His pace back up, Harry rounded the corner of his driveway, legs pumping, heart beating. Lucky, lucky, lucky, he sang silently to himself. When he saw his agent’s forest green Jaguar parked in the circular driveway behind his house, the dread sliced through again, as sharp as a paper cut. Aaron Kramer had been Harry’s agent for four years, ever since he had picked Harry’s headshot out of the hundreds of B-list (okay, C-list) actors the agency represented. He remembered the call well.
“You’re an agent?” Harry had asked, lifting a cushion on the couch. He was pretty certain he had seen a quarter there earlier in the week.
Aaron proposed a drink. Harry countered with lunch. He could use a meal, and agents always paid. They settled on coffee. When Harry arrived at the Starbucks on La Brea Avenue, he ordered three mozzarella paninis, a cheese pastry, and a fruit cup, and asked the girl behind the counter to run a tab. It was against store policy, but the girl had been so undone by Harry’s looks, she put the bill aside, just as he had asked. Her heart beating fast. When Aaron paid the bill, he raised an eyebrow theatrically at the total. Harry never forgave him for that.
Aaron Kramer was Jewish and from the East Coast. He had gone to Princeton but his roots were on Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where his grandfather had bought blocks of apartment buildings during the 1970s, when, as he liked to say, “the city was in the toilet.” Today, the Kramers were the sixth richest family in the borough, a fact Aaron researched for his senior thesis at Poly Prep, an exclusive high school in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. Most of Aaron’s college friends had gone to Wall Street, but he was “creative,” so he went to Hollywood. He had thick, black eyebrows that tapered together in the middle of his forehead and a body as soft as a woman’s. His lower lip was round, red, and wet. A child’s mouth. But his eyes were ancient.
“Your problem,” Aaron had said, sipping a caffè latte as Harry wolfed down his second panini, “is you’re too handsome.” Harry smiled, thinking that was the cue for him to flirt. Not that he’d ever go to bed with a man, but he wasn’t above putting on a white cotton sweater and standing by a pool with a drink in his hand if that was what it took to get a job. Aaron didn’t smile back.
“You couldn’t be in movies,” Aaron continued, “because no star wants someone as good-looking as you on screen with them.” Harry stopped chewing. It was true. He’d never been able to put his finger on it before, but the guy was right. Harry was too handsome. He could feel it every time he went out into the world. At the gym, in the grocery store, even at church those three months he had decided to give religion a try, people stopped and stared at him as if he were an alien. He’d learned to live with it, to act as if he didn’t notice. But he hated it. Hated the way people seemed to expect something of him, though what that might be, Harry didn’t have a clue. “WHAT??!” he always wanted to yell at them. Something in him stopped still at the irony. He was failing as an actor because he was too handsome, but he’d only become an actor because every body had said to him, “You’re so handsome, you ought to be an actor.”
“So make me a star,” Harry mugged, resisting the impulse to lick his fingers now that the paninis were done. Aaron didn’t bother to answer.
“That would have left soap operas,” Aaron went on, more to himself. Harry grunted. He’d been on a soap for two years. The hours were long, the work was dull, and the pay was mingy. Harry mocked the work along with the other actors, but truthfully, he loved the steadiness of the job, the camaraderie on the set, and the steady supply of good-looking women cycling in and out of the bit parts. You could make real money on the side by appearing at mall openings, but Harry’s character on The Fire Within raped his stepdaughter in a drunken stupor, stole money from his father, and burned down the family house to cover his crime. Nobody wanted to hire that guy to sign autographs in a department store in Encino. When he complained to the writers, twin sisters from Baltimore who always wore black stretch pants covered in cat hair, they ignored him. “We just write the crap,” they said. “Bill thinks it up.”
“Bill” was Bill Ball, creator and part owner of The Fire Within. One of the wealthiest men in Hollywood, Bill was eighty-one and lived alone in an all-white house high in Beverly Hills with a roof that could open and close, just like a convertible. Ever since 1967, when he and his wife had entered a “Create Your Own Soap Opera” contest sponsored by the Ajax soap company, Bill had overseen every bend in the road, twist of fate, and turn of fortune for the eighteen characters who made up the longest-running soap opera in the business (though there were some in the industry who liked to say The Fire Within could use a new spark). Bill supposedly watched all the rehearsals on a live feed, but the actors only saw him once a year, when the entire staff of the show was invited to Bill’s house for the annual Christmas party. Harry might still be working on The Fire Within if he hadn’t gone to the party. He had been standing outside on a balcony, admiring the view, pretending the house was his own, when he turned to find the owner himself.
“Hell of a view,” Bill said, leaning over the balustrade so his shiny black leather jacket scrunched up over his shoulders, making him look like a hunchback.
Harry nodded, his pulse racing. Rule number one on the set of The Fire Within had been drilled into his head from the day he signed his contract: Under no circumstances should any actor ever discuss his character with Mr. Ball. If you ran into him in the elevator, if you were seated next to him at the Emmys, if you were pissing next to him at Chasens, it didn’t matter. You never discuss your character with Mr. Ball. But the way things had happened—it being Christmas, the old guy making conversation about nothing, as if trying to find a way to what mattered most—it had to be some sort of a sign.
“You know, sir, I’ve been thinking about Danny,” Harry began, his heart throbbing like a sewing machine.
The old man had given Harry a look of such startled ferocity, Harry stumbled, momentarily losing his train of thought.
“Yes?” he asked.
“It’s just”—Harry swallowed and went on—“he’s such a son of a bitch, I just couldn’t help wonder, are people really like that?”
The old man looked as if he were really thinking hard about the question, really giving it some serious thought. “You know, I’ll have to think about that,” he said. Then he touched Harry on his shoulder, looked him in the eye, and said, “Thanks for the feedback, son, I really appreciate it.” Harry had felt great. It wasn’t often that he defied conventional wisdom and took a leap, but look what happened when he did! He squared his shoulders and looked out at the lights of Los Angeles twinkling below like circuits on a motherboard. The old guy had actually thanked him. From now on, he wasn’t going to be Mr. Rule Follower. Mr. Wimp. Mr. Go with the Crowd. He was going to stand up for what he believed in.
The next week, his stepdaughter killed him.
The woman he’d been sleeping with on the set, a brunette with a turned-up nose, fake breasts, and the disconcerting habit of wearing twenty tiny little-girl barrettes in her hair at once, came to visit while he was packing up his dressing room. “If enough fans complain about your death,” she said, “maybe you can come back as the twin brother nobody knew about?” She had a particularly annoying habit of making every sentence sound like a question: “We’re rehearsing at three?” “I’ll miss you when you’re gone?” “If you get famous, don’t forget me?”
“I raped my stepdaughter,” Harry said. “Who’s going to want me back?”
The brunette frowned and interlocked her fingers together in a gesture that reminded Harry of the child’s game—This is the church, this is the steeple, now open the doors and see all the people. “I could get my mom and her friends to write in?”
Since then, work had been spotty. He’d had a few small roles on television shows and a few call-backs for commercials, but if nothing changed, Harry would be in trouble. So when Aaron laid out the idea for the new game show he was casting, Harry listened closely.
“You know what th
e number-one rule in business is, Harry?” Aaron asked in the Starbucks that afternoon.
Harry’s eyes wandered toward the glass display case behind the counter. Would a fourth panini be too piggish?
“Change,” Aaron said, dead serious. “You stop changing, you die. Game shows were the most profitable sector of television in the seventies. People got stinko rich with that shit.” Stinko? Harry wondered silently at the word. Was it something the hip people were saying now? Had he missed it? “You know those houses in the hills? The ones with seven-car garages, beautiful women coming and going in their little white tennis dresses? You think those guys made their money on ‘quality’ movies? No. They made it on television”—Aaron said the word as if Harry were hard of hearing—“that’s where the real money is, and nobody made more money than people who owned a piece of a game show. But after they got rich, they got stupid. The same hosts, the same goofy gags, the same dumb questions—‘Who wrote Carmen? What three presidents are on Mount Rushmore?’”
“Four,” Harry interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“There are four presidents on Mount Rushmore, not three.”
“Yeah, but who gives a shit? The point is, the genre died because it went soft. People were too nice. Life is hard. It’s full of suffering and humiliation and taking crap. If life is hard, why should the game be easy? If people want a trip to Tahiti for free, they should have to suffer. Game shows died because they didn’t acknowledge that. They didn’t grow.”
Harry stared at Aaron. “You’re going to hurt people on TV?”
“Not physically. Mentally. Remember that game you played when you were a kid? Would you rather eat your grandmother’s toenails or slide down a giant razor into a vat of rubbing alcohol? We want to use things that tap into people ’s deepest fears and revulsions: public nudity, rats, worms.”
“Rats?” Harry hated rats. “What about them?”
“To be determined. You could eat one, kill one with your bare hands. There are a lot of ways to go.”
“You can do that on television?”
“The world is changing.”
“Why me?” Harry asked Aaron the night after they’d filmed the pilot and were having a celebratory drink at the Polo Lounge.
“You have a mean streak,” Aaron answered.
Harry stared at him. It was true, he did have a mean streak. He tried to be placid and nice on the surface. He wanted people to like him. But inside, Harry seethed. The woman in the Ford Bronco who cut him off on La Cienega that morning? Fucking cunt! All the idiots who hadn’t given him the roles he auditioned for? Get cancer, dickheads! The phone company that cut off his bill because he was two months behind? Eat shit and die, assholes! Even he was appalled by the boiling cauldron of resentment brewing right under the surface of his personality, which was why he worked extra hard to hide it. So how had Aaron seen it?
“Don’t worry.” Aaron had laughed when he saw the expression on Harry’s face. “It’s going to make us rich.”
Harry bent at the waist, letting his weight stretch the muscles in the back of his thighs. Through the back door, he could hear Aaron and Catherine laughing. He thought about going in the front door and bypassing Aaron altogether, but he knew his wife would come looking for him. “Harry,” she’d say, forehead creased with concern, “how can you be so rude?” Easily.
He had married Catherine two years earlier, on the beach in Malibu after knowing her for six months. She was thirteen years younger than he, from a wealthy wine-growing family in northern California, and pretty in a blond, ethereal way, though Harry couldn’t help notice how quickly her coloring went from delicate to washed out whenever she had a cold. She rode horses and painted big, pale abstract canvases. “What is it?” he’d ask, staring at one of them. “It’s a feeling,” she’d answer patiently, unflummoxed by his skepticism. That was the thing about people who grow up with money, Harry would think sourly to himself, they never wonder whether they’re wrong or untalented. Maybe it wasn’t a feeling, maybe it was just a blob of paint on a canvas, a thing without meaning, the manifestation of a woman determined to be creative at whatever cost, but Catherine never asked the hard questions of herself. She’d never needed to. Everything had been given to her so easily she never worried over the practical matters of life. If Catherine turned the lights off when she left the room, it was not to keep the electricity bill down, it was to save the world.
At first, Harry was charmed by her assumption of plenty. He had grown so disillusioned with the desperation of his female counterparts in Hollywood—the almost-made-it actresses whose eyes grew fearful as they approached thirty—like horses in a smoky stable. More than once, Harry had gone to get his hair cut at an expensive, marble-floored salon in West Hollywood, only to recognize one of the stylists from his early days of acting. “I couldn’t take it anymore,” the former actress would say, gently pushing Harry’s head forward, scissors poised at the nape of his neck. “All that rejection.” Snip. Snip.
He pushed the door open. Wife and agent looked startled and then—was it Harry’s imagination?—guilty. Aaron recomposed the smile on his face from genuine to fake in less than a second.
“Harry, my man.” He stuck out his hand in that jokey way meant to evoke a ghetto where Aaron would never be caught dead. “Nice number last night.”
Harry kissed Catherine on the cheek. An animal marking his territory. Catherine made a face at the dampness of his sweat. Aaron noticed it. Harry noticed Aaron noticing it, and his heart hardened fractionally toward his wife on account of it.
“What’s this?” Harry asked, looking into an oil-stained bag on the counter.
“Aaron brought them,” Catherine said, smiling at her husband’s agent.
“Everyone should have an agent who brings them croissants for breakfast,” Harry answered. That fattening shit might be fine for them, but he’d never put it in his own mouth.
“I’m here to watch the new promo.” Aaron checked his watch. “Which should be on right about now.”
Harry used the remote control to turn on the television. Almost immediately, the screen was filled with an image of him standing next to a dorky teenager in a University of Ohio sweatshirt. Harry remembered being grossed out by the way the kid breathed through his open mouth, no filter between his insides and the world.
“Tonight, on Would You Rather?” the announcer said, “host Harry Harlow asks, ‘Would you rather conduct a survey wearing nothing but a bathing suit?’” The camera cut to footage of an old man in a tiny black Speedo, black socks, and shoes approaching two teenage girls on a crowded sidewalk in the mall. His body was long and pale, his breasts hung low, and the skeleton underneath the skin was visible, making him look like the figure of death from a medieval linotype. The girls recoiled in horror. The audience roared with laughter.
“Or,” the announcer continued, “endure the dreaded Torturtron?”
The screen changed to a roller coaster–like contraption speeding toward the camera. The terrified face of a middle-aged woman, mouth open in a silent scream, flashed on the screen. The audience roared with approval as the announcer teased, “Tune in to America’s number-one-rated game show, when host Harry Harlow asks…” Harry’s face filled the screen as the audio switched to Harry’s own, unmistakeable baritone. “Which would you rather?”
Standing on one leg, his hamstring stretched behind him like a wading bird at rest, Harry frowned and clicked the television off.
“It looked good,” Catherine said, smiling at her husband. That was another thing about her. The glass wasn’t half full for Catherine. It was full. Always. Even when it was empty. Harry had hoped to become a sunnier, happier person with Catherine, but it had not worked like that. Happiness, it turned out, was not contagious. Instead, Harry had grown to see her optimism as a personality flaw, one that leached the intelligence out of her. If every thing was good, he once tried to explain to her, nothing was good.
“Everything can be good,”
she had answered, round-eyed, serious, filled with a pitying love for her husband. He was appalled by a sudden desire to hit her.
“I look like I have a double chin,” Harry sulked.
“You don’t have a double chin,” Catherine said.
“I know that,” Harry answered, “so why do they shoot me so I look like I do?”
“He’s probably president of the ‘Get Harry’ cabal,” Aaron said, putting on his jacket, “the one that’s always trying to ruin your career.”
“I’m not vain,” Harry answered, “I’m protecting my assets. Our assets.”
Aaron checked his watch. “I’m off,” he announced, kissed Catherine good-bye on one cheek, and waved broadly in his client’s direction. “So long, asset.”
Harry leaned his head back to do the facial exercises his mother used to minimize her double chin. “Ayyyy, eeeeee, ayeee, ohhhhh, youuuuu,” he enunciated, exaggerating the sound of each vowel so it stretched his mouth comically wide.
“And sometimes Y,” Aaron added, shutting the door behind him.
“Everybody always forgets Y,” Catherine agreed.
3
miranda wished she could lie better. She had the feeling that her life would be wider and richer if she could make up things without her throat constricting or the capillaries on her cheek dilating with red heat. Even as a child, she’d been as easy to read as a large-print newspaper.
“Did you eat your vegetables?”
“Mmmhmm.”
“Then why are your pockets full of broccoli?”
“How do you know?”
“I can see your face.”
Having secured the car, Miranda found herself driving toward the university through the back streets of the west side, going to freshman orientation, just as she told her father she would. If she went shopping, as she had planned, she knew she’d never be able to lie convincingly when, at the end of the day, her father would ask, “How was orientation?” his face all lit up with paternal hopefulness. Unlike her mother, who seemed to accept the constant low-level disappointment inherent in parenting, her father would be wounded. She wasn’t entirely sorry to be going. The orientation packet, with its promise of “human pyramid building” and a “literary scavenger hunt” was exactly the kind of thing she would have made fun of in high school, but all that cynicism, she had to admit, had left her with a pretty empty life. Instead of admitting the truth—she was shy and fearful of being wounded—Miranda chose the more comfortable but lonelier role of snob. Participation in group activities was the sign of an unoriginal mind, she told her parents when they asked why she didn’t try out for soccer. Sophia, who shared more than a few of the same character traits, knew Miranda was missing out, but she also understood that children needed to make their own mistakes. As long as her grades and scores were fine, Sophia let her be. By the time Miranda understood that the kids who did play basketball or soccer, argue on the debate team, edit the yearbook, or star in the school play all seemed to be having a better time than she was, it was too late to change.
And Sometimes Why Page 2