by Karen Karbo
What was happening to Mouse was simple. She was having a realization. It was: she could not get married.
Mouse thought, if she could only sit down. Sit down and think. Where was she? Near the Academy. They had a library, didn’t they? She would go in, cool off, have a bit of a think. Or no, not think. Escape.
Like the movies it had a tendency to honor, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was housed in a solid but unimaginative building of toffee-colored concrete, dark-tinted glass. Getting into the fourth-floor library made getting into the Pentagon look like going to a neighbor’s garage sale. Just inside, there was a squinty-eyed guard with a gun who made Mouse sign in, then directed her to the elevators. On the fourth floor, past a set of bulletproof glass doors, she had to sign in again. What company was she with? Self, she wrote. What was she there to research? How to (A) Get out of the wedding; and (B) Get back to Nairobi without ruining or ending anyone’s life, including my own, she thought.
Trends in American Documentary, she wrote. She noticed that everyone else who had signed in above her was also with Self. Odd, she thought. Not at all, Mimi could have told her.
No one ever came to the Academy Library in an official capacity. Desperate people came here, people twitching with ambition. They hunkered over books on breaking into acting, directing, writing, even casting. Or else a biography of someone who had, against mega odds, broken into acting, directing, writing, and casting. People who actually worked in the movies had no need for libraries. The more successful you were in Hollywood, the less you had any need for books of any kind. It was true when Mouse came here so many years ago with Ivan. It was true now.
She got a few magazines on independent filmmaking from the librarian, who looked as if he was part of an experiment to see how long a human being could go without sunlight. His skin was the color of an almost-cooked onion. He was narrow-chested, his weak-looking arms splattered with brown moles. He wore a rag of a T-shirt, a limp thing silk-screened with a faded MR. SUCCESS across his narrow chest. Mouse guessed it was a souvenir from a student film he’d worked on years ago, when he was brimming with dreams.
His ear was being talked off by a man in a white dress shirt and lint-ridden black slacks. A Xerox repairman, a Mormon missionary, a waiter. A respectable middle-class man, whom the film industry had turned into a zealot, with a light-gray face, pink-rimmed eyes.
“– says they can give me fifteen hundred dollars. Fifteen hundred, I say. Okay. Okay. Not great. Humiliating, really, but okay. A producer, director, creative-what-have-you makes up to something like a hundred thousand per episode, but I say okay. Fifteen hundred. It’s something. So then they say Business Affairs has gotta call. I’m thinking that’s it, that’s the brushoff, Business Affairs is never going to call, but then they do. A miracle, I think how I’ll spend the fifteen hundred. I’ll send it to the Feds, is what I do. I make shit wages, but I owe ’em anyway. I feel good about this. Success is not getting to my head. I’ll pay the Feds. They call, Business Affairs does, and they say, ‘Oh.’ They say, ‘Oh no, oh no.’ They say, we have a special thing in television, an if-come clause. Why it’s called this pornographic thing, who knows. But what it boils down to is, they get a free option. They’ve given it a name though, see. You hear the words free option and you think, ‘I’m not gonna get screwed again!’ But they say if-come clause, ohhh, very businesslike, and you think, ‘Huh, well, I guess that’s how things work.’ But not me! I’ve broken my ass on this thing for three years. I took out another mortgage on my house to finish this sucker. I borrowed money from my parents. I’m forty-eight years old, Marvin. Forty-eight years old and they’re telling me they don’t have any money for an option. Warner Fucking Brothers doesn’t have any money?”
“It’s Martin,” said the librarian.
From the back room another librarian appeared with Mouse’s magazines, “You interested in filmmaking, are you?” she asked.
Mouse suddenly had an eerie feeling that this woman had been working here when she came here with Ivan during the Watergate summer. This woman was over six feet tall, her long spine as straight as a railway through Kansas. One of those steely matriarchs with no time or patience for osteoporosis or arthritis, whom all men loathe and fear and all women aspire to be when it no longer matters what men think. How could you forget a woman like that?
“I make documentaries,” said Mouse.
“Would I know your work?” The Steely Matriarch read the slip Mouse had filled out to get the books. “Mouse FitzHenry?”
Mouse told her briefly about the disease films, about the films on the Moroccan rock climbers, about The New Stanley.
“Fascinating,” she said.
No, thought Mouse, taking the magazines along with a book called Africa Goes Hollywood, it’s not her. It’s this place. The sad silence, the same air circulated round and round, desperation hugging the room like a cozy on a teapot.
The librarian reminded her of something Ivan had said. It was a fresh memory, not something she’d run through her head eight thousand times. She’d thought she’d manage to cull from her unconscious every glance, every touch, every thought worth remembering. Once in a while there was something new.
They had come to the Academy Library one afternoon after class to look at the script for Sunset Boulevard, which was housed in Special Collections. They had just seen the movie, and the idea that they could also actually read and touch and smell the screenplay was startling and thrilling. It was behind-the-scenes. It was almost like having been on the set with William Holden and Gloria Swanson. This, of course, was still during the time when words like plot point and hook were exotic movie terminology, when a screenplay was as esoteric as a Best Boy, a gaffer, an aspect ratio, before every housewife, convict, and valet parking attendant south of the forty-fifth parallel and west of Plymouth Rock had an idea for a script, before cottage industries had sprung around teaching screenplay writing and story structure, before five-year-olds knew what a screenwriter was and wanted to be one when they grew up.
It was before Africa, Mouse thought, as she sat down across from a gorgeous blond, a man with chiseled everything, curly eyelashes, a beckoning space between his teeth, breathing heavily over a book on acting.
It was before Tony. It was before Mimi got her hands on Ivan. It was in another life.
She flipped through pages of a magazine, glancing idly at headlines. The usual articles on national funding, state funding, local funding, the lack of funding. Old news. Same all over the world.
That day with Ivan he’d said that everyone who worked at the Academy Library looked like they had something major wrong with them. Sunset Boulevard arched open on the table between them. Mouse was wearing her yellow polyester flares, an orange gingham crop top that Shirley had made. Mimi had a blue one just like it. Ivan was sunburned from too many hours spent body surfing over the weekend. His forearm was smooth and hot against hers. He leaned into her shoulder and said, out of the side of his mouth, “That guy there’s about two hundred pounds overweight. That chick there looks like a stutterer. That one there is shy, man, so shy, go up to her and say BOO!, see what she does.” His stubby fingers crawled up her side like a hyperactive tarantula.
“Then we should work here,” she giggled, pushing his fingers away.
“That’s the part I forgot to say,” said Ivan. “Everyone here? All these losers? They all want to make documentary films.”
Articles on Third World women and the documentary film. An update on the Toronto Experimental Documentary Film Festival. None of it was very interesting. It was like reading about listening to someone play Mozart. What was fun was the actual listening. What was worthwhile was playing, or trying to play, Mozart yourself.
In the back of the magazine, under a section entitled Notices, between want ads, advertisements for conferences and workshops, calls for films and tapes, listings of funding sources and publications, was a small, odd paragraph at the bottom of the page. There was no reason
her eyes should have happened on it. There was nothing remarkable about it.
It said: Kudos to award winner I. Esparza on completion of his nine-part series on death and dying in Spanish Harlem EL FUNERAL.
Her stomach squeezed up her throat. She stared at the paragraph as though it was capable of giving up more information if she just waited. That was the strategy she had taken with Ivan before, following Shirl’s motherly advice, Ivan would come back if Mouse just waited. For, even though Shirl was appalled by everything early seventies, she had not escaped the influence of that popular hippie poem (vanilla paper, burnt edges, artfully shellacked onto a piece of driftwood, sold at record stores and poster-cum-headshops) that found its way onto the bedroom wall of every teen in the free world. The wisdom it offered was wishful thinking: If you have a bird and you let it go free, and it doesn’t come back to you, it wasn’t meant to be. If it does come back, it’s beautiful.
So there was Shirl, advising Mouse to sit tight, play hard to get, wait him out…
There was Mouse, pretending to the world like she didn’t care, saying it’s over…
There was Ivan, calling the house, disguising his voice, asking for Mimi…
There was Shirl telling Mouse not to panic, he only wanted an excuse to call, in the hopes that she, Mouse, might answer the phone…
There was Ivan coming over, no one’s home, wanting – Shirl was right about one thing – to talk about Mouse, wondering what in the hell was going on. Why was she so cool? What had gone wrong?
But these things he couldn’t bring himself to ask. He was eighteen, half shy, half tough. He came over and used the pool when Shirl and Mouse weren’t home, thinking maybe this time he’d get up his courage to ask Mimi about her. But it was the end of summer, and he was eighteen, with those heavy-lidded eyes, those hormones rocketing around under the honey-colored skin…
There was Mimi, nineteen, working at a bead shop. All day long she dusted beads in plastic boxes when she wasn’t making a sale for eighty-seven cents to a bra-less girl in an Indian print blouse. Mimi thought it was over, whatever “it” was Mouse and Ivan had. A friendship, to her eyes. A platonic friendship.
Mouse was mum. Ivan came over when no one was home. Mimi was working at a bead shop, living at home. It was summer. All those songs, wistful songs of sex and despair. On the radio at the bead shop. On the radio Mimi played incessantly as she weeded the lawn, as she sunbathed, as she waited for someone, anyone to come and rescue her from being nineteen living at home in the Valley.
Mimi bought a new yellow velour bikini, the sides held together with gold rings, in anticipation of Ivan’s next visit. Mouse, when he called and she answered the phone, pretended not to recognize his voice. Shirl said be patient. Mimi got an IUD from the student health service at Cal State Northridge, where she went to school during the year.
Mouse macraméed wall hangings.
Ivan married Mimi.
It was going to happen: Mouse was going to cry. Right there, in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library. She would sooner welcome dysentery. Her bowels would listen to her commands, whereas her tears wouldn’t. She wished she could cry like other women, like Mimi, who could sniffle and weep, sob and blubber, without losing control.
She swallowed. The first wave hit the beach of her cheeks and rolled down her face, over her chin, down her neck. “Sir, if you’re done with this, another gentleman is interested in seeing it…: It was the Steely Matriarch, tugging politely at a book under the elbow of the chiseled, gap-toothed actor sitting across from Mouse.
The poor clod can’t even read in peace, thought Mouse. She sniffed. Slurp slurp up her small nose. Ivan, oh Ivan.
The Steely Matriarch looked down at her. She had the tiniest blue eyes Mouse had ever seen. “Are you all right?”
“Ye-ye-ye-haa-haa-haa-haa-haa” lurched out of Mouse’s throat.
“Now now now,” said the Steely Matriarch.
“I’m all-I’m all-I’m all,” she hiccupped. “Ri-ri-right.”
“Don’t,” said the actor, his voice crushed with emotion, “please.”
The inside of the library looked underwater to Mouse. She didn’t see the tears standing in his emerald-green-thanks-to-contacts eyes. She didn’t see his chiseled chin fall to his chest. He bit his tongue. “Ah-huh,” his chest heaved, “ah-huh-huh-huh-huh.”
“Sniffle-sniffle-oh-ho-ho” came from behind her. “Sniffle-sniffle-oh-ho-ho.” It was the forty-eight-year-old Xerox repairman with the if-come clause. His head was cradled in his arm, his bald spot showing slightly under thinning gauzy hair. His shoulders shook. “My wife said, ‘Honey, it doesn’t matter, you don’t want to be a whore anyway.’ But I do want to be a whore! To be a whore would be a promotion. Right now it’s rape. They can’t part with fifteen hundred dollars? Those people spend fifteen hundred on dinner and a movie.”
The library filled with sighs and quiet sobs. You know how it is in a sad movie. All around you, in the dark, sniffle-sniff, the soft rustle of frayed Kleenex. These people were watching a movie, too. It was the movie inside their own heads. It was the movie of their lives. And unlike the average three-hanky weepy, where the lives of the heroines and heroes are changed (usually ruined) forever, in these movies, the movies in the heads of the desperate, nothing happened. Ever. They pushed their rocks uphill, they went to meetings, they sent out their scripts, their eight-by-tens, their reels. They did that, and they went to the Academy Library.
And nothing ever happened. They died making the same wage they did at the bead shop. Even Mr. Success dabbed at his eyes with his knuckles. Their lives made a Beckett play look action-packed.
This would have gone on who knows how long. The Steely Matriarch, whose eyes were quite dry, glared around the room in disbelief. To her, the snuffs and coughs were nothing more than disruptive noise in the library.
Suddenly Mouse felt herself being lifted out of her chair by her armpit. The Steely Matriarch steered her through the library and out the bulletproof door.
“Are you going to be all right?” the Matriarch asked.
“Ye-ye-ye-I’m fi-fine. I’m fine,” said Mouse, inhaling deeply.
“You’re sure? Have a drink of water.”
Mouse obediently bent to the drinking fountain.
“I have an idea for a documentary you might be interested in. A history of the Academy Library. People don’t know, for example, that we have a large collection of pamphlets, clippings. We have an extensive collection of cocktail napkins on which Mr. Zinnemann made his notes for High Noon….”
9.
TONY THOUGHT HE’D FOUND HIS SPIRITUAL HOME. HE had grown up in Malaysia, in Ghana, Kenya, and India. His father, now retired, had been a middle-level officer in the British Foreign Service. But nowhere had Tony felt so at home as in Mimi’s almost-on-the-Westside duplex in Los Angeles, California.
He loved the pace of the city, the light, the latitude, the way everyone was always off somewhere, driving to the next meeting, the next meal, leaning into the future in their shiny cars. The streets were so clean, compared to the streets of Kuala Lumpur, of Accra and Nairobi and Bombay. He was shocked at how Third World his expectations had become.
He was taken with L.A.’s fiddling-while-Rome-burned ambience, the populace cheerfully asphyxiating itself, building million-dollar homes that perennially slid to the valleys below. He admired Hollywood.
Tony confessed these impressions of the city to Mimi one day when he dropped her off at Talent and Artists. The morning was clear, the air damp with a million sprinklers watering a thousand lawns. Coo-roo-roo-roo went the mourning doves, hidden in the trees. Coo-roo-roo-roo, you heard them but never saw them.
“Spiritual L.A.,” Mimi muttered, “that’s like plastic silverware and business ethics. The land of drive-meet-eat. Spiritual – ha.”
Tony had certainly been consumed with driving, meeting, and eating since he’d gotten Love Among the Gorillas going with Ralph and V.J. Parchman several we
eks before.
Usually, Tony would drop Mimi at Talent and Artists by nine, then, if he was meeting Ralph for an early lunch, he would drive to Santa Monica to Ralph’s office. Because he had missed the traffic, he would inevitably arrive twenty minutes early (had he waited ten minutes longer, he would inevitably be thirty minutes late). Then they would go for lunch, Vietnamese on Venice, soul food on San Vicente, or moussaka on Montana. This regimen served to put some much-needed meat on Tony’s bones, and taught him how to confidently drive seventy miles an hour on the freeway while tailgating the car ahead of him.
Today, they ate Japanese and practiced what Ralph called their dog and pony show. After lunch they were having their long-awaited, much-rescheduled meeting with V.J. Parchman.