by Rachel Cline
“I know,” said David.
And they sat in silence for quite a while, until Peter finally said, “Thank you for telling me. I’m going to turn on the radio now,” and they got off the phone.
By the time Annabeth got home that night, David was asleep. He was also asleep the next morning when she left the house, and so on through the weekend, and then, on Monday evening, Laura actually hired a masseuse to come and work on the cutting room staff, so it wasn’t until Annabeth was listening to Old Brown Show late Tuesday night that she realized her boyfriend had lost someone truly important to him. She was listening in the dark, so it was almost like being in the room with him—or so she tried to convince herself.
“There are a lot of different reasons why people write songs, write letters…try and tell their stories,” said David to his late-night listeners. “I think about this a lot because, well, maybe because I’m not much of a storyteller myself. I wish I was. Well, obviously, I’m talking to you now, and you don’t even know me. Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about Kurt Cobain because the stories he told meant something to me, a lot more than most pop songs do, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone on that one.
“You know, in some languages, the word history is the same as the word for story. It’s just what we tell ourselves about why things happened the way they did, no matter what the scale of those things is. Because it’s really the same thing, whether you’re trying to communicate with your father, or your girlfriend, or your coworker, or the guy sitting next to you on the plane. You want to be seen and understood as you really are, not as anyone expects you to be.”
Annabeth wondered whether she was the girlfriend in this sentence and, if so, what else she had failed to see and understand about David.
“Kurt’s songs are all about that, about not really knowing who you’re talking to, who the other person really is. The ‘you’ he’s singing to is always in play and, instead of that making his songs seem unfocused, I think it makes them more interesting. I’ll spare you my singing but there are tons of examples. And it’s the way he was able to turn that inside out that makes him a more important songwriter than, like, Billy Corgan or Thurston Moore. It probably won’t be obvious or come into focus for another dozen years, maybe longer, but the way he blurred the line between collective and individual is seminal. It’s like the essence of what’s wrong with my generation, with the country we live in, with everything now, really: We don’t know where the intimate ends and the public begins. You know what I mean? The boundaries just keep moving.”
Annabeth wasn’t sure whether David was saying Cobain’s songs were a symptom of this problem or a chronicle of it, but whatever he was saying, he sounded upset. He was talking loudly and very fast.
“I mean, for the sixties generation, it was like ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’ Everything was clear. Like with Dylan, at first his ‘you’ is so clearly the other. You, who philosophize disgrace; you masters of war; you, clueless Mister Jones…And I’m sure that’s why people felt so betrayed when he turned it around. You’ve got a lot of nerve, How does it feel? Suddenly, they were the problem.”
He paused. It was slightly longer than a radio pause is supposed to be, but when he resumed his voice was calmer.
“We’ve replaced all that sincerity with irony now. And Kurt’s the only one, for me, who really cuts through. Who tells the truth.”
Annabeth had never heard David speak at such length or so seriously, not even about events in his own life. She could tell he was really just struggling to turn an emotional loss into something intellectual, something he could wrap his head around, and this made her feel for him because it was a trick she knew all too well.
But she also felt jealous. Those tangled thoughts should have been hers to hear first, and he had laid them out for all of late-night Los Angeles, as though he had no one else to talk to. And all she could do was tell him that she had listened and—if he admitted that anything was the matter at all—that she wanted to be there for him in the future. It didn’t sound like nearly enough.
24
Laura was supposed to be spending her every waking hour in a suite at the Chateau Marmont with Ramona, working on the reshoots, but their relationship was no better than it had been before shooting started (and there was no longer the prospect of making a complete and perfect version of the movie in either of their heads to keep them amiable). One particularly listless morning she decided to drive over to the cutting room and check in on Annabeth and Peter, who were essentially getting paid to wait, which killed her. Because her contract was an over-scale lump sum, every extra week just came out of that figure, whereas members of the editors local got paid for every hour they worked.
“Let’s go get some sushi,” she said to them both when she got there, but Peter had a dentist’s appointment and had to decline.
“My car or yours?” said Annabeth.
“Here’s a really crazy idea,” said Laura. “Let’s walk.” It was only about a mile, after all, and the weather was mild enough. But once they were out and about among the silent little-box houses of Nebraska Avenue, walking seemed so very peculiar that they looked at each other and had to laugh.
“It’s like we’re the last people on earth,” Annabeth said.
“God, do you think there are gamma rays or something we don’t know about? Is it safe?” Without even thinking, Laura pronounced the last three words in Laurence Olivier’s Nazi accent from Marathon Man. Iz et seff?
“Yes, it’s safe, it’s very safe, it’s so safe it’s unbelievable!” Annabeth said back, which was the spirit if not the letter of Dustin Hoffman’s response.
“Thus far I find you rather repulsive; may I say that without hurting your feelings?” rejoined Laura, which was another line from the movie and made them laugh some more. Everything was funny, all of a sudden. Especially to Laura, who was stoned.
Once inside the tiny restaurant, Laura became almost immediately engrossed by the television mounted on the wall above them: a high-speed car chase was taking place in Asuza with a news helicopter along for the ride. “When did this become the news? Metal and concrete, cars chasing cars chasing cars…it’s so boring.”
“At least the sound is off,” said Annabeth, trying to get into Laura’s groove.
“They still need a cutaway.”
“Totally,” Annabeth agreed. “Insert on the perp’s face, point of view from the street, something.”
“Insert on uni,” said Laura, looking at her dish and giggling. The food looked like butterscotch custard to Annabeth, but she suspected it was something inedible. She had opted for the miso soup and was avoiding the slimy seaweed as best she could.
“Do you ever listen to that show on KROQ? The one with Dr. Drew?” she asked Laura. It was not such a long leap from the car chase to LoveLine—both belonged to the slow-motion-train-wreck class of entertainment.
“That show where some kid is always asking if he can get AIDS from fucking the family dog?”
Annabeth nodded. “I just remembered this caller I heard once, at the beginning of the movie. He sounded so familiar.”
For a moment, Laura looked startled. “Like someone on the movie?”
“I don’t think so. He had this affected way of talking, like he was too much of a gentleman to say ‘blow job’ but circumstances were forcing him to be indelicate.”
Laura shrugged and dispatched the rest of her sea urchin, her eyes wandering back toward the TV.
“So, like, he’d go out to buy a newspaper or something and wind up with a streetwalker underneath the 101, or he’d get the girl from the espresso place to go with him to Griffith Park on her break…He had a bunch of examples…” This story had somehow seemed like an amusing anecdote before she’d started talking, but now it just sounded gross and she didn’t know why she was telling it. She forged on anyway, hoping to bump into whatever had struck her as amusing at first. “Dr. Drew said it was an illness, li
ke alcoholism—and that it was usually as much about getting found out and punished as about the sex—and the guy said, ‘Yeah, tell that to the president.’” There’d been another headline about the Paula Jones thing earlier in the week. Maybe she’d seen something about that on the sushi bar TV without realizing it.
The chef placed Annabeth’s bamboo pallet of California rolls in front of her, then a large ceramic bowl of sashimi in front of Laura.
Laura looked down at her watch. It had been a gift from Greg—an apology. He couldn’t possibly have called LoveLine—he had some shame, after all. But he’d said the same thing about Clinton to her the other day, more or less.
“Goatish behavior,” she said to Annabeth, echoing Hugh Grant’s public apology for getting a blow job on Hollywood Boulevard, though she could see that the reference was lost on Little Miss Milkmaid from Minnesota. She didn’t know what she was talking about; she’d just blundered onto the subject the way she blundered into everything else: trial and error and an uncanny instinct for the location of other people’s buttons.
Looking at Laura’s profile in the contrasty afternoon light, Annabeth could see that she was irritated. Her bowl was still full of fish but she was making the silent scribbling gesture that meant Check, please.
“So, back to the coal mine?” she said to Annabeth.
Laura returned to the Chateau Marmont with a gathering sense of purpose that afternoon. She’d never thought of herself as much of a writer, but that was mainly because she sucked so badly at dialogue. While driving back across town it had come to her that the work they needed to do on Bunny’s character was not about speeches at all.
“This really isn’t working,” she told Ramona when she got back to the bungalow.
“What isn’t?”
“This,” said Laura, gesturing haphazardly at the space between them. “You and me writing together. Don’t you agree?”
“It’s funny you should say that because I finally did something good today, while you were gone. I was just about to print it out,” said Ramona, turning back to the computer and placing her hand on the mouse.
“You’re just too close to it all, is the thing,” Laura went on, having prepared her remarks in advance. “I’m not talking about the screen credit or anything, but I just—I want to do the rest of this by myself.”
Ramona stopped mousing. She tried to keep herself from saying what came to her lips, but quickly gave up. “How did you get to be such a cunt?”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Who the fuck do you think you are?”
“There’s no reason to go crazy,” said Laura.
“I’m not crazy, I’m angry. There’s a difference. And I have every right to be angry because you’re standing there screwing me.” With deliberate gestures, Ramona dragged a folder across the screen and trashed it, making sure to also empty the trash. “So fuck you!” she said and, stopping long enough to grab her shoulder bag and sunglasses, she walked past Laura and out the door.
Laura could see that Ramona had done something on the computer and she had a feeling she knew what that something was, but she really, truly didn’t care. The work they’d done together was crap. She had a different idea about Bunny now, and it was finally crystal clear in her mind: Bunny was funny and sad at the same time, like Giulietta Masina dancing her crazy mambo in Nights of Cabiria, like Lisa Eichhorn getting her vodka bottle back from Jeff Bridges in Cutter’s Way, like Annabeth getting all weepy over the ridiculous sculptures at the La Brea Tar Pits. Bunny was Annabeth.
“No great loss there,” said Simpson the next day when Laura told him about her schism with Ramona. “Too bad it doesn’t save us any money.”
“If you want to save money, why don’t you just get rid of Annabeth?”
“Really?”
They were sitting at a table within spitting distance of the giant copper vat of beer at the restaurant across from the cutting room. Laura had invited Simpson “to talk about Bunny,” but she didn’t really want his advice; she just wanted him to think she did.
“I think Peter can cut in the reshoots, with my help. He’s a smart kid. Besides, it’s going to be really simple. I just want to fill in some of Bunny’s childhood.”
Simpson nodded and focused on preparing a very complete bite of all the foods on his plate—a little bit of grilled fish, some watercress, a touch of garlic aioli. “I don’t think a few weeks of Annabeth’s salary is going to stretch fifty grand into a budget for period cars and wardrobe. Do you?”
“No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just going to shoot everything super-tight, as though the frame itself is the limitation of memory. Do you know what I mean? So we won’t have to dress extras or anything but it will also be really interesting visually. I mean, enough already with the flashed-film-stock, bleach-bypass look. Wouldn’t it be cool to do something new?”
While Simpson finished his meal with great precision, Laura explained her ideas in general terms, suggesting the sorts of locations she pictured using and the scenes she planned to shoot.
Simpson liked the new concept immensely. It was not only smart and stylish but would be cheap. The suggestion about firing Annabeth came back to him only the next morning, while he was reviewing the latest cost summaries.
25
Annabeth next crossed paths with Simpson in the parking lot as she was arriving for work. There was still nothing for her to do in the cutting room, but Laura had been writing furiously and Annabeth was hoping she would ask her to read the new scenes as soon as they were ready, so she kept showing up, being patient, batting away doubts like flies.
“Hey!” Simpson called out to her, waving cheerily and beckoning. She went toward him, of course. “Laura tells me you’re leaving us,” he said. “Please don’t tell me you’re doing Sharon Fried’s picture at Propaganda!”
“Uh, no,” said Annabeth as all of the blood in her body seemed to succumb to gravity. “It’s personal,” she added, which seemed undeniably true as soon as the words escaped her mouth. It had to be personal. Laura said she was leaving?
“Oh,” said Simpson. “I’m sorry.” He looked truly abashed, as though he assumed “personal” meant death in the family or hospitalization for drug abuse.
“It’s okay,” she said. And then she looked at her watch and said she had to go. Stunned, she went back to her car and sat inside it to collect her thoughts. What would she tell people? In a normal workplace, you could blame the boss, or the boss’s cretinous son, or bean counters and number crunchers—a rare instance of a phrase she could recall hearing in her father’s voice. But the only two authority figures in Annabeth’s work life were Laura and Simpson, and she couldn’t afford to bad-mouth either one of them. Moreover, she didn’t want to.
She spent twenty minutes in the car imagining every bad thing Laura might say about her: she was lazy, she was deceptive, her behavior with Simpson was presumptuous, her sense of story was juvenile, her inability to give any consistent style or “edge” to the picture, inexcusable. But in the back of her mind Annabeth knew that she had washed up on a familiar shore and it had nothing to do with any of these potential criticisms. She put her fingers on the ignition key but didn’t turn it. Instead, she left the car, stopped at the ladies’ room to wash her face, and then forced herself back through the carpeted, fluorescent hallways to the cutting room, her cutting room. There, as she had half-expected, she found Laura already seated at the Avid, hard at work. She was watching Bunny enter the party with the Chinese lanterns, the scene now complete with background wallah and jazzy underscore. Annabeth knew that Laura was aware of her presence as soon as the light from the open door fell across the screen, but she waited until the exchange of dialogue between Bunny and Jude was over to stop the playback. Bunny no longer said, “All I want is a chance.”
“Look,” Laura said, as she swiveled her chair, “it’s about money. We let you go, and I can hire a crane for the reshoots. You know, you cost a lot with hea
lth and welfare. And I can really cut the rest myself…”
Annabeth nodded. She had not expected the money angle, but it told her that whatever else was going on, her departure was a done deal, irretrievable. “I’ll leave things in good order,” she mumbled, wishing fervently that Laura would feel sorry for her and relent. “You could keep me on and not pay me, you know,” she said, her voice cracking.
Laura had been sitting with her legs splayed out straight from her chair, looking at her feet, but now she pulled them under her and picked up her head to look at Annabeth. “You know that would never work. You resent being my employee so much it’s like there’s a force field around you sometimes. The thing is, you are my employee, or you were. Anyway, I’m just tired of it.”
Annabeth was stunned. Suddenly, she felt very uncomfortable standing in the doorway but, looking around, saw nowhere else to go. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “I can’t believe you would do this to me.”
“You’ll get over it,” said Laura. Her hands were shaking but her voice was calm.
26
The only person, besides David, who Annabeth told about losing her job was her old friend Denise. “I’m cursed,” she said.
“Where’s the curse? You’ll still get the credit, won’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Annabeth, you have a union.” Denise was always practical, which was a large part of why Annabeth felt it was safe to tell her about what had happened, but even though she could have anticipated most of what her old friend would say to her, she found it frustrating to get solutions instead of sympathy.
“Yeah, but she’s going to blackball me.”
“I thought you said it was about money. Did you actually do something wrong?”
It was a sincere question, asked without accusation, but Annabeth was amazed to hear it come out of her friend’s mouth. She was speechless.