“So America it is,” he said now.
I nodded and looked out over the endless blue surrounding us. Boudewijn insisted on taking me to the station despite his bad ankle. The seclusion of his car seemed to perk him up. “She’s forgotten you the minute she’s sitting on a horse’s back,” he said. The leather steering wheel sliding in his hands, the easiness of his driving manner: alert and ironic instead of on the defensive. That’s how I remembered him from the wedding. As we glided over the highway he thanked me for sending my résumé, he thought I would make an excellent “Academy Fellow,” he would send a recommendation to his colleague in Silicon Valley on Monday.
“Nice guy?”
“Woman. Really nice woman. That is, as long as you turn in your ovaries at HR and save up your vacation days off until after you’re gone.”
“Funny term, ‘vacation days off.’ ”
“Perfectly normal one. Only not at McKinsey.”
“Funny word, ‘ovary.’ ”
Then, at last, he laughed, and just about the moment he took a slightly wild swing around the mini-roundabout, we both lost our balance and he grabbed hold of my leg, high and warm, his fingers between my thighs.
Aaron and I made a toast to the Ligurian Sea. And to the Barbara Ann, our ridiculously luxurious yacht that we whored up together and bought on a reckless whim—why, we weren’t really sure, maybe because two secret millionaires have to splash out on something. But it did the trick. This was ours. Who else could I sail across the open sea with except Aaron Bever? That very night, I think, we finally resumed our photo sessions. We sailed around Cap Corse and down the east coast of Corsica, past Bastia, and moored at Santa Lucia di Moriani, the small seaside resort where we had the rental house. We chatted freely about the immediate future, about America, we laughed about the number of pictures we’d have to take in advance. He said he was planning to come visit me in California, he’d like to join me there.
“Are you still going to go see Wilbert?” he asked a few days later.
“No,” I reassured him. “The day I was supposed to go see him, we’ll still be here. It’s better this way. Dad brought it up again when we went out to eat. He was afraid I was up to something. I didn’t tell him I’d already talked to him.”
“How’d you get his number?” Suspicion had crept back into his voice.
“Easy, from my parents’ phone.”
I didn’t tell Siem that either. I had a war president of a father who had dragged his son into court, just like that. Since then, our household was well and truly devoid of nuance: you’re either with us, or against us. Wilbert’s name hadn’t been mentioned at the farmhouse since 1990. You didn’t dare. Let alone phone him up. Let alone go see him.
“Did you cancel?”
“Not yet.”
The afternoon of the bushfire Aaron asked how I’d feel if he didn’t return to the Vluchtestraat and I gave up my student house: “We’ll just ship all our junk,” he said, “you know, emigrate. And not come back for the time being. Ship our stuff? Heck, we’ll just ditch it. What do you think?” And although living together had never really occurred to me before, and was, more to the point, exactly the opposite of my conclusions over the previous weeks, I shared his audacity: Yes! Let’s do it! The more we philosophized about it, the more gung-ho we became about moving to California—together—after just six days on vacation, six days away from screwed-up Enschede, six days after our deepest ever relationship crisis, we were, to our amazement, talking about living together, we fantasized excitedly about a new start in the USA. Recovering from a crisis like this one, we told each other, requires more than patchwork, and as we stood there on our hill watching that bushfire, I wondered whether the prickly smell of millions of popping pine needles had cleansed our muddled heads, or in fact fogged them up.
Aaron’s head was smudged with soot. “It’ll all work out,” he said. I turned and looked down at the small marina where six, seven boats were moored; our blue-pink spear was by far the largest. “We could always just sail the hell out of here,” I said, and we retreated, smiling, to the coolness of the house they had bricked in under a pair of especially flammable pine trees. While Aaron started frying some goat meat in a heavy cast-iron pan he’d pulled out of a kitchen cabinet, I rinsed the scent of charred bark out of my hair in the shower and imagined, for the first time, what it would be like to stay with him forever, start a family together—could I imagine something like that? How would it be to do it without from now on; I fantasized about walking into the kitchen with my hair wrapped in a towel and saying to Aaron: “Honey, I love you, how about we forget those stupid condoms?”
My office door opened, and from the impatient squeak of the hinges I could guess who was on the other side. “Joy—five minutes?” Rusty’s smile tickled me between my shoulder blades. I clicked away Aaron’s website but did not take my eyes off the monitor. It was the end of the day, and I wanted to be getting home. When he started counting backward from five I turned around. Holding on to the doorknob, Rusty leaned into Room 203 (we’d never bothered to unscrew the red-painted metal hotel room numbers), and said: “Been crying?”
“Not since I was born. Why?”
“Two things.” He walked over to the small conference table, pulled one of the heavy chairs into the middle of the room and sat down. Just like me, he crossed his left leg over the right one, but reconsidered, and planted his cowboy boots firmly on the carpeting a few feet apart. “First: why don’t you do that interview.”
“Oh?” I gathered my hair, twisted it into a knot, and pulled a rubber band around it. “If I feel like it, you mean.”
“If you feel like it, I mean. Anyway, you’ve earned it. I’d do it myself, but I think you deserve it. And of course you feel like it.”
The very opposite of feeling like it coursed through my nerves, a pre-programmed aversion to showing my hand, to being asked things by someone whose job it is to infringe on my privacy.
“Do you think I can mention the Barracks?”
“Difficult not to. Besides, it’s for the magazine. Before they’ve printed the thing even Belfast will know about it.”
“What if they pick the newsworthy bit out?”
“The New York Times? They won’t. Too local. They’d sooner ditch an entire issue than publish a West Coast news item. What they’re interested in is the phenomenon, the lifestyle, the success.”
“Are they coming here? I mean, to Coldwater?”
“That girl’s gonna be sitting in this very chair tomorrow morning at ten.”
“What’s her name?”
Rusty looked at me, concentrated, stuck two fingers in the air. “Double name. Wait a sec … Mary Jo something.”
“And the other thing?”
He got up and walked over to a side window. He slid open the window sash, smeared thick with blue paint, and stuck his head outside, giving me a view of the worn-out seat of his jeans. Rusty must have read somewhere that a “founder,” a genuine dot-com guy, should dress as casually as possible. (“Do I have a suit?” he said when I first broached the subject. “Yeah, my birthday suit.” He did have one suit, a weird cobalt-blue thing with cactuses embroidered on it, a suit made especially for him by somebody named Nudie. “Who’s Nudie?” “Don’t you know? Nudie. Nudie Cohn. Hank Williams’s Tailor. Nudie made Elvis’s gold suit. Gram Parsons’s Marijuana suit. She doesn’t know who Nudie is.”) And I have to admit: it worked. If Rusty and I went to an advertiser together, me in Gucci or the like and he as a freewheeler in one of his artistic shirts, we complemented each other and exuded just the right combination of anarchy and business sense. Now he belched. He brought his head back inside and went over to his chair. “I want to start filming in the Barracks in two weeks,” he said. “Should be possible.”
That was typical Rusty: he’d dig in his heels for months on end, procrastinate, run up against hurdles, then the about-face and, finally, overshoot his target.
“Are you kidding? No way. The
re’s not even electricity.”
“Then we’ll improvise. Emergency generators. You just watch. And that journalist’s name is Harland. That’s her name. Mary Jo Harland.”
I typed in the name on Google, 162,000 hits in twenty-four hundredths of a second, and the first was her own website. “She writes for the New Yorker,” I said. “And for Granta.”
“Great,” Rusty said, “I’m going right out to not buy them and then I’m going to not read them.”
“Is she pro or con, do you think?”
“Joy—we’re gonna get shit either way. With your Barracks. Who do you think PR had on the line this morning? Louis Theroux.”
A strange vibration high in my windpipe told me I should not do that interview: don’t do it, why should you. Just as I was about to say that to Rusty, my telephone rang. An inside line. “Theroux’s an asshole,” I said, and switched the phone to speaker. “Hi, Steve.”
Rusty made a gagging gesture. He had something against Steve, said he was “dry shite.” I had snatched him away from Google, where he had obviously done good work for human resources.
“Joy,” his voice echoed metallically through the room. “I’m just calling to say that Kristin called me to say you’re scheduled for Wednesday, June 11th.”
Rusty smiled and nodded at me.
“Why doesn’t Kristin call me herself?” I asked. Yesterday at the Gold Digger, Kristin Rose took me aside and said that Isis had psychological problems, nervous tension, identity crisis, God knows what, and would be out of the running for at least a month, and would I consider filling in now and then. “You’re my last resort, sweetie. And you’re so good.” What irritated me was that I still hadn’t answered and now Steve was on the line. Kristin was a director about my age and was there when Rusty had scouted me, and she’d started right in with that sweetie stuff. Her strategic friendliness worked wonders on Rusty.
“Because I need to know if I can book you for the usual fee,” Steve answered.
“Have I said yes yet? Who’s it with?”
“With, um … just a sec.” Steve coughed, which the speaker translated into an ear-splitting grate. I wondered if he could tell he was being amplified.
“It’s for girlslapgirl. Bobbi …”
“Bobbi Red,” I offered.
“I think so, yeah,” Steve said.
Rusty nodded wildly and gave a double thumbs-up. “Steven!” he shouted.
For a moment, only a hum. And then: “Rusty?”
“Steve—she’ll do it, man. You should see her face. Joy’s crazy about Bobbi.” He sent me a warm smile. He was right, I was crazy about Bobbi.
“Steven,” he continued, “as long as we’re talking: have you drawn up that contract for Vince?”
“Almost,” Steve said. “I mean: it’s nearly done. In fact, I was just waiting for your answer. About my salary suggestion.”
“Just make it seven,” Rusty said. “Sweeten it up with secondary conditions.”
“In Cleveland he got a percentage,” Steve said.
“Sales?”
“Uh … profit. Half a per cent.”
Rusty looked at me, I shook my head. “It’s a deal, Steve,” he said. “Print it out, send it off. Yeah? Do it. Bye, Steve.”
He got up without putting back the chair, and leaned in the doorframe with his hand on the doorknob again. “OK, what are you up to?” I said after I hung up.
“Sorry,” he said, “but that Vince—I’ve got to have him. You do too, take my word for it. By the way, did you know that Bobbi’s gonna be on Tyra Banks next week?”
I was so taken aback that I forgot I was angry. “Really? What for?”
“Exorcism. Satan sent his daughter and her name is Bobbi Red.” He glanced at his Rolex. “Feck! Joy, I’ve gotta go. Now. In two weeks you and the world-famous Bobbi will be shooting in the Barracks. That’s a promise.”
Bobbi Red—I let her stay at my place for a while in 2007, my hospitality tweaked by what you could call an atypical job application. It started with an open solicitation she sent to Rusty, not the usual slipshod e-mail we normally got, but a neatly folded, printed letter in a sealed envelope that out of fascination I’ve kept in my desk drawer. We got ones like this at McKinsey: a top-heavy letterhead, a Re: line and the textbook young-entrepreneur format that made you wonder if Bobbi, who still called herself Meryl Dryzak, was pulling our leg or really meant it, whether she was incredibly naïve or incredibly funny. “You gotta read this,” Rusty said.
“Dear Mr. Wells,” her letter began, “It has been my great pleasure to view your productions on the Internet over the past few years. I would very much like to join your company as an actress.” The paragraph continued with the fact that she was attending a junior college in Denver, Colorado, where she studied voice and acting, film history, and modern literature, and while she found it all “extremely interesting,” ever since her eighteenth birthday, the same age as the Federal Obscenity Statute, she thought the time was ripe to follow her heart. And her heart, she believed, lay in making pornographic films, preferably the kind of porn films we produced: “robust, realistic, and creative.” The second paragraph began as the classic personal sketch. “I am generally considered reliable and a person with excellent communication skills. I have studied state-of-the-art X-rated films since I was twelve. I have extensive experience in anal sex, deep-throating, squirting, etc. During coitus I take pleasure in submission, but am equally comfortable playing the dominant role. Moreover I have many creative ideas to enhance your range and repertoire. In five years I would like to see myself directing; perhaps your company offers advancement opportunities? In closing, let me assure you of my capabilities as a team player and one who values a positive working atmosphere. I would very much like to visit your premises for a personal interview. Sincerely, Meryl Dryzak.”
Rusty just about lost it. And that was even before he had seen Meryl’s résumé. That she was poking fun at a genre, poking fun at Rusty himself, was obvious once you read her CV, which was constructed with the same pseudo-earnestness as her cover letter. Between her personal data and hobbies (sports and film, she admired Werner Herzog, Kurt Russell, Rocco Siffredi, and Michelangelo Antonioni) she inserted a section entitled “education and lessons,” but where you would expect to find elementary school and high school, she listed her romantic relationships, including the exact dates, each entry in boldface, followed by concise accounts of what exactly she picked up in bed with “Rich” or “Josh” or “LaToya.” She offered, if we so desired, three references, and to check whether the telephone numbers really existed Rusty, grinning from ear to ear, called someone she gave as “Joey F(ucking) Bastard.” When he got an answering machine (“Joe Lightcloud Landscape Architects, for all your backyard decks and ponds”), he broke into a slow chuckle that carried on until well after the beep.
A week later Meryl Dryzak sat across from us in Rusty’s office—not the girl in the letter, but a girl like her letter: decent but dirty. She wore a long, dark-green Led Zeppelin T-shirt, a wide belt with iron studs wound around her narrow hips. Her skirt was made of frayed camouflage fabric, her feet were packed into Nike high-tops. With her dark-brown braids and placid face, a pleasant mixture of the Mona Lisa, Kate Moss, and a heroine from a manga comic strip, she not only stood out from the typical debauched cheerleader type that overpopulated the Valley (no Botoxed lips, not covered in tattoos, not prone to uncontrolled giggling), but she also acted differently too. Intelligent and serious. She had a sensible, propersounding voice, a bit bored, but what she said in that languid tone was self-confident and, just like her letter, uncommonly sincere.
As usual, Rusty did the talking; he didn’t like other people conducting auditions. “Meryl,” he said after a few jokes about the kilo of sugar he dumped in his coffee, “your letter, your manner of speaking, your presentation, tells us you’re an intelligent, talented girl. A girl who undoubtedly has what it takes to have any future she wants. I see you study film and literature,
but I can imagine you could just as soon have chosen law or medicine or aeronautics. And yet you want to work for us. Can you tell me a little about your creditors?”
Rusty assumed she wouldn’t catch on right away, but she understood just fine. “I’m not interested in money,” she said without smiling. “Money doesn’t turn me on.”
And as though Rusty were Herbert von Karajan and she a violinist auditioning for the Berlin Philharmonic, she explained that, first of all, the business attracted her because of the intense pleasure she got from sex, a pleasure she wanted to explore to its fullest: “Pleasure is something very much worth pursuing,” as she so elegantly put it; in close second place was her desire to share the fruits of her personal enlightenment with as many people as possible, she was something of an altruist, she regarded porn—“good porn,” she clarified with her index finger raised—as an undervalued source of pleasure for plenty of people. She told us she came from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a small town in the Rocky Mountains, where she spent eighteen years making a detailed study of everything that was boring and everyday and tedious. It was time for something new.
“Do you use meth?” Rusty asked. I could tell from his face this was getting too philosophical for him.
“I’m a fuck-junkie,” she replied.
“Ho-kay.” Rusty pretended to take notes.
We were used to anything here, from morning till night there was dirty talk at Coldwater, especially on and around the sets—but this? Without the vulgar spontaneity of her ilk (and who knows, without their typical snarkiness, their phony kookiness, their fickle unreliability too, which, I had to admit, seemed essential to a person’s survival in this city), without the provocative prattle, the crass chomping of an entire pack of gum at once, it all sounded different, more surreal. Harder.
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