by Jess Walter
Pasquale didn’t know what to say.
“A long time ago, during a flood, the river lifted a boat and dumped it here, where the fountain sits today. The artist was trying to capture the random nature of disaster.
“His point was this: sometimes there is no explanation for the things that happen. Sometimes a boat simply appears on a street. And as odd as it may seem, one has no choice but to deal with the fact that there’s suddenly a boat on the street. Well . . . such is the position I find myself in here in Rome, on this movie. Except it’s not just one boat. There are fucking boats on every fucking street.”
Again, Pasquale had no idea what the man meant.
“You may think what I’ve done to Dee is cruel. I won’t argue that, from a certain vantage, it was. But I just deal with whatever disasters arise, one at a time.” With that, Michael Deane produced an envelope from his suit coat. He pressed it into Pasquale’s hand. “Half is for her. And half is for you, for what you’ve done and for what I hope you can do for me now.” He put a hand on Pasquale’s arm. “Even though you’ve assaulted me, I’m going to consider you a friend, Mr. Tursi, and I will treat you as a friend. But if I find out that you have given her less than half or that you have talked to anyone about this, I will no longer be your friend. And you don’t want that.”
Pasquale pulled his arm away. Was this awful man accusing him of being dishonest? He remembered Dee’s word and he said, “Please! I am frank!”
“Yes, good,” Michael Deane said, holding up his hands as if he were afraid Pasquale would hit him again. Then his eyes narrowed and he stepped in close. “You want to be frank? I can be frank. I was sent here to save this dying movie. That’s my only job. My job has no moral component. It is not good and it is not bad. It is merely my job to get the boats off the streets.”
He looked away. “Obviously your doctor is right. We misled Dee to get her out of here. I’m not proud of myself for that. Please tell her, Dr. Crane shouldn’t have chosen stomach cancer. He didn’t mean to scare her. You know doctors—almost too analytical. He chose it because the symptoms could match up with those of early pregnancy. But it was only supposed to be for a day or two. That’s why she was supposed to go to Switzerland. There’s a doctor there who specializes in unwanted pregnancies. He’s safe. Discreet.”
Pasquale was a few steps behind. So it was true. She was pregnant.
Michael Deane reacted to Pasquale’s look. “Look, please tell her how sorry I am.” Then he patted the envelope in Pasquale’s hand. “Tell her . . . it’s the way things sometimes are. And I am truly sorry. But she needs to go to Switzerland as Dr. Crane advised her to do. The doctor there will take care of everything. It’s all paid for.”
Pasquale stared at the envelope in his hands.
“Oh, and I have something else for her.” He reached in the same jacket pocket and removed three small, square photographs. They appeared to have been taken on the set of the movie—he could see a camera crew in the background of one—and while the pictures were small, Pasquale could see clearly, in all three of them, Dee Moray. She wore a kind of long, flowing dress and was standing with another woman, both of them flanking a third woman, a beautiful, dark-haired woman who was in the foreground of the pictures. In the best photo, Dee and this dark-haired woman were leaning back, caught by the photographer in a genuine moment, dissolving in laughter. “These are continuity photos,” Michael Deane said. “We use these pictures to make sure we get the setup for the next shot right. Costumes, hair . . . make sure no one puts on a wristwatch. I thought Dee might want to have these.”
Pasquale looked hard into the top photo. Dee Moray had her hand on the other woman’s arm, and they were laughing so hard that Pasquale would have given anything right then to know what was so funny. Maybe it was the same joke she’d shared with him, about this man who loved himself so much.
Deane was looking down at the top photo, too. “She has an interesting look. Honestly, I didn’t see it at first. I thought Mankiewicz had lost his mind—casting a blond woman as an Egyptian lady-in-waiting. But she has this quality . . .” Michael Deane leaned in. “And I’m not just talking tits here. There’s something else . . . an authenticity. She’s a real actress, that one.” Deane shook off this thought and looked back at the top photo. “We’ll have to reshoot the scenes with Dee in them. There aren’t many. What with the delays, the rains, the labor stuff, then Liz got sick, and then Dee got sick. When I sent her away, she told me she was disappointed that no one would ever know she was in this movie. So I thought she would want these.” Michael Deane shrugged. “Of course, that was when she thought she was dying.”
It hung in the air, the word dying.
“You know,” Michael Deane said, “I sort of imagined that she’d eventually call me and we’d laugh about this. That it would be a funny story that two people share years later, maybe we’d even . . .” He trailed off, smiled wanly. “But that’s not going to happen. She’s going to want my balls. But please . . . tell her that once she’s over her anger, if she remains cooperative, I’ll get her all the film work she wants when we all get back to the States. Could you tell her that? She could be a star if she wants to be.”
Pasquale felt like he might be sick. He was trying so hard not to hit Michael Deane again—wondering what kind of man abandons a pregnant woman—when a realization came to him, so obvious that it hit him square in the chest, and he gasped. He’d never had a thought as physical as this one, like a kick to his gut: Here I am, angry at this man for abandoning a pregnant woman . . .
While my own son is raised believing that his mother is his sister.
Pasquale flushed. He remembered crouching on the machine-gun nest and saying to Dee Moray: It is not always that simple. But it was. It was entirely simple. There was one kind of man who ran from such responsibility. He and Michael Deane were such men. He could no more hit this man than he could hit himself. Pasquale felt the sickness of his own hypocrisy and covered his mouth.
When Pasquale said nothing, Michael Deane glanced back at the Fontana della Barcaccia and frowned. “This is the world, I guess.”
And then Michael Deane walked away, into the crowd, leaving Pasquale leaning against the fountain. He opened the heavy envelope. It was filled with more money than he’d ever seen—a stack of American currency for Dee and Italian lire for him.
Pasquale put the photos in the envelope and closed it. He looked all around. The day was overcast. People were spread all over the Spanish Steps, resting, but in the piazza and on the street they moved with purpose, at different speeds but in straight lines, like a thousand bullets fired at a thousand different angles from a thousand different guns. All of these people moving in the way they thought right . . . all of these stories, all of these weak, sick people with their betrayals and their dark hearts—This is the world—swirling all around him, speaking and smoking and snapping photographs, and Pasquale felt himself turn hard, and he thought he might spend the rest of his life standing here, like the old fountain of the stranded boat. People would point to the statue of the poor villager who had naively come to the city to talk to the American movie people, the man who had been frozen in time when his own weak character was revealed to him.
And Dee! What was he going to tell her? Would he assail the character of this man she loved, this snake Deane, when Pasquale himself was a species of the same snake? Pasquale covered his mouth as a groan came out.
He felt a hand on his shoulder just then. Pasquale turned. It was a woman, the interpreter who had moved down the line of centurion extras earlier in the day. “You’re the man who knows where Dee is?” she asked in Italian.
“Yes,” Pasquale said.
The woman looked around and then squeezed Pasquale’s arm. “Please. Come with me. There is someone who would like very much to talk to you.”
9
The Room
Recently
Universal City, California
The Room is everything. When yo
u are in The Room, nothing exists outside. The people hearing your pitch could no more leave The Room than choose to not orgasm. They MUST hear your story. The Room is all there is.
Great fiction tells unknown truths. Great film goes further. Great film improves Truth. After all, what Truth ever made $40 million in its first weekend of wide release? What Truth sold in forty foreign territories in six hours? Who’s lining up to see a sequel to Truth?
If your story improves Truth, you will sell it in The Room. Sell it in The Room and you’ll get The Deal. Get The Deal and the world awaits like a quivering bride in your bed.
—From chapter 14 of The Deane’s Way: How I Pitched Modern Hollywood to America and How You Can Pitch Success Into Your Life Too, by Michael Deane
In The Room, Shane Wheeler feels the exhilaration Michael Deane promised. They are going to make Donner! He knows it. Michael Deane is his Mr. Miyagi and he has just waxed the car. Michael Deane is his Yoda and he has just raised the ship from the muck. Shane did it. He’s never felt so invigorated. He wishes Saundra could’ve been here to see it, or his parents. He might have been a little nervous in the beginning, but he’s never been as sure of anything as he is of this: he killed that pitch.
The Room is suitably quiet. Shane waits. It is old Pasquale who speaks first, pats Shane on the arm, and says, “Penso è andata molto bene.” I think that went very well.
“Grazie, Mr. Tursi.”
Shane glances around the room. Michael Deane is totally inscrutable, but Shane isn’t sure that human expression is even possible anymore on his face. He does look to be deep in thought, though, his wrinkly hands crossed in front of his smooth face, his index fingers raised like a steeple before his lips. Shane looks hard at the man: is one of his brows higher than the other? Or is it just fixed that way?
Then Shane glances to Michael Deane’s right, where Claire Silver has the strangest look on her face. It could be a smile (she loves it!) or a grimace (God, is it possible she hated it?), but if he had to name it he might go with pained bemusement.
Still no one speaks. Shane starts to wonder if maybe he’s misread The Room—all of last year’s self-doubt creeping back in—when . . . a noise comes from Claire Silver. A humming through her nose, like a low motor starting. “Cannibals,” she says, and then she loses it—full, out-of-control, breathless laughter: high, manic, and chirping, and she puts a hand out toward Shane. “I— I’m sorry, it’s not— I just— It’s—” And then she gives in to the laughter; she dissolves in it.
“I’m sorry,” Claire says when she can talk again, “I am. But—” And now the laughter peals again, somehow goes higher. “I wait three years for a good movie pitch . . . and when I get it, what’s it about? A cowboy”—she covers her mouth to try to stop the laughter—“whose family gets eaten by a fat German.” She doubles over.
“He’s not a cowboy,” Shane mumbles, feeling himself shrinking, shriveling, dying. “And we wouldn’t show the cannibalism.”
“No, no, I’m sorry,” Claire says, breathless now. “I’m sorry.” She covers her mouth again and squeezes her eyes shut but she can’t stop laughing.
Shane sneaks a peek at Michael Deane, but the old producer is just staring off, deep in thought, as Claire snorts through her nose—
And Shane feels the last of the air leave his body. He’s two-dimensional now—a flat drawing of his crushed self. This is how he’s felt the last year, during his depression, and he sees now that it was foolish to believe, even for a minute, that he could muster his old ACT confidence—even in its new, humbler form. That Shane is gone now, dead. A veal cutlet. He mutters, “But . . . it’s a good story,” and looks at Michael Deane for help.
Claire knows the rule: no producer ever admits to not liking a pitch, just in case it sells somewhere else and you end up looking like an idiot for passing. You always come up with some other excuse: The market isn’t right for this, or It’s too close to something else we’re doing, or if the idea is truly awful, It just isn’t right for us. But after this day, after the last three years, after everything—she just can’t help herself. All of her gagged responses to three years of ludicrous ideas and moronic pitches gush out in teary, breathless laughter. An effects-driven period thriller about cowboy cannibals? Three hours of sorrow and degradation, all to find out the hero’s son is . . . dessert?
“I’m sorry,” she gasps, but she can’t stop laughing.
I’m sorry: the words seem finally to snap Michael Deane out of some trance. He shoots a cross look at his assistant and drops his hands from his chin. “Claire. Please. That’s enough.” Then he looks at Shane Wheeler and leans forward on his desk. “I love it.”
Claire laughs a few more times, dying sounds. She wipes the tears from her eyes and sees that Michael is serious.
“It’s perfect,” he says. “It’s exactly the kind of film I set out to make when I started in this business.”
Claire falls back in her chair, stunned—hurt, even, beyond the point she realized was possible anymore.
“It’s brilliant,” Michael says, warming up to the idea. “An epic, untold story of American hardship.” And now he turns to Claire. “Let’s option this outright. I want to go to the studio with it.”
He turns back to Shane. “If you’re amenable, we’ll do a short six-month option agreement while I try to set this up with the studio—say, ten thousand dollars? Obviously that’s just to secure the rights against a larger purchase price if it’s further developed. If that’s acceptable, Mr.—”
“Wheeler,” Shane says, barely finding the breath to speak his own name. “Yes,” he manages, “ten thousand is . . . uh . . . acceptable.”
“Well, Mr. Wheeler—that was quite a pitch. You have great energy. Reminds me a bit of myself when I was young.”
Shane looks from Michael Deane to Claire, who has gone pale now, and back again to Michael. “Thank you, Mr. Deane. I practically devoured your book.”
Michael flinches again at the mention of his book. “Well, it shows,” he says, his lips parting to show his gleaming teeth in something like a smile. “Maybe I should have been a teacher, huh, Claire?”
A movie about the Donner Party? Michael as a teacher? Language has completely failed Claire now. She thinks of the deal she’d made with herself—One day, one idea for one film—and realizes that Fate is truly fucking with her now. It’s bad enough trying to live in this vacuous, cynical world, but if Fate is telling her that she doesn’t even understand the rules of the world—well, that’s more than she can bear. People can handle an unjust world; it’s when the world becomes arbitrary and inexplicable that order breaks down.
Michael stands and turns again to his dumbstruck development assistant. “Claire, I need you to set up a meeting at the studio next week—Wallace, Julie . . . everyone.”
“You’re going to take this to the studio?”
“Yes. Monday morning, you, me, Danny, and Mr. Wheeler are going in to pitch The Donner Party.”
“Uh, it’s just called Donner!” Shane offers. “With an exclamation point?”
“Even better,” Michael says. “Mr. Wheeler, can you give that pitch next week? Just like you did today?”
“Sure,” Shane says. “Yeah.”
“Okay then.” Michael pulls out his cell phone. “And Mr. Wheeler, as long as you’re going to be here over the weekend, would it be asking too much for you to help us with Mr. Tursi? We can pay you for translating and put you up at a hotel. Then we’ll set about getting you a film deal on Monday. How does all that sound?”
“Good?” Shane suggests. He glances over at Claire, who looks even more shocked than he is.
Michael opens a drawer in his desk and begins searching for something. “Oh, and Mr. Wheeler, before you go . . . I wonder if you could ask Mr. Tursi one more question.” Michael smiles at Pasquale again. “Ask him . . .” He takes a deep breath and stammers a bit, as if this is the difficult part for him. “I wonder if he knows if Dee . . . what I’m trying to say
is . . . was there a child?”
But Pasquale doesn’t need this particular translation. He reaches into an inside pocket of his suit coat and pulls out an envelope. He pulls from it an old, weathered postcard and carefully hands it to Shane. The front of the postcard has a faded blue drawing of a baby. IT’S A BOY! it announces. On the back, the card has been addressed to Pasquale Tursi at the Hotel Adequate View, Porto Vergogna, Italy. Written on the back of the card is a note in careful handwriting:
Dear Pasquale: It seems wrong we didn’t get to say good-bye. But I guess some things are meant just for a certain place and time. Anyway, thank you.
Always—Dee.
P.S.: I named him Pat, after you.
The postcard makes the rounds. When it arrives at Michael, he smiles distantly. “My God. A boy.” He shakes his head. “Well, not a boy anymore, obviously. A man. He’d be . . . Jesus. What? Fortysomething?”
He hands the postcard back to Pasquale, who carefully slides it back in his coat.
Michael stands again and offers his hand to Pasquale. “Mr. Tursi. We’re going to make good on this—you and me.” Pasquale stands and they shake hands uneasily. “Claire, get these gentlemen settled in a hotel. I’ll check in with the private investigator and we’ll reconvene tomorrow.” Michael adjusts his heavy coat over his pajama pants. “Now I’ve got to get home to Mrs. Deane.”
Michael turns to Shane, extends his hand.
“Mr. Wheeler, welcome to Hollywood.”
Michael is already out the door before Claire rises. She tells Shane and Pasquale she’ll be right back, and chases her boss, catching him on the pathway outside the bungalow. “Michael!”
He turns, his face clear and glassy beneath the decorative street-light. “Yes, Claire, what is it?”
She glances back over her shoulder to make sure Shane hasn’t followed her outside. “I can find another translator. You don’t need to string the poor guy along.”