by Rachel Cline
D-girl with ponytail: “I can’t even tell you how much we paid.”
D-girl with big diamond ring: “Of course not.” A polite pause; then: “Two-fifty?”
No denial from Ponytail, just a smile, a beat, and the “keep going” gesture. “This is unbelievable. Listen. We get this envelope from FedEx last week and the script’s in it. I mean the same exact copy that I sent him six weeks ago. No note, no nothing. So I flip through it? And eventually—like around page thirty-five or something—I come to some writing. In Sharpie! He wrote on it with magic marker! There were maybe twenty changes in the whole thing, some cuts, a few words here and there, and they’re like scrawled.”
“No way! What did Bill say?” Bill, Annabeth surmised, was Ponytail’s director, producer, or actor employer.
“‘Fucking brilliant!’”
The D-girls stared at one another with eyebrows circumflexed. It was as though each was waiting for the other to betray some sign of whether or not Bill’s comment was to be understood as a joke. It defied all of their expectations and training. Annabeth watched the wheels turn. Obviously, whatever Bill did was right in this case. And it was received wisdom that Mamet was a genius—Pulitzer Prize. So: half a million dollars for a few dozen strokes of Sharpie? Money well spent!
Laura had overheard this little conference, too, as it turned out. Her eyes met Annabeth’s over the heads of the mystified D-girls and they both had to turn away before they fell apart laughing. A few moments later, near the fruit salad, Annabeth felt someone grab her arm. “Fucking brilliant!” Laura repeated and they laughed again, and then took their plastic dishes outside and sat side by side on a flowered chaise longue positioned to have a view across the canyon.
“So what are you doing here?” asked Annabeth, to whom the idea that Laura would ever have to network seemed absurd on its face.
“Looking for crew—department heads, maybe an editor.”
Did she remember that Annabeth was an editor? Was she being purposefully coy? Annabeth knew from the Weekly article that Laura herself had started out as an editor. Jerry Greenberg, who cut The French Connection, had hired her when she was “just a kid,” she’d told the reporter. Also according to that article, which Annabeth had reread twice since their first meeting, Laura was only five years older than she was. “But don’t you do your own cutting?” she asked.
“Last time, that didn’t work so well,” said Laura.
Annabeth couldn’t quite bring herself to say, “What about me?” because she couldn’t quite tell whether Laura was teasing her. In the article, Laura’d said she’d be “boiled in oil” before she saw a film of hers cut on a digital system, that cutting a movie without handling the celluloid itself was like writing a symphony without touching a musical instrument. She must have had to eat those words by now, but still they meant that she understood the craft, that she wouldn’t expect her editor to recut a ghost story as a caper film. Annabeth’s heart was beating fast—should she say something? But maybe it was better not to push.
“So, seen any good movies lately?” she asked instead. This question got them through the rest of the brunch—they had profoundly similar taste. Martin Bell’s American Heart was the first common bond, but their shared guilty pleasure in The Fabulous Baker Boys sealed the deal. “Who knew it was still possible to make a musical?” said Laura. “Who knew it was still possible to make a romance?” said Annabeth, nodding wistfully.
Below where they sat, a stretch of Lookout Mountain Avenue’s asphalt was visible, and as their conversation paused, a Western Exterminator van drove by. Mounted on its roof was a papier-mâché gentleman caught in the act of walloping a rodent with a giant black mallet—he looked like the Monopoly banker. It was a hilarious thing when you saw it on the freeway, but it seemed even funnier rustling by among the climbing vines and wind chimes of Laurel Canyon. As the van passed from sight, Laura said, “There’s this movie…” and Annabeth said “Last Night at the Alamo!” They exchanged a glance of stunned hilarity as they realized they’d both seen and appreciated the same obscure little movie. (Alamo’s main character, an off-duty exterminator, drives a pickup truck fitted with a pathetically homemade-looking pair of vinyl rat ears.) For Annabeth, this moment seemed magical. Not only could Laura see the humor in the Western Exterminator truck, she understood why Annabeth sometimes went into the room with the Acmade edge coder just to smell its fumes—and she was the director of Two Chevrolets! It all made her so happy that she drove home chorusing along with U2 on the radio. As the glittering ocean came into view over the hill at Fourth Street, Annabeth had the rare, exalted feeling that she was in the right place at the right time.
6
While jobless and first adjusting to life with David, Annabeth began to have a recurring nightmare. In it, she was at a sewing machine, piecing together the skin of an elephant. The skin was bloody and hard to maneuver, and the needle on the sewing machine was dull. There was a deadline to complete the job—she was not going to make it—and periodically she had to ask herself if the elephant was even dead or if it was its persistent life that made it so difficult to sew. Her hands and arms were slick with blood to the elbows. When she woke up from this dream the first time, she started to describe it to David but grew ashamed when she realized how ghoulish it sounded. She didn’t want him to think that was what her subconscious was really like. But he seemed not to mind at all, asking her to go into detail about everything. He even asked her how it smelled, which upset her. Because it did smell; it smelled like the basement of the house she’d grown up in: bruised apples, mildew, and kerosene. She wouldn’t have had to know that if he hadn’t asked.
Most of the movie-business people Annabeth knew well—the crew members and postproduction staff—had hobbies. Between jobs, they gardened or golfed, made paintings, threw pots, danced, cooked, knitted, wrote poetry, and worked out. They all worked out. Annabeth’s hobbies were going to the movies, reading, walking, and riding her bike on the boardwalk. Being near the ocean mattered to her for some reason she could never put her finger on. It wasn’t as though she ever swam in it. In any case, she didn’t really have enough to do with herself while unemployed, and she and David began to get in each other’s way. He was working two afternoons a week at the library and also occasionally subbing at KCRW but he was home an awful lot, and their house was all of a thousand square feet.
The area of their most heated disputes was the living room: David wanted to use the stereo for listening to music; Annabeth wanted to watch videos. David was willing to use headphones—in fact, he preferred to—but Annabeth was not willing to watch movies with the blinds open. This irritated David, who was obsessed with getting “enough” sunlight (but had never explained to Annabeth why he believed this was so important, because that would have required telling her the story of his teenage depression in all its disturbing detail). For the most part it was a silent battle, with David angling the blinds and repositioning the TV to address the glare problem that he assumed to be Annabeth’s underlying concern, and Annabeth closing the blinds as soon as he left the room because it wasn’t about the glare, it was about immersion.
When David came home from the farmers’ market one Wednesday morning and found Annabeth sitting in the dark, already well into Nights of Cabiria, he left the front door wide open before carrying his shopping bags into the kitchen. He knew he’d get a reaction, but he didn’t know what it would be. He’d never intentionally provoked her before. In fact, they’d never really had a fight.
Annabeth sprang forward like a toy goblin but remained silent, telling herself he would return and close the door after he’d put down the shopping. She picked up the remote control but didn’t pause the tape. Then David stuck his head through the doorway and said, “It’s ten in the morning—what are you doing?”
“I’m watching a movie, obviously.”
“You’re lying on the couch in the dark like an invalid.”
“I’m watching a Fellini movie. I h
appen to be lying down. What’s your problem?”
David shrugged dramatically, implying that her reaction was unduly harsh. Annabeth looked back at the movie but after a few seconds found that she was too irked to focus. She stopped the tape again, got up, and went into the kitchen. A bunch of wild-flowers was lying on the kitchen table—pink and lavender ones she couldn’t name. David was taking things out of the refrigerator and lining them up on the counter: jars of jam and hot sauce; quart yogurt containers full of festering remnants; a brittle, translucent slab of cheese. The food he’d bought at the market, in filthy canvas bags originally obtained at Trader Joe’s, remained on the table beside the rapidly wilting flowers.
“Is something the matter?” asked Annabeth.
“The refrigerator is disgusting,” David said.
“Not a big surprise—neither of us cleans it.”
David slammed the fridge door and turned on her. “And whose fault is that?”
“Ours?” Annabeth paused for a moment and tried to regroup. “What are you so mad about?”
“I ran into Danny Kaplan at the market,” he said, sitting down at the table, apparently changing the subject. “With his wife and their new baby. Isabel. She’s adorable.” Annabeth couldn’t remember who Danny Kaplan was. Some half-famous musician, most likely. She could never keep their names straight. “They just got back from Paris,” David continued.
Then she remembered: Kaplan was a production designer who had gone to high school with David. “Well, I bet his wife lets him watch all the movies he wants,” she said, not realizing her poisonous implication until she’d already said the words.
“I’m your fucking wife?” David yelled.
Annabeth just stood there in the doorway.
“Are you expecting me to bear your children for you, too?” he added.
Annabeth went back to the couch, where she sat down, blinking. That was an uncalled-for remark, she thought. It should have hurt like hell. The thing was, she had no intention of having children. After a moment or two, she heard him resuming his activity in the kitchen—the sounds of items hitting the trash container, water running, the garbage disposal doing its job. Flummoxed, she returned to the movie. After backing it up a few feet, she pretended she had found her way back into the story. Instead, the movie ran, and Annabeth’s thoughts ran alongside it. She’d never wanted to be a mother. Mothers were trapped, enslaved creatures. But David probably did want children. His parents wanted grandchildren, certainly. So what was she doing moving in with this guy, playing house? When, in the movie, Cabiria packed up her scant belongings to go off with a guy she’s just met, you knew she was making a mistake. But you also loved her for her bravery, her faith. It was a nearly perfect movie and the sequence then starting, where Cabiria spends the night in a movie star’s apartment, was Annabeth’s favorite part.
As soon as David left the house the next day, Annabeth called her friend Denise in Ann Arbor. Denise had become a pediatrician, a wife, and a mother in the time it had taken Annabeth to go from apprentice editor to first assistant. She was not exactly Annabeth’s version of Danny Kaplan, but only because the two women were and had always been close friends.
“I fucked up,” said Annabeth, after catching up on Denise’s latest doings. It didn’t take that long, because Denise knew she was being called for a reason. “I don’t know why I always do this. He’s basically the nicest guy I’ve ever slept with.”
“Do what?” said Denise.
“Turn into a shrew.”
“Funny, you don’t look shrewish.” This was an old joke from high school, and it comforted Annabeth just to hear it repeated. Annabeth’s shrewishness had been one of her mother’s ever-ready explanations for why her father had gone away.
“I just don’t know how to be in a couple—I never have.”
“Couples have fights; it’s not the end of the world.”
“Yeah, but…”
“But yours was worse?”
Annabeth smiled wryly, accepting this truth. “I was mean,” she said. “I insulted his manhood.”
“Did you apologize?”
“Yes.”
“Did he accept your apology?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re done,” said Denise. “Let it go.”
Yeah, right, thought Annabeth. Sometimes Denise’s wisdom seemed to verge on smugness. She could never quite believe she had a close friend who actually said the things printed on bumper stickers. There were a lot of AA bumper stickers in Los Angeles, Gothic letters printed on foil, like the logos of ’80s metal bands: “Easy Does It,” “One Day at a Time,” “Powerless.” Why would anyone want to be powerless? And yet Denise was the only person Annabeth had ever met who seemed unequivocally to love her life—and not in a saccharine way either. Once, when Annabeth had visited Denise at college, she’d allowed herself to be dragged along to an Al-Anon meeting in Madison: a room full of buttoned-up Swedes and Norwegians. They all looked normal enough at first but turned out to be human train wrecks. Annabeth recognized that there had been alcohol abuse in her family, probably for generations, but it was nothing like the Mom’s-blacked-out-on-the-couch-again nightmare of Denise’s childhood. Nevertheless, when Annabeth’s life got bad, she always called Denise. Denise was the only one who was ever able to make Annabeth feel better.
A week later, David was given the regular midnight-to-three Tuesday and Thursday slot at KCRW. The pay was ridiculously low, but at least it was a steady check, and KCRW had a commitment to deep and varied music programming, so it was an amazing opportunity. He called his segment Old Brown Show, which was a pun on the little-loved Beatles track but was not a sly implication about the importance of African and black influences in popular music. Well, not consciously or intentionally—not any more than the Beatles tune’s name had been. Of course, people assumed it was and told David it was “brave” and “witty,” and these observations made him uncomfortable. He put everything he had into the show. Seeing his name on the program grid in the station’s monthly newsletter the first time nearly made his heart stop—his parents and all their friends got that newsletter, too. Take that, Danny Kaplan.
David’s taste in music encompassed various chapters of pop, soul, funk, psychedelic rock, art rock, R&B, and even the occasional instance of rap, but his concept for Old Brown Show was to play new music that felt old, and that was all he’d meant by the name. He’d pictured an ankle-high brown blucher with its sole partially unstitched: a hillbilly shoe, tapping out a steady rhythm. He’d pictured that image on a compilation CD that the station would sell at the annual fund-raiser. He’d pictured himself getting to meet and interview guys like Beck and Kurt Cobain. Kurt would certainly “get” what he was trying to do.
But he soon found that the three hours he spent doing the show were the loneliest, weirdest, most relentlessly painful hours he had ever spent doing anything. He’d had radio shows before—at Vassar, and in Lake Placid, where he’d lived for a while after college. But people had listened to those shows—they told him so, and he believed them. In Los Angeles, people claimed to listen but he could tell they were lying—the same way they lied about having read the book discussed on Bookworm, or having seen the brilliantly reviewed Turkish film that played for exactly one week at the Royal. Liza Richardson, who was his lead-in, always did a lovely job of introducing him and he always showed up wildly overprepared with liner notes and library books and clever associations, but he still felt himself fall into a state of helpless ineloquence as soon as the ON AIR light was illuminated—even when the music was playing. For the first few days, he phoned Annabeth during the music sets, but it was the middle of the night and he could tell she was lying in bed half asleep and resented being made to talk on the phone.
In reality, many people other than Annabeth were listening to Old Brown Show, and no people—including Annabeth—found it dull or disappointing. To them, David Bronstein seemed like a droll, understated dude they’d like to know better. A
nd for no real reason beyond the lateness of the hours at which he broadcast, they assumed he was someone largely immune to music business fame-mongering and hype. When he introduced one of his discoveries, a song by the band Papas Fritas (which he pronounced in Californian iambs: pahpuz freeduss), he commented, “Well, I guess it’s freed me, too, ’cause here I sit talking to the void. On the other hand, maybe I have Marlo Thomas to thank for that…” For people David’s age, the Free to Be…You and Me reference was a gimme. It was that kind of almost random association that made his on-air sensibility so appealing—he was an outsider’s insider, self-conscious to the point of self-parody.
7
A trio of stores called American Rag occupied the middle of the block of La Brea Boulevard between First and Second Streets, and its three distinct storefronts offered new and used fashions, very expensive shoes, and housewares, respectively. Crammed into the back of the housewares store was a café that sold salads and quiches and various types of coffee, all served by unusually handsome French waiters. These men, along with certain very expensive tea towels and the “et Cie” that no one ever pronounced in the name of the place, were the only trace of Frenchness on the premises, but the shopaholics of greater Los Angeles seemed to find these elements sufficiently exotic to justify spending fifteen dollars on an omelette with a tiny, wilted sprig of frisée on the side.
Annabeth rarely shopped in this part of town for anything—it was far from where she lived, and she was not someone who paid much attention to fashion. Nevertheless, during the months of idleness since her last job, she’d begun to notice that at unemployment, the Santa Monica Public Library, the Nuart cinemas, and Abbot’s Habit café, young hipsters had started wearing Hush Puppies—in bright colors. She had also learned that the store that sold these shoes was just down the street from American Rag, which was why she had been the one to suggest the associated café to Laura as the location for their much-postponed first lunch. She thought that Laura might be the sort of person who would tell her it was okay to spend fifty-five dollars on shoes even though she was unemployed. Over jambon et fromage, however, Laura began telling Annabeth about Trouble Doll, and Annabeth soon forgot all about the red shoes. She was flattered to death when Laura asked for her advice on how to manage her ongoing difficulties with the script’s author, a woman named Ramona Engel.