by Jess Walter
Pasquale turned and scuffled up the hall, and down the stairs, past the night clerk and outside, to where Tomasso leaned against a wall, smoking. His cap was pulled down on his eyes. He showed Tomasso the photo of Dee and the other woman.
Tomasso looked at it, then shrugged one shoulder. “Bah,” he said. And the two men started back toward the marina.
12
The Tenth Pass
Recently
Los Angeles, California
Before sunrise, before Guatemalan gardeners, before sharks and Benzes and the gentrification of the American mind—Claire feels a hand on her hip.
“Don’t, Daryl,” she mutters.
“Who?”
She opens her eyes to a blond-wood desk, a flat-screen television, and the kind of painting they put in hotel rooms . . . because this is a hotel room.
She’s on her side, and the hand on her hip is coming from behind her. She looks down, sees that she’s still dressed; at least they didn’t have sex. She rolls over and stares into the big, dewy eyes of Shane Wheeler. She’s never awakened in a hotel room next to a man she just met, so she’s not quite sure what one says in this situation. “Hi,” she says.
“Daryl. Is that your boyfriend?”
“He was ten hours ago.”
“The strip-club guy?”
Good memory. “Yeah,” she says. At some point in their drunken sharing last night, she had explained how Daryl unapologetically watches online porn all day and goes to strip clubs at night and then laughs when she suggests this might be disrespectful to her. (Hopeless, she recalls describing her relationship.) Now, as she lies next to Shane, Claire feels a different sort of hopelessness. What’s the matter with her, going back to this guy’s room? And what to do with her hands now, which not long ago had been running through Shane’s hair and over various parts of his body? She reaches for her silenced BlackBerry, takes a data hit: seven A.M., sixty-one degrees, nine new e-mails, two phone calls, and a simple text message from Daryl: what up—
She glances back over her shoulder at Shane again. His hair seems even more unruly than it did last night, his sideburns more late-Elvis than alt-hipster. His shirt is off and she can see, on his skinny left forearm, that damned tattoo, ACT, which she half blames for what happened last night. Only in the movies does such a moment require a boozy flashback: how Michael had her book rooms at the W for Shane and Pasquale, how she drove the Italian to the hotel while Shane followed in his rental car, how Pasquale said he was tired and went to his room, and she apologized to Shane for laughing at his pitch, how he shrugged it off, but in the way people shrug off something that genuinely bothers them. How she said, No, I really am sorry, and explained that it wasn’t him—it was her frustration with the business. How he said he understood and that he felt like celebrating, so they went to the bar and she bought him a drink and gently reminded him that getting a producer interested was only the first step; how he bought the next round of drinks (I just made ten grand; I can afford two cocktails) and she the one after; and how, amid all those drinks, they’d told their stories: first the bland, self-serving surface story one tells a stranger—family, college, career—and then the truth, the pain of Shane’s failed marriage and the rejection of his book of short stories; Claire’s seemingly misguided decision to come out of the cocoon of academia and her anguish over whether to go back in; Shane’s painful realization that he was milk-fed veal; Claire’s failed quest to make one great film; and then the loud, laugh-until-you-cry sharing—My boyfriend is a gorgeous zombie who loves strip clubs! and I actually live in my parents’ basement!—and more drinks came and the commonplace became revelatory—I like Wilco and I like Wilco, too! and My favorite pizza is Thai and Mine, too!—and then Shane rolled up the sleeves on his faux-Western shirt, and Claire’s eyes fell on that tattoo (so weak for ink), that one word, ACT, and she did—leaned over in the bar and kissed him, and his hand rose to her cheek while they kissed, such a simple thing, his hand on her face, but something Daryl never did, and ten minutes later they were in his room, sifting through the minibar for more fuel and making out like college kids, her giggling at the tickle of his bushy sideburns, him pausing to compliment her breasts—a sweet, two-hour, kissing, groping, laughing debate over whether or not to have sex (him: I’m leaning toward Yes; her: I feel like the swing vote) until . . . they must’ve fallen asleep.
And now, morning after, Claire sits up. “This wasn’t very professional of me.”
“Depends on your profession.”
She laughs. “If you paid for that I think you got ripped off.”
He puts his hand back on her hip. “There’s still time.”
She laughs, takes his hand from her hip and sets it on the bed. But she can’t say she isn’t tempted. The kissing and rolling around were nice enough; she assumes the sex would be good. With Daryl, the sex was the first thing between them, the selling point, the foundation for a whole relationship. But in the last few months, she’s felt as if the intimacy has seeped out of it and now there are two distinct phases to sex with Daryl: the first two minutes like an exam from an autistic gynecologist, the next ten a visit from the Roto-Rooter man. At the very least, she imagines, Shane would be . . . present.
Conflicted, confused, she stands, to think, or to buy time.
“Where are you going?”
Claire holds up her phone. “See if I still have a boyfriend.”
“I thought you were going to break up with him.”
“I haven’t decided.”
“I’ll decide for you.”
“I appreciate that, but I should probably take care of it.”
“And if the porn-zombie asks where you were all night?”
“Guess I’ll tell him.”
“Will he break up with you?”
She hears some bit of hopefulness in the question. “I don’t know,” she says. She pulls the chair out from the desk, sits, and begins thumbing through the calls and e-mails on her phone, to see when Daryl called last.
Shane sits up, too, now, swings his feet over the edge of the bed, and grabs his shirt off the floor. She glances up, can’t help but smile at his scrawny attractiveness. He’s an aging version of the boys she always fell for in college: in the vicinity of good-looking but a few blocks away. Physically, he’s the anti-Daryl (square-jawed Daryl with his five-hundred-push-ups-a-day chest)—Shane all narrow angles and jutting collarbones, just the hint of a roll in his gut. “When, exactly, did you take your shirt off?” she asks.
“I’m not sure. I guess I was hoping to start a trend.”
She goes back to her BlackBerry, opens Daryl’s “what up” text, and tries to figure out what to type back. Her thumbs hover over the keys. But nothing comes.
“So what did you see in this guy?” Shane asks. “Originally?”
Claire glances up. What did she see? It’s too corny to say—but she saw all the clichéd shit: Stars. Flashes of light. Babies. A future. She saw all of this the very first night, as they banged through her apartment door, flinging clothes and chewing each other’s lips and reaching and prodding and cupping—and then he lifted her off the ground and all of her college fumblings became as insignificant as bumping into someone on a stairwell. She felt exactly like she’d never been fully alive before the moment Daryl first touched her. And it wasn’t just sex; he was inside her. She’d never really thought about that phrase until that night, when in the middle of it she looked up and saw herself . . . every bit of herself . . . in his eyes.
Claire shakes the memory off. How could she possibly say any of that, especially here? And so she simply says, “Abs. I saw abs.” And it’s odd; she feels worse for dismissing Daryl as a set of stomach muscles than she does for being in this hotel room with a boy she just met.
Shane nods again at the cell phone in her hands. “So . . . what are you going to tell him?”
“No idea.”
“Tell him we’re falling in love; that’ll end it.”
“Yeah?�
�� She looks up. “Are we?”
He smiles as he snaps the buttons on his faux Western shirt. “Maybe. We could be. How will we know if we don’t spend the day together.”
“Impulsive much?”
“Key to my quirky appeal.”
Goddamn it; she thinks that might be the case—his appeal. She recalls Shane saying that he married the harsh, truth-telling waitress after dating for only a few months. She’s not surprised—who even uses the words falling in love fourteen hours after meeting someone? There is something undeniably . . . optimistic about him. And for a moment, she wonders if she ever had such a quality. “Can I ask you something?” Claire says. “Why the Donner Party?”
“Oh, no,” he says. “You’re just looking for a laugh again.”
“I told you, I’m sorry about that. It’s just that for three years Michael has rejected every idea I bring in as being too dark, too expensive, too period . . . not commercial enough. Then you come in yesterday with—no offense—the darkest, least commercial, most expensive period film I’ve ever heard about, and he loves it. It’s just so . . . unlikely. I just wondered where it came from.”
Shane shrugs and reaches for one of his socks on the floor. “I have three older sisters. All of my early memories are of them. I loved them; I was their toy, like a doll they dressed up. When I was six or so, my oldest sister, Olivia, developed an eating disorder. Just about destroyed our family.
“It was awful. Olivia was thirteen, and she’d go in the bathroom and throw up. She’d spend her lunch money on diet pills, squirrel food away in her clothes. At first my parents yelled at her, but that did no good. She didn’t care. It was like she wanted to waste away. You could see the bones in her arms. Her hair falling out.
“My parents tried everything. Therapists and psychologists, inpatient treatment. My ex thinks that’s when they really started becoming so overprotective—I don’t know. What I remember is lying in bed one night and hearing my mom weep and my father trying to comfort her, Mom just saying over and over, ‘My baby is starving to death.’ ” Shane still has the sock in his hand, but he doesn’t put it on. He just stares at it.
“What happened?” Claire asks quietly.
“Hmm?” He looks up. “Oh, she’s fine now. The treatment clicked or something, I guess. Olivia just . . . got over it. She’s still got some food hang-ups—she’s the sister who never brings food for Thanksgiving, always makes a centerpiece instead. Little pumpkins. Cornucopias. And don’t even mention the word brownie around her. But she came out okay. Married this jackass, but they’re happy enough. Have two kids. The funny thing is . . . the rest of my family never talks about that time. Even Olivia shakes off that whole period like it was nothing. ‘My skinny years,’ she calls them.
“But I never got over it. When I was seven or eight, I’d lie awake at night, praying that if God would make Olivia better, I’d go to church, become a minister . . . something. And so when it didn’t happen right away—you know how kids are—I blamed myself, connected my sister’s starving to my own lack of faith.”
He stares off, rubs the inside of his arm. “By high school, Olivia was fine, and I was over my religious phase. But after that, I was always fascinated by stories of starvation and deprivation. I read everything I could find, did my school reports on the siege of Leningrad and the Potato Famine . . . I especially liked stories of cannibalism: the Uruguayan rugby team, Alfred Packer, the Maori . . . and of course the Donner Party.”
Shane looks down and sees the sock in his hands. “I guess I identified with poor William Eddy, who escaped himself, but who could do nothing while his family starved in that awful camp.” He absentmindedly puts the sock on. “So when I read in Michael Deane’s book how pitching a movie is all about believing in yourself, pitching yourself—it was like a vision: I knew exactly the story I needed to pitch.”
A vision? Believing in yourself? Claire looks down, wondering if this Just-Do-It-Dude confidence is what Michael was actually responding to yesterday. And what had attracted her last night. Hell, maybe they can make Donner! based on nothing more than this kid’s passion for it. Passion: another word that sticks in her throat.
Claire glances back down at her BlackBerry and sees an e-mail from Michael’s producing partner, Danny Roth. The subject line is Donner! Michael must have called Danny about Shane’s pitch. She wonders if Danny talked some sense into Michael. She opens the e-mail, written in the tortured, hurried, moronic, electronic shorthand that Danny somehow believes is saving him great amounts of time:
C—Rbrt says your setting up pitch for Unvsl Mnday on Donner. Has to look gd, re: contract. See if writr has storybords or bakstory, anthing that looks lk wre furthr down the road. Straigt faces. Danny
She looks up at Shane, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her. She looks back down at Danny’s e-mail. Has to look gd . . . Why would it look good and not be good? And storyboards to make it look like they’re further down the road? Straight faces? Then she recalls Michael’s boast yesterday: I’m going to pitch an eighty-million-dollar movie about frontier cannibalism.
“Ah, shit,” she says.
“Another text from your boyfriend?”
Would they really do this? She recalls Danny and Michael talking about the lawyers looking for a way out of Michael’s contract with Universal. What a stupid question: of course they would do this. They would never not do this. This is what they do. Claire’s hand comes to her temple.
“What?” Shane stands and she looks over at him, his big doe eyes and those bushy sideburns framing his face. “Are you okay?”
Claire considers not telling him, letting him have his weekend of triumph. She could just put on blinders and finish out the weekend, help Michael with his doomed pitch and his missing actress, then on Monday accept the cult museum job . . . start stocking up on cat food. But Shane is staring at her with those moon-eyes, and she realizes that she likes him and that if she’s ever going to break away it has to be now.
“Shane, Michael has no intention of making your movie.”
“What?” He laughs a little. “What are you talking about?”
She sits on the bed next to him and explains the whole thing, as she sees it now, starting with the deal Michael made with the studio—how, at the low point of his career, the studio took on some of Michael’s debt in exchange for the rights to some of his old films. “There were two other parts to the deal,” she says. “Michael got an office on the lot. And the studio got a first-look deal, meaning that Michael had to show them all of his ideas and he could only go to other studios if they passed. Well, the first-look was a joke. For five years the studio rejected every script Michael brought in. And when he took those scripts and treatments and books out to other studios—if you already know that Universal has rejected an idea, why would you ever want it?
“Then came Hookbook. When Michael started developing that idea, he figured a reality show and Web site was beyond the scope of his contract, which he assumed was for film development only. But it turned out the contract stipulated the studio got the first shot at all material ‘developed in any media.’ Here was Michael, with this potentially huge unscripted TV business, and it turned out the studio basically owned it.”
“I don’t understand what this has to do with—”
Claire holds up her hand. “Ever since then, Michael’s lawyers have been looking for a way out of the contract. A few weeks ago they found it. The studio put an escape clause in the contract to protect itself in case Michael wasn’t just in a slump, but was totally played out. If Michael brings a certain number of bad ideas over a certain period of time—say, the studio doesn’t develop ten straight projects over five years—then either side can opt out. But where the contract stipulates all material, the escape clause mentions only films. So even though the studio made Hookbook, if Michael options and develops ten film ideas in five years and the studio passes on all ten—then either side can walk away with no obligation.”
Shane
catches up quickly, his brow furrowing. “So you’re saying I am—”
“—the tenth pass,” Claire says. “An eighty-million-dollar cannibal Western—a movie so dark, expensive, and noncommercial that the studio could never say yes to it. Michael will option your idea for nothing, then send you off to write a spec script he has no intention of making. When the studio passes, he’ll be free to sell his TV shows to the highest bidder—for, I don’t know, tens of millions.”
Shane stares at her. Claire feels awful for telling him, for puncturing the kid’s confidence. She puts a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry, Shane,” she says.
Then her phone rings. Daryl. Shit. She squeezes Shane’s arm, stands, and walks across the room, answering without looking at the screen. “Hey,” she says to Daryl.
But it’s not Daryl.
It’s Michael Deane. “Claire, good, you’re up. Where are you?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Did you drop the Italian and his translator off at the hotel last night?”
She looks over at Shane. “Uh, sort of,” she says.
“How soon can you meet me at the hotel?”
“Pretty quickly.” She’s never heard Michael’s voice like this. “Listen, Michael,” she says, “we need to talk about Shane’s pitch—”
But he interrupts her. “We found her,” Michael says.
“Who?”
“Dee Moray! Only her name wasn’t Dee Moray. It was Debra Moore. She was a high school drama and Italian teacher all these years in Seattle. Can you fucking believe it?” Michael sounds hopped up, high. “And her kid—have you ever heard of a band called the Reticents?” Again, he doesn’t wait for her to answer. “Yeah, me neither. Anyway, the investigator worked overnight preparing a file. I’ll fill you in on the way to the airport.”
“Airport? Michael, what’s going on—”