My Liar

by Rachel Cline

  “There isn’t a starlet or a von Stroheim anywhere in the picture, and it takes place smack in the middle of the studio system’s golden age.”

  Her listeners nodded thoughtfully, trying unsuccessfully to recollect an exception.

  “Instead, it’s all about water. And, like, water at the most elemental level: desert or torrent. It makes the movie business look so insignificant. Like, ‘O look upon my works, ye moguls, and despair!’”

  The young men—screenwriters and/or actors, Annabeth figured—smirked, shaking their heads. “We love Chinatown because we’re self-loathing? Is that what you’re telling me?” said one of them.

  “Well, it’s certainly a movie about America’s love-hate relationship with wealth. I mean, Gittes is seduced by Mrs. Mulwray’s class, right? She comes from the world of private clubs and goldfish ponds and then it turns out she’s completely and utterly tainted. That’s just the immigrant-outsider experience any way you look at it,” said Laura. “Setting it in the movie business would have just been too on the nose.”

  Annabeth remembered watching as the young men drank their beers, smoked their cigarettes, or flicked their fingers in the pool. Did they recognize the extent to which they were all now standing in the same corrupted desert as Gittes, and Towne, and the malevolent Mulwrays? In any case, Laura had shut them up. Then Laura had smiled at Annabeth and shrugged. Nothing to it, she seemed to say, just a party trick. Stick around and I’ll show you another. And Annabeth had. That had been the moment when she decided that Laura would be the one to move her life along to its next stage. And she’d believed that the look they had traded then had been mutual and well understood.

  Passing the seven-story face of Kim Basinger on a billboard at the intersection of Pico and Crescent Heights, Annabeth was reminded of the day, sometime before the Oscars, when Laura had closed the cutting room door behind her and, in a state of breathless enthusiasm, announced that she had just had lunch with the guy she called her liar.

  Laura had not only asked Annabeth to lie to Simpson about her lunch date that day, she’d told her about the conversation she’d witnessed between Golden and an A-list director they’d run into at the restaurant—“the sockless wonder,” she called him. The two men had begun talking about the outrageous demands and pathetic antics of an actress they had both recently worked with, referring to her, consistently, as “the cunt,” and Laura had mimicked them, seeming to enjoy herself immensely, relishing their easy contempt for the beautiful woman. Annabeth could remember sitting there at the Avid, knowing she was supposed to be enjoying this piece of gossip but instead feeling soiled by it. It was not that she was shocked by the word itself. It was Laura’s ready adoption of it that surprised her, and the way she had taken it up against this other woman she obviously didn’t even know on the say-so of these guys, who she did know but didn’t seem to particularly respect. Annabeth had been so desperately attuned to her new boss, she hadn’t had the nerve to say, “Enough,” or even to frown or feign disinterest. And ever since then, in her own mind, she found that she could no longer think of the actress as anything other than “the cunt,” a name she would not have called her worst enemy.

  A Los Angeles County sheriff’s car traveling in front of her made her think of the drive back from Manzanar. “My father disappeared when I was twelve,” Annabeth had announced that day, as they passed the sign announcing their return to Los Angeles County. They were words she had never before said out loud, and she half-expected to be struck dead for saying them.

  “I didn’t know that,” Laura replied. Her eyes never left the road, but Annabeth kept on talking.

  “It wasn’t the first time. I never knew what made him go. I never heard him complain or even saw him get angry, actually. Sometimes my mother yelled at him, but he would just sit there and take it.

  “The only time I remember vividly was in the car. It was winter—really cold, even in the car, and snow everywhere. I was in the back seat—my brother wasn’t there for some reason. Anyway, Mom was giving Dad hell. About the bills that she’d been unable to pay when he was gone, and the lies she’d had to make up to cover for him at church and with her friends…She was yelling so hard that there was spit falling on the arm of her winter coat. I wanted to hide in the footwell—curl up like an armadillo behind my father’s seat—but I didn’t fit. Anyway, he stopped the car in the middle of nowhere. Just pulled over to the side. Then he got out and started walking. Maybe he was even running—I feel like I can see that, him running away in the snow in his Sunday suit. We were outside of town somewhere. Going to a wedding or a funeral? I can’t remember. He didn’t say anything; he just went.”

  “What happened?” asked Laura.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did he come back? Did your mother slide over and start driving? Did you go on to the wedding or whatever without him?”

  “I don’t know,” said Annabeth, shaking her head. “That’s the whole memory: him walking away, my mother’s spittle, me freezing my ass off in the back seat because he left the door open.”

  “You never knew where he went?”

  Annabeth shook her head. “When he came back, we never asked. It seemed too risky. ‘Don’t buy into it,’ my mother used to say. ‘A mystery is just a secret no one is in on.’ That always sounded so smart to me, but when you think about it, it doesn’t really mean anything, does it?”

  “Yeah, but you remember it,” said Laura.

  When Annabeth finally got home from her trip to Koreatown, she found David sitting on the couch, reading one of her old textbooks from film school. She’d taken them out as a way of asking herself if she was going to keep cutting or pack it in, but leaving them on the living room floor was as far as she’d gotten.

  “Look,” he said as she walked in, “is that the machine from your dream?” He turned the book toward her and pointed at a photograph of an editor operating an upright Moviola, circa 1949. It was a picture that had made a big impression on Annabeth the first time she’d seen it because the editor in the picture was wearing heels and a smart suit. She’d made moving to Los Angeles seem plausible, at one time in Annabeth’s life. She had never looked all that closely at the machine in the picture because it was the same as the ones at school. But, sitting down beside David to gaze at it now, she saw that he was right. It was the machine in her nightmares.

  “I haven’t had that dream since I left the movie,” she said. The words “got fired” still stuck in her throat.

  “But that’s really it?”

  Annabeth nodded. He hugged her, he was so pleased with himself, but she broke the embrace.

  “It still doesn’t really explain anything if I don’t know what the elephant is. The elephant in the room?” She tried again, free-associating: “A woolly mammoth? Mastodon? The McGuffin?”

  “What is that, exactly, the McGuffin?”

  “It’s Hitchcock’s term,” she told him. “It’s what he called the thing that everyone’s after: the microfilm, the Maltese falcon, the intercostal clavicle…the point is, it doesn’t matter what it actually is, it’s a red herring.”

  “Does that explain your dream then?”

  “How?”

  “Well, the elephant in the room and the McGuffin are sort of the same thing then. The thing you can’t identify too closely, that you agree to accept and ignore. So if your machine is an editing machine, it seems like the elephant is, like, the script, or the story, or the film itself.”

  “So why’s it bleeding?”

  “I don’t know. Because you’re afraid you’re hurting it?”

  She had a tremendous urge to hit him but restrained herself. She could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t sure whether what he’d just said even made any sense.

  29

  David and Annabeth held hands during the first half hour of Trouble Doll, which they went to see on opening day at the Laemmle Grand, downtown, one of two places in the city that it was playing. As Laura had feared,
Halo was more or less dumping the film because its people had no idea how to market it. But they were still giving it a few weeks at the art theaters in New York and L.A. to see if it could build some word of mouth.

  Settling in before the film started, Annabeth looked carefully and furtively at the other patrons—there were only a half dozen or so. What else did she expect at two P.M. on a Friday? Still, she found herself bristling. She would have come out to see this movie in the first week, even if she hadn’t worked on it. David stroked her arm. “It’s always like this here,” he whispered. She nodded, focused on the screen as the theater was darkening, and then, seeing (of course!) that there would first be trailers, she turned to look quizzically at her boyfriend. He kept his eyes on the screen but felt her inquiry. “I used to come here sometimes,” he whispered, “when you were at work.”

  The first trailer advertised a French film—the actors all looked familiar, but Annabeth couldn’t name them. She pictured David sitting there alone, and wondered what else she didn’t know about his life during the months when she’d thought about nothing but Trouble Doll. Then, a few rows behind them, an older woman asked her companion, “Have you ever been to the Dordogne?” in a loud voice. Annabeth’s head whipped around to glare at the woman. People who talked in movies were intolerable to her.

  When the second trailer started up, she was fascinated to see Gary Oldman portraying Ludwig van Beethoven. The narration explained that Ludwig van had enjoyed a secret love the world has never known.

  “Strudel!” whispered Annabeth.

  “I think it was kreplach,” countered David. The women behind them hushed them aggressively and in unison, and Annabeth would have apologized but she heard the sad mandolin music that opened Trouble Doll and her mouth went dry.

  The main titles were still played over Bunny, walking alone on the highway at night. Annabeth had cut it early in the schedule but had never seen the credits placed. Her own card appeared superimposed on the purplish blue of the evening sky; Laura’s directing credit appeared against the shimmering lamé of the stripper’s torso, the image that began the first scene.

  For the rest of reel 1, Annabeth found herself unable to stay with the story. She kept feeling the need to concoct a defense for why Laura might have undone her work on the following scene, or the next, or the next. (She’d been premenstrual when she was working on that one; Laura had never liked that angle; the music cue just didn’t fit the best take; and on and on.) But as the film unspooled, Annabeth’s work continued to play out unaltered. The first thirty minutes was, cut for cut, exactly as she had left it.

  Gradually and cautiously, she began to feel proud of her work: that was a nice elision there; good pacing in the driving sequence; elegant transition from Bunny’s hands at the end of the fight scene to the money on the table in the next shot…She had forgotten all about the prospect of the reshoots by time the first new scene made its appearance. It was a flashback in which a tow-headed child, obviously meant to be Bunny, sat in the back seat of a car as a snowy road unwound behind her. There was no voice-over, just a gradual sharpening of muffled dialogue from the front seat—a child’s perception of a burgeoning argument between parents. The shot stayed tight on the little girl’s face.

  Annabeth was relieved that Laura had had the good taste to keep it there, on the girl, and not track off into the vagaries of the parental squabble. The only other shot in the sequence—if fifteen seconds of film could be called that—was a quick reverse from the girl’s viewpoint as the car’s driver, the dad, walked off into the snow, leaving his door open. The sound of the wind made it clear that it was extremely cold outside, and this detail jarred Annabeth into recognizing what she had resisted up till then: this moment in Bunny’s fictional past was taken from Annabeth’s real one.

  This scene in the snow was the first of Laura’s larcenies, but not the last. Other shreds of Annabeth’s past were soon projected, elaborated, distorted, dramatized: the rolled-up mattress in the basement, the embarrassed yank of her mother’s hand to avoid crossing the path of a creditor, the sighting of a man in a downtown alley who seemed at first to be her father but was only an old wino. Laura had assigned Annabeth’s memories to a character who grew up to be a runaway, a stripper, and ultimately an anonymous corpse.

  As the end titles began to roll, David could tell from Annabeth’s posture that something was wrong. Ordinarily, she would sit quietly until she saw the Panavision logo, but now she seemed ready to leave before the crawl of actors’ names had even finished.

  “‘A film by Laura Katz,’” he whispered derisively. “I mean, who’s it supposed to fool—her mother?” Of course, Annabeth had been the one who’d taught him to recognize the possessory credit as problematic in the first place, but now she found his comment embarassingly naïve. The credit was so beside the point.

  30

  Annabeth didn’t remember the walk from the theater back to the car, and she didn’t remember what words she had used to explain what she had just seen to David. They drove west on Sunset in silence, past Les Frères Taix and the Bright Spot, the Tropical bakery and Millie’s, all places Annabeth used to meet her friends when she was new in town and everyone lived in Echo Park or Silver Lake—places so down-market that Laura had probably never set foot in any of them.

  “You never told me any of those stories,” said David.

  Although she knew which stories he meant and he was right, You’re right seemed like the wrong answer. “I must have told you some of them,” she said. “Maybe you just weren’t listening.”

  David was silent, but she could tell she had made him angry. He listened to everything she told him, and she knew that. He seemed to remember everything she told him, too. She looked out the window at a corner hamburger stand clad in greenish-gold glazed bricks. Their color grabbed the afternoon light and reflected it back in a weirdly brilliant flash. Even Tommy’s Burgers is braver than I am, she thought.

  “I didn’t tell her those things because I trusted her, or loved her, or whatever it is that makes you think it really matters.”

  “Explain that to me?”

  But she couldn’t, really. “Well, I never told her about my dreams,” she said, meaning the nightmares about the elephant. David misunderstood, thinking she meant her dreams of becoming Dede Allen or whatever—her movie-business dreams, which to him seemed highly impersonal, not to mention irrelevant.

  “I told her that stuff because I wanted her to feel sorry for me,” Annabeth said finally.

  “Didn’t work, did it?” David regretted the cruelty of this remark only slightly as he turned onto Highland Avenue.

  “Where are you going?” asked Annabeth, but she knew.

  Greg answered the door. He didn’t look at her with any particular curiosity or emotion. “She’s upstairs getting ready,” he said, after raising his eyebrows to acknowledge the unlikelihood of the visit. Of course there was going to be a party, Annabeth realized, amazed that it had not occurred to her earlier. A party to celebrate the movie, to which she had somehow not been invited. She followed Greg inside and sat down on the gray-green couch. It faced a canyon view, and the golden light was tracing the ridges and rooftops as it receded. She had left David in the car, but now she wished he had come with her.

  Laura entered the room wearing her bathrobe and with her face only partly made up, but she seemed both pleased and concerned to see Annabeth. Annabeth saw the Did somebody die? look on her face and found herself wanting to reassure, to make okay everything that wasn’t. “Can you sit down?” she said.

  Laura perched herself on the arm of a chair beside the sofa, modestly rewrapping her robe but keeping her eyes on Annabeth. “I would have invited you tonight, I just…” She trailed off, then changed her tack: “Simpson’s been asking for you.”

  “I don’t care about the party,” Annabeth began. “I just came from the movie and I saw what you did. It fucking sucks, Laura.” This speech had sounded fine in her head in the car—legiti
mately and justifiably outraged.

  “What does?” Laura seemed genuinely uncertain.

  “You stole my life.”

  Laura thought for a second, then nodded. “The reshoots, yeah, well, not really, but I guess I know what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m not ‘thinking,’ I know it. It’s the case.”

  Laura pursed her lips, looking speculatively at Annabeth.

  “That scene in the snow? I’ve never told anyone about that before—not even David.”

  “Lots of families have fights in cars, Annabeth.”

  “Not like that one.”

  “No one could possibly think that but you.”

  “My mother will.”

  Laura scowled. “I hate to slag my own work, but this movie will be lucky to get to Wherever-the-hell-it-is, Minnesota, on video. Your mother is never going to see it.”

  “But my father might…and my brother.”

  “Look, Annabeth, I’m sorry you’re upset, but I need to get dressed. Can we talk about this later?”

  “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying, Laura. I’m calling you a thief.”

  Laura stood up to go, hesitating only slightly at the vehemence of Annabeth’s last remark. “Call me anything you want,” she said after a moment. “I didn’t see you doing anything with that stuff, I mean, besides trying to get me to think you were pitiful somehow—”

  “What do you mean, ‘doing anything with it’?”

  “—which I don’t and never will.”

  “It’s my life—I don’t have to do anything with it!”

  Laura waited a beat, hoping Annabeth would hear what she’d just said. But Annabeth just sat there, teetering on the verge of tears. “Look, here’s the thing. You’re not an artist,” Laura told her, “you’re a craftsperson—a very talented craftsperson. But it’s not the same thing. This is what artists do.”