by Alon Preiss
“I’m not really a bad person,” Joyce said, while the camera was still off.
“Hold on a second,” Calliope-Luu said sharply, her sympathetic, teary personality temporarily in storage. But when her director gave her the signal, warmth oozed disconcertingly from every pore. Calliope-Luu asked the rudest questions first, personal questions about Joyce’s relationship with the senator. How had they managed to carry on such an affair for the better part of a decade without it becoming common knowledge? She refused to answer.
“The reason I’m here,” she said quietly, “is that I explained in great detail to the Washington Post that I was stepping forward to try to avert the military assistance that Senator Solomon” – how strange it sounded to call him that on national television! – “the assistance that Stephen is trying to push through the Senate, which will go to the Royalist faction in Phnom Penh to help them fight against the government faction. So what he’s really trying to do is set brother against brother and bring a new civil war to the urban areas just as peace is settling in. I could have just started a little lonely crusade, but no one would have paid any attention to me. So I decided to try to bring this to the public’s attention the only way I knew how. But the problem is, the Post said nothing about the Cambodia issue, so I had to prolong this whole thing and come to speak with you myself.”
Calliope-Luu leaned forward, touched Joyce lightly on the knee. Joyce politely brushed the reporter’s hand away.
“I told you that I would ask all the tough questions,” Calliope-Luu said. “I can’t ignore the tough questions.”
“Nothing ‘tough’ about those questions. It was a relationship like any relationship. We met, we spent time together, we talked about the future. Same as anyone.”
“What about the rumors that you had an abortion?”
“If I’d become pregnant,” Joyce said, “there’s a good chance that I would have had an abortion.”
“I know what this must be like,” Calliope-Luu said. “I was in your position once. I was with a man for ten years who raped me repeatedly. He beat me, and I wound up in the hospital on many occasions. He hit my womb with his fist until I miscarried. I was abused by my father. I’m going to try not to cry. I know all about bad relationships.” In my fifty million dollar mansion, asleep on my silk sheets, surrounded by my gigolos, I dream about what your sad life must be like. You can trust me.
“I’m not like your usual interview subjects,” Joyce said. “I don’t have any interest in people knowing this. I don’t want to discuss this. Yes, Senator Solomon and I had a relationship. It was like any relationship, except that he was married. There was nothing odd or sick about it. Like many women, had I become pregnant, I might well have had an abortion. Why is that interesting?”
“How can the American people be certain that you’ve even had a long-term relationship with the Senator?” Calliope-Luu asked, throwing a hard-ball question, apparently.
“I played the tape for the Washington Post,” she said, “and they’ve published the portions that provide proof, which you might have read. When Stephen and I last spoke on the phone, I just brought up our relationship a lot. You know, I said things like, ‘This affair we’ve been having for almost ten years.’ All the talk about the closeness of our relationship, eventually it seemed to make him nervous, and that’s when he said, ‘If you go public with this I’ll kill you. Killing one more person won’t bother me.’ ”
“What did he mean when he said, ‘Killing one more person won’t bother me’?”
“He just meant, I think, that he has killed so many people around the world. He’s pushed for aid to Savimbi, El Salvador, the contras, the Khmer Rouge, Renamo. That’s killed a lot of people. I suppose he just recognizes that, morally, killing me wouldn’t change the total body count that much.” She stopped when her lawyer tapped her on the shoulder. He whispered in her ear, and Joyce quickly added, “That’s not to say that I think his threat was anything more than bluster.”
“The Washington Post apparently alleged some financial impropriety by Senator Solomon, though it didn’t directly implicate you.”
“The article didn’t implicate me at all, except that I accepted Stephen’s gifts.”
“But is it true that – ”
“I don’t know anything about that. I went to the Post over a week ago with my story and my tape-recording of the phone conversation with Stephen. I waited for the story to break, and I phoned them every day. I suppose the Post had to find an abuse of power angle before publishing my story, and I guess abuse of power is not that hard to find in Washington. It took them only a week.” Only secretly would the paper’s editors admit that, absent the bona fide proof of a long-term adulterous affair by a future president of the United States, this story, purportedly concerning “financial” improprieties, would never have made the front page. “Again,” Joyce repeated, “I don’t even understand what those allegations were supposed to be about. I’m just here to talk about Cambodia.”
Calliope-Luu thought, touched her lower lip with one perfectly manicured nail. Her gigantic hair bobbed up and down in the wind. She opened her eyes widely, and she smiled a small sad smile. “Did you love the Senator?”
“Yes,” Joyce replied, “and I still love him. That’s forever, that won’t ever change.” Now, ten years of her life gone. What would she look forward to, if not his clandestine visits, their nights together in her little apartment in the capital? What else did she have? A tear came to her eye, and she gave up. “Calliope-Luu, I love him more than anything. People have been laughing about that for the last few days, everyone’s been making fun of it, all the comedians .... I can’t even watch television, because whenever I watch TV, someone will joke about me, and ask why? and how? – how could I ever love such a cold man, a man with no ... without any ... I don’t know, you just know what I mean. But he wasn’t really like that, or I guess he was like that, but he was also like something else, something I can’t describe.” She put one hand on her forehead and looked down at the ground. Somehow, she knew that this pained and inarticulate confession made Calliope-Luu very happy, that she was another feather in Calliope-Luu’s cap, another notch on her bedpost.
“Then, Joyce,” Calliope-Luu said, her voice low and husky, “I have to ask you a question that might hurt you. I know better than anyone about impossible love affairs, so I don’t ask how you could love him. I ask, if you love him, how could you do this to him?”
In a small voice, Joyce said “I thought there were more important things than love. I realized that I would never be able to live with myself if I didn’t do whatever I could to try to save lives.”
She stopped, exasperated.
“Is this an alien idea? People seem shocked at the idea that I might have killed my fetus, but Senator Solomon tries to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Cambodia and no one even wants to talk about it. I had the power to give up one thing, one thing that is very important to me, so that people could walk safely through their city streets on the other side of the world, so that millions of people I’ve never met can live without fear of dying violently and painfully, so that little children will stop getting their limbs blown off every single day, so that people can stop grieving .... Why did Stephen want to do this? I used to think it was ego, but now I see that he’s doing this thing quietly, secretly, and so I think maybe it’s blind hatred, some hatred that keeps him from thinking rationally, from caring about the results of his actions at all, from the misery he causes millions of ordinary, anonymous people.” Why was she near hysterical tears? Perhaps some hypnotic power Calliope-Luu had over celebrities. Joyce tried to control her breathing. “So I gave him up, I slashed and burned the last ten years of my life, I ruined and destroyed everything in my life that makes me happy.” Now tears were flowing freely down her cheeks, and she looked Calliope-Luu directly in the eyes. “Now I don’t have him to love anymore, I can’t even keep my apartment, I’ve lost my job. I gave all that up to save lives. W
hy does everyone think that’s so funny? Why are they making me into a clown?”
The senator’s difficulties were a hot topic of conversation at a dinner party that Katherine and Emmett gave for a few friends that week. Emmett would repeat his usual claims about the senator’s inherently evil nature and defend the press coverage, insisting that the whole story was not about sex, but about murder. Before dinner, Paulette entertained the guests, jumping about in a little purple party dress that Katherine had chosen for her, shouting “Buh!” gleefully. From time to time, the Chinese acrobat would perform a back flip in the living room, almost thoughtlessly, and the other guests would applaud.
“Watch this,” Katherine said. “Paulette’s learned something new.” She looked straight at her daughter and asked, “Is your name Paulette?”
“Yuh!” Paulette exclaimed, smiling proudly.
“Are you my daughter?”
“Yuh!”
Their friend Ken, a broker, asked, “Are you a man from Mars?” to which Paulette did not respond. She looked up at her mother with a bit of panic in her eyes.
“She can’t say ‘No,’ yet,” Emmett explained.
Katherine laughed. “She doesn’t know about men from Mars.”
Paulette still looked frightened. “Bedtime, sweetheart,” Emmett said, smiling down at his daughter, his own frightened little creation. “Time to say good night.”
The next morning, Emmett read all the New York papers for news about Senator Solomon and his pathetic attempts to win public vindication. He had scrapped his foreign policy agenda and was working overtime to win back his reputation from what was now regarded, somewhat irrationally, as a financial scandal. Immediately after his mistress spoke to Calliope-Luu, the senator held a press conference, swearing that he would continue fighting for the people of New York, that he would not allow his political enemies and the cynicism of the day to win. And so on.
As she got ready for work, Katherine made her usual attempts to be fair, pointing out that these sorts of things were really no one’s business. Emmett said he knew that, but he relished the man’s discomfort nevertheless. Still, it bothered Emmett that a man who had caused so much death around the globe was being publicly crucified for diverting funds intended for foreign bombing raids, giving the money to a young woman he apparently loved. What about his crimes? Emmett wondered aloud whenever anyone would listen. Shouldn’t he be punished for those instead? “Does it matter what he’s punished for?” his brother Joe asked. “Can you afford to be so fussy? Why not just be happy that he’s been punished, and leave it at that?” Emmett could not immediately think of a good response. Al Capone had been jailed for tax evasion, after all
“Drop Paulette off at Nancy’s apartment today,” Katherine said, heading out the door. Emmett kissed her goodbye, and he returned to the news.
Emmett read the tabloids and trade papers for tidbits on Irina, whose face had become almost familiar in the gossip columns. His Times article received attention in every news story discussing Irina’s story-book ascendancy. The glossy entertainment magazines, so charmed by this story, had begun to take note of Emmett’s name and now offered him occasional work.
It seemed that the only Hollywood source he hadn’t spoken to since Irina’s fortuitous discovery was Irina herself, but in spite of her absence from his life, her spirit hung heavy in everything he did. The delirium into which he had plunged as a result of Senator Solomon’s travails was balanced and even overwhelmed by his nervousness over Irina’s career. He could no longer be sure that he had ever really believed that she could be a modern Garbo. He had not set out to change the course of popular culture. He could not possibly claim that right. He knew now that, in his desperate struggle to meet deadline and to give the Times a story worth publishing, he had used his words too carelessly. He had plucked Irina from the Third World and somehow sent her to Hollywood. Easy enough to write an article and give your opinion, but he had never expected everyone to take that opinion seriously ....
She now gave more revealing interviews to the press. She claimed to have been a “mafia party girl,” which made a few headlines. She explained that the reason every major Hollywood actress had turned down this role was that, in one scene, she would be tied completely naked to a chair and a group of villainous thugs would shave the hair from her head. It was apparently not the nakedness that bothered anyone, but the director’s insistence on actual baldness. In interviews, Irina also waxed homesick for Russia. “I miss the ice cream cafés in Moscow,” she said, “and the huge parks like forests, and the ponds. I will return there a star, and rich.”
But even as the press doted on every word Irina telephoned back to the States, the young actress had secretly begun to worry about her potential stardom. The sequences shot in Switzerland did not go as planned. It seemed to her that nearly every time she opened her mouth in front of the camera, she would stumble over her lines. Even when she managed to pronounce the multi-syllabic English words correctly, the director would betray his frustration. “Just saying your lines without stammering isn’t enough!” he exclaimed more than once. At one point he asked without bothering to disguise his contempt, “Didn’t you even think to learn English before coming to America to be a movie star?”
One cold Wednesday evening, Irina appeared on the set, her brow furrowed with nervousness. She had been up for hours the night before, studying a particularly convoluted piece of text. A speech coach, who had been hurriedly assigned to her after the second day of filming, had been unable to guide her through it. After she stumbled over her lines on the fifth take, the director exploded, bellowed obscenities, then hurled a chair from the set into a nearby snow bank. Irina could not understand a word he said, but marched off the set without another word, her face frozen and unreadable. That night, she found a message from the director at the front desk of the hotel, demanding a meeting in his hotel room at seven am.
“Irina,” he said the next morning over breakfast, “I have lost my temper with you, and it wasn’t your fault. This script, it was written for an actress who can deliver lines with wit. It’s meant as an intellectual game of cat-and-mouse. No one will ever believe you in that sort of role.” He sighed. “I watched Chernyy Glaz from beginning to end last night, and we’re going to tailor this film to match your strengths.” He raised a finger. “Another actress might have been fired. But you’ve received so much publicity, so much good publicity. That is how things must remain. If you are unhappy with these decisions, I just ask you to discuss them with me. Don’t let anything leave this room.” He had a new idea, he explained. He would eliminate nearly all of her lines in favor of more silent meaningful stares and the cool brutality with which the casting director had been so impressed after her abbreviated viewing of Chernyy Glaz. Scenes in which the original script called for her to explain her nefarious plans would be revamped; now, she simply would hold a telephone to her ear and nod. “Make that mean face you’re so good at.” He was adding a few more handsome and appealing male characters to the script whom Irina could screw and murder. More nudity and violence, he said, fewer actual words, less screen time. “But you can still say ‘I love you’ before you kill the guy,” he added, more gently. “I liked the way you did that. Single syllables, filled with lust, tenderness, implicit violence ....” Scenes scheduled to be filmed in Moscow had been cut. She would no longer be the mastermind of the film’s criminal scheme but a pawn, a Mata Hari without the latter’s comparatively searing intelligence. “You see,” he said, “in our new vision of this film, the mob tells you what to do, and you do it. Like a machine.” Irina nodded solemnly, letting his words sink in. From now on, she was to listen to the mob, shut up, screw and kill. It sounded, she thought, familiar. She could not refuse, she knew that. Do with me as you please, she thought, trying to leave her expression completely blank. I am defenseless.
She followed his instructions obediently. She disagreed with his every word. Perhaps they could have re-written her lines to make th
em more pronounceable. Perhaps she could have alternated her English lines with the occasional Russian. Could she not have been a killing machine with half a brain? She quickly dismissed any thoughts of resistance. She did not tell him any of her ideas, nor did she speak to the press, except to exude enthusiasm. When her scenes were completed, a car took her away from the little city in the snow, and she realized now that castles can also be prisons.
The rest of the major actors in the film flew off to Moscow, while she remained in Los Angeles, waiting for the director to return for final interiors on a sound stage in Hollywood. In the meantime, the studio’s publicists worked on getting her seen, giving preliminary interviews, telling funny stories in her own inimitably muddled way about the traumas and triumphs of filming a major motion picture up to her knees in snow. She felt miserable, dejected. However, her agent in New York reported that he was fielding offers. “Let’s sign something before my bad reviews ruin me,” she said, and he took her seriously. By the end of the week she had agreed, after a brief meeting with a first-time director, to play the exotic “other woman” in a romantic comedy. Her salary would exceed one million dollars. The role had originally been written for a Chinese woman, but a Russian had been deemed “exotic enough,” her agent told her, with a little laugh.
The second week in Los Angeles, Irina tired of the photographers, and she realized with some surprise that she had not called Emmett to tell him the good news.
He was startled to hear her voice. “Where are you?” he asked.
“I have returned to Los Angeles,” she said. “Have you heard? I am making an American Hollywood film.”
Emmett said that he had heard.
“But you know,” she went on, “I am calling only to thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Emmett said. Silence ensued. “That’s it?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered. He could hear her breathing. “I have something else. It’s hard to say. I don’t know the right words.”