The Biograph Girl

by William J. Mann

  Sure, he got what the festival organizers had promised: a seat in some planning sessions, perfunctory introductions to a handful of movers and shakers. He watched some pros at work: John Sayles making Eight Men Out, Wes Craven cutting The Serpent and the Rainbow. Then George Lucas’s people had expressed possible interest in backing a full-length feature of One Chance, One World. There were a couple of heady meetings back and forth for a few days; this was when Xerxes signed Ben on as a client. “You’re gonna be famous, kid,” Xerxes promised him, and that was exactly what he wrote back home to Mom. Maybe, finally, Mom might acknowledge his potential the way she always had Richard’s. He was going to be the kind of filmmaker he’d dreamed of becoming ever since he was a kid and would lie awake at night, annoying the shit out of Richard, reading interviews in Cineaste with Lindsay Anderson and Martin Scorsese.

  But then, suddenly, the world shifted on its axis. The Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union went belly up. Lucas stopped returning Xerxes’s calls. No one was interested in a picture on an arms race that wasn’t racing anymore.

  Ben has tried to come up with other ideas ever since. He and Anita got together after he’d placed an ad looking for an actress to play Queen Elizabeth I in a comic short he was sure would win all sorts of accolades. After auditioning her, he didn’t think she was a very good actress—an opinion that’s never wavered for him—but he was entranced by her bouncy walk, her incandescent smile, and her perky little tits. He’d always been a sucker for a pretty girl. Too many times he’d gotten distracted from his work by his latest love: a bankteller with green eyes, a Brazilian dancer, a waitress with a beauty mark like Cindy Crawford’s, the barely legal intern at the ad agency. As many might have predicted, and many certainly did, the film on Queen Elizabeth only got as far as ordering the ruffles for the gowns. Ben blamed it on script problems with a collaborator, but in truth, he had lost the passion for the project—his perennial dilemma—and found it instead with Anita in bed.

  “Ah, so I got something out of it anyway,” Ben murmurs to himself.

  “What’s that?” Rex asks.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  They’re riding the subway up to Xerxes’s office on the Upper West Side. Rex goes back to reading Entertainment Weekly. Ben studies his hands and reassures himself that this time he’s hit solid gold. This time there would be no wasted months planning outlines he’d later crumple up and toss into the trash, no footage shot that he’d later scrap. “You need something more personal, more original,” Xerxes has told him year after year. “Something like you did with One Chance.”

  In that, he’d focused on a family: the father a raving hawk, the mother a bleeding-heart lib who gets caught up in the peace movement. The arms race is seen through their eyes, Reagan and Andropov and Dr. Helen Caldicott are heard through their ears. When—in the film’s last five minutes—Ben created a montage of nuclear war, viewers saw the end of the world through the eyes of this family they’d come to identify with.

  “Something like that,” Xerxes had urged. “This is the era of People magazine, of Hard Copy. Give me a person. Make this real.”

  Real. What the fuck did that mean? Oh, Ben imagines they’d all claim Richard’s screenplay had been “real.” Richard had written a screenplay a couple years ago about the AIDS epidemic based on a friend of his who had died, who’d suffered a lot and wasted down to nothing. He offered it to Ben. “Whaddya think, Ben? Think the Sheehan boys can work together?”

  “AIDS is too big for me to tackle,” Ben had said after reading Richard’s script. “I’m not the director for it.”

  Richard had looked hurt. “You mean you don’t like it?”

  “It’s just not for me,” Ben had insisted.

  And it wasn’t, Ben thinks again now, as the subway lurches and screeches and the lights momentarily go out. He and Rex have never discussed Richard’s screenplay. Too touchy, Ben thinks. Rex is HIV-positive, and Richard had written it during a time when Rex had been pretty sick. As therapy, Ben assumes.

  But, hey, he thinks, I can’t be expected to be my brother’s therapist. I just didn’t like the script.

  He’s sitting across from an old Chinese woman, who, when the lights come back on, is staring at him. Ben averts his eyes.

  It wasn’t for me, he thinks again. It just wasn’t.

  “I don’t like diseases,” he told Anita after he’d turned Richard down.

  “I know,” she answered, taking his hand.

  His father had died of cancer, wasting away in front of all of them in that little house on the dead-end street in Chicopee. Mom had been no help at all—retreating into herself and her boxes of Hostess Cupcakes and Devil Dogs. Richard had railed against the injustice of it all, demanding that the doctors do more—but it had been Ben who had cleaned the bedpan and wiped his father’s mouth when he couldn’t keep his food down anymore. It had been Ben who’d been with him when he died.

  I don’t like diseases.

  And damn Richard for thinking he could make it in Ben’s world. Movies were his territory; did Ben try to write for Vanity Fair?

  Okay, so maybe Richard’s screenplay wasn’t bad. It was … okay. It did have a lot going for it, and when Ben admits that to himself, he feels a little guilty about turning his brother down. Maybe we could have done something together. Maybe even gotten past some of the shit that’s been between us for so long.…

  “Give me something personal,” Xerxes had insisted.

  The old Chinese woman is still staring at him.

  “Okay,” Ben says. “Just hear me out.”

  Xerxes Stavropoulous is leaning back in his chair, his feet up on his desk, his hands laced behind his curly black-haired head. Ben is standing in front of the desk like a stand-up comic trying out a new bit. Rex is sitting straight-backed in a chair against the wall, legs crossed, hands folded in his lap.

  “I’m listening,” Xerxes says.

  “Marge Schott,” Ben tells him.

  “Marge who?”

  “Marge Schott. The owner of the Cincinnati Reds. The one who made all those racist remarks and acts like a man.”

  He can’t see Rex’s reaction. He doesn’t want to turn around to find out.

  Xerxes leans forward, placing his hands in front of him on the glass top of his desk. “I know who Marge Schott is,” he says.

  “So I was thinking of doing kind of an up-close-and-personal look at her—maybe she’d even talk to me. You know, make her real. Show how racism affects baseball. You know, a whole look inside the culture of sports.”

  Xerxes is silent. Ben turns around to Rex, who just gives him a wan smile.

  “Well, what do you guys think?”

  “Well, I don’t know, Ben,” Xerxes says, stroking his short-cropped goatee. “I mean, isn’t she kind of old news?”

  “No, no. Well, sure, she hasn’t made any headlines lately, but she’s still the owner, and apparently she was never really sorry for what she said.”

  “She does look like a man,” Rex says. “Is she a dyke?”

  “I don’t think so,” Ben says, gesturing at him as if he’s just made a pertinent point. “But that could be part of it. Why we’d even think such a thing. A whole exploration of gender and what we expect women and men to be. She swears and makes racist comments like any male owner.”

  Xerxes is quiet. He leans back in his chair, pulls out a box of cigars. He opens the lid, offers one to Ben, who shakes his head. “You mind?” he asks Rex.

  “Actually, yes,” Rex says, crossing his legs and placing his hands over his upturned knee. “Secondhand smoke, you know.”

  Xerxes sighs, says nothing, just puts the cigars away. “Benny Boy,” he says at last. “You’re still pulling out these die-hard liberal ideas, aren’t you? You’re a hippie out of his time.”

  He isn’t really. Back in film school, he’d been a passionate leftie, but now he just wants to find something that will work. And what was wrong with that?

  “I belie
ve in the film’s premise,” Ben tells him.

  “If you believe in it, then do it.” Xerxes reaches over instinctively for a cigar to punctuate his pronouncement, but seems to remember Rex’s objection and stops himself. “Do it, show me the finished product, and we’ll see what we can do then.”

  “You don’t think you can help me get any financing—”

  “Look, Ben. I’m here to help you sell a finished product—”

  “No, you’re here to help me get my career going again.”

  Those were Anita’s words. After all, she’d said, speaking from experience, what good was an agent who didn’t push you? Who didn’t believe in you?

  Xerxes stands up. He fumbles for a pink hard candy in a dish on his desk. He unwraps it, pops it into his mouth. “I’m sorry if the Schott idea doesn’t get me hard. Maybe I’m being shortsighted. But I just can’t see anybody I know coming up with cash for it.”

  He comes around to the front of his desk. He leans against it, crossing his arms over his chest and looking at Ben. “Benny, let’s face it. You’ve been flitting from one idea to the next for more than a year. You’ve got to pick an idea, stick with it, and do it.”

  “I’ve done that, and nothing I’ve done has gotten you hard.”

  “Keep trying.”

  “But I can’t do something of quality without money.”

  Xerxes moves closer to him. Ben can smell the watermelon candy in his mouth. “The money will come when the idea comes from here.” He taps Ben’s chest.

  He thinks this is the same old pattern, Ben realizes. He thinks this idea will evaporate, too. That I’ll forget about it in a few months. But I won’t. This time it’s the real thing.

  Then why hasn’t he even told Anita about it? “Oh, Ben, let’s just go to L.A.,” she’d said just last night. “It’ll be easier there.”

  You’re holding her back, you know. It’s Mom’s voice. Or Richard’s. Anita should be in L.A., where maybe she could make it on television or in the movies. The only reason she stays in New York is because of Ben.

  He’s well aware of her sacrifice. But he was also convinced that Anita’s talent was minuscule. So we should move to L.A. so she can get walk-ons on The Nanny?

  Anita knew the score. Moving to Hollywood guaranteed nothing. She’d been there before, given it her best shot. She was born up near Buffalo, but at age ten her divorced mother had taken her out to Hollywood, scandalizing their conservative Catholic relatives. Mrs. Murawski was determined her pretty little girl would make them both rich. Anita acted in a slew of commercials in the early 80s, most of which she still has on videotape: Prell shampoo, Burger King, Children’s Tylenol. At eleven, she was one of the original Toys “ Я ” Us kids. At thirteen, she did a walk-on on The Cosby Show. At fourteen, she won her biggest part ever: a murdered teenaged streetwalker on Miami Vice.

  She’d come back to New York only temporarily. Her father lived in Brooklyn. He had gotten sick—cancer, just like Ben’s dad—and she wanted to be nearby in his last months. She did some acting off-off-Broadway, and answered Ben’s ad for his abortive Elizabethan comedy. Their fathers’ cancer had been a bond, although neither talked about it much. They moved in together. When her father finally died, Ben accompanied Anita to the funeral. He met all her clan. “When do you plan on getting married?” her mother’s prune-faced aunt Trinka had asked. “We don’t,” Ben had answered honestly. Only later did he think maybe Anita had thought otherwise.

  He expected she’d leave then, return with her mother to the west coast. But Mrs. Murawski was tired of the studio game; she told Anita she was on her own. Anita kept making vague plans to return, but she never left. It’s been more than seven years now.

  They’ve settled into a kind of mindless routine that neither talks much about, not even when Ben’s old roving eye starts up again and Anita discovers lipstick on his collar. She bore his indiscretion nobly, as if she were playing in a television movie, saying only, as she scrubbed the collar with Wisk, “Did you have to be so cliched?”

  Ben will tell friends that, sure, they’d have it easier if they moved to L.A. “But who wants to live there?” he quickly adds. “What is L.A. anyway but smog, imported palm trees, and ex-East Coasters missing the snow at Christmastime?” Richard just griped that his brother was simply too scared to try.

  Last week, Anita had dragged Ben to the Unitarian-Universalist church. A lot of actors and artsy folk go there on Sunday mornings, finding the Unitarians’ free-and-easy approach to spirituality a refreshing change from the rigid religions of their childhood. No Jesus stuff or heavy incense or talk of sin, the kind of church Ben remembered all too well from back in Chicopee.

  This day, the minister’s words spoke to Ben in a way he hadn’t expected. She told the parable of the Sufi trickster, Nasrudin, who was riding the train to the city. He’d lost his connecting ticket, and he’d become frantic, looking everywhere for it: under the seat cushions, in the seat pocket in front of him, in the aisle. Finally he leaned over to the man seated in front of him. “Sir,” he asked, “have you seen a ticket up there? I may have dropped it. I have looked everywhere.”

  The man in front of him told him that there was no ticket there. “But,” he asked, “have you looked in the front pocket of your jacket? People often place their tickets there—and never think to look in the most obvious place!”

  Nasrudin merely scowled. “My good sir, don’t you think I know that? But, sir, if I do look in my front pocket and the ticket isn’t there, then I will have lost all hope.”

  But Ben won’t give up hope this time, not even after he realizes that Xerxes has given him the brush-off. Again. He’d just have to find some way of raising the dough on his own.

  Like holding up this goddamn gay cafe at gunpoint.

  “Well, you were right,” Rex says, looking at his watch. “They’re late.”

  “Buffalo’s a long way away,” Ben says grumpily.

  They both sip their lattes in silence for a few minutes. Rex still hasn’t said anything about the Marge Schott idea since they left Xerxes’s office. He’s reading H/X, a gay newspaper with lots of pictures of buffed-up men without shirts, and Ben wonders if he’s trying to avoid talking about it. The cafe is very bright—Ben prefers his coffeehouses, like his coffee, dark—and it’s filled with shaved-headed muscle boys. There’s only one woman in the entire room, a Gen-Xer with short green hair and eyebrow rings. Ben assumes she’s a lesbian. He can’t wait for Anita to get there.

  “I’m thinking of calling it Hard Ball,” Ben says, referring to his film idea.

  Rex laughs. “I think I made a picture by that name back in my porno days.”

  “You can’t copyright titles.” He’s determined to get Rex’s approval. “I want to intercut it with actual footage of Schott with actors as ballplayers and fans. They can react to what she says. That way I can get a dialogue about racism and gender and the sports culture going.” Rex’s eyes betray no reaction one way or another. “You see? It can be personal. It can be real.”

  Ben pushes away at the doubt that nags at him like a pesty fly. This is timely, this is relevant, he tells himself. This is sexy. This will get me noticed.

  You’re just lucky you got a brother like Richard, Benjamin.

  Mom again.

  Richard’s got a good head on his shoulders. You listen to him.

  “So whaddya think, Rex? What do you think Richard will—”

  But it’s too late. He sees Rex’s eyes move toward the door and the smile that spreads across his face. “Here they are,” he says, waving to catch the attention of Anita and Richard.

  Richard. He’s here. No more holding it back from him. Ben would know soon enough what his brother thought of his idea.

  Why should that matter so? What was it about his goddamn twin brother? Ben might resent Richard, but he also crazily wanted his approval. Back in high school, Ben would secretly glow if Richard, who always got the better grades, said something—anything—about
one of Ben’s oral reports. “That was interesting,” Richard once said after Ben had made a presentation on auto racing. He’d beamed all day.

  When Richard, who had more friends, would occasionally invite Ben along on some outing, it always made Ben feel good. Not that he often went—he had his paper route every afternoon or else he just preferred to hang back and not try to keep up with the banter among Richard’s groupies—but he was always so grateful to be asked. It made him angry—furious—when he’d think about it later on, how much he craved Richard’s approval, how thankful he was for scraps.

  Richard was a goddamn golden boy. There’s no explaining golden boys; they just appear, and they go through life with the world at their feet. Richard had a steady string of pretty girlfriends—Ben had none—even if he later claimed to have known all along that he was gay. He was voted Most Handsome in their senior class—a slap at Ben if there ever was one, given that they were identical twins.

  There’s always been this dividing line between them, as real as the line of chalk Richard had drawn down the center of their bedroom one day when they were ten. “That’s your side of the room, and this is mine,” he’d announced. Ben had just shrugged and called him an asshole. Today he thinks it a might fine idea indeed. You stay on your side, and I’ll stay on mine.

  Ben watches his brother make his way through the crush of muscle boys. They all seem to know him, call out his name. He waves, blows a few kisses.

  Anita’s behind him. “Do we have a story for you!” she sings.

  “You’re late,” Ben says, giving her a quick kiss. She sits down next to him.

  Richard follows, sliding in next to Rex and nuzzling him behind the ear. “It’s good to be back, Nooker,” he says. Ben makes a face: Nooker is what Richard calls Rex, and they won’t ever reveal what it means. “What a drive all the way back from Buffalo.”

  “So how was Uncle Stan?” Rex asks.

  Anita looks over at him with tired eyes. “Uncle Stan is dead,” she says. Then both she and Richard start laughing.