Women of Consequence

by Wolos, Gregory;

  The rain has stopped. The sky is so white it hurts to look at it. The pavement around the pavilion is steaming. I suck at the thick air, pretending my shallow breaths fill me up. The basketball boys rise from their table and rush toward me as if riding a wave. As they come at me through the shadows, I see that they’re younger than I thought—maybe late elementary school. The holes at Blue Jean’s knees look less fashionable than worn from play. Yellow Bands’ troll features are baby fat. Driven by hunger, they sweep past me without even a nod, still boys I wouldn’t have known who’ll become men I won’t ever know.

  I hear their ball smack wetly on the pavement, but I don’t turn to look. They’re no more attached to me than any of the thousands of warehoused Oofy babies would be to the mothers or fathers who spawned them. No more attached to me than they are to each other.

  They’re going to eat. My stomach makes a fist, gives a small cry. I take another breath. Nobody hears that cry but me. The cry is triumphant. It announces the fulfillment of the life I have chosen to live. My plan. My creation. Like Mrs. Poulter’s Hungarian “Impossible Dream” and Mr. Silberbach’s sculpture and his granddaughter’s Madagascar bees. Everything is so clear under Fortunato’s light.

  Doctor Moreau’s Pet Shop

  Is there such a thing as being ‘fresh out of rehab’ when it’s your sixth time?” Annabelle asked as she settled into the bucket seat of her convertible, coaching the B-list reporters who followed her after she’d signed herself out of the facility. “Maybe say ‘rotten out of rehab’ or ‘spoiled.’ Or ‘stale’. . . ‘Stale out of rehab Annabelle Hadley.’”

  Which, in her condo, where an odor of something neglected in the refrigerator lingered, was exactly how she felt: stale, and detached from the thickened figure facing her in her bedroom mirror. She wouldn’t even try to lose the rehab donut weight this time. There seemed no point in whittling herself down to a self so easily condemnable. With less effort she could crop her hair, maybe brutally short; the new look would match the voice that countless cigarettes had scrubbed into a growl.

  Annabelle’s court-ordered abstinence from outside communication was over, and her agent had left word about a job on her voice mail: “P. P. Frederico is remaking The Island of Dr. Moreau as a full-length animated feature. He wants you to voice a character named ‘M’ling.’ I told him you’d be thrilled.”

  Annabelle hadn’t been so sure. She’d seen enough has-been actresses lose themselves in the world of animation: usually they’d be animals—gloriously feathered and distinctively beaked birds, sinuously-waisted minks, cobras hooded like Cleopatra—that were all sad memorials to faded careers. She’d be turned into a cat, Annabelle guessed, with huge green eyes, a whiskey purr, and a slender body. For a cartoon no one needed to trim down, either by exercise or diet pills or a finger down the throat.

  A Moreau script was delivered, but Annabelle didn’t bother to read it. She knew the story—a crazy doctor on a remote island operates on animals, trying to turn them into human beings. Her character’s name, M’ling, hinted at a wickedly seductive antagonist, maybe with a vaguely threatening Middle Eastern allure. Too late in the arc of her reputation to give her voice to a heroine.

  It wasn’t until the telephone interview arranged by the studio a week before recording was to start that Annabelle discovered what she’d gotten herself into. The interview began with the usual questions about her rehab stint and her legal trouble. Did she think she’d stay sober this time? Would she think twice before again leaving the scene of an accident? Would she consider an apology to PETA and the vegan coalition she had enraged with her observation that “only stupid people don’t eat meat—meat, including brains, is brain food. Even zombies know that.” Curled up on her bed in sweatpants and a too-snug T-shirt from her own “Scaredy Cat” line for tweens, she watched herself yawn and smoke in her dresser mirror as she asserted her “every confidence and hope” that her new sobriety would lead to better future decisions. Annabelle considered herself adept at deflecting awkward questions provocatively yet insubstantially; when asked what she thought PETA’s take on her involvement with Frederico’s Moreau project would be, she saw the languorous drag she took from her cigarette and the careful way she patted the bed around her hips for the Snickers bar she’d half unwrapped before the call. She could still mesmerize herself with her own eyes, though at the moment they were no more bewitching than frozen peas. And when had her chin begun to melt into her neck?

  “It’s just a cartoon,” she said. “No animals, I can assure you, will be harmed during filming.”

  The reviewer chuckled. “Right. But since Frederico has already commented on his intentions of releasing this as the first graphically violent cartoon in the history of cinema—“shocking,” I think was the word he used, do you get the feeling you were cast because of your comments on meat?”

  Annabelle watched her brow furrow, thought “worry,” and deepened the frown. Cigarette ash dropped onto her chest into the open green eye of her T-shirt’s winking “Scaredy Cat” logo. The identical logo was tattooed in color on the small of her back.

  “You mean do I think it’s unusual for a filmmaker to inspire interest in his film by introducing a note of controversy?”

  “Animals surgically altered—torn apart by Dr. Moreau and reconstructed as humanoids—deformed, suffering creatures treated first as experiments, then as slaves by the evil doctor.” The reporter seemed to be reading this from a press release.

  “What cartoon doesn’t tear apart animals and make them half human? Mickey Mouse and Goofy and Bugs—they’re freaks, right? Talking biped animals. Bipedophiles—is that a word?”

  “No—but the film’s theme seems to glorify suffering—”

  “It’s a horror cartoon. And I like meat.”

  “Hmm. Well, are you put off by the absence of a female presence in the film?”

  “I’m M’ling.”

  “Right.” The interviewer waited. Annabelle traced a circle around her reflected face with her cigarette butt. She imagined herself with a snout and protruding yellow teeth, shivered, and looked away.

  “Well, I’m sure that some suppressed sexual tension will bubble to the surface—isn’t that what horror films are all about these days?—red-lipped vampires burying their fangs into the necks of— ”

  “Of course, but how do you feel about the fact that M’ling is a male?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How do you feel about the fact that for your first role in almost four years, you’ve been cast as a male?”

  Annabelle pictured her script, still in its Fedex envelope in the center of her black granite kitchen island. “Um—” She wouldn’t surrender the truth—that her career was in the toilet and this was the only job she’d been offered. “—I’m sure it’s integral to the film. Mr. Frederico is an artist, and a certain liberation from convention should be—expected. Are we almost over? My publicist is pointing at her watch. I think I have an appearance at a charity event scheduled.” Annabelle watched the figure in her mirror tap her wrist.

  “Just one thing more. How do you feel about the fact that Carl Walchuk is responsible for the screenplay? You know the Moreau project originated with his father, right? The production is something like a memorial to Raymond Walchuk. He gave P. P. Frederico his start, after all. Do you know Carl?”

  “Not really. Maybe we met at some child star thing twenty years ago, before he quit acting. I don’t remember if he was on the set of Svidrigaylov’s Dream, if that’s what you’re getting at. That whole mess with his father got settled, and everybody involved moved on. Raymond Walchuk died years ago. I’ve really got no comment beyond that.”

  After the interview, Annabelle shrugged back on her pillows and shut her eyes. Raymond Walchuk, the filmmaker responsible for Svidrigaylov’s Dream. Who would try to make such a movie? Who would cast an eight year old as the object of a perverted Rus
sian noble’s nightmare, choosing the little girl whose features were most precociously adult? It hadn’t been difficult to transform her into a dream-whore. But what responsible director would emphasize to the child that the goat-bearded character imagining her was “thinking fucky-fucky”? All done for the sake of art, Raymond Walchuk argued when her parents brought a civil suit against him for attempting to corrupt a minor. The settlement and publicity had ruined him, and, paradoxically, launched Annabelle Hadley’s career. She had been the winner. There were long stretches, months at a time, when she didn’t think about being the little girl of Svidrigaylov’s Dream, the movie that was never finished; but, when she was conscious of being, she was never anyone else.

  The chicken or the egg? The life that followed—a few family movies and teen romps, G and PG, then a love affair with drugs, with older actors, male and female celebrities of similarly tattered reputations, raunchy paparazzi photographs, moments when she glimpsed her own mascara-ringed eyes or caught a whiff of her cigarette breath or the fermented smell of bodily fluids she only half-remembered sharing. It hadn’t taken long for the butterfly to revert to a worm that had a love-hate relationship with the spotlight’s shriveling heat.

  Her parents should have known, Raymond Walchuk maintained. Had they been so eager for their daughter to succeed that they had at first ignored the obvious subject of Svidrigaylov’s Dream? Hadn’t they read the script? Weren’t they familiar with Crime and Punishment? And now Mom and Dad lived snugly and advice-less on the edge of a Palm Springs golf course, while Annabelle found herself marooned on The Island of Doctor Moreau— in another of Raymond Walchuk’s fantasies.

  

  Annabelle finally read the Moreau screenplay. There was a note that the description of her character M’ling had been transcribed directly from H. G. Wells’s novel: “a misshapen man, short, broad, and clumsy, with a crooked back, a hairy neck, and a head sunk between his shoulders. He…had peculiarly thick, coarse, black hair…the black face was a singularly deformed one. The facial part projected, forming something dimly suggestive of a muzzle, and the huge half-open mouth showed…big white teeth.”

  The story seemed pointlessly grim and violent—live animals torn apart by Moreau and reconfigured as gruesome humanoids. It was a story of degeneration and madness; there wasn’t a shred of redemption or hope in it. As a cartoon, maybe it would develop a cult following among the morbid, but it was nothing but a grim, gratuitously violent slaughterhouse, in spite of its Victorian era pedigree. When Annabelle called her agent to tell him she wanted out, he pooh-poohed her.

  “Classy author, classy connections. You need a touch of class. It’s P. P. Frederico! And now is not the time to quit smoking, if you’re thinking about it. Your voice is your signature now. There’s a fortune in cartoons and commercials.”

  

  Annabelle’s dangling legs ached, and her ass had cramped from sitting for almost two hours on a rung-less stool. Her headphones pinched her ears, and her scalp was sweating under her new buzz cut. On the screen in front of her, a human-ish blob haunted a glimmering vacancy. Her voice would aid its transformation into M’ling. She wouldn’t see the completely realized character until the film’s premiere.

  She had just delivered her sixteenth take of her first line: “They—won’t have me forward.” M’ling, the only one of Moreau’s “transformed” animals to be trusted as a house servant, was being abused by sailors on a ship transporting fresh animals to the mad doctor’s island.

  “Ms. Hadley—” P. P. Frederico’s words buzzed like hornets in her headphones— “according to Mr. Walchuk’s faithful transcription from the original text, M’ling should deliver this line ‘slowly, with a queer, hoarse quality in his voice.’ You’ve captured the ‘hoarse’—but that’s just your natural rasp. Where’s the ‘queer’? Once again, please.”

  Annabelle craved a cigarette, but no break seemed imminent. “They—won’t have me forward,” she said for the seventeenth time.

  “Ms. Hadley. Annabelle. What does ‘queer’ mean to you?”

  “‘Queer’? Annabelle had made a dozen films and had never repeated a line more than four times. And this was just a goddamn cartoon. “For Wells it would have meant ‘strange,’ right? ‘Weird.’ But there’s a lot of ‘weirds.’ I think you need to tell me a little more of what you’re after.”

  “‘To you, to you, to you. To you. To. You—’ I said. M’ling’s words don’t belong to H. G. Wells any longer. They’re ours, and we’re in the twenty-first century. What does ‘queer’ mean to you?”

  “Hunh,” Annabelle sighed. To-yoo-to-yoo-to-yoo. Frederico, the bird man. If she turned she’d see him through the glass wall of the control booth, his face surrounded by feather-petals, pecking at his microphone with a tiny beak. On the screen in front of her the gingerbread man blob standing in for her character floated impassively, waiting for her voice. Queer? A YouTube video gone viral flashed through her mind: a kiss—less kiss, really, than glottal assault—she’d shared with a one hit pop nymphette. Annabelle remembered the video clip, but not the actual kiss. She looked at the M’ling-blob waiting for her answer. “‘Queer’ means ‘gay’ to me,” she growled into her microphone.

  “Exactly! Could you lend something of your new understanding to your characterization, please? Oh—wait a minute—visitors—take five. Hello, Carl—and how’s our little man?” Annabelle heard a click and dead air. She plucked off her headphones and slid from the stool. She stamped the pins and needles out of her numb legs before hurrying out for a cigarette.

  

  They won’t have me forward. Annabelle sat on the hood of her lipstick-red convertible in the parking lot of the sound studio, trying to enjoy a second cigarette she’d lit from her first. Her fingers shook from nerves or anger or nicotine. I’m keeping my voice in shape, she thought as the smoke burned through her throat and filled her lungs. She’d been sober for weeks. Two. The truth was, cigarettes were her only craving. She tried to remember what her other urges had felt like. A haze Annabelle imagined rising from the united efforts of all the city’s smokers absorbed the distant hills. Queer wasn’t one of her words—it didn’t measure her liberal attitude toward her own sexual proclivities or history, clips of which swam through the stew of her memory along with the YouTube kiss.

  Annabelle thought harder, surprising herself with a desire to understand P. P. Frederico. Her character M’ling had been carved by Moreau into human form from what? A dog? He’d suffered a kind of extractive rape, torn from one body, one species, into another. Forced to fit an idea of “human.” Dragged from a natural self into an isolating “otherness.” They won’t have me forward. Annabelle felt an unexpectedly sensual swelling behind her eyes—she wasn’t far from tears. Poor, queer M’ling. How cruel of Moreau to have thrust him into the human condition.

  “P.P. says you’re doing great.” A young man pushing a blond toddler in a stroller had passed through the glass doors of the sound studio lobby and now stood squinting at Annabelle through the milky sunshine. Not eager for company, she pretended that it was the child who had spoken. The toddler was sunk deep into the stroller’s seat, and his limp arms and legs hung from his stubby torso like the appendages of a sock monkey. He’d fixed her with a pale-eyed gaze that seemed to insist on an apology. What if, she wondered, what if this little boy was dying, what if his brief life was ebbing away with each heartbeat? She mewed with relief when the child hurled his doll, a naked, flaxen-haired Barbie, toward her. It was a healthy toss. The doll struck the headlight next to Annabelle’s knee and fell face down onto the blacktop. Annabelle caught her breath and choked up a cough that turned into sobs. Two heaves, and a third, before she bowed into her shoulder, smothering her tears. “Sorry,” she said. “Wrong pipe.”

  The young man, who was not robust, had rolled the stroller closer, leaning on it as if it were a walker. Though his hair and eyes were dark, the shape of his
head and the tilt of his posture were identical to the child’s. “Pipes can be ornery,” he said. He waited for her to compose herself. “P. P. isn’t always able to communicate his needs. He wants me to tell you to give M’ling a little lisp. He thinks it’ll get audiences to think about a dog’s inner life.”

  Annabelle’s nose was full. Without a tissue, she snorted back her salty mucus and swallowed demurely. “A dog’s life?”

  The young man’s dark curls receded like an eroding coastline; he would probably shave his head before too long. Annabelle shielded her eyes with her cigarette hand as if his cranium already gleamed. With sudden dexterity he bent, caught the child under the arms, and swung him out of the stroller. The clean, white rubber bottoms of the toddler’s tiny sneakers flew past Annabelle’s head. Set on his feet, the child tottered toward his doll, picked her up by one of her long, flesh-toned legs, and flipped her into the parking space beside Annabelle’s convertible.

  “Careful for cars,” the young man warned, though Annabelle’s was the only vehicle within a hundred yards. “Careful. Yeah—” He kept the corner of his eye on the toddler, while shifting the bulk of his attention to Annabelle— “so P. P. sees each species as having a kind of ‘hook’—something subtle about them that the change into human form exposes. I can’t tell you about the other animals, because he thinks too much information will muddle your performance. But he wants his dog-people kind of fey.”

  “‘Fey.’” It was an odd, antique word. Annabelle doubted she’d ever spoken it.

  “P. P.’s approach to creating a film can be idiosyncratic.” The young man’s tone and expression begged for patience—or was it with Annabelle he was showing patience? “His idea is to keep all the parts separate until they meet in the final cut. Like a recipe where the ingredients don’t mix until they reach your palate. Or a painting where each brush stroke is a distinct entity. When you see the whole, you also feel the impact of each separate part.”