Driver's Education

by Grant Ginder

  I didn’t want to create any new worlds. All I wanted it to do was wipe the grime away from the window we were already looking through in the first place.

  So I think that above all else, I was proud of The Family Room’s truthfulness. Of the basic familiarity of its subjects: a son, a daughter, and a father deciding what to do with the mother’s étagère after her sudden, unanticipated death. As the objects—tiny urns, crystal sculptures of animals, a chipped piece of coral from the Indian Ocean—were removed from the case and parsed out, so were the fragile bonds that had been barely keeping the family intact.

  Sammy sucked tequila from two cubes of ice. “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Dustin Hoffman?”

  “No.”

  • • •

  And as I said—she came to the casting call for The Family Room, which the film’s producers asked me to attend. In a single day she read along with five hundred other girls for the part of the daughter, Kate. I suppose I should’ve recognized her when she was first called into the room, but we’d changed so much since the Avalon. I’d grown into myself and had worn my skin, while she’d learned how to piece together her beauty, I think: she took bits of it from other people and created an allure that seemed to envelop her, instead of inhabit her. Lips painted to look fuller, pushed-up breasts, and sleeveless tan arms. Legs like daggers that I couldn’t stop staring at. When she looked at me, I smiled, just like how I’d been smiling at everyone else. I read the new name on the top of her résumé, and I returned to my notes.

  But then she read. The side that we’d given the actresses to read was a monologue in which Kate, sitting in a darkened family room with her brother Max, recounts the day her mother came home with a small Baccarat statue of a lioness sleeping with her cub.

  She said, “I remember when she showed me this.” She pantomimed holding the crystal piece with two hands. “She told me, That’s you and me, baby. That’s you and me.” She bit her upper lip and brought her right hand to her chest, fluttering her fingers along the base of her neck.

  The casting director removed his glasses and stopped her. “Let’s start over.”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “Let’s try it again. And this time, try not to do that hand thing—the fingers against the neck.” Then: “It’s very . . . I don’t know, it’s very Faye Dunaway in Network.”

  “Oh,” she said. “All right.”

  She began the scene again, but the casting director stopped her a second time—now, just fifteen seconds in.

  “And that—that was very Ingrid Bergman.”

  She smiled nervously; she crossed her heels at her ankles and teetered to the left. “Was it?”

  Twice more: too Diane Ladd, too Jane Fonda.

  The casting director slipped his glasses back on, balancing the frames on his beaked nose. He said, “Thank you, Ms.—”

  “Moore.”

  When the door had closed behind her, I leaned over to one of the producers sitting next to me and said, “I think I know that girl.”

  • • •

  I tracked her down a second time in the parking lot outside the casting office—a squat grey building with two identical rows of square windows. We’d taken half an hour for lunch, and I found her leaning against a Honda, smoking a cigarette like Rita Hayworth.

  “Clare?” I said as I approached.

  “Colin? Shit, Colin, I knew that was you. Really—the second I walked in there I knew it was you.”

  “You changed your last name.”

  “No one wants an autograph from Clare Murkowski.”

  We both commented on how surprised we were to see each other—but really, there were few other places that would make more sense for us to reunite. Given how much time we’d spent in the Avalon’s darkened theater, how much time we’d spent living in film frames, it was inevitable that we’d both end up here.

  She stubbed out the cigarette and waved the smoke away from her face. When she hugged me she lifted herself onto her toes and pressed into me. Her neck, her cheeks smelled like lilac and smoke. When she finally released me, she still kept her hands on my arms. “Look at you! Some Hollywood big shot.”

  “No,” I laughed. “No, nothing like that.”

  She straightened the lapels on my blazer and dusted ash from her cigarette that’d landed on my shoulder. “Who knew you could look so good out of that shit they made us wear at the Avalon?”

  “You’re awful.”

  “I mean it—those grey suits flattered no one. They made us all look like popcorn-wielding elephants.”

  I laughed and she smiled and her cheeks turned red.

  She said, “But really, what are you doing here?”

  Two girls with folded scripts passed by, reciting the monologue to each other. “Actually, I wrote it. I’m the writer.”

  “The writer!” She reached into her purse for another cigarette. “That’s great, Colin. That’s really something.”

  “It was mostly luck, I think.”

  She lit a match and cupped it against the wind.

  “Oh, don’t do that. Don’t be so modest. Especially when you don’t mean it.” She held her cigarette at chin level and the smoke framed her face, gauzing over her green eyes, her lifted cheekbones. She’d grown into her beauty, Clare. “You want to smoke? Probably not. Ron tells me that I’m the only person in this town who smokes anymore.”

  “Who’s Ron?”

  She scratched the back of her neck with her free hand. On all sides, the sun reflecting off the windshields blinded us. “Oh—no one.”

  I said, “Sure. Sure, I’ll smoke.”

  I took her book of matches. I slouched against the Honda and held the cigarette between my thumb and middle finger. I exhaled from the corners of my mouth.

  “How am I doing?” I asked.

  She studied me like she did when we were kids outside the theater. She moved the crook in my elbow to a different angle. Pushed against the insides of my thighs so my feet edged apart.

  “Almost there. Almost Steve McQueen.”

  We both watched as the two girls who had been running lines fixed their makeup in the reflection of car windows, as they stapled headshots to the backs of their résumés.

  I said, “So how is all this going?”

  “It’s great. It’s fantastic.” She switched her cigarette to her left hand. “God, I was horrible in there, wasn’t I. I was really horrible.”

  “You weren’t. You were wonderful,” I lied. “They’ve been brusque with everyone.”

  “I always get that, you know. They’re always telling me that I do things like everyone else. It’s infuriating.”

  “Then maybe start doing them like yourself?”

  “No,” she said. “No, that wouldn’t work, either.”

  “You never know. It might,” I told her and she kissed my cheek.

  When my lunch break was over, I asked her if she’d like to get dinner.

  “You know,” I said. “Just to catch up.” We’d just finished our cigarettes and had tossed the butts into the gutter.

  “I think that’d be nice.”

  “Will Ron care?”

  She laughed and dipped her chin into her shoulder. She tucked her bangs behind her ears. Basically Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, even though her hair was brown.

  • • •

  We met at a place on Sunset called the Rainbow Bar and Grill, which Clare told me used to be called Villa Nova, where Marilyn Monroe had her first blind date with Joe DiMaggio, where Vincente Minnelli proposed to Judy Garland. The dark walls were cut up with framed pictures of famous Hollywood types, many of whom were now dead, and I took this as a sign of the restaurant’s inevitable decline to kitsch—a theory that’d be rubber-stamped two years later when John Belushi would purportedly eat his last meal there. A bowl of pea soup.

  “I come here all the time,” she said as we slid into a red vinyl booth. She reached out and began rearranging the ketchup and mustard
bottles, the salt. “I can never seem to get anyone to recognize me, though. Or even remember me.”

  I unfolded the menu. “I hardly recognized you.” I added, “You’d been hiding those legs.”

  “Knock it off.”

  We ordered two vodkas and stabbed at the ice with our thin plastic straws.

  “So how long have you been out here?” I asked her.

  “Six years, I guess? Seven? I don’t know. Too long, but not long enough.”

  She’d moved west to act when she was twenty-one, she told me.

  “It was the only thing that seemed to make sense. I’d spent my life figuring out how to do things like other people did them, so I figured I might as well start getting paid for it.”

  In the meantime, she’d worked at one of the theaters in L.A. to make ends meet. She’d fallen in love with the pictures she’d seen of the Chinese Theatre, of the El Rey and Grauman’s Egyptian and the El Capitan. The glossy images of four-story marquees and lines of limousines and red carpets unfurling like so many tongues. Of the theaters’ staffs aligned out in front of them in smart, pressed uniforms. These were places that weren’t like the Avalon; there were spotlights that tracked outside in great arcing swoops every weekend—not just opening night.

  “Crazy, isn’t it? Moving across the country to shovel popcorn and tear tickets?”

  “How did you make your way out here?”

  “The bus at first. But in Cleveland I got bored and bought a plane ticket.”

  When she arrived on an August afternoon in 1968, though, she was greeted by a rude awakening: the Hollywood Boulevard that she stepped onto wasn’t the same Hollywood Boulevard from the pictures that she’d pinned to her bedroom wall in Sleepy Hollow. The dazzling glitz had somehow faded—now, everything just looked drab. Or not just drab, but dangerous. As she made her way between the different theaters along the boulevard, she was accosted by the women who worked it—girls in miniskirts and halter tops, girls with calves that’d grown too thick, too muscular from spending ten hours a night in heels, treading along an uneven and canyoned sidewalk. Girls who smelled like mouthwash and cigarettes and the leftovers of so many men. They screeched at Clare if she stood on a particular corner for too long. They stabbed their veiny fingers into her chest; they left bits of their acrylic nails in the seams of her shirt.

  “I paid money to sit in one of those viewing booths at a porn store. Just so I could have a private place to cry.”

  She was tough, though—she always had been—and eventually, she ended up getting a job ushering four days a week at Grauman’s Egyptian, but that proved to be a disappointment as well. The annoyances she’d faced at the Avalon were ever present at the Egyptian, except now on a grander scale: the smells more nauseating, the stains on the carpet in new, larger shapes. The posh premieres she’d been anticipating didn’t happen as often as she thought they would, and when they did, they were a nightmare. So much running around, and yelling, and fulfilling strange demands (“There was one actress—I won’t say who, but take my word that it’s someone you know—who insisted that her seat be blessed by a Santeria shaman before she arrived. I’ll also add this: many Santeria blessings include blood from a recently killed chicken.”)

  “I did get to see a lot of movies, though.”

  Clare flagged down the waitress and asked for a second vodka.

  “And the acting?”

  “I kept at it, but it wasn’t panning out like I thought it would. The farthest I got was a callback for this B-horror thing. Something about people who turn into fish. I don’t think it ever got made.” The straw that she’d been chewing on—the one from the empty first drink—she now tied into a knot. “But then I met Ron and things started turning around.”

  Ron. Ron Wagner. Taller than her, than me, not as lean as he could’ve been, and a decade older than either of us. Hair that was then brown, but that I imagine has since gone grey, or silver, or whichever shade carries with it that cheap sense of distinction characteristic of state college professors or car salesmen or—in his case—a man who directed commercials. She said he was a frequent customer of the Egyptian; he’d been coming twice a week since long before she arrived. He’d sit quietly, alone in the back row of the theater, polishing his Coke-bottle glasses, occasionally slipping his pudgy fingers into a tub of buttered popcorn, which he never finished. For the first few weeks, he saw Clare only as she passed in the dark (after each movie began, she’d peek into the theater to count empty seats). But then, as those first few weeks turned into a month, there was an issue with the projector during the second showing on a Thursday night, and Clare was sent in by the head usher to quell the anxious audience.

  “You did that like a movie star,” Ron said to her as she made her way from the front of the house to the exit. The bottom half of his glasses was fogged. She had her palm pressed against one of the giant swinging doors.

  “What?”

  “The way you got everyone’s attention. A real movie star.”

  “Buddy,” she told him, “in this town, everyone’s a goddamned movie star.”

  And she left.

  A few days later, though, he returned. Over the next few months, his twice-a-week routine quickly became a four-a-week routine (a showing on Tuesday, a showing on Thursday, two matinees each weekend). He’d arrive early to find her, wherever she was working. He’d wait in interminable lines at the concession stands; he’d stand next to her while she swept the littered corners of the lobby.

  “Ron,” she’d say to him, maneuvering the broom around his feet. “I’m trying to work.”

  He’d crane his neck upward to inspect the ceiling’s inlays. The carvings of suns, of palm trees, of a crowned, stoic pharaoh. He’d tell her, “I’m just admiring the architecture.” Then he’d tell her, “The way you’ve got her hair today. It reminds me of Audrey Hepburn in Charade.”

  “Oh, cut it out.” She’d slip the broom and the dustpan into the utility closet, taking too long with the lock. She’d pull straight the wrinkles from her uniform and tell him, again, that she wanted him to leave her alone.

  But that was a lie, of course. She didn’t want to be left alone by him, at least not anymore. Because what Ron had said was precisely what Clare had wanted to hear. It was, in fact, what she’d come to that goddamned town to hear; while most women want to be told that they’re beautiful, Clare had come to Hollywood to hear that she was as beautiful as someone else. That she’d become expertly capable of being someone else. And so, as they’re wont to do, the tables began to turn. Subtly, self-consciously, she began to seek Ron out during her shifts at the Egyptian. Then, when she found him, she’d perform for him. She’d shove her fists into the pockets of her uniform like Annie Hall; when she tore ticket stubs, she’d give him her best Faye Dunaway.

  The waitress returned and we ordered two steaks.

  “He ended up casting me in a shampoo commercial, which led to a bit part in a soap opera.”

  “Oh, I bet he did.”

  “Don’t be coy. He’s a lovely man. He really got me started.” She added, “He took me to dinner first.”

  “What a gentleman.”

  She spoke of him admiringly, reverently. She praised his soft demeanor and quiet masculinity.

  I said, “We’re talking about a man who directs shampoo commercials.”

  But she ignored me. While she buttered a triangle of bread, she described, twice, how endearing it was when his glasses fogged, how she thought it betrayed a vulnerability and innocence.

  When I asked her what drew her to him most, she told me, “Certainty. And unless you’re an actress, you can’t understand how appealing that is.”

  “You mean attention.”

  She tore the bread in half. She set both pieces on her plate but ate neither. “I think I mean certainty. I don’t know. Yes—I think I mean certainty.”

  Our steaks arrived. As Clare cut away strips of wrinkled fat, she begged me, “But please—let’s change the subject, all
right? How was I today? You can be honest. In fact, please, be honest.”

  And because I was a man in love, and what men in love do most often is lie, I said, “You were the best.”

  • • •

  The next morning I wrote her the first letter, and it went something like this:

  Dear Ms. Moore,

  Your performance last night at the Rainbow Bar and Grill was groundbreaking. I was moved by your beauty, your poise, and the passion with which you spoke about serving popcorn in a cinema. I wish you wouldn’t end up with that Ron fellow. He seems a bit of a bore and entirely undeserving of you. I anxiously await the sequel.

  Signed, with adoration,

  Colin McPhee

  P.S. Marry me?

  A fan letter, I told myself, as I creased the paper in half and slipped it into an envelope bearing her address. And a good one, honed from my years of reading and stealing and copying similar notes from Capitol Records. I’d typed it on my Smith Corona in the tiny studio on Gower and Afton. Even though I’d come into a not-unimpressive amount of money when I sold The Family Room, I was still there, and in fact very little had changed. The futon still dipped on the floor; the posters still wrapped around the walls. The only change, I think, was that I’d swapped out Jaws for Jaws 2 in the bathroom.

  The next day, I waited for her to call. And then when she didn’t, I wrote another letter. I folded it into a second envelope, and I licked the sweet adhesive from a stamp’s back. And then the next day, another, and the next day, another, and the next day, another. Dear Ms. Moore, I—. Dear Ms. Moore, You—. Dear Ms. Moore, We—. And always—always: Marry me? I’d walk them to the mailbox on the far corner of Afton, and I’d slip them into the slot. I’d peek my head into the small darkness, conferring with the box: Okay, we have a deal here. I’ve done my part, now it’s your turn. It’s your job to get it to her.

  When I’d return home, I’d stare at the phone and I’d will it to ring; I’d curse myself every time my eyes became so dry that I had to blink. I’d crack open beers before noon. I’d drink three in a row, but it wouldn’t work: it’d turn me drunk and anxious, instead of just anxious. Often, I cleaned manically. I burrowed around in corners I hadn’t peered into in years, sweeping away dust, and hair, and little bits of torn paper; I vacuumed the colorless wall-to-wall carpet with a handheld Dust Buster.