"He must be pretty long in the tooth now."
"Only in his forties, and Tampa is actually a good actor," Flip said. "Great comic timing. He worked with Ben and me on our first show, No Human Involved." Again, there was a pause, as if waiting for a gasp of recognition, but Tess didn't have to fake her ignorance this time. She remembered a terrific novel by that name, but not a television show.
"It ran for only two seasons, and it never got the ratings it deserved, but the critics loved us. Loved. Ahead of its time, a one-camera show done with voice-over. And Johnny won an Emmy for his guest shot. He was our first choice to play Mann. Like I said, he's really good. But Selene — Selene's got all the heat since Baby Jane."
"A remake of the Bette Davis movie?"
"No, this was really gritty, done in the style of Requiem for a Dream, about a fourteen-year-old prostitute. The studio that bought it at Sundance had decided it was a stinker and they dumped it in theaters on Memorial Day weekend last year, a sacrificial lamb opposite X-Men. It almost disappeared, but then she got nominated for a Golden Globe. Did you see it?"
Tess decided not to volunteer that she had been part of the rabble flocking to X-Men with her boyfriend, instead of dutifully paying eight dollars to watch yet another young actress prove her Serious Thespian Chops by pretending to be a prostitute. The only cinematic cliché that bothered her more was high-spirited white guys, à la Ferris Bueller or the Blues Brothers, proving their innate soulfulness by inspiring black people to dance.
"It's in my Netflix queue," she lied.
"Well, she's great in it. And she's ours, for now. The future of this show depends far more on Selene Waites than it does on Johnny Tampa, and that's all there is to it. I can't risk having anything happen to her."
"I'm a one-woman agency. I don't have the manpower — woman-power, if you will — to provide the kind of services you want."
"We just need someone to be with her while she's off set. When she's filming, our security provides all the coverage we need. But away from work, she needs someone, and it has to be a woman."
"Why?"
"Men are… helpless around Selene. Any male between eight and eighty, she can twist to her will."
"Including you?"
Flip pulled out a wallet and showed Tess a photograph of what appeared to be Philip Tumulty III. Same brown curls, same puckish expression — and probably the same Freudian issues in a decade or so. "My son, just turned five. He's back in Los Angeles with his mom. Now that he's in school, they can't travel to locations with me, although if we get a full order for Mann of Steel, we'll move east. Which would be a godsend, having a chance to raise him some place other than Los Angeles. You know my dad?"
Tess, remembering how upset Flip had been when she almost invoked his father's name, shrugged vaguely to indicate that she might — possibly, maybe — have heard of someone named Phil Tumulty.
"It's okay. I know he's the big man, that I can make television shows the rest of my life and win a hundred thirty-seven Emmys and probably never equal the two movies he made in the '80s. Anyway, my dad is a great director and a brilliant writer. Was, before he started doing big-budget crap. He wins on that score. But he was and is a shitty father, and I can beat him at that game. I'm not saying that I'm made of stone, that I can't see how beautiful Selene is. I'm saying that I resist temptation for this little guy's sake."
"That's great," Tess said, meaning it, but also wondering at his vehemence. Flip's little speech carried the whiff of addiction, a junkie at his first 12-step meeting, saying the right things, but not yet feeling them. "I get that you need a woman. But I'm not the right woman for the job."
"We'll see," Flip said, putting his wallet away. His cell phone reprised its eerie imitation of a real phone, and he departed abruptly, leaving Tess alone for the first time. A sneeze overtook her, and Tess realized that the pink chenille had spread, like kudzu, almost to her nose. She hoped someone returned with her clothes before the bathrobe swallowed her completely. Killer Bathrobe — now that was a promising concept for a horror film. She would rather see that than a hundred Oscar-worthy films about beautiful underage prostitutes.
Chapter 3
What time was it?
The hotel's blackout curtains were drawn, which always disoriented him, made him feel as if he were in a sensory deprivation tank. Going on two months in Baltimore, and he still couldn't get on local time. Couldn't get on anything local, if you didn't count the local girls, and he didn't. He was through with them, anyway.
Ben looked at the empty spot next to him. Had Selene really been there, just a few hours ago? She hadn't left so much as a dent in the pillow. Maybe she didn't weigh enough to make an impression. She was thin even by actress standards, almost fragile. It had been disturbing how young she looked, undressed. He wasn't a pedophile, for fuck's sake. And while a lifetime spent more or less in Los Angeles had inured him to bony women, at least most of those had gone out and bought a pair of tits along the way. But then, Selene liked to say she was 100 percent certified organic, one of those throwback freaks born gorgeous. He could never work out whether such women had increased or decreased in value as plastic surgery became mainstream. If anyone could buy a face and a body, then was it so special to have one bestowed on you by nature? The law of supply and demand would seem to suggest that natural beauty was less important than it had once been. But that face. With a face like that, he could forgive Selene for not having any tits.
He glanced at his Treo. Several messages from Flip, including a text, which said in its entirety: "Fucking Selene." For one paranoid second, Ben imagined a question mark at the end of that flat phrase, and his empty stomach lurched. Flip would not be Mr. Happy if he found out that Ben had bedded Selene. In fact, Flip had expressly forbidden him to fuck Selene, which was when Ben decided he pretty much had to do it. Who was Flip to tell him anything? Other than the boss and executive producer. But Ben was an executive producer on this project as well — finally — because he had brought the concept to Flip. He had been screwed out of the created-by credit, but he was going to have sole teleplay and story credit on four of the episodes and, as always, he would stick a spoon in Flip's mush, make it work. Flip isn't the boss of me. Only he was, kind of.
Fucking Selene. Had he made her late for her set call? No, his conscience was pretty clear on that score. He had not only gone downstairs with her at 4 A.M., but had gotten in her cab as well, accompanying her back to her condo, watching her pass through the glass doors. He wanted to kiss her on the front steps, act like the teenager he once was and she had so recently been, at least chronologically, but they couldn't risk that, not even at 4 A.M. in Baltimore, with only a stoned cabdriver to see. Fact was, his little act of gallantry, riding in the cab, had been a big enough risk.
The irony was Ben didn't even sleep with actors anymore, not for years. He had had enough of that kind of crazy to last him the rest of his life. And Selene really was on the bubble, age-wise, fifteen years younger than he was. How old had Jerry Seinfeld been when he dated that huge-breasted seventeen-year-old? Were the rules different for the Jerry Seinfelds of the world than they were for the Ben Marcuses? Probably. Almost certainly. Fuck Flip for telling him not to touch her. Now he had, three times so far, and she was trouble. He should have stuck to Baltimore waitresses, girls for whom a night at the Tremont Hotel counted as an upgrade. Whereas Selene had pointed out to him tonight — twice — that it was relative slumming for her. When she was told she would have to be in Baltimore for almost four months, she had rejected every hotel in Baltimore and Washington, finally agreeing to stay in a furnished, four-bedroom waterfront condo that was costing the production four thousand dollars a week. A week! You could buy most of Baltimore for less. And she had stipulated that it was four bedrooms or nothing, saying she intended to bring her family in from Utah, but none of them had shown yet, thank God. He sometimes wondered if the family — the happy, well-adjusted Mormons who had let their youngest daughter head off to
Hollywood at fourteen — were even real, or the creation of some slick publicist.
The budget wasn't Ben's problem, but he found Selene's demands outrageous on principle. "What a dinky little suite," Selene had said last night, all but inserting her entire head in the minibar, and he had experienced a clutch of fear for his per diem. Lottie was watching his expenses like a hawk, eager to catch him in any kind of impropriety of the fiscal variety. He wasn't supposed to know it — Lottie had told Flip not to tell — but she had argued against his installation as an executive producer, said they could keep him at story editor, which meant a lower salary. Pretty ballsy, considering that the network had forced Lottie on them, insisted they needed someone with a track record for running a tight set. And Mussolini made the trains run on time, Ben wanted to say, but that comparison was decidedly unfair. To Mussolini.
What Lottie didn't know was that it was useless to ask Flip to keep anything from Ben. Their friendship trumped all other alliances. Flip trusted Ben more than anyone, even his old man, especially his old man. Ben, after all, hadn't dumped Flip's mother, moved to fucking Taos, and started a second family. A second family that enjoyed the true big money, while Flip and his mom had struggled to get by on a mere fifty thousand a month.
Ben scrolled through the other messages stacked up on his Treo. Morning had been second-unit stuff, so he had been within his rights to sleep in, yet Flip was out there, raring to go. He probably just wanted to pull a head trip on Wes, the director on this episode, one of the eight hacks that the network had foisted on them, the same way they had shoved Lottie down their throats. "You two guys know words, these guys know visuals," the network types had said. You couldn't call them suits anymore because most of these losers didn't wear suits, with the exception of the lone female executive, who looked as if she should be playing the male lead in some Edwardian-era drama. The network, Zylon, aka Plan-Z — God help them, their wizened corporate owner thought the name was hip, as opposed to a ready-made punch line for television critics everywhere — was struggling, trying to find a toehold among the other not-quite networks, the FXs and USAs and Spikes of the nonpremium cable world. The buzz was that Plan Z was a vanity project, that its billionaire owner would become disenchanted with the money drain, and the network would probably disappear before a single one of its shows even aired. But hadn't they said the same thing about Fox once upon a time?
Then again, Fox had come along before all the buzz about platforms, before it was possible to download a television show on your phone, before iTunes and, worst of all, YouTube, which had convinced half the sentient world that they, too, were filmmakers because they could point and shoot. Ben and Flip were only thirty-five, way too young to be playing the "back in my day" game, but that's how he felt, the Ancient Producer, with the albatross of new technology and old expectations weighing him down. In fact, his back hurt and his knees creaked a little as he got out of bed, but he blamed that on the subpar hotel mattress.
Selene had a Tempur-Pedic bed in her rental apartment. She had Tempur-Pedic beds in every room, for the phantom family that never showed up. Lottie had shared that with Ben in a rare burst of camaraderie, assuming he resented Selene as much as everyone else. He had before he slept with her, but he supposed it would be hypocritical now. Instead he resented her for not sharing the penthouse-condo-Tempur-Pedic wealth with him.
Not that he had ever lost too much sleep over being a hypocrite. That was Flip's side of the street, being all earnest and lovable. Ben had no problem smiling in someone's face, taking his money, all the while raking him over the coals behind his back. Even Flip.
He pulled on last night's clothes, but he wasn't a pig enough to stomach yesterday's smells, which carried a faint whiff of Selene, so he rooted around for something fresher to wear. Eau de Selene wasn't the light flowery fragrance that one might expect, more like cigarettes and Red Bull and Kahlúa. In fact, the whole room smelled of her. He'd go out, instead of having his usual room service breakfast, which was pretty ordinary fare anyway, although he enjoyed torturing the kitchen with special requests, such as fresh chives on his omelet. They had tried to get away with dried once and he had sent it back, if only to keep them on their toes.
But today — which, now that he had the curtains open, looked pretty nice — he was going to venture into the city, and not just his usual Starbucks. He was going to find some cool little diner, eat whatever people ate in Baltimore. Pancakes? Scrapple? Flip kept encouraging him to try scrapple, swore by the stuff, but Ben sensed he was being punked. Whatever he ended up eating, he was going to sit at the counter and inhale all the cholesterol and trans fats and scorched caffeine that the city had to offer, read the local sports page, pretend to care about the Ravens, and if Lottie bitched about him being MIA, he'd call it research. Mann of Steel was a man of the people. How could Ben write him convincingly if he didn't get out there, mingle with the Real Folks?
Out in the crisp air, his head clearing even as his feet stumbled a bit, he thought to wonder if Selene really understood that they had to keep their thing a secret. Then he wondered if they had a thing, after three times. He didn't really care if they slept together again. Unless she didn't want to, in which case he would definitely be keen for it. But he cared desperately that she tell no one, because if anyone else knew, it would get back to Lottie, and if Lottie had this morsel of gossip, it would get back to Flip, who would consider it a betrayal. And as much as Ben resented Flip sometimes — for the name that opened doors, for the anticharisma that drew people to him — Ben never wanted to hurt him. Flip was his best friend.
He stopped for a second, physically and mentally centering himself. He was good at understanding people, their desires and motivations. It was, in the end, what he brought to his partnership with Flip — not just a thirty-year friendship cemented on the first day of nursery school, but a genuine curiosity about people. Flip was too used to people being curious about him — more correctly, curious about his father, and his various stepmoms. Line for line, Flip wrote terrific dialogue, but it was Ben who gave it depth, because Ben had actually spent some time thinking about other people. The joke on No Human Involved was that it would have been the show's modus operandi if Ben hadn't been hired. Flip was kind of a robot — at work. But Ben still remembered the kid he knew all those years at Harvard-Westlake, the one whose dad almost never showed for anything, the one who had cried when the debate team had been trounced at regionals. Sometimes, he had to remind himself that that Flip was still somewhere inside the increasingly priggish guy who showed up on set every day, wearing another goddamn local ball cap.
Now, standing on a corner somewhere in downtown Baltimore, Ben turned his knowledge of people on himself. If he had slept with Selene just because Flip told him not to, why was he so fearful of discovery? Wasn't the point of disobeying a friend's high-handed order to remind the friend that he wasn't the boss, that he couldn't control everything? What would Flip do, anyway? Wasn't there an argument to be made that Selene would be much easier to handle if she were having an affair with one of the producers? They had actually hoped, for a day or two, that she might get attached to her costar, but for all the chemistry she and Johnny Tampa generated on-screen, their hostility toward each other was palpable. Those two really hated each other. Rumor was that Tampa was gay, but in Ben's opinion, no gay man would have allowed himself to go that much to seed at forty-two. Wardrobe was going nuts, trying to keep up with the expanding ass of Johnny Tampa, and the DP was forced to shoot him above the waist most of the time, a waste of a great DP. Lottie rationalized that they were lucky that Tampa put on his weight below the belt, but wouldn't they be luckier if they could just keep the fat fuck from going facedown into craft services like there was no tomorrow?
Ben popped a Nexium, which would help the reflux, but not the emotions beneath it. What was weighing him down? It wasn't Selene, Ben decided. She was just another secret.
He found a diner tucked into a side street near the courthouse,
but his appetite was gone. He drank black coffee and read USA Today, going over and over the weather info for California. Where, in fact, it was raining and there were mud slides, but he still would rather be there. Only four more weeks of shooting, and then he could go home. He didn't belong here, and neither did Flip, much as he pretended to love it. If they got the pickup for a second season, Ben was going to actively lobby for Los Angeles or Vancouver. They could reproduce Baltimore on a soundstage. Hell, based on what he had seen, they could make a better one.
Chapter 4
He stopped at the mock-retro diner on Eastern Avenue, the one he had come to think of as his base camp, a term he had picked up from one of the call sheets he had actually seen. They were on the soundstage later today, with the second unit on the water, which would make it difficult to get to her. But then, except for that one brief encounter, it had proven impossible to get to her, and he was beginning to suspect this was no mere coincidence. They were keeping her from him. If he could just get her alone, he was sure she would be understanding, even sympathetic. But he needed her alone.
Perhaps he should hire a pro, someone detached, but that was exactly the reason he didn't want a pro. A pro had nothing on line but his fee. Besides, the pros used so far had done nothing but collect their fat checks. They hadn't even bothered to apologize for their failures, their incompetence.
The diner, with its aluminum siding and leatherette booths, reminded him of Diner, although he knew this one was shiny new, a fake on many levels, its booths harboring video games instead of miniature jukeboxes. The real diner from Diner had been moved downtown after the movie wrapped, and staffed with juvenile delinquents as part of a training program. Funny to think how desolate East Baltimore and the waterfront had been then, how easy it was to create the illusion that a diner sat on a lonely little forkful of land in the middle of the old industrial base. That had been his first visit to a movie set, more than twenty-five years ago. No — wait, his memory was playing tricks on him. It was only after seeing Diner in the theater that he realized that a movie had been made here, in Baltimore. He had been almost sick over it. What were the odds that Hollywood would ever return? But Levinson had come back, several times over, and Phil Tumulty had followed with his version of Baltimore. Although he thought Tumulty the better filmmaker, he felt closer to Levinson's world. He remembered the day that they closed Howard Street to film the collision outside the old Anderson Cadillac — that was Levinson's Tin Men — and the balloon festival in Patterson Park, staged expressly for Pit Beef, the first in Tumulty's trilogy about growing up in Highlandtown.
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