The lot was small, but midcentury bungalows lined the edges that had once housed script doctors and starlets.
“Fitzgerald worked in one of those buildings for a while,” Mannie said.
Betsey smiled, and her pain receded a little. This was exactly where she had wanted to be when she first drove across the country with boxes of DVDs in her trunk, ready for film school.
Mannie led her knowingly to a small stucco office building. Next door, golf carts darted in and out of a giant soundstage, and this contributed to Betsey’s joy. Once inside, Mannie led her to an office full of composite furniture and unframed posters. A young woman sat behind a desk, reading a script.
“Hi, I’m Mannie.” He held out his hand.
“I’m sorry, who?” She looked from him to her computer screen, then back again.
“Mannie Cooper, and this is my partner Betsey,” he said. “Rob is expecting us.”
The woman typed something into a little machine that looked like a calculator. She stared until it beeped. “He’ll be ready for you in just a few. Would you two like any water? A soda, maybe?”
Mannie took a Coke, but Betsey couldn’t risk the fluids in her system. She just sat there, glistening in sweat turned sour by dehydration. Betsey watched the woman — her pink cheeks broadcasting health — make notes on the script. I used to be you, she thought.
Rob turned out to be a bald, slovenly man. Betsey had expected a power suit and carefully pomaded hair, but instead she found herself seated across from a man in a stained white polo shirt that barely contained his girth. Rust stains marred the ceiling tiles of his office, the gray threadbare carpet revealed patches of concrete, and the paint peeled from the walls, uncovering multiple layers of beige, moss green, and institutional blue. The room smelled like BENGAY.
Rob steepled his fingers over his gut. “How’ve you been, Mannie?”
“Good, real good,” Mannie said. “Betsey here is a real talent.”
“You know, I was just at TromaDance and I thought, man, this would be right up Mannie Cooper’s alley. What have you been up to?”
“Just prepping this project with Betsey.”
Rob glanced at a piece of paper on the corner of his desk. Betsey knew it was coverage. Rob’s assistant probably read and synopsized the script so Rob wouldn’t have to.
“Our movie is like Gremlins meets Tremors, set in Antarctica,” Betsey said, proud of her logline.
Mannie launched into the story, establishing the team of loveable research scientists who discover the herd of killer ice boars and warn the oil tycoons, who of course ignore the research scientists. Mannie and Betsey traded back and forth, weaving their way through the plot, but once they reached the climactic showdown between the evil corporate fixer and the scientists (led by the valiant Bruce Campbell–inspired penguin researcher and his orca specialist girlfriend), she felt a wave of nausea so intense that she blanked. She looked to Mannie, who nodded, bolstering her with wide, hopeful eyes.
“So, uh, a penguin pecks at the fixer’s leg, distracting him, just long enough for …” Rob stared at her without a hint of smile. Betsey fought back another wave of nausea. Blackness crept in from the periphery, shrinking her vision to a pinhole.
Betsey said, “Just long enough for Bruce to signal a killer whale to leap onto the ice, to leap onto the ice and slide — ”
She felt the telltale twist in her gut, then the release, followed by a wet sound down there. Mannie raised an eyebrow. She shook her head. She had the diaper. Just keep going, she thought, shifting in the plastic seat.
“The whale slides across the ice and bites the fixer, drags him back into the ocean.” Betsey could smell the rotten eggs wafting up from her seat, but she forced a smile. “And it reminds us of when he saw that whale eat his dad at the zoo all those years ago, but this time, the whale saved him, and his anger is just …” Rob sniffed and bunched up his nose. Betsey added, “… released. His anger is just released. He finds peace and can finally love Emma, the orca researcher.”
“That’s how it ends,” Mannie said, “with Bruce and Emma together, and the pet penguin beside them.”
Rob turned away and pushed open the window behind his desk. When he sat back down, he scooted his chair against the wall, as close to the breeze as possible.
“I lost focus for a minute there,” Rob said. “Do you smell that?”
Betsey felt the blood creeping into her face. She hoped the spores weren’t airborne, that they stayed put rather than microscopically escaping her clothing and dispersing through the office. Maybe she should tell Rob, if only so that he could protect himself. She gave Mannie a pained look. She twisted around in her chair and stretched her arms to mask her intention of checking the seat. And there it was, a faint trace of brown on the yellow plastic.
Mannie put his hand over his mouth, whether with revul sion or concern, she couldn’t decipher. She disgusted herself. She felt less capable than a toddler.
“Where do you want me to pick up again?” Mannie said to Rob. “Where did we leave off?” He shot an encouraging smile at Betsey.
“That whale sliding on the ice,” Rob said.
As Mannie retold the ending, Betsey pulled some alcohol towelettes from her purse and slid them under her seat, wiping the smooth plastic as she kept her eyes trained on Mannie and Rob. The effect was that she kept shifting in her chair like a hyper kindergartener, or like a self-pleasuring nympho, depending on one’s frame of reference.
Rob held up his hands, cutting Mannie off. “What is going on here?”
“Excuse me?” Mannie said.
“You.” Rob pointed at Betsey. “What are you doing?”
Betsey couldn’t look at him. “I have a condition.”
Mannie shook his head at her. She knew this was his first meeting in years. She wouldn’t let the spores take this away from him.
“I have to clean things,” she said, “all the time.” She held up an unopened wipe.
“Like OCD.” Rob smiled. “Me too.” He pulled a bottle of Purell out of a drawer and placed it across the desk. “Help yourself.”
Betsey squirted some into her hands and rubbed in the gel. “So we end with Bruce and Emma together. With their penguin.”
“It’s a fun idea,” Rob pumped some Purell into his own hands and rubbed his palms together, “but it sounds pricey.”
“It could go low-budget too,” Mannie said.
“In Antarctica?”
“You don’t have to shoot it in Antarctica,” Mannie said.
“Yeah, but there’s a freaking ice hotel.” Rob laughed.
“You can fake that,” Mannie said.
“It’s meant to be campy,” Betsey said, “so if the effects are cheap, it doesn’t matter.”
Rob leaned back in his polyester chair. “I’m not sure it fits with our slate at this time.”
Betsey looked at Mannie. He was already nodding, accepting the news.
“You knew what type of film this would be before we showed up,” she said. “Mannie told you.” Her head ached and she felt chilled.
Mannie touched her elbow. “It’s okay. Let’s go.”
“It would help to know what isn’t working for you,” Betsey said, “for other meetings we have.”
“Other meetings?” Rob laughed. “Right.”
“So we can prepare.”
“Mannie and I go way back. If the pitch surprised me, great. But I can’t work with what you guys brought.”
“If it surprised you?” she said. “You planned on passing before we even walked in the door?”
Rob looked at Mannie. “You had a good run. You should let it go while some people still respect you.”
“Come on.” Betsey offered her hand to Mannie, but he stood up without it.
“I’m sorry I wasted your time,” Mannie said to her.
“You didn’t waste my time,” she said.
She lingered in the doorway. Mannie stopped in front of the assistant’s desk and s
tared out the window. Several gaffers were tightening bolts on C-stands, securing a large scrim. The warm sunlight passed through the large swath of gauze, emerging bleached and diffused on the set, where a young man, twenty-five years old at best, sat in a director’s chair.
Betsey glanced back at Rob, who had already cleared his desk of their script and his assistant’s synopsis of their script. She suspected the documents were already lying in a trash can by his feet.
“What?” Rob said, arching an eyebrow.
“I just want you to know,” she said, “I shat in your chair.”
After the pitch, the chills got worse. She stopped in one of the studio’s bungalows to use the restroom and clean herself. The smell overwhelmed her, and with the fever, she couldn’t hold back the vomit. She was dizzy, and when she sipped a handful of water from the bathroom tap, she couldn’t keep it down.
Mannie drove her back to her place. He took her temperature and confirmed her fever. He set her up on the couch with a blanket and brought her Pedialyte popsicles from the grocery down the street. “I get dehydrated from time to time myself,” he said, and winked at her.
He turned on the television, and she flipped the channels until she found a movie about voodoo and an elderly woman who hexes a young woman in order to steal her body. She watched the horror spread on the wrinkled face as the woman realized that she was no longer young, that she was in the wrong body.
Mannie sat beside her, and she leaned her head on his woolly shoulder. When the movie ended, she said, “The antibiotics aren’t working, you know. I’ll have to go back to the doctor.”
“You don’t know that,” he said.
“I know a girl in Australia who has been on nine rounds of antibiotics, and none of them worked. But she just did this experimental procedure and now she’s completely cured.”
“Is it a risky procedure?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “But I’d hate to go through with it.”
“Don’t borrow worry.” He patted her on the shoulder and stood up to go.
“Do you think you could stay a little longer? Maybe watch another movie?”
“Okay,” he said.
“How about Rosemary’s Baby?” she said.
“Good choice.”
He found the DVD on her shelves, next to copies of his own films. He set the film to play and then sat beside her, lifting her blanketed feet and placing them in his lap.
LIKE THE LOVE OF SOME DEAD GIRL
It’s three in the morning, and the man who lives across the street has brought a woman home for the night. Amanda, unable to sleep, stares at his window — has been staring for hours — when the lights flick on. At three, the bars are closed and Los Angeles is nearest to being at peace. Even from this distance, even through the floor-length windows of her loft and the arched windows of the man’s tenth-floor apartment, Amanda can see their bodies merge, a dark silhouette framed by industrial track lights. When they part, he leads her to a drop cloth that encompasses the space in which he paints. Amanda knows from other nights that he often stays up painting until the sun rises and gilds the eastward face of his columned Beaux-Arts building. When she is alone, she will sometimes turn her lights off and pull up a chair. She bought binoculars from the swap meet around the corner, in the block that marks the beginning of Skid Row. She bought them so that she could watch him paint, but she found herself watching on other occasions.
Amanda peels herself off the sweaty sheets and slides Frank’s arm from her waist, placing it instead on a pillow. She doesn’t know if Frank has ever noticed the painter. She usually watches him when Frank is sleeping at his own place.
When she feels sure that Frank is still in deep sleep, she cracks the window and lights a cigarette. The smokes are a new thing. She has an idea that maybe someday the painter will see her smoking and wave to her, that they will become friends this way. A month ago, soon after he moved in, she noticed that he took frequent smoke breaks, leaning on the ledge of his window. Once he faced her direction, and she dropped out of sight, hoping that he had not seen her binoculars.
The historical district is in flux. Many of the buildings were abandoned until recently, when twenty- and thirty-somethings swarmed the area, renting recently gutted and renovated lofts and failing to budget for curtains big enough to cover the expansive windows. Now it’s a dreamland for voyeurs and exhibitionists, but Amanda has never thought of herself as either of those things. The painter is her first case study.
The way he can touch people and the way people choose to expose themselves to him fascinates her. His current paintings are larger-than-life studies of women’s bellies. Sometimes a bit of breast or the crease of their sex emerges on the edge of the frame like an afterthought. She watches the women pose for these studies. Many are young and taut, and he paints bluish lines descending to the hollow of their belly buttons, emphasizing their concavity, their firmness. She once saw a squat, fortyish woman with pinned-up hair undress for him. Once naked, the woman crossed her arms to hide her chest. The painter spoke to her, and the woman nodded, relaxing her arms. One by one, he removed the pins from her hair and fanned it out through his fingers so that it flowed over her breasts. Her stomach sagged with the fallen skin of multiple childbirths. A myriad of stretch marks framed her navel. The way he painted it was like geometry or the fractals found in nature, like the repeated fact of the degrees at which a branch will divide from the branch before it. That close, the variances of the tones and textures of her skin became beautiful in their complexity.
He paid her. They thanked each other, and she left. He did not sleep with her, although he does sleep with others. Amanda cannot predict his bedmates. There is too much variance in their traits.
Tonight, the woman is bald. Her eyes clench and her mouth gapes as the painter thrusts into her. Amanda cannot hear her, but she imagines different screams of pleasure she could place on the scene, like different dresses on a paper doll. She prefers the nights when the painter is painting.
She stubs out her cigarette and climbs back into bed. Frank lets out a throaty sound as he rolls over in sleep, his back to her. She presses her lips to the nape of his neck. She can smell the musk of him there. It is a scent that she could not place, or maybe did not notice, until now. She parts her lips, sucking lightly on his skin.
She feels his muscles tense with wakefulness. He rolls to face her. “What are you doing?”
“It’s just a kiss,” she says.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know,” she says.
He props himself up to see the digital display on the alarm clock. “Jesus. I have to teach in four hours. Go to bed.”
He lies back down at the edge of the mattress, with space between them.
Frank cannot — or will not, depending on the conversation — have sex. They give each other massages. They run their fingers lightly through each other’s hair. They hold hands. They hold each other. Sometimes they kiss, but it is never deep or prolonged. Once Amanda thought she felt a lump, so Frank kneaded her breast. It was methodical, his hands spiraling to her nipple. After, he pecked her on the lips and said, “I think you’re fine.”
Amanda met Frank at an asexual conference five months ago. She did not always know that there was such a thing as being asexual. One morning she was sipping her coffee and watching an interview with Frank on the local news. He was promoting the conference and called himself a romantic asexual. He described it as someone who wanted companionship, who wanted an emotionally intimate relationship, but who did not have sexual urges. Amanda wondered if this definition applied to her. She had given up companionship five years ago, figuring that her (nonexistent) sexual wiring precluded finding a boyfriend, never mind a husband. After Frank’s interview, she hoped she might not have to be alone.
She knew there might be discernable causes for her limited capacity for intimacy, but she’d already been to therapy and talked about the usual suspects for too long. The therapist probe
d each trauma and significant relationship and asked about her childhood memories of her family. She left no stone unturned and then kept turning stones over until they were shiny as mirrors, and Amanda was still no closer to wanting anyone in that way. Before Amanda canceled all her future appointments, she told her therapist it wasn’t helping. It wasn’t like she was a victim of abuse. She grew up in a healthy family. The man who kidnapped her was a stranger, caught even before the day ended, before he really touched her. A life sentence, and he died in a prison fight — from a rusty knife to the spleen and then an infection — soon after. He was as far in the past as the past could go.
Amanda drove to the conference early so that she could sit in the front row for Frank’s panel: Considerations of Asexuality in Queer Theory. Frank tossed around a lot of terms she couldn’t quite grasp, but his general message reassured her. She didn’t have to compromise on what she wanted in life just because she was different. There were others like her, others who might build a life with her.
She asked him to coffee. They found a place around the corner that served lattes with foam shaped like swans. Frank leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs. Amanda liked that each of his movements was slow and deliberate. There was something nonthreatening about the way he sat, close without encroaching on her space. His hand rested on the arm of his chair, several inches from hers. He also happened to be handsome, an aesthetic quality that she could appreciate, if only on a less visceral level than she suspected most other people would.
“How did you know that you were, well, you know?” she asked.
“That I was asexual?” His voice, honed by years of public speaking, carried across the café. Amanda felt disappointed by the glances of nearby patrons. She had wanted people to think she was with him. He was much more conventionally good-looking than anyone she had ever dated.
“You don’t have to worry about outing me,” he said. “I made it my job to out myself. I’m outing myself at least two, sometimes five times a week. Tomorrow I out myself on national television to a group of bored middle-aged women.”
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 9