Not Another Happy Ending

by David Solomons

  ‘That's Juan Kerr,’ he said without missing a beat. ‘He was a nineteenth-century South American revolutionary.’

  Tom held the screenplay open at the last page. ‘This will break her heart.’

  ‘Uh, isn't that what we've been trying to accomplish all along?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘You suppose? Come on, this is the moment. Seize the day. Once more unto the breach!’

  ‘You're quoting Henry V to motivate a Frenchman?’

  ‘Listen, mon ami, it's time to get over Agincourt,’ said Roddy. ‘If you want your novel, then man up. It couldn't be simpler, all you have to do is make sure she reads Willie's screenplay. She'll be distraught. Melancholy. Miserable. Mission Accomplished.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tom doubtfully. He looked down at the screenplay, took a deep breath and made a decision.

  After searching for him in what felt like every possible hangout in the West End—there were even more poseurs’ cafés than he remembered—Tom finally found Willie in Paramount, a wannabe American diner on Argyle Street. Tom had passed by it for years without venturing in, but he could see how the place might appeal to an ersatz Hollywood screenwriter.

  Willie sat beneath a poster for Martin Scorsese's epic boxing movie, Raging Bull. The battered, haunted face of Robert De Niro stared over the top of Willie's head as he tucked messily into a bagel.

  Tom looked him up and down. He was wearing running shoes that resembled human feet, loose-fitting shorts that gaped alarmingly about his thighs and a matching black T-shirt, lightly stained with sweat. It looked like he'd just been for a run. In between bites of his bagel he attempted to engage the attention of two young women at the next table. It was clear to Tom that Willie believed he was being more charming than they did.

  ‘So, you fancy a leg-up in showbusiness …?’

  There was a thud and Willie's coffee cup rattled against its saucer as Tom slapped the copy of his screenplay down in front of him.

  ‘You've given it a happy ending,’ said Tom.

  Willie smiled at the two girls and then looked up slowly to meet his accuser's gaze. ‘And your point?

  ‘The point is Jane's novel doesn't end happily.’

  Willie lowered his bagel and brushed crumbs from his sleeve. ‘Who the hell wants to walk out of a movie feeling miserable?’

  Had the man never heard of art-house cinema? Tom stopped himself from responding; this wasn't the moment for a debate. ‘You have to change it back.’

  ‘Uh, I don't think so.’ There was chuckle of disbelief in his voice.

  Part of Tom wanted to let Willie have it his way, let the smug screenwriter make the same mistake that he had. But this wasn't about him. ‘She doesn't know yet, does she?’

  Willie stirred his coffee.

  ‘Do you have any idea what this'll do to her—to both of you? I made a mistake and I can't take it back. But, Willie, if you truly love her, change it.’

  Willie leant back, laced his hands behind his head and regarded Tom with a quizzical air.

  ‘What's going on here?’

  The man was infuriatingly slow on the uptake. Did he have to spell it out? ‘You just don't get her, do you?’

  ‘Oh, I get her all right.’ A sneer curled his lip. ‘Every night I get her—any way up I fancy.’

  Tom wasn't sure why the innuendo at Jane's expense bothered him so much. It wasn't as if he was some old-school gentleman confronting a cad in order to protect her honour, and yet as soon as Willie said the words he balled his hands into fists and raised them to his chest in what he hoped was an approximation of a boxing pose.

  ‘Right! Come on.’ He shuffled his feet and waved his fists. ‘You and me. Here. Now!’

  He knew as soon as he opened his mouth that it was a terrible miscalculation. But he didn't care. One punch, he prayed, just let me land one good punch. Willie rose up like a black wave, tipping back his chair, sending it clattering to the floor. The ventilated legs of his shorts flared, exposing the café to an unwelcome flash of hairy balls cupped snugly in white mesh. The other patrons looked on in horrified silence at the unfolding brawl.

  The last time they'd come to blows, Tom had allowed Willie to throw the first punch. At least, that was how he remembered it. This time he wasn't taking any chances. He drew back his right arm and flailed at Willie. The blow glanced harmlessly off his chest.

  ‘Hit a sick man, would you?’ Willie growled. Elbows pressed tight to his body, he began to advance on Tom. ‘I am a piece of bamboo,’ he chanted. ‘Firm but flexible. Rooted but yielding.’

  There was a blur as his arm shot out in a deadly effective straight line. The last thing Tom saw was De Niro's tenderised raw meat face staring out balefully from the film poster.

  CHAPTER 22

  ‘Scottish Rain’, The Silencers, 1988, RCA

  ‘READ IT. GO ON, you know you want to.’ Darsie held out a copy of Willie's screenplay.

  They were outside, in the square of garden that filled the back court amidst the flats. The rain had given way to late afternoon sunlight that slanted down past the high tenements.

  Jane swung a watering can over a flowering quilt of Busy Lizzies. Despite the earlier downpour the bed was bone-dry, as usual; the spot in the corner where she'd planted the flowers protected from all weathers beneath the overhanging buildings. The only permanently dry corner in Glasgow.

  ‘I'm not reading it,’ she said firmly. ‘I told you. I don't need to.’ After thinking it through she had decided to take the high ground. She had to trust Willie. He was an experienced writer—he knew his business. He knew what he was doing, even if the alterations she suspected he'd made to her novel might make her uncomfortable.

  ‘But what if he's changed stuff?’

  ‘I'm sure he has. A film is not a book. Changes are not only inevitable, but desirable. If you ask me, adaptation is sorely underestimated as an art form. I prefer to think of Willie's screenplay as a response to my novel, rather than a slavish copy.’ She'd been practising this speech for days, repeating it like a mantra in the hope that it would still her anxiety. She was still waiting for the Zen calm to descend.

  ‘Yeah, but what if he's put in a car chase, or something, y'know, really crap?’ Darsie opened the screenplay to the middle and scanned the page hopefully.

  ‘It doesn't matter what he's done,’ said Jane evenly. ‘The novel will still be there on my bookshelf, just the same as before. The film will have another life of its—’

  ‘No way!’ gasped Darsie.

  ‘What?’ she snapped, her serene acceptance ruffling in an instant. ‘He's put in a bloody car chase, hasn't he?’

  ‘Uh, not exactly.’ Darsie looked up, deep in thought. ‘Remind me, does the bridge explode in the novel?’

  Jane snatched the screenplay out of her hands, sat down on the lawn and turned to the first page.

  She came out here about this time to read on those infrequent days when the grass was still warm from the sun and the light had softened after the peak of its midday harshness. It was a comfortable, shady spot where she'd passed the time with some of her favourite novelists. Not today. She started to read.

  Despite everything she feared, there was a part of her that still held out hope that Willie's script would be a love letter; that it would say more about his love for her than he'd so far been able to put into any other words. But as she read each terrible new scene, wincing at every clunking misstep, she felt her body tense and her throat constrict, until by the end she was struggling to breathe. She fell back on the grass, closed her eyes and let out a moan of despair.

  ‘I'm not going to say I told you so,’ said Darsie.

  ‘Shut. Up.’

  Jane trudged back up to her flat, every step on the worn stone an effort. How could he? She slammed the heavy front door behind her and stomped into the living room. How dare he!

  She wrenched open the stiff bay window and perched on the ledge, looking out over the green canopy of trees, so thick with l
eaves that they hid the road beneath. At this time of year her flat was like a tree house in the woods, cut off from the rest of the world. Not cut off enough, she decided.

  Darsie appeared at her side with two large glasses of red wine.

  ‘Where's yours?’ Jane asked, grabbing them both. What was it about the men she dated that they all felt the need to rewrite her? Tom had changed her title and Willie, well, he had changed everything else.

  A breeze fanned the trees. The sound always had a calming effect. If she gritted her teeth perhaps she could forgive a lot of what Willie had perpetrated on her novel—but not that ending. What was he thinking? She'd ask him, simple as that. He was due back from his run any time now. They'd sit down together and talk it through like grown-ups, and then he would do what she told him.

  Or perhaps he had a truly excellent reason for rejecting her shattering final chapter, the ending that readers told her through their tearful letters that they loved, the high watermark of her writing career, thus far. It was the right ending, the best ending. She heard the front door open and close. He was back. She felt her heart race. It was the only ending. She would demand that he reinstate it and ditch his own insipid attempt. Either it went, or he did.

  ‘Janey?’

  Willie strolled into the living room, wrapping a length of bandage around the bloodied knuckles of his right hand. For a moment Jane forgot about the script. ‘What happened to you?’

  He flexed the hand and smiled. ‘Ran into an old friend.’ He flopped down on the sofa and stretched out. ‘Bit early for that, isn't it?’ He motioned to the two glasses of wine, adding with a puzzled expression, ‘Who's the other one for?’

  She put them down on her desk next to his screenplay and turned to close the window. After he'd proposed she'd made a list of writers married to other writers. Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster, Maggie O'Farrell and William Sutcliffe, Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer. To her surprise it seemed that it could work. The discovery had made her cautiously hopeful. Two writers living and working together—she would pen novels and he would adapt them for film. A perfect, symbiotic relationship. But it had already gone wrong for the two of them.

  ‘Meant to say, Janey, I read your new novel.’

  She had been prepared to lambast him for crimes against adaptation, but this threw her like a sideswipe in one of his stupid car chases. ‘You did?’

  He nodded. ‘Just the chapters you gave me.’ The bandage on his knuckles had worked its way loose. ‘It's terrific.’

  She waited for him to elaborate, but when he didn't she asked, ‘Is that all?’

  He started to rewrap the bandage. ‘Really terrific?’

  That's not what she wanted. She wasn't fishing for praise, she wanted—and she had to laugh at the irony—she wanted him to be … engaged. Tom had had more to say on the first sentence than Willie had on the first thirty chapters.

  ‘So, now that I've read your thing, you should read mine,’ he said.

  Ah, so that's what this was about. I'll show you mine if you show me yours. She glanced at the script. ‘I have read it.’

  Willie perked up immediately, spreading his arms wide in invitation. ‘And?’

  ‘Willie …’

  ‘Now, try not to be defensive. Remember, it's an adaptation. You can't have every scene from the novel in the film or it'd be twelve hours long. And to be honest, you had a lot of unnecessary stuff in there. There were whole chapters I could do with a single look. And a lot of your dialogue doesn't work so well when you say it out loud—yes, I know, but you need a screenwriter's ear to hear it. So I punched it up, gave it some—’ he made a fist and moved it back and forth like a piston ‘—real emotion.’ He got up from the sofa. ‘All in all I'm pretty pleased.’

  She bit her tongue. ‘But it's a first draft. Things will change, right?’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ he said with a generous wave. Then stopped. ‘Well, maybe a few tiny things. My first drafts are most writers’ fourth or fifth.’ He crossed to the desk and gathered up his screenplay in both hands, holding it out like a votive offering. ‘It's all in here,’ he breathed. ‘With the right director, this is a go script.’

  Then go, she wanted to say. Just take it and go! ‘But Willie, what about the ending?’

  He gave a shrug of incomprehension. ‘What is it with you people and the ending?’

  ‘What are you talking about? Which people?’

  ‘Oh, I bumped into your publisher,’ he said casually. A drop of blood fell to the floor. They both gazed at it, and then he brushed it away with his foot. ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘No. No, thank you.’ She watched him head into the kitchen. ‘Why were you talking to Tom?’

  ‘I sent him the screenplay. Wanted to rub his nose in it.’ He held up his hands in a gesture of admission. ‘I know, I know, not very mature, but you don't mind, do you? He's a prat.’ He rubbed his bandaged hand. ‘Well, the lanky French prat got what he deserved.’

  ‘You hit him?!’ She cringed. ‘Again?’

  ‘He hit me first,’ he said indignantly.

  ‘Oh, Willie, what were you thinking? Why did you go looking for him?’

  ‘I didn't. He came looking for me. Had a beef about my ending. Like he knows anything about filmmaking. Every French film I've ever seen ends the same way,’ he said, rising to his theme. ‘A shot of some guy in a hat sitting alone in a room smoking a cigarette. In black and white.’

  ‘What was his beef?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Why didn't Tom appreciate your ending?’

  Willie gave a dismissive pout. ‘Uh, it was about you. He said you wouldn't like it.’

  She struggled to understand the implication of what he was saying. Tom had read Willie's screenplay and then confronted him about the ending, earning another beating for his audacity.

  ‘But you do, right? You like my ending, don't you?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘I know it's not the same as yours, but it's what people want. You've got to trust me on this. I've never said it before, but your book is bloody depressing. No one wants the hero to die in the final chapter.’

  She thumped a palm against her chest. ‘I want him to die. That's why I wrote it like that. And a hundred thousand satisfied readers agree.’

  ‘Yeah, but did you ever think that maybe a hundred thousand could have been a million,’ he was in her face now, ‘if you'd just written one more chapter—he's not really dead! Whammo! They walk off into the sunset.’

  Then he said it. And in his expression she saw that he truly believed he was playing his trump card.

  ‘For god's sake, Janey, the book's even called Happy Ending.’

  Willie moved out the following afternoon. There was no shouting, which in Jane's experience was always a sign that nothing was left worth fighting for. She was surprised at how little stuff he had to pack up since for most of the time he'd lived there it felt like he'd colonised her flat. He explained to her that he followed the philosophy of Al Pacino's character in the movie Heat, who boasted that he had so few ties he could walk away from his life in thirty seconds. Willie reckoned he had it down to about twelve minutes including tablewear, but it was a work in progress. What about his desk? she'd asked. Oh, shit. He'd forgotten about that. The desk was really going to mess up his exit. He told her he'd send someone to collect it in a few days.

  ‘Where will you go?’ she asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Back to my mum's.’

  ‘Not Hollywood?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, of course. LA, baby! But, y'know, not now. When the time is right.’

  He stood in the doorway, a cardboard box full of clothes, books, photos and his two film posters rolled up under one arm, his typewriter tucked beneath the other.

  ‘I don't understand how you can do this over a dumb ending.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You don't.’

  He looked mystified and then shrugged. ‘Well, if it's any consolation I don't think it would've worked out with us. To
be honest, Janey, I just don't get all that worshipping your pain stuff.’

  She closed the door and listened to his footsteps recede down the stairs until they faded into the background hum of the day.

  She resented his parting accusation; she didn't worship her pain. Of course in her writing she drew on her painful upbringing, but she didn't venerate it, whatever Willie believed. What did she care? She didn't have to answer his charge any more.

  It was a pain dating men with opinions about her work. Her next boyfriend would be functionally illiterate, she decided. One of those men who never cracked open a book unless it was a car manual. She'd read on Jezebel that the average woman used twenty thousand words a day and the average man just seven thousand. That was still too many. Next time she was aiming for a sub-thousand bloke—guttural, but with fastidious personal hygiene. During the day she'd labour in her study, alone, only to join him in the evening for dinner. He'd greet each new novel of hers with a bland ‘that's nice, dear’ and she'd be fascinated by his job in finance. She wouldn't dedicate a novel to him since he'd never bother to read the inscription. There was just one problem with this perfect picture.

  It sounded lonely.

  The following day Jane's dad helped her move Willie's desk out of the flat. By mid-afternoon the outline of four claw feet in the dust and a couple of brass drawing pins in the wall were the only reminders that he had ever been there. When they were done, Benny hugged her and said he could stay, if she wanted company. To her surprise she nodded and they sat and talked about nothing in particular until dinnertime. But it only postponed the inevitable moment when he did finally leave, and she was alone in the empty flat.

  She wandered through the vacant rooms half-expecting to find Darsie lounging on the sofa drinking champagne to celebrate Willie's eviction, but her heroine was nowhere to be found, which was a shame as it would have been nice to hear her voice.

  Willie had even cleared all of his bottles from the bathroom cabinet—and gone off with her Sensodyne, she noted. She was about to leave when she noticed something poking out from under the bath. It was a page from her manuscript. Briefly she puzzled how it had got there and then guessed what had happened. Tom must have dropped it the night he stole the first three chapters and locked himself in here.