by Rachel Cline
Annabeth, meanwhile, was obsessing over the placement of the new optical, her own version of the last-minute-anxiety fire drill. That Laura had been able to keep working without her the night before—even for the forty minutes it took her to drive to Venice, make a tuna sandwich, and drive back—had made her territorial and a little bit insane.
“It’s five fucking frames!” Peter said at a quarter to three, as he watched her running the footage back and forth for what seemed like the twentieth time. Peter was the only human on the planet who could really judge what Annabeth had done—not just with the stupid dissolve but with the whole film. He was the only other person who had seen all the footage, knew all the changes, the only one who could comprehend what she had invented, what she had elegantly finessed, what she had left out because she had to. Unfortunately, she didn’t care what Peter thought. She cared what Laura thought, and to a lesser extent Simpson, but also David. And where the hell was David? He’d promised to call when he woke up.
David was driving to Dr. Leight’s office in the Palisades. He always felt better in the car than anywhere else. Being able to see so much of his surroundings while remaining sheltered and, to some extent, soundproofed in the mock room of the car’s interior was like being present and absent at the same time; in the world but also out of it. It was how he imagined it would feel to be dead. He knew it was wrong to love driving as much as he did (fossil fuels, foreign oil, urban sprawl, all of it came down to driving too much), but it was his birthright as an Angeleno; he couldn’t help himself.
Dr. Leight had been treating David since childhood. She had a sunny office full of contemporary art that reminded him of being happy and small. After examining his foot, she gave him a shot of antibiotics and told him to come in sooner next time and get a few stitches. Then she asked him if he knew the play Philoctetes by Sophocles.
“Philoctetes has this festering, wounded foot. It smells so bad, and he complains so bitterly, that Odysseus abandons him on a desert island.”
“Are you saying I’m going to be abandoned?” he asked, hoping his tone was sufficiently arch.
“No, I’m telling you a story. So, after ten years, an oracle tells the Greeks that they need Philoctetes and his bow, which is magic, in order to win the Trojan War. To avoid getting shot on sight by this guy he’s left to rot, Odysseus sends a young soldier who Philoctetes has never seen before to do the dirty work. He gives the kid a sob story to tell about how the Greeks have betrayed him too, so he can gain Philoctetes’ trust and disarm him. And it works, up to a point. But Philoctetes is so pathetic, the kid falls apart—he admits it’s all a trick and gives the old guy back his magic bow.”
“Huh,” said David. He had wanted to ask her for a prescription for Vicodin, but if he mentioned it now it would seem too intentional. She’d know what he was thinking. “Why did you tell me that?”
“Because it’s a good story,” she said. “And you have a festering foot injury. And no one seems to read it anymore.”
“At least mine doesn’t smell,” said David.
“You’ll be fine,” she told him.
David nodded but suspected the story was supposed to mean more. The young man who has to do the dirty work of the big hero Odysseus, weighed down by all that history and virtue the Greeks were so famous for. It was like all those dead fucking Jews he wasn’t allowed to let down. Very clever, that Dr. Leight. She’d blocked his request for painkillers intentionally.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to lecture you,” she said, then, seeing his consternation.
“Oh, no, it sounds worth reading,” said David. “I bet my parents even have a copy. I’ll check it out next time I’m over there.” It amazed him how his social self could continue on autopilot while the edges of his mental frame were already turning so dark.
“Send them my regards,” said Dr. Leight.
Annabeth managed to have a minor accident on the way to Long Beach—rear-ending a Lincoln that was crawling along at five miles an hour as she careened off the ramp from the 710. (The freeways had been empty and she had made up considerable time en route.) The Lincoln sustained very little damage but Annabeth, seatbeltless because of the heat, bruised her nose and breastbone on the steering wheel of her Civic and found that it hurt to breathe as she exchanged insurance information with the seventy-four-year-old Mrs. Myra Last, who was wearing orange lipstick and looked like a bent brown stick.
When Annabeth finally walked into the the auditorium it was five minutes after four, but the lights were still up. She found Laura standing in the back. The seats, just as predicted, were filled mostly by people who looked like they spent the majority of their waking hours playing golf. The marketing people were walking around making sure everyone had a response card and a stubby pencil with which to complete it.
“This is a disaster,” whispered Laura.
“I know,” said Annabeth. “I’m sorry. You were totally right.”
Laura wanted to accept the apology, but she was too agitated. Then she noticed Annabeth’s face, which was even paler than usual. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I had a car accident on the way over.” Annabeth was shaking—a delayed reaction.
It took a moment for Laura to understand what she had just heard—the information had to fight its way past the obsessively detailed mental list of things-to-fix-next-time that she’d been keeping all afternoon. When it finally landed, Laura’s anxiety changed its shape: what had been spiky and contained became formless and immense. “Well, I hope to hell nothing else goes wrong,” she snapped over her shoulder, disguising the emotion in her voice. She half-ran to the ladies’ room and locked herself in to the farthest stall. Then she sat, head on knees, until the sensation of being in a free-falling elevator abated. She did not want Annabeth to die in a car accident. She did not want to be left alone with this movie.
David arrived just as the lights were going down. He found Annabeth almost instinctively and took her hand in his. Relieved, she pulled him closer. She wasn’t dead and neither was David and neither was Mrs. Last. She felt a strange rush of gratitude as the movie began.
The opening sequence (it didn’t yet have credits over it) was a long tracking shot of Bunny walking along the side of a state highway at night. She was wearing a dress, a raincoat that was obviously not warm enough for the blustery weather, and pumps. Not hooker shoes, but not the sort of shoes anyone would choose to wear for a long walk on asphalt either. Laura said the scene told you everything you needed to know about Bunny. Annabeth had always been willing to admit that it was a beautiful piece of footage and that it certainly made you curious about the character but, since you never found out why she was walking on the highway, or saw her in the outfit again, or even knew—as those who had read the previous draft of the script did—that the highway was in Oklahoma, not far from Tulsa, where Bunny had come from but would never return, it seemed an unfair place to start. She had cut together the scene of Bunny on the highway so that it was exactly as Laura had designed it: funny, because her coat wouldn’t stay closed and she wrestled with it in an almost slapstick dance; sad, because there is something intrinsically sad about a woman alone on a highway; and mysterious, because there was so much the audience just could not know. Seeing it on the big screen, she understood that Laura had been right. It really was the whole movie in one shot.
Laura didn’t return from the bathroom until the end of reel 3. She sat on the aisle in the back row with Annabeth, David, and Simpson but said nothing and left as soon as the lights came up. There was something missing in her movie, something big, and she had no idea what it was. She should have invited Annabeth and Peter and Simpson out for drinks afterward and allowed them to convince her otherwise, but she went home to Greg instead, and lay beside him in silence while he watched television and held her hand.
When Annabeth and David got home that night, she made fierce love to him. She wanted to devour him—all his softness, all his maleness, all his intelligence a
nd wit. She wanted to squirm out of her own skin and into his. David was surprised at first, but perfectly happy to be devoured. When they were done bucking and yelping, they looked at each other with strange curiosity: Is there someone else in there—inside that head, animating that body? Someone I haven’t met yet? Do I love him? Do I like her?
Part 4
REVERSALS
22
The Long Beach audience was largely mystified by Trouble Doll, and they hated Bunny. “Wimpy,” “Airhead,” “Not pretty enough to be such a dope” were some of their comments. Laura refused to read the burgeoning scroll of postscreening notes faxed by Halo executives to the cutting room the next morning—she wouldn’t even let Annabeth tear them off the machine. Crouching next to the fax until her calves went to pins and needles, Annabeth read them all, many of them twice. She recognized the criticisms—they were of a piece with the comments she’d made herself when she first read the script, as well as those she’d muttered as she had macheted her way through her worst days in the cutting room. Bunny was as inert as egg white, as dull as soap. You kept wanting her to walk away, but she just wouldn’t.
Simpson also read the notes, after finally tearing them off the machine. When he was finished reading, he called a meeting with Halo to discuss “solutions.” It was the first time Annabeth had seen him in action, and she was impressed by his passion. The color came up in his cheeks. “What would that audience have thought about Wild at Heart?” he asked the telephone. “What would they have made of sex, lies, and videotape?”
While waiting for Laura and Simpson to return from the “solutions” meeting, Annabeth ran the movie twice at high speed. She went back to the notes from the set and the notes from dailies. She forced herself to imagine restoring long-abandoned sequences and to consider ordering reprints of alternate takes that no one had ever considered any good. She even reconsidered the sin of voice-over narration. (Adding narration in postproduction, Janusz had once said, was “like the shirt saying ‘I’m wid sztupid,’” an editor’s humiliating admission of total defeat.) What she didn’t prepare herself for was what happened: Laura and Simpson returned with Halo’s promise to back fifty thousand dollars’ worth of additional photography.
“Reshoots?” Annabeth repeated, knowing she should have felt relieved.
“More is better,” said Simpson, standing in the doorway.
“More is morphine,” said Laura at his side. They were like the hipster version of American Gothic, Annabeth thought, hating them.
She hunched in her swivel chair, wondering why the idea of reshoots sounded so bad to her, waiting for the feeling of having been tricked to go away.
“Cheer up, Annabeth, we’re in Schaefer City,” Simpson said.
“Who’s going to write them?” she asked him.
“Don’t worry. Laura can do it. I’ll even bring Ramona back for a few days to help stir the pot.” He looked at Laura as he said this, open to her veto, but she just nodded. Annabeth wondered whether anyone was going to ask her to contribute to this mysterious new stew they were about to concoct.
“Go home,” said Laura. “You deserve some time off. Go home and relax.” But Annabeth knew she didn’t really mean “relax,” she just meant “get out of my way,” and there was no way she was going to do any such thing. As soon as she left they were going to sit down and do exactly what she had been doing for the last three hours…without her. She was the only one of them who actually knew the movie completely—all the takes, all the shots. And she was the only one who could see past her own ego to the truth of how it played. Why was she suddenly, apparently, inessential? She looked to Simpson for help, but he just smiled and nodded.
“Well, I guess I’ll call it a night then,” she said. She stopped herself from volunteering to call Peter in to help them. If they hadn’t thought of doing any “rewriting” tonight, with the film itself, she didn’t want to suggest it. It was late, they would have to get tired soon anyway, and in the morning she would come in first thing and make another backup of the backup on Peter’s system, just to be safe.
Annabeth drove off that night in a kind of trance. It was too early to go home—the house was empty, and so was the refrigerator. Instead, she followed the spindly bent parade of palm trees at the end of David’s old street as though it led somewhere worth going. But it really didn’t. As she found herself crossing the silent suburban neighborhood north of Montana Avenue, she thought of David’s parents’ house. He’d been spending a lot of time there lately—doing his laundry and retrieving old LPs was what he said, but it made her uncomfortable. She’d been invited there only once since Thanksgiving and only for a quick visit, not even dinner. David said they didn’t really eat formal meals, but she knew that was a lie. When she’d said the words “Duluth, Minnesota” to Naomi the first time, the woman’s face had closed up like a clam. But it was true that the eerie laboratory of the Bronsteins’ kitchen didn’t seem like a place where food was prepared. There were no burners on the stove, only glass with some kind of starburst pattern printed on it where the burners were supposed to be. And though the giant, double-doored refrigerator was fully stocked with groceries, they were all sealed in plastic containers announcing their provenance: Gelson’s. Laura’s groceries came from Gelson’s, too.
On reaching the intersection with Sunset Boulevard, Annabeth turned left, heading for the Gelson’s in the Palisades. She’d driven past it dozens of times but had never gone inside. Maybe she would see Jack Nicholson contemplatively tasting olives, as Linda Bronstein claimed to have done. Maybe she would spend a thousand dollars on groceries, as Peter claimed his mother did annually at Christmas. Maybe she would think of a way to fix the movie and be allowed in on the rewriting process, instead of being pushed aside like a secretary who was taking too long at the typewriter.
The first thing she noticed inside the supermarket was the smell. It was missing. The mixture of mild disinfectant, old lettuce, mouse droppings, and slightly decayed beef fat that was the same at the Mar Vista Vons as it had been at the Hooley in Duluth and the Randalls in Austin was not present. How did they do it? The light at Gelson’s was whiter, too. Maybe not particularly flattering to people but good for green vegetables and somehow also persuasively antiseptic. The store was nearly empty of people, but the produce department was full of wonders: lingonberries, gooseberries, kumquats, quinces! She wondered if there had been a Gelson’s when Hollywood was the new home for all those European refugees. She could picture Billy Wilder weeping sentimentally over the sight of long-lost gooseberries. She wished Laura were there with her, so she could make that observation out loud to someone who would get it. Instead, she bought wild strawberries: $6.99 for a half-pint. The checkout girl didn’t even blink. As Annabeth drove home along the PCH, she ate them out of the box, and they tasted more like strawberries than anything she had ever tasted before—almost fake in their specificity. They lasted her as far as the light at Chautauqua.
The next morning, Annabeth returned to the cutting room. She had a million excuses for why, but she didn’t need any of them, because Ramona was waiting for her in the lobby. “Laura said you’d show me the cut,” she said without making eye contact, let alone saying hello. Annabeth had never had much patience for anorexics, especially those over the age of seventeen. If you were locked in a dungeon in your youth, she thought, get help, or at least revenge, but don’t make everyone who meets you have to wonder what the nature and extent of your suffering has been. Nevertheless, Ramona’s presence gave her a legitimate job to perform that day, and for that she was grateful.
She found Ramona a chair, set it up next to the Avid, dimmed the lights, drew the blinds, and tried not to flinch when the writer commanded her to pause or rewind, so she could take seemingly endless, furious notes. When the last scene faded out, Annabeth politely asked, “So what do you think?” but she did not actually want to know the answer.
“It’s great,” said Ramona, while giving the impression of someone do
ing integral calculus in her head.
“Does it look anything like you pictured it would?” This was a dumb question, possibly even a hostile one, but Annabeth suddenly felt the need to probe. “It must be so weird to see your own life turned into a movie—I mean, I know it’s not exactly your life, but Laura said parts of it are kind of close—”
“I’m sorry, I’m really distracted,” said Ramona. “Do you have a continuity I can have? To take with me?”
Which brought Annabeth up short. She should have offered the current chronological list of scenes to Ramona before they’d started, just as she would have done for the composer or the ADR editor or anyone else who came to work on the movie during post. Ramona, by asking for it now, was both pointing out Annabeth’s gaffe and putting her in her place at the same time. Annabeth felt horrible, only it was too late to do anything but rustle around for a copy of the thing and apologize profusely, which she did, wishing all the while that when Ramona got home she would feel the need to consume a gallon of Häagen-Dazs.
When the writer had the continuity in her hands and had paged through it cursorily, she looked up at Annabeth and said, “I’m going to want some changes.”
23
Kurt Cobain’s death was first reported on a Friday. David had been half-expecting it ever since the overdose the month before, but he still felt jolted. The cliché—but he had so much to live for—was all he could think. Frances Bean wasn’t even two. He called Annabeth but she was “in with Laura” and couldn’t be disturbed, so he wound up talking to Peter. Though they hardly knew each other, on hearing the news Peter made a noise that sounded like all the air being let out of a pool toy and David felt that he understood. “Oh, man,” Peter said, “that just sucks.”