My Liar

by Rachel Cline

  “You’ve never been to the Oscars before?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “So how’d you get the tickets?”

  “Friend from film school who works in Penny Marshall’s office.”

  And then he did something completely bizarre. He tickled her. Just stuck an index finger into her midriff and voilà! Annabeth giggled. She couldn’t remember the last time she had done so. Smirked, chuckled, snickered, sure, but the high-pitched trill that she heard come out of her throat in the Town Car was none of the above. She braced herself for further incursions—wasn’t that how tickling went?—but Simpson looked entirely satisfied with himself. Maybe he really was her imaginary half brother.

  They walked along the red carpet with everyone else—to Annabeth’s surprise, there was no side entrance for the nonfamous; the TV cameras just somehow shot around them. Annabeth took note of the stupendously Irish-looking old guy from In the Name of the Father, who was surrounded by reporters—he was a nominee in the supporting category. Then they passed Christina Ricci from Addams Family Values, who was attempting to attract the attention of a camera crew with a come-hither smile out of all proportion to her tiny presence. Simpson appeared to tsk this sight as they went by. But traveling at a normal pace, they were off the carpet and into the building before Annabeth had even had a chance to realize that the normal-enough-looking guy on her right was Jeff Bridges, her idea of someone actually worth ogling.

  Their seats were in the second balcony, a circumstance it had never occurred to Simpson to anticipate and that he found almost intolerable once they were seated. She could see him hunching down with his hand on his forehead, hiding his face from the people seated around them—as though it mattered to them where the white-rat-looking guy and the scrawny girl in the baggy dress were sitting. Their presumed onlookers were just the extended families of the sound, editing, documentary, and short-film nominees, after all. Here and there, Annabeth even saw faces she recognized (from life, not television or film)—six sound editors had been nominated for The Fugitive alone, and God only knew how many special-effects guys. But she could sense that Simpson did not want her waving or beckoning so she, too, laid low. Which left her not much to do. They were miles away from the stage, and even to follow along on the nearby TV monitors required a degree of neck craning that soon defeated her. As the evening went on, Annabeth found herself dozing. At the Oscars! Appalled, she undertook a foray to the ladies’ room.

  Down several flights, below orchestra level, she found a large lounge area and a small refreshment stand. A hodgepodge of people were there watching television monitors with the same bonhomie as home viewers—Annabeth could hear the familiar undercurrent of wisecracks, mystified observations, and strangely attenuated murmurs of affection. She would have had to stride across the vast room to join them, though, and that would have required a bolder personality than the one she was stuck with. Instead, she made a beeline for the ladies’ room, where Sally Field was washing her hands and chatting loudly with an invisible someone who sounded an awful lot like Bette Midler. Annabeth quickly immured herself in the booth nearest the door and waited. Movie-star gossip! In person!

  “Yeah, I don’t know, it looked a lot better in the can,” said the Midler soundalike.

  “How do you mean?” asked Field.

  “One sec, I have to figure out how to get this damn thing back around without dipping my train…”

  “Just flush. I’ll help you straighten your train out, darling,” Field said.

  “Well then!” said Midler, and flush she did, drowning out most of the interchange that followed. Still, Annabeth had heard enough to deduce that the can in question contained a paint color and not a feature motion picture. Unless someone was about to release a movie called Tuscan Putty, but that seemed unlikely. On her way back up the stairs she tried avidly to reconstruct the moment as something she could retell to Simpson, but it had almost nothing going for it as an anecdote, except maybe its lack of anecdotal content. It didn’t matter, because when she had finally sweated her way back up the four flights of stairs, Simpson took one look at her and said, “Let’s go. At least we’ll beat the traffic.”

  On the way back down, they passed Oliver Stone loitering on a landing. He smiled and nodded, seeming to suggest that Annabeth and Simpson were rushing off to have hot sex with each other. Annabeth found herself turning to look back over her shoulder at the director, wanting to clarify—No, it’s not that at all. But Stone just nodded again, and also winked.

  And that was it. The night of glamour and giddiness was over. She stopped at Simpson’s just long enough to remove the unharmed evening gown, wrap it in its tissue, and return it to its box. When she got back to Venice, David was engrossed in his usual activity: sampling the ever-more-giant pile of freebie CDs that were now his work—as though it were a night like any other. She got his attention when she came in, but he was the wrong audience for her debrief.

  “So, did you see me?” she asked.

  “You were on TV?”

  He’d spent the early part of the evening at his sister Linda’s in Larchmont. Her rambling mansion of a house would not have been remotely affordable until after the riots, and since the earthquake it had been half-swathed in black Duvateen (the roof leaked) and adrift in various types of dust. While she and her husband and their friends had watched the awards show in the den, David had sat on the living room floor, trying to sort through the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which he had always thought of as his until Linda had taken it to Larchmont, and which had thus been battered during the earthquake. Pages were torn and spines were broken. Smoothing out the wrinkled leaves and dusting off the covers was David’s idea of the perfect antidote to the inane chatter of Oscar night, and as soon as he was done with that project, he left. He knew it was good for Annabeth’s career that the producer liked her enough to take her to the Oscars, and also that it was good for Annabeth’s career to go to the Oscars, and to whatever parties might follow, but he hadn’t really wanted her to do any of it. He’d wanted her to sit with him on his sister’s floor, examining encyclopedia volumes and making fun of the big kids on TV. On his way back to Venice, driving through the strangely deserted city, David had decided that the movie business and the music business had no legitimate relation to each other—they just happened to occupy the same county. Within the music business (which also had the propensity to become odious; he couldn’t deny that) working as a DJ on public radio was, if he wanted to stretch the point, as clean and blameless as you could get. He was a music lover, not a unit shifter.

  “I was standing right next to Christina Ricci on the red carpet,” Annabeth said, still trying to interest him.

  “Who’s Christina Ricci?”

  But she knew that he knew—he had loved the scene in which Wednesday told her summer camp bunkmates a ghost story so terrifying that it made them scream in true horror. His denial now made Annabeth laugh—it was such a perfect David moment. His Eeyore-sounding voice, his prickly lack of interest in Hollywood—these were the things about him that she loved. Sometimes she forgot.

  And David was sorry to have missed seeing his girlfriend in her beautiful getup on TV; he just couldn’t say so. There were still traces of makeup on her face—just some mascara and sparkly gray stuff at the corners of her eyes—but he could tell that she’d been exquisitely beautiful just a few hours before and he’d missed it. It made him want to kill and eat that Simpson guy.

  Annabeth went into the bedroom and telephoned Laura, who had seen her editor’s infinitesimally brief appearance on national television. Laura had recorded the red carpet and had reviewed the tape repeatedly for signs of Simpson’s arthritic cowboy gait. She loved the part about the seats in the peanut gallery and Simpson hiding his face. She also loved the part about Oliver Stone’s insinuating looks. “You should have told him you went to Yale,” she told Annabeth.

  “But I didn’t,” Annabeth said.

  “Yeah, I know, but he’s one
of those assholes who think you have to have an Ivy degree to breathe the same air he does.”

  “We were just passing on the stairs.”

  “You probably could have gone home with him if you’d wanted to.”

  “I didn’t want to.”

  “Oh, play along!”

  “Okay.”

  “So what else?”

  But there was nothing else. She’d only wanted sympathy for having somehow alienated her boyfriend and depressed her producer in the same night, through no fault of her own that she could discern. And she wanted someone, anyone, to celebrate with her—she’d been to the Oscars, she’d worn an evening gown, Oliver Stone had winked at her!

  Annabeth lay awake in bed that night wondering what her mother would have thought. Not that she expected her mother to have watched the thing—Eva didn’t care for television. She would have spent the evening reading some book about medieval Europe, obtained at great pains from interlibrary loan. But if Annabeth presented the evening the right way—not too self-impressed, a little bit woeful—she might be able to discern some trace of pride leaking out among her mother’s clipped queries and skeptical “hmmphs.” She didn’t call and try this, though—it was too risky. Feeling how she felt was not perfect, but it was better than feeling destroyed.

  Eva Jensen was proud of her daughter, if only—well, mostly—for getting out of the northern Midwest. No one else in her family had ever gotten south of Green Bay. Eva herself was still living in the same large, cold house Annabeth’s father had left her in twenty-three years earlier, and she still resented every minute she spent sitting in that living room, being ticked at by the brass-and-cherrywood clock that had belonged to Gus’s mother. At first, she’d thought he’d eventually have to return for it—and she’d kept it wound and polished, in perfect condition, against that possibility. But as the years had passed, she came to realize that if Gus did return, it would not be until Eva herself was good and dead. Still, she kept winding the clock, and polishing it, and waiting.

  20

  Scene 11 was the hardest part of the movie for Annabeth. She worked on it for almost two solid days. It was a fight scene and she had never cut one before, and this made her insecure. But she did remember Janusz’s recipe—“A fight is just a conversation with fists”—and that was enough to get her started.

  The fight was supposed to gradually build to the moment when Trip punched Bunny in the face. The most difficult part was cutting it so the audience would believe the actor’s timid shove was a real slam, because Bunny was going to have a black eye in scenes 12 and 13. Unfortunately, at the end of a long night of hard work in close quarters, Laura had let Deke talk her into shooting Trip’s final punch only from angles beside and underneath Bunny’s head.

  When Annabeth had finally gotten the rest of the scene to work, it seemed painfully obvious to her that Deke’s “Dutch angles” made the moment seem more humorous than painful. And the sequence came early enough in the picture that this unintended humor could skew the whole tone of the movie.

  When she finally cracked it, she felt like a genius. She started with a staccato series of back-and-forth cuts that got faster as the argument escalated. Then, just before Trip’s shoulder moved, she went into a close-up of his face for an extra-long beat. She stole this close-up from a completely different scene in which the actor playing Trip had flubbed his line, but she found she could use the slack expression on his face to supply the vicious subtext for the punch. She knew that, because of what had come before, the viewers would project the buildup of rage that the scene needed, even though what he was really thinking was something more like Uh, what was that line again?

  But something still wasn’t right. The punch still lacked impact. Frustrated, she lopped off the last shot entirely, so that the scene ended just after Trip’s shoulder flinched. She told herself she would watch it again the next morning, when fresh eyes might suggest what should come next, but then she ran it one more time and saw something else. The absence of a final blow was, in itself, a solution. It left an unanswered question hanging over the rest of the movie, a subconscious desire to see that last punch land. And that uneasy suspense would make Bunny’s violent death feel like a relief as well as an affront when it finally came. “Always, if possible, make two emotions at once,” Janusz had taught her, and at last she had done it. Laura seemed to get it when she showed it to her, but all she said was “Nice work. I think we still need a meatier sound effect for that first one, though.”

  21

  Annabeth set up the first recruited screening of Trouble Doll for four in the afternoon at the Art Theatre in Long Beach.

  “We’re doing it where?” Laura snarled in disbelief. The location indicated to her that Halo Pictures had decided to dump her film. Why else test it with a demographic destined to find it, at best, mystifying?

  “It’s a beautiful old Deco theater, you’ll like it,” said Annabeth.

  “I don’t fucking care how beautiful the theater is, it’s Orange County. They’ll all be Republican retirees. What were you thinking?”

  Laura had assumed that Annabeth was smart enough to run interference with Halo’s publicity harpies—lipsticky women in suits who had suggested the Art because it was close to the South Bay towns where they all happened to live. She believed that, as the film’s editor, Annabeth should have raised objections about the quality of the projection, the audio system, any number of technical things the marketing bitches wouldn’t know how to rebut. All Laura could do was whine, no matter how successfully she modulated her voice.

  From Annabeth’s point of view, the farther the screening was from her own neighborhood and demographic, the more easily she could distance herself from whatever hurtful things the viewers might write on their little blue cards. It was her assumption that The Director was the one who could push the studio around when it came to questions of marketing and promotion. If Laura was so unhappy about the Art, why didn’t she throw some weight around?

  So: Long Beach it was. And, as in every cutting room Annabeth had ever worked in, everything seemed fine until the night before, when the director finally started to understand that the film was about to face the eyes of strangers. Like the rest of them, Laura then began a fusillade of picture trims, dialogue lifts, and sound-effect tweaks that it fell to Annabeth both to execute and to keep track of in case Laura decided later to revert. The problem was exacerbated by Laura’s conviction that, because she remembered how to operate the Avid, she was still a competent editor. At eight-fifteen that evening she took over Annabeth’s chair and, when she could no longer bear the sense of her editor breathing down her neck, she asked, or perhaps told, Annabeth to go get her a sandwich.

  “Sure,” said Annabeth. “I’ll send Peter.”

  “No,” said Laura. “I don’t trust him.”

  Annabeth thought Laura meant that she didn’t trust Peter with petty cash, which he’d been spending frugally and keeping very good track of for more than three months at that point and which assertion offended Annabeth on principal. Hearing no answer, Laura turned momentarily away from the Avid and saw the appalled look on Annabeth’s face.

  “No, I mean I don’t trust him to pick out a good sandwich. He’s a guy.”

  “Well, just tell me what kind you want and he’ll get it.”

  “Just a sandwich, you know, tuna fish or turkey or something.”

  It was already after eight and Annabeth was hard put to even think of a nearby deli that was open. In some ways, the easiest thing would just be for her to drive home and make the sandwich herself. And, after five minutes of cruising around West L.A., that was exactly what she did. By the time Annabeth got back, Laura was no longer interested in food, though. She’d decided to make a few more “tiny” changes and Peter was dutifully logging the conformations. They went home at midnight.

  The day of the screening, Laura “slept in” unsuccessfully while Annabeth and Peter got the film ready to go—cleaning it, reinforcing the
splices, adding leader, and labeling the reels. The screening itself was at four in the afternoon, and by two they were ready to roll. Until Annabeth put up reel 3 for one last look at the night-sky effect they’d gotten back from the optical house the preceding morning. Peter bit his tongue.

  The 10 was still closed, so Laura decided to drive to Long Beach on surface streets—mainly Alameda Avenue. She’d never before taken this street much past downtown, where it was a wide road that moved quickly, but on the map it appeared to go directly to her destination via a sequence of thinly populated ex-suburbs. It had to be better than the 110, she figured. Greg warned her that, in effect, taking Alameda was taking the Blue Line and she should expect to stop as often and as miserably as she might if riding L.A.’s proud, empty prototype for a new era of rapid transit. She asked him when the last time he’d taken the Blue Line was, knowing the answer was “never.”

  As it turned out, what got in her way was not vehicles but rubble—truckloads of it. On a small side street in Huntington Park, a local entrepreneur had created an ad hoc waste-management site that had become the final resting place for the remains of the earthquake-ravaged Santa Monica Freeway. Truckloads of the stuff trailed plumes of pulverized asphalt in a steady parade. The dumping ground, already known locally as La Montana, was almost a hundred feet high. Laura, a childhood asthmatic, got herself trapped between two rubble-laden tractor-trailers on their slow, gritty way to the pile. It was a hot afternoon and the Karmann Ghia, which she was driving “for luck,” was laboring under the effort of generating cool air. If she turned off the AC she’d have to open the window, but if she opened the window she feared her lungs would close up. She was sweating, her new Belgian linen jacket was getting inappropriately rumpled, and it was starting to look like she would be late to her own screening. Irrationally perhaps, but also viciously, she blamed Annabeth for all of this.