“The problem,” she said sternly, “is that four people, including my agent, had conversations with me yesterday concerning my low enjoyment level, and it bothered me. I would prefer to receive direction solely from you.”
Simon looked concerned, and the wind almost blew off his hat. “Really?” he said, in an affronted English tone. “That shouldn’t be. I’ll have to have a word with them. Your agent called you about this?”
“My agent,” Suzanne repeated indignantly. “As if I were a child. As if I were difficult to communicate with,” she said, rising to some inner occasion. “I mean, why don’t I give them my mother’s number! Or better yet, call my grandmother! She’s down here, she can stand by and make sure I’m relaxed!”
“That’s it!” Simon said excitedly, snapping his fingers. “This is her! This is the quality I want for your character. Right there, what you’re doing now. See?”
“But Simon,” Suzanne said, trying now not to give him the quality he wanted in her character, “this is not relaxed. This is incredibly upset. If this is the quality, then maybe—”
“Darling,” he soothed her, putting his arm around her and walking her toward the car on the platform, where the crew was waiting to do a rehearsal. “Just be yourself and you’ll be fine. I know it sounds trite, but trust me. I’ll talk to the producers and make sure that what occurred yesterday is not repeated. Now, try to calm down.” He kissed the top of her head.
Rocky came up to Simon. “They need you behind camera,” he said.
“Oh, surely, surely,” said Simon, going around to the other side of the truck. Suzanne made her way to the passenger side of the platform, where Ted helped her up into the car. Bobby Munch came in a few minutes later, and Suzanne filled him in on the entire enjoyment/relaxation saga as the platform was dragged out to a lonely stretch of desert highway where they would spend the next few hours.
When she finished her story, Bobby smiled gleefully. “Telephone call for Suzanne Vale,” he said. “Brrring! ‘Hello,’ you say. ‘Hello, sweetheart, this is your Aunt Lillian in Tucson,’ ” Bobby said in a high little voice. “ ‘Listen, honey, George Lazan called today and mentioned that you didn’t seem to be enjoying yourself. Well, now, I know that it’s harder nowadays to have fun than it was when I was a girl. You know what we used to do for enjoyment, we would go down to the swimming hole and swing in one by one from a tire tied to a rope. Anyway, seems to me that if you want to do this dang fool thing for a living, you might as well try to enjoy it while you’re at it. Well, bye-bye, dear.’ ”
Suzanne was as happy as she’d been in months. “Brrring!” she intoned gaily. “Hello,” she said as herself, then went on, “Suzanne, it’s me, Mary. Now, listen, girl, I been lookin’ after you since you was tiny, and I’m worried about you. This Mr. George Lazan called me, uh huh, he shore did. Says you’re not relaxin’ enough. Suzanne? What are you eatin’? I bet you’re gettin’ too much sugar and not enough proteins and things like that. You know, my Pete, what he do to enjoy himself—now, I know he’s not an actor but he has a lot of tension—often he will take a very hot bath and a cold shower right afterward, and then he’ll . . . Well, you can’t drink, so that might not work for you, uh-uh. All right now, honey, stay warm. Bye-bye.’ ”
“Brrring! Brrring!” Bobby said excitedly. “ ‘Hello?’ ‘Hi, Suzanne? You may not remember me, but I was in kindergarten with you. Louis Bodenfelden? We were in Mrs. Webber’s class together. I threw up scrambled eggs out of my nose one day on the way to the library. On the stairs? Anyway, this guy George Lazan called me. He thought maybe I could talk to you about relaxing in your performance. I don’t know why he called me. He said he tried to reach Mrs. Webber, but she was dead. Anyway, nice to talk to you again. I’ve enjoyed your work over the years. Good luck.’ ”
Suzanne noticed that Simon and Rocky and all the sound guys were laughing, and she remembered she and Bobby were body-miked. Anyone with a headset was in their audience. She tapped insistently on her window. “ ‘Miss Vale?’ ” she said in a low male voice. “ ‘Miss Vale! It’s your pool man, Jeff. Sorry to wake you, but this dude George somethin’ or other called and said you weren’t owning your performance. I told him you always seem pretty relaxed to me, but then you’re usually asleep when I get here. Maybe there’s too much chlorine in the pool. Well, take it easy. I say, shine the old guy on. Later.’ ”
It went on for hours. Between every take there were new calls from people George Lazan had contacted. Suzanne’s dry cleaner, her exercise coach, her gynecologist, an old water-skiing instructor, a camp counselor, both her parents and all of her stepparents, Jack Burroughs, and, finally, the New York critic who had once suggested that Suzanne leave show business, and who now restated his position more vehemently.
“You were wonderful all morning,” said Simon enthusiastically on the way back to the set. “Just a delight, on camera and off.”
Suzanne smiled and blushed. Her entire body ached from laughing. She had to admit she felt pretty relaxed.
A week later, on her thirtieth birthday, Suzanne sat in an unmarked police car, soaked to the skin and waiting for Simon to call, “Action!” She looked over at Bobby. “If this is any indication of how my thirties are going to go—” she began.
“Your thirties?” he shouted. “Let’s talk about my forties for a few minutes, shall we? Let’s discuss that I have a wife and two daughters and I’m still soaked to the skin with a big movie wound on my arm, playing cops and robbers.”
“What about that I’m thirty and I don’t have any children?” countered Suzanne. “Or a husband, for that matter.”
Bobby started laughing. “This is a perfect actor conversation,” he said. “ ‘What about me?’ ‘Oh, yeah? Well, what about me?’ ”
“An actress on her thirtieth birthday obsessing about herself,” Suzanne said, also laughing. “I’ve become typical.”
“Sweetheart, you became typical long ago, only you were too stoned to notice.”
“Oh, thank you,” she said. “I suppose you’re not typical?”
“I revel in my typicalness,” Bobby said. “Do you think they remember that we’re out here waiting to do this shot?” He squinted down the highway at the crew, where Simon and Rocky were having what appeared to be an important conversation. Simon looked down the road toward their car and held up five fingers. “Five more minutes,” Bobby sighed.
“Hey, babe,” teased Suzanne, “you wanted to go into show business.”
“Not this show business,” he said. “I wanted to be in the glamorous, fun show business.” A soft warm breeze moved steadily across the desert, carrying the voices of the crew. “You’re awfully cheerful for someone who’s just turned thirty,” he said.
“I’d just hate to remember my thirtieth birthday as an ordeal,” she explained. “Sometimes I’m afraid I’m happy and I just don’t . . .” She paused, looking for the right words. “Sometimes I’m afraid I’m happy, but because I expect it to be something else, I question the experience. So now, when in doubt,” she shrugged with true bravado, “I’ll assume I’m happy.”
Suddenly they heard Rocky call them, and Simon made a thumbs-up sign. Roger ran up the hill with a water bottle to spray them.
“Action!” called Simon.
Bobby clutched his wound and started driving down the hill. Suzanne grabbed her movie gun. As they drove past the camera, Suzanne was exhilarated. She was still young, good-looking, funny, bright, her wet hair was blowing behind her, and she had a gun in her hand. As soon as they were out of camera range she began to sing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.”
As they hit the main highway, Suzanne saw that the Desert Palm Drive-In was showing False Start, a movie she had read for and not gotten. Her spirits sank instantly. “We should go back,” she said quietly. “They’ll be mad.”
Bobby noticed the sign and smirked sympathetically. “Were you up for that?”
Suzanne pretended to be interested in her gun. “I’ll get ov
er it,” she said stoically.
“When?” Bobby asked, turning the car around and heading back.
“When I have my therapy breakthrough and nothing bothers me anymore.”
“You know,” he said, “there are people who feel bad because they didn’t get this movie. What would you tell them?”
“To rethink their careers,” she said. “I’m always rethinking mine. It keeps my skin soft.”
“Do you think you’ll stay in show business till the end of this picture?” he asked.
“Do you mean this show business, or the glamorous, fun show business?” Suzanne asked.
“This show business,” he said dramatically, gesturing grandly and stopping the car. Suzanne looked around and saw that the entire crew was mooning her and singing “Happy Birthday.” Marilyn stood at the car holding a chocolate cake with thirty-one candles.
“I had the worst ass, so I got to present the cake,” she said, smiling.
“It’ll be hard to forget this,” said Suzanne, blushing like a desert rose.
“Still,” Bobby said, “maybe with enough therapy . . .”
“There isn’t enough therapy,” said Suzanne.
Dysphoria
She was going to a party, but she was pregnant and she didn’t want to bring the baby, so she took it out and left it home. While she was at the party, she realized that you can’t do that with babies, so she went home. When she got there, the baby was blue, so she panicked and tried to get it back in. “How could I have done this?” she thought. “How could I have not known what would happen? I didn’t even want to go to the party.”
All of a sudden she was flying, soaring over great stretches of countryside, and it was wonderful. Wonderful. Then, in the middle of her flight, she thought, “I can’t fly!” and she realized she wasn’t flying at all but was actually falling from a great height. She was trying to get the wind under her arms to keep herself in the air when someone on the ground started shooting at her. She felt completely exposed. She couldn’t hide, couldn’t duck the bullets. She wanted to get farther inside her clothes. There was nowhere to go. She couldn’t go down because they were shooting at her, but they were shooting at her so it wasn’t safe to stay in the sky.
Then she was in the passenger seat of a car. The driver was in shadow, but she could tell it was a man. She wanted to get out of the car—it seemed to be out of control—but it was moving too fast, traveling great distances in a direction she’d never been. Suddenly they came to a house, and she opened the door and was in a tunnel, a long tunnel. From deep in the tunnel, she thought she heard a little baby crying, and then she heard the echoes of the crying and she got very frightened. She started to run, and then the man from the car was behind her, chasing her through deep snow with a gun . . .
The phone rang, jarring Suzanne from her dream and out of immediate danger. She lurched across her bed. “Hello,” she gasped, clearing her sleep-filled throat. “Hello?” she repeated, hearing the overseas hiss.
“Hello?” she heard a male voice cry from deep inside the phone. “Is Suzanne Vale there, please?”
“Who’s calling?” asked Suzanne, with her eyes shut tight to block out the morning sun experience.
“Sven Gahooden,” the accented voice carefully said. “I met her at an est intensive several years ago, and she told me to call her if I should ever—”
“Suzanne is on a verbal fast retreat in New Mexico,” interrupted Suzanne.
“The Insight Chaparral?” cried Sven.
“I think that’s the one,” said Suzanne patiently.
“Well, tell her I just wanted to share with her about a breakthrough I had watching a film of hers in Stockholm,” Sven said.
“I’ll tell her,” said Suzanne in her best let’s-wind-this-up voice.
“And that I’ve quit medical school to work full-time on the Hunger Project,” Sven finished.
“Okay, I’ll tell her,” said Suzanne with some gusto. “Good-bye, Sven.”
“Who is this?” asked Sven politely.
“A friend of Suzanne’s. Ruth Buzzi,” said Suzanne.
“Well, thank you, Ruth.”
“Thank you, Sven. Good-bye.” Suzanne replaced the receiver and shook her head. “Ruth Buzzi,” she thought with disbelief. “Maybe I should go on a verbal fast.”
The storm of sleep had blown her nightgown around her body in such a way that it was cutting off circulation in her left arm. She threw off her blanket as though it was a magic cloak and stood up, preparing to enter the dangerous arena of her day without its much-needed protection.
She untwisted her nightgown, walked into the bathroom, ran some bath water, and moved into the kitchen for some eye-opening orange juice. “A man with a gun,” she thought. “How obtuse.”
Suzanne went back to her bedroom and put a cassette in her stereo. She liked to listen to soundtracks in the morning. In the car she only liked rock ‘n’ roll, but soundtracks were house music. This morning she put on Somewhere in Time, which sounded like what she thought love was like. It sounded like longing. She listened to the music thoughtfully as she sipped her juice and walked back into the bathroom. Her thoughts seemed more like poetry to her, and less like idle chatter, with this music on. She turned off the water and sat in the tub.
The score started to gnaw at Suzanne a little as she bathed. It had been recommended to her by a musician she had gone out with once named Chester Pryce, whom she had liked but had never heard from again. She couldn’t remember whether she had liked him before she never heard from him again or only afterward. In any case, he had told her about this music—he said he listened to it a lot—but he hadn’t warned her that it sounded like feelings you had to be brave about. Suzanne imagined Chester listening to it in his car as he wistfully drove over a cliff.
She reached for her towel, stood up, and got out of the tub, surveying her reflection in the mirror. She had to get thin. In fact, she had to get too thin, so she could eat for a couple of days and not have to worry that much about it. “I won’t eat today unless I absolutely have to,” she thought.
Then she saw the looming largeness of a new blemish on her chin. It looked to her like a new feature. “I’m already worrying about wrinkles and I’m still getting pimples,” she thought. “Life is a cruel, horrible joke and I am the punch line.” She was especially dismayed because she had to go to her friend Wallis’s party that night, which would have been difficult enough for her to attend with relatively clear skin.
She got into her gym outfit, which was a black bathing suit with little teddy bears on it that she had purchased in Hawaii a few years ago after losing her luggage. She wasn’t what you would call enthusiastic about teddy bears, but it had been an emergency and the suit made her tits look good. She pulled on her turquoise-and-black-checked shorts. Her ensemble was less than stylish, but when Suzanne got used to an outfit, she stayed with it. She pulled on her black socks and turquoise sneakers, sprayed herself with perfume and deodorant, wiped some makeup under her eyes, got her purse, put on her sunglasses, and left for the gym.
She drove out to Venice behind a Kharmann Ghia with a license plate that read BURRRPP. She knew the route by heart so she didn’t even have to concentrate. She thought she was a wonderful driver, and she wished she could build a healthy self-esteem from that foundation. When it got down to the larger issues, though, she didn’t think believing in yourself as a driver meant that much.
With the sunroof open, the windows down, and the radio up full blast, Suzanne felt at peace. She had once decided that God was in her car radio, and He would play her songs she liked when He was happiest with her. The week before—when God was evidently not that happy with her—she had blown out her amplifier playing a Pretenders tape. The speakers had gone dead after she went over a speed bump during “Middle of the Road,” and she’d driven around after that in a daze of silence. She’d had it repaired the next day, and now the music—Bob Seger’s “Still the Same” as she headed west on Olympic�
��was so loud it made her legs vibrate. She was always a little sad when she turned onto Lincoln Boulevard, because it meant she had only one complete song left before she got to Gold’s Gym.
She liked going to the gym, or rather, she liked having been to the gym, and the only way to have been was to go. She liked that little blip that she got between her shoulder and her triceps from lifting weights. Still, she knew that no matter how much work you did, the only way to get your body to look really great was to eat right. Suzanne only knew how to eat wrong.
She had always eaten wrong. It was a tradition in her family. Dairy, red meat, salt, sugar, caffeine, and fried everything: American food. She knew what it did to you, but she couldn’t do without it for too long. Her diets lasted until about four thirty in the afternoon, when she couldn’t stand it anymore and ate something absurd like teriyaki beef jerky.
She didn’t like preparing food or sitting down to a meal, maybe because when she was young her mother had the children sit and “visit” after the meals. Suzanne felt that eating was a private thing that should be done in corners or in cars. Food was simply fuel for the body. Her car didn’t “visit” with the other cars when she filled its gas tank. She smiled as she drove past McDonald’s and Jack in the Box and smelled their familiar sodium fumes.
She got to Gold’s Gym fifteen minutes late and saw her trainer Michelle waiting in front. Michelle was a muscular blond girl from back east who had been a PCP junkie and who now used the gym to give her what drugs had.
“Sorry,” said Suzanne.
Michelle shrugged. Suzanne was always fifteen minutes late. “What are we doing today? Legs?” Michelle asked.
Suzanne’s face went into a fist. Legs were the hardest. “Chest and shoulders?” she pleaded wanly.
“Okay,” Michelle laughed, “but you can’t avoid those puppies forever. We’ll do legs tomorrow.” Suzanne was relieved. She had a day’s reprieve. She looked around as she followed Michelle back to the machines, recognizing some of the regulars: the tall guy with the headband and the Egyptian hieroglyphics on his arms, the wiry dark-haired actor who was always drenched with sweat, and her favorite, the giant black guy who was there all day, every day, and never spoke to anyone. From the way he acted, Michelle guessed that he’d served a lot of time.
Postcards From the Edge Page 14