Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  “Tell him not to talk that way,” Rebecca said.

  “He doesn’t listen to me,” he said. “He only listens to Todd.”

  “Enrique!” she said sternly, as if training a dog. “Pull your pants up! Shirt down! No bathroom words!”

  He obeyed. It was the oddest thing. The boy listened to everyone but Papa. Marco often felt like he was missing paternal DNA. He’d had the thought that he had been born gay so as not to have kids. By adopting, they were messing with evolution.

  The three kids wandered back to the sprinklers. Benny fell and wailed like a baby, and Rebecca scurried to rescue him. The playground was a world without denouement. Marco could see Enrique humping one of the sprinklers so that his crotch area filled with water. He moved away, and water spurted everywhere.

  Marco looked down at his phone, scrolled through the menu of torsos. He was starting to see the same faces. It was like a gay Cheers. He tried to load more guys, but it didn’t work, which he took as a sign that he should pay attention to his son.

  Gottlieb

  The first Say Uncle pitch meeting was on the Universal lot, with Drew Fine. Drew Fine was an executive VP at Universal Pictures and had gotten a reputation for green-lighting male-centric comedies like The Temporary Separation and Stalking Hope. Gottlieb drove up to the building in the red Porsche Cayenne he had rented at LAX. He had chosen a Cayenne because it was classy and big enough for a surfboard. He parked the car and got out at the wrong elevator bay, and then a security guard sent him back down to his parking level, where he had to walk to the right elevator and come up to six.

  It was always a hassle parking for meetings in L.A. On his late-nineties trip, a security guard had told him to “take any open space.” The first empty space he found said CARL SAGAN. Sagan had died recently, and Gottlieb decided to park there. He told that story at one of his meetings, expecting to get a big laugh, but the executive merely smiled faintly, and the rest of the meeting went downhill. They didn’t like parking stories or riffs about drive-ons versus walk-ons. They had heard them all, had seen the Albert Brooks movie, memorized The Player, knew the New York–versus–L.A. jokes.

  Now he knew not to make any of those jokes. He liked the fact that he was thirty-nine and not twenty-six, that he had a wedding ring on his finger, and that he would have Jed Finger in the room when he was pitching the movie. He and Andy were exotic New Yorkers, and Andy was marginally famous, which was better than not famous at all. New York screenwriters were interesting and sought after, until they moved to L.A. Then they were another dime a dozen. He and Andy would sell this thing, probably by Friday.

  When they had come through the terminal at LAX on their way to baggage claim, he had passed a video installation showing a washed-out, distorted vision of the city on a big LED screen. When you walked by, the image shimmered in the shape of your body, and if you moved your hand, a ripple went through all of L.A. Andy hadn’t noticed it, but Gottlieb had gone back and played in front of it, feeling as awestruck as a little boy.

  When Gottlieb emerged on the sixth floor of Universal, he saw a large black man in his forties who resembled a nightclub bouncer or ex-football player, sitting behind a desk. It was unclear whether he was a secretary or security. Gottlieb announced himself, and the man offered him a bottle of water, tiny in his enormous hand.

  Gottlieb felt sweat rolling down his sides as he waited, despite the air-conditioning. He was wearing Built by Wendy jeans that CC had bought for him and a gray T-shirt, also a CC pick, that looked like it had been run on a tour of Iraq. Andy texted as he was walking into the lobby, and the bouncer/secretary gave him water, too.

  After a few minutes Jed and Ross Biberman, his producer, a serious-looking guy with a shaved-bald head, came in. “Gentlemen,” Jed said in that ironic, half-joking tone, and shook their hands. He introduced them to Ross, whose deadpan, professional style was a heartening contrast to Jed’s goofiness.

  Jed looked shorter in person than in the movies. Gottlieb wondered if he wore lifts in his films. His nose didn’t look as feminine and tiny as it had on Saturday Night Live. There was a bump in the bridge and a decent amount of cartilage at the tip. Gottlieb figured he’d had it redone, gone to a new plastic surgeon, asked for a half-Jew instead of a full. There was probably an entire industry of second nose jobs, designed to make them look more natural, less fixed.

  A pert young brunette walked out, saw Jed, and approached. “I’m Ambrosia, Drew’s assistant,” she said. “Drew is ready for you guys.” She led them to a suite of offices and to a conference room to wait. A few minutes later, a bunch of executives came in. They were all sleek and had a similar coiffed look. Their titles were a jumble—senior VP, creative executive, director of development. One girl seemed about twenty-six and had a voluptuous body and a full head of blond hair, but there was something weird going on with her skin, odd pink patches on her cheeks.

  Drew Fine was big, with a Clooney cut, and wore a soft-looking button-down with black jeans and a pair of Vans that Gottlieb recognized as limited-edition. They all gathered around a long table with a pod in the middle for conference calls and a screen at one end for videoconferencing. The women blushed and kept glancing at Jed. It was good that they all wanted to fuck him. It raised the energy in the room. The men wore perky expressions, as if they’d just done lines.

  They exchanged small talk about the flight and the weather. Drew leaned toward Andy and said, “I feel like such a dweeb, but I love those YouTube videos of you doing improv at Princeton. My girlfriend and I have seen all of them.”

  “I don’t know how they got up there,” Andy said. “I think it was my stalker.”

  “You have a stalker?” Drew asked.

  “Yes, but a very low grade of stalker. Tech geeks are like one step above Renaissance Faire girls.”

  Drew and Jed chuckled. Andy launched into a story about a tech conference he had attended that spring. Gottlieb had heard it but was glad Andy was telling it. It would make Drew like them even more. “So they put me at this table with this woman who was a little too friendly,” Andy was saying. “She was a Texan in her early forties, put together well. Like a second-tier cougar, above a hyena but below a leopard. She’s hanging on every word I’m saying and drinking a little too much sauvignon blanc. All night she’s telling me how funny I am, and just as she’s finishing her crème brûlée, she leans back in her chair and says, ‘I cannot eat another bite. Would you mind if I unbuttoned my pants?’ That was it. It was all over for me.”

  Drew chuckled and nodded as if he approved. Jed laughed harder than anyone, and the execs looked at him, fascinated, because if a comedian laughed at something, it had to be really funny. Drew put his BlackBerry on the table, and the other execs followed suit.

  Gottlieb began Act One of the pitch. The first few minutes he aced it, hitting all the beats he and Andy had refined in Wellfleet, in Brooklyn, and on the plane—the one-liners, the comedic set pieces. Whenever Drew smiled, the other executives noticed and smiled, too. It reminded Gottlieb of that joke about the writer who calls his agent to ask what he thinks of his new screenplay. The agent replies, “I don’t know. I’m the only one who’s read it.” Gottlieb let Andy deliver Act Two, as they had planned, and they delivered Act Three together because there were a few funny bits (one involving mistaken identity, one involving a hookup with an overweight stripper) that Andy delivered pricelessly, playing all the roles. Jed listened more attentively than anyone in the room, or seemed to, interjecting only a few times, at which point everyone’s attention would immediately go to Jed, waiting for him to riff further. Then he would finish what he had to say and turn back to Andy and Gottlieb to keep the attention focused on them.

  When Andy reached the final beat, in which Mikey Slotnick is in the middle of a crucial business meeting designed to get him a promotion, and the guy he bullied as a child, Ralphie Spitznagel, bursts in and humiliates him by telling them all what Mikey used to do to him, Drew Fine leaned forward and gave A
ndy and Gottlieb fist pounds. Gottlieb was so surprised, he managed only a weak pound back. “I gotta give you guys those!” Drew said. “That was terrific!” They finished the pitch a minute later.

  “That’s awesome!” Drew Fine cried.

  “Toldja,” Jed said. The other execs nodded.

  Drew went on about everything he loved about the pitch, using phrases like “four-quadrant movie” and “We’re looking for what’s best and what’s next.” Then he said, “I really want to do this. Let me get on the phone with Topper and get my ducks in order.”

  The rest of the meetings that day—at Sony and Disney—went even better than at Universal. All had crowded rooms of ass-kissers, and Gottlieb and Andy improved their delivery. It became clear that Hollywood executives used the same expressions, all of which seemed to derive from bad television writing: “And there’s that,” “Not so much,” and “Not a fan.” The most popular was “This is the bad version,” after which they would launch into their suggestions for improvements.

  After the Disney meeting, Gottlieb drove straight to Malibu with the new board he had bought at Mollusk Surf Shop in Venice the day before. It was a five-fin Campbell Brothers Speed Egg, a foot and a half shorter than his nine-footer. “Not your father’s fun board,” the saleskid had told him. He had been looking for a longboard but fell for the Egg’s translucent maroon color. Deep down he wondered if he wasn’t making a mistake going with a shorter board, whether he was ready for what he knew would be a faster ride, but the kid had been persuasive, and he had a strange now-or-never feeling.

  In Malibu he pulled into the lot and paid the attendant the hefty parking fee, realizing with frustration as he took a space that a slew of cars had parked along the highway for free and he could have lined up behind one. Locals, of course. He changed into his wet suit in the lot and stowed the Hide-A-Key in the nook above the wheel. The other surfers in the lot were a combination of gay couples in matching wet suits and tourists like himself, with a slightly confused look.

  The beach was much more crowded than the ones in Rockaway. The waves were big, head-high, and clean. A small day out here was like a huge day in Rockaway or Wellfleet. As he walked down the long, sandy path to the beach with his new unwaxed board and parking naïveté, he felt like a novice, a kook.

  A couple of heavy dudes gave him measured looks as he paddled out. From Rockaway, he was familiar with the Stare, the way surfers checked you out, the implicit Darwinism of the lineup. Know your place or else. The stereotype was that surfers were all mellow stoners like Bill and Ted in the movie, but they weren’t; they could be tough and mean. In Rockaway Gottlieb had seen a few fistfights in the water.

  After a while he got accustomed to his new board, catching the smaller leftovers of the bigger sets. He acquitted himself decently, though he had a few wipeouts of the scary variety, where he came up gasping for air and then had to dive for the bottom to avoid the next set. It would take time to get comfortable on the new board. He would get better at surfing if he lived in Malibu. He would buy an understated Spanish house that once belonged to Fatty Arbuckle. On a leafy veranda overlooking the Pacific, he would write screenplays, take calls, surf, and drive a vintage Ford pickup. He would start meditating, become a Buddhist like Brad Pitt, and squire around beautiful women every night, even though he knew that wasn’t an entirely Buddhist goal. He was aware as he had this fantasy that CC and the boys were nowhere in it, and tried not to read too much into it. But in the water he felt great. The sky was clear. The Malibu surfers friendly.

  After his session, he stuck the board and wet suit in the Cayenne, drove across the highway, and went inside a shop called Malibu Kitchen & Gourmet Country Market. At the sandwich counter, there was a long line of locals and surfers, a few still in their wet suits, waiting to place their orders. The line was crawling forward and all of a sudden he felt like the New York Gottlieb again, irritable and permeable.

  An old man came in with a hot, toothy woman in her thirties who wore a BabyBjörn. They moseyed up to the counter, and the man began making small talk with the counter boy, who stopped his prep to converse on matters like the size of the swell. Gottlieb heard him say slyly, “Can you make a BLT with extra mayo to go, Tim?” The counter guy nodded. None of the other customers seemed to care about the stealth order. Gottlieb wanted to shout, “Did anyone see that?” but he was trying to go L.A., and in L.A. people didn’t get upset. Instead of shouting, he let out an exaggerated sigh in hopes that someone else would hear it and feel emboldened enough to tell off the old man. But no one did. The counter kid fixed the BLT and the old man slipped him a bill. As he turned, Gottlieb saw that it was Gary Busey.

  On the ride back from Malibu, Topper called to say that Universal was crunching numbers, but he expected an offer within a day. He was waiting to hear from Sony and Disney. The next day they would meet with Summit, Paramount, and Fox.

  When Gottlieb got back to his room at the Sunset Tower, the radio was playing a Chris Martin imitator, the lights were dim, and the covers had been turned down. He was aware that someone truly cool would not choose his hotel based on an article in The New York Times, but he was proud of himself for having been industrious, and relieved when the hotel turned out not to be ridiculously expensive. When he arrived, he realized that the Sunset Tower, then called the Argyle, had been Chili Palmer’s hotel in one of his favorite movies, Get Shorty, and this cemented his belief that he had made the right choice. He had splurged on a junior suite, which had a living room separate from the bedroom. The wallpaper was maroon, with an art deco gold-and-pink print, and there were photographs of Gloria Swanson and other old stars on the wall above the couch. The clutter at home sometimes depressed him, the constant drift of boys’ toys and trucks into the living room, the bedroom, the marital bed.

  Gottlieb collapsed on top of the comforter. His back and shoulders ached powerfully from the surfing session, but in a good way he hadn’t felt in a while. Restless, he got out of bed and went to the window. He noticed a dog park below, a stretch of grass between two buildings. Two dogs chased each other while their owners watched from opposite sides.

  He took a vodka from the minibar, poured it into a glass neat, and sat on the plush chocolate couch. It was a relief to be away from his family, to have a break that came with an excuse: making money. On the plane when they landed, he had listened to the businessmen calling to check in with wives and kids. Though their tones were concerned and responsible, their expressions were distracted and half present. They were free, they were off the hook, they were happy.

  On the coffee table was a book of photographs of Los Angeles. Flipping through, he saw an image of an apartment building from the 1920s called El Mirador. He went to the window and looked out the window. A few blocks away was the building, the regal, capital white letters on top spelling out EL MIRADOR APTS.

  This was what it meant to be in L.A.: You found a photo in a book in your deco hotel and saw it replicated out your window. He imagined young, striving screenwriters inside the El Mirador apartments, staring at blue screens, dreaming of money, fame, and women. He felt sorry for them. Those kids were working so hard, but they didn’t have Jed Finger, and he did.

  Rebecca

  Rebecca was busy closing the store so she could get to Stuart on time, but her customer wouldn’t make a decision. She was a fortysomething woman with the short hairstyle made popular by Mia Farrow in her Frank Sinatra phase. It was a cut that looked good only on someone gorgeous or waifish, and this woman was neither.

  Seed was small, just eight hundred square feet, but Rebecca prided herself on having a well-curated collection of vintage stuff for kids. It was on Fourth Avenue between Carroll and Garfield, long and narrow. In the back, there were three small dressing rooms and behind them a storage room for clothes she hadn’t priced yet. Rebecca’s register sat atop a glass display case containing unique vintage jewelry for moms, such as Bakelite bracelets. The idea was that after they shopped for their children, they w
ould want to treat themselves to something, too.

  The woman had been there for half an hour and was deciding between two 1950s collared shirts for her son. One had embroidered cowboys; the other was striped, with a crisp collar. “I’m just wondering if the cowboys are too too,” the woman said.

  “I love them,” Rebecca said. “I’d wear that shirt. I think it’s more inventive than the other.” The woman agonized for a few minutes longer before picking the other one. Rebecca had found that people generally didn’t heed the advice of shopkeepers; they wanted confirmation of the choice they’d already made.

  She rang up the sale and the woman left. Rebecca scooted out, locked the front door, and pulled down the grate out front. She hoped she had chosen the right clothes for her drinks date: a white button-down cotton shirt with two breast pockets, a dark denim skirt, and high tan Michael Kors slingbacks. She was wearing a sturdy German cotton nursing bra; though she nursed Benny only a few times a day, she wore nursing bras more often than regular ones for convenience.

  On Eighth Avenue, as she approached the Montauk Club, she saw Klieg lights. She figured another Boardwalk Empire was shooting, but when she stopped at a lamppost to read the pink production flyer, it said, The David Keller Show. She inhaled slowly.

  David Keller was her ex-boyfriend. They had dated for a year and a half, after which he had gone on to astronomical fame while she had married and procreated. He lived in a double-wide, double-deep brownstone on First Street that everyone knew he had bought for almost $4 million. A memoirist, television writer, and minor New York celebrity, he had launched his own Comedy Central show the summer before. It was an irreverent talk show with sketches shot on location. Critics were saying it was funnier than The Daily Show and “the most sophisticated and provocative variety program on TV.” Rebecca didn’t think it was sophisticated or provocative—much of the humor involved big-breasted women—but everyone who watched it seemed to love it, including Theo, to her great chagrin.