for film-industry celebs.
"You're gonna have a lamb loin named after you one day, honey pie," Emma would tell Jack. She usually ordered the Lew Wasserman veal chop. After Wasserman died, Jack felt funny about eating there--as if the veal chop in his name were a piece of Lew himself. Emma also liked the steak a la Diller, but Jack ate light--often just a salad. He was back on iced tea big-time, as during his days cutting weight as a wrestler. With a half-gallon of tea on an empty stomach, Jack could dance all night.
Emma liked late-night music, too. She was crazy about a place in West Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard--Coconut Teaszer. It was a bit sleazy--lots of rock 'n' roll and fast, sweaty dancing. Very young kids went there. Emma would occasionally pick up a boy and bring him home. Jack made an effort not to watch them making out in the backseat. "Listen," she would always say to the kid. "You gotta do exactly what I tell you." Jack tried not to listen.
He also tried not to imagine Emma in the top position. He didn't like to think about her vaginismus, but he would remember the night he found her in tears in the bathroom--doubled over in pain. "He said he wouldn't move," she was crying. "He promised he wouldn't--the little fucker!"
The mornings after Emma brought home some kid from Coconut Teaszer were the only ones when she wouldn't get up early to write her next Hollywood novel. ("Number Two," as she would refer to it--as if that were the title.) Emma was disciplined, even driven, but the pressure was off; she'd published her first novel and seemed confident that someone would publish the second.
To a lesser degree, the pressure was off Jack, too. That he had made his first film with William Vanvleck--and worse, was under contract to make another movie with him--didn't impress anyone at C.A.A. (Or at I.C.M. or the William Morris Agency.) Perhaps, when Jack was free of any future obligation to Wild Bill, one of those agencies would consider representing him. But for now, Myra Ascheim was looking after him--he was instructed to call Myra his manager.
When Jack quit his job at American Pacific, there were no hard feelings; he'd slept with only two of the waitresses, and one of them had quit before he did. Even working for
The Remake Monster beat being a waiter.
Emma wanted Jack to read her fan mail before he showed it to her. She had no tolerance for anything negative; Jack was under orders to throw the criticism away. "And don't show me the death threats, Jack--just send them to the F.B.I." There weren't any death threats; most of Emma's mail was positive. The worst of it, in Jack's opinion, was how many of her readers insisted on telling Emma their life stories. It was amazing how many dysfunctional people wanted her to write about them.
Emma read Jack's fan mail before he saw it, but he read all of his mail eventually--good and bad. He didn't get a twentieth of the mail Emma received, and most of his was both vaguely and not so vaguely insinuating. Letters, always with photographs, from transsexuals--"chicks with dicks," according to Emma--and letters from gay men, inquiring if Jack was gay. There was only the occasional letter from a young woman--usually, but not always, stating that she hoped he was straight.
Jack was more interested in Emma's mail than he was in his, because he kept thinking that Michele Maher would write to her--demanding to know why Emma had used her name. But there was no letter from Michele Maher about The Slush-Pile Reader.
It killed Jack that he knew nothing about Michele; worse, he imagined she had seen My Last Hitchhiker and found his performance as a transvestite to be resounding confirmation that he was "too weird."
"Just wait till Michele sees the next one, baby cakes--talk about too weird!" They'd both read Vanvleck's screenplay, which had prompted even Emma to say: "Words fail me."
It was a magical but unknown movie that Wild Bill had ripped off this time; he'd stolen a little gem from a fellow Dutchman, Peter van Engen, who died of AIDS shortly after his first and only feature film was made. Called Lieve Anne Frank (in English, Dear Anne Frank, as you might begin a letter to the dead girl), it won a prize at some film festival in the Netherlands--and it was dubbed for distribution in Germany, but nowhere else. Outside Holland, almost no one saw it; yet William Vanvleck had seen it, and he'd traduced Lieve Anne Frank to such a degree that poor Peter van Engen couldn't possibly have recognized his own movie--not even from the all-seeing perspective of his grave.
"Lieve Anne Frank," the voice-over begins. It is the voice of a young Jewish girl, living in Amsterdam today; she is about the same age Anne Frank was when Anne was caught by the Nazis and taken to the death camp.
Emma and Jack saw the original Dutch film in William Vanvleck's home screening room. The Remake Monster had an ugly mansion on Loma Vista Drive in Beverly Hills. Wild Bill liked whippets; they ran free in the mansion, slipping and falling on the hardwood floors. Vanvleck had his own chef and his own gardener--a Surinamese couple, a child-size woman with a similarly miniature husband.
" 'Dear Anne Frank,' " Wild Bill translated for Emma and Jack; he had a smoker's cough. " 'I believe that you live in me, and that I have been born to serve you.' "
Rachel is her name. Weekdays after school, and on weekends, she works as a tour guide in the Anne Frank House--Prinsengracht 263. The house is open, as a museum, every day of the year except Yom Kippur.
"The Anne Frank House is beautiful in a sad way," Rachel says to the camera--as if we (the audience) were tourists and Rachel our guide. We see samples of Anne's handwriting, facsimiles from her diary, and many photographs. Rachel has cut her hair to look as much like Anne as she can; she despises contemporary fashion and dresses herself, whenever possible, in clothes Anne might have worn.
We see Rachel shopping in flea markets and secondhand clothing stores; we see her at night, hiding from her parents in her bedroom, imitating poses and expressions we recognize from photographs of Anne.
"They could have gotten away," Rachel keeps repeating. "Her father, Otto, could have stolen a boat. He could have steered a course from the Prinsengracht, the canal, to the Amstel--a river, broader than the canal. Not to the sea, of course, but somewhere safe. I know they could have gotten away."
By this point in the film, nothing had really happened, but Emma was already in tears. "You see--it's good, isn't it?" Vanvleck kept asking. "Isn't it great?"
Rachel is obsessed with the idea that she is Anne Frank come back to life; she believes she can rewrite history. On Yom Kippur, when the Anne Frank House is closed, Rachel unlocks the door and lets herself inside. She dresses herself as Anne--transforms herself, actually, because the likeness is more than a little creepy--and the next morning, when the tourists are waiting to get in, Rachel-as-Anne simply walks out of the Anne Frank House as if she were Anne Frank. Some of the tourists scream, believing she's a ghost; others follow her, taking her picture.
She goes to the canal, the Prinsengracht, where her father, Otto, is waiting with a boat. Absurdly, it's a kind of gondola--more suited to Venice than to Amsterdam--and Otto is a most unlikely, un-Italian-looking gondolier. Anne boards the boat, waving to her admirers.
There's a beautiful shot from the golden crown of the Westerkerk of the boat passing on the Prinsengracht--crowds of well-wishers run to the bridges, waving. There's a shot of the little boat entering the broader water of the Amstel; more crowds, more cameras clicking.
How the fantasy dies is almost entirely done with sound--the sound of soldiers' boots on the cobblestone streets; the sound of the boots on the stairs of the Anne Frank House, which we see is empty. Some furniture has been tipped over; Anne's writing has been scattered here and there. She hasn't escaped.
Emma was bawling her eyes out. As Jack sat there in that tasteless mansion on Loma Vista Drive, the sound of The Mad Dutchman's whippets dashing everywhere was somehow intercut in Jack's mind with the sound of the storm troopers' boots. He couldn't imagine what a mess Wild Bill Vanvleck was going to make of Dear Anne Frank.
As it turned out, The Remake Monster's screenplay would leave Emma and Jack depressed for days.
"I think I'll go to the gym," Jack told Emma when he first read it.
After she said, "Words fail me," Emma took a deep breath and announced she was going back to work. "I should have known when we saw the movie," Emma told Jack later. "There was no way you were gonna be Anne Frank."
But that day they read the remake, which was their first understanding of what would become of Dear Anne Frank, all Jack could do was go to the gym and punish his body; all Emma could do was go back to work on her next Hollywood novel. The Mad Dutchman's screenplay was god-awful.
Being successful had made Emma even more of a workaholic. She usually got up with the rush-hour traffic on the PCH and drank several cups of strong coffee, sometimes with her eyes closed but always with the music playing--something too loud and metallic for Jack's taste, although it was a welcome change from the generally uninspired music out on the highway.
Emma wrote all morning--the coffee was what she called her "appetite suppressant of choice." When she was famished, she drove herself out to lunch. She didn't drink at lunch, although she was a big eater--both at lunch and at her late-night dinners.
She liked Le Dome on Sunset Strip. It had a stodgy, Old Hollywood feeling, but it was still a happening place for executives and agents and entertainment lawyers. Emma also liked Spago in West Hollywood--the original Spago, up the hill on Sunset Boulevard. And while it was too expensive even for the most successful of first novelists, Emma needed a weekly fix of The Palm on Santa Monica Boulevard, where she said there were more agents than steaks and lobsters.
She was burning the candle at both ends, because she'd go to the gym after lunch and lift weights most of the afternoon. After the weightlifting, when she said she had "digested," she would do a hundred or more crunches for her abs. Nothing aerobic. (Dancing and whatever sex she could manage in the top position were Emma's aerobics.)
It was a lot for a big girl to put her body through, and Jack didn't like to think of her driving--not even in the daytime, when she hadn't been drinking. Emma was a fast driver, but the speed was only a small part of what bothered Jack.
Emma loved Sunset Boulevard. Even in Toronto, as a schoolgirl
at St. Hilda's, she used to dream of driving on Sunset Boulevard. Emma tried to drive everywhere on Sunset--out to Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and Hollywood, all on Sunset.
It was when she was driving back to Santa Monica that Jack worried about her. He knew she'd had a big lunch and had crazily worked it off, or not, in the gym. He worried about the curves on Sunset. And when Emma took that left on Chautauqua, just before the Palisades, it was a steep, twisting downhill to the PCH. You had to get into the far-left lane and make what amounted to a U-turn on West Channel.
It would be late afternoon, rush-hour traffic, and Emma was drained from her workout in the gym--two or three liter-size bottles of Evian later. With the traffic barreling down Chautauqua, into that last long curve, Emma would be three quarters of the way through the turn before she could see the ocean. Jack knew Emma, even her driving. She wouldn't be watching the cars--not when she could see that first, dazzling-blue glint of the Pacific. She was, after all, a Toronto girl. L.A. affected you in direct proportion to where you came from; there were no views of the Pacific in Toronto.
Jack would wait in the Entrada house for Emma to come home. Then she would write. That was when Jack went to the gym. (He never told her he occasionally went to Gold's.)
It was a good time to work out; mostly the nondrinkers, and a few noneaters, were there. Jack met some pretty pumped women doing free weights, but the ones on the cardiovascular machines were the ultra-skinny girls, and at dinnertime, many of the skinny girls were anorexics. One girl--she spent an hour every night on the stair-climber--told Jack she was on "an all-smoothie diet."
"How's your energy?" he asked her.
"Berries, teaspoon of honey, nonfat yogurt--every third day, a banana. Just put everything in the blender," she told him. "Your body doesn't need anything else."
She fell off the treadmill one night and just lay there. One of the yoga instructors speculated that her colon had collapsed on itself. Jack would remember a bunch of bodybuilders standing outside the gym; when they saw the ambulance, they waved it down with their towels.