by Susan Isaacs
“Did she have a plan?” I asked.
“I remember she showed me a list of all the zip codes and what the per capita income was for each one plus lots of other demographic boring stuff. She was so optimistic, so positive. I could almost see her on the cover of Time.” Zee put her feet up on the seat again, wrapped her arms around her legs, then rested her chin on her knees, a feat of elasticity I found impressive. “At first anyway.”
“She changed at some point?”
“Yeah, I guess last summer, probably in July. She’d said something a few months before then that summer might be a little slow for business because parents were around more, kids could do more outdoors and all that. I’d have thought that was a good time for filming, except I had this feeling that if I liked my job, I shouldn’t contradict her. But business didn’t pick up after school began again.” Before I could ask she added: “It didn’t slow down either. Courtney just seemed kind of bummed to me, although that was strictly me and my ESP. For all I know I could have been reading her totally wrong. Because she wasn’t all that readable. She never made small talk. And she had zero curiosity.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like when people meet me and hear ‘Friedman,’ they tend to squinch up their eyes because they’re thinking: Asian and adopted? Half-and-half? Or because of the film-major business, they’re curious about what my favorite movie is. But with Courtney, zilch. She read my resume, checked out the first two minutes of my student film, and told me what the pay was. I was less a human being and more the mechanism that operated the camera. She was Total Business Person.”
“She was cold?”
“Not what most people would call cold. With a truly cold person, you’re always wondering, Shit, what did I do wrong? But she never made me feel inadequate. In fact, I could tell she liked the way I worked. She’d even say Good work! and sound as though she meant it. So I felt she had her code of privacy or sense of boundaries and it wasn’t anything personal.”
“Did she stay so dispirited about the way the business was going?” I asked.
“Not really. By the time mid-September came she ... I honestly don’t know. She did what she had to do—go over what each family was looking for, how much to shoot. But she acted disengaged, like her mind was someplace else. Before that, even when she was going through her bummed phase, she’d always brainstorm ideas on where to film, or think of ways to get the parents to ask for more time, which equaled money, but essentially she said to me, Whatever.”
“I’m trying to get a handle on her,” I explained to Zee. “She doesn’t sound as if she was the world’s warmest person,” I mused.
“Except that’s really not right because with her kids she was Mrs. Warmth. Mrs. Mom. I mean, Travis, the little boy, came into the room once. She put her arms out for him and her face got this blissed-out expression. Madonna and child—the Virgin Mary, not the singer. And from the way her house was fixed up, she was really into that Mrs. Homebody role. She had no eye in terms of film, but she did have ... I guess you’d call it Rich Suburban Lady good taste.” An uh-oh expression came over Zee’s big-cheeked face.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured her. “I’m not rich. And if left to my own devices—although fortunately my friends restrain me—I’d probably put up purple plaid wallpaper. But I know what you mean. Nothing offensive.”
“Right. But nothing imaginative. Nothing personal. Everything done. I mean, you couldn’t pee there without good taste. Sorry. My mom hates it when I say ‘pee.’ Anyhow, you’d go to the bathroom—the guest bathroom, downstairs. She had a pile of guest towels—the kind you’re afraid to use because they have to be ironed, but then you’ve got to because you’re scared she’ll think you didn’t wash your hands. And then on the sink counter—pink marble—she had this basket with eensy-weensy Tylenol and Motrin tins and a teeny sewing kit. Tampaxes with a pink bow around each one. I swear to God!” She shook her head and added: “Courtney lined the bottom of the waste-basket with a paper doily.”
Zee Friedman’s breezy manner was actually not that distant from my own children’s more sardonic Long Island style: Both were true to the Generation X credo that when one is profoundly cool, life can hold no surprises, and thus, there is never any reason to act excited. “You couldn’t go into that house without feeling awe,” Zee went on, sounding noticeably unawed. “It was the apotheosis of its kind. Did you get that? ‘Apotheosis’? That’s four years at Columbia. Anyhow, her house is to upper-middle-class suburban houses what the Parthenon is to Doric architecture.”
I nodded, recollecting the miniature decorated lampshades over each candelabra bulb in the chandelier in the front hall, the impeccable arrangement of photograph, lamp, and leather-bound books on a small antique table in the living room. How Courtney must have loved what she created. Then I said: “I saw the StarBaby video you made of Luke Badinowski.” Zee simultaneously grinned and pressed her fingertips against her temples, as if Luke or his parents had been a headache. “Your work looked professional to me.”
She shook her head. “Thanks, but it’s just competent. I’ve got an editor friend with super-rich parents. She’s got a monsterly expensive piece of computer editing equipment, an Avid. Trust me: If you used one, your videos would totally look Kar-Wai Wong.”
“What kind of equipment did Courtney Logan have?”
Zee ran her fingers through her hair, pulling it back from her face and shoulders, then twisting it into a bun. “Not that much. Lights for indoor shots. No big, expensive deal. I forget what they’re called—the things those guys who make wedding videos use. Maybe eight, nine hundred bucks’ worth of lights.”
I thought about the fifteen thousand bucks Fancy Phil had claimed came out of the Logans’ joint money market account plus the ten thousand Courtney had ultimately kept from the Smith Barney brokerage account. Fancy Phil had said that sum, twenty-five thousand dollars, was spent for “camera crap” and promoting the company. “What about cameras?”
“I used my own,” Zee replied. She let her hair fall back to her shoulders.
“Any other equipment?”
“No. The other guy she had filming kept the StarBaby equipment in his house. He went to Wesleyan.”
“Did you ever meet him?”
“No. Typical Courtney. She said practically zero about him. I got the impression she didn’t want us to get to talking, which probably meant she was paying one of us more than the other. Anyway, she expected I’d use my own equipment. I did rent a mike because the one on my camera makes everybody sound like King Kong.”
“Did she spend a bundle on ads or publicity?” I asked.
“That I don’t know. If she did, I couldn’t see any serious results. The whole time I worked for her, the level of business seemed about the same.”
“Did she ever talk shop with you?”
Zee leaned her head against the back of the love seat and gazed up at the carved molding at the top of her wall. The decoration could have been a series of grapes or rosettes, but obscured by a century’s worth of paint, it was just evenly spaced bumps. “One time. She said businesses fail for two reasons. Lack of capital and one other thing. Patience or a plan or something.” She looked apologetic. “I’m interested in production, but what she was going on about was more like a business school rant. I timed out.”
“What made her chatty about business all of a sudden?”
“It must have been when I asked her if she had any more work, around July, when she started to act bummed. I’d been hoping she’d give me more to do. But she sort of intimated that she wanted to spread whatever work there was around, not to have to rely on one person.”
“Did that make sense to you?”
“If you believe the clichés about film people—that we’re undependable and narcissistic—it did, even though the truth is making movies is a highly organized operation. If people aren’t reliable they don’t work again. But to me her talk about patience and stuff sounded defensive. I coul
dn’t see that she was on any road to franchising.”
“How often did you work for her?”
“Two or three weekends a month.”
“What did you think of StarBaby?” I asked. “As someone interested in the producing end of making movies.”
“I guess it’s not a bad idea for wealthy communities, where people have a lot of disposable income and not that much time. Probably there are, like, rich dot-com couples with babies who buy video-cams but then are too busy to read the instruction book. Except unless Courtney could get the price down, StarBaby wasn’t going to become the McDonald’s of kiddie video. I mean, she’d been talking about wanting to trademark everything with the word ‘star’ in it: StarChild, StarKid, StarGirl, StarBoy. And before the summer, she’d been looking into all sorts of other stuff. She’d gotten two pediatricians to let their exams be photographed, which had to have been a brilliant con job on her part because of doctors’ malpracticephobia. And she was thinking about renting or buying some cuddly dog—a beagle or a collie—the kids could snuggle up to if the family didn’t have its own dog. But she said there was a liability problem, like if lovable dog decided StarBaby was lunch.”
“What about her husband?”
“I only met him once—the last time I saw her. He came in after golf. The way she looked at him you’d think he was this combo of—I don’t know—Gary Cooper and Jude Law. You mentioned warmth: She acted pretty warm with him, as if he was really, really hot. To me, he was a majorly boring golf guy with good facial planes.”
“Do you think the hot stuff was an act on her part?”
Zee cocked her head to one side for a moment of introspection. Finally she said: “I never had enough of a sense of the real Courtney to know if there was a false Courtney. For all I could tell, she was deep and unknowable. Or shallow and what you saw was all there was.”
“But with you she was just businesslike?”
“Right, but ... In the last couple of months, she did seem kind of detached. I mean, not upset or sad it wasn’t doing better. Indifferent. Distant. Her mind was someplace else.”
“Where?”
Zee offered an I-don’t-know shrug. “I couldn’t begin to guess. But Courtney went from trying to inhale for me—which was a real pain, I’m very organized—to basically letting me wing it.”
“Could she have been depressed?”
“Well, she always acted so peppy. It was hard to see beyond that. She’d say hi and it would come out ‘Hi-ee!’ with this cute little squeak at the end. I’d say she was pretty low in July, but she was still squeaking. And by September she was squeaking Hi-ee, except her head was someplace else that wasn’t StarBaby country.”
“Did she seem afraid of anything? Nervous in any way?”
“Not that I could see, but then again, how much was she going to let me see?”
“Could she have been in love? Having an affair?” Zee offered me an I-don’t-know shrug. “Did you ever see her emotional about anything?”
Zee shook her head slowly, though I could see she was still mulling over my question. While she mulled, I concluded she wasn’t a homicidal psychopath and would be terrific for Joey. “It was weird,” she said finally. “One time she got a phone call. We were in her office, which was an upstairs bedroom she’d converted. Cool. She used a beaten-up table that had to be an antique for her desk. There were tons of real flowers in vases. The room was done to a tee, like everything in the house. Anyhow, she put whoever was calling on hold and then went someplace else. But she must have stayed on the second floor, maybe her bedroom, because I could hear her, although a lot of it was muffled. She seemed pretty upset: ‘Why can’t you ...’ And what else? Oh. ‘You promised ...’ That was all I heard, but boy, did she sound hassled. Almost desperate. I don’t know, I could be reading too much into it.”
“Could you tell if she was talking to a man or woman?” Zee shook her head. “Do you happen to remember when it was?”
“Late afternoon, when she was making out my check. That’s why I was in her office. It must have been my last check—which would have made it a Sunday. The Sunday before Halloween. The Sunday before she disappeared.”
“Was that before or after you met her husband that afternoon?”
“After. Definitely after.”
From Zee’s I drove from Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge—a structure that does not inspire confidence in the profession of civil engineering—into Brooklyn to keep a lunch date I’d made with Joey two weeks earlier. Ever since Bob died, I had to force myself out of the house to live something that vaguely resembled a life.
Except whenever I was out, all I wanted to do was get home. It wasn’t so bad the days I was teaching at St. Elizabeth’s, because my classes were all in the morning. I could be safely home by twelve-thirty. But for the first few months after his death, when I had days off, and I’d be doing volunteer work or running errands, I found myself scurrying to my car and rushing back to the house at lunchtime. And once I got there, my face damp from the tension, my breathing harsh ... What? What was I expecting? Bob calling really long distance?
So for the last eighteen months or so I’d pushed myself back into the world, making lunch and dinner dates weeks in advance. Some nights I went to meetings, lectures, concerts. I was in an adult-ed class for beginning conversational Spanish. Or I let Nancy drag me into the city, to the galleries or the theater. When I was alone I buried myself in piles of term papers or exams. Or I’d reread a favorite book—nothing new, nothing unexpected for me. I played endless, numbing games of computer solitaire. Or I’d watch my favorite old movies until I’d become so enervated by Rosalind Russell’s pluck that I’d fall asleep.
Maybe Socrates was right and the unexamined life was not worth living, but I was giving it my best shot. Weekends were harder. Everybody else knocked themselves out with leisure. But unless Nancy or one of the kids was free, or I had a date, I’d have no answer for the universal Monday-morning-at-work question: What did you do this weekend? For a while I made elaborate to-do lists in eighteen-point boldface and taped them up on the refrigerator. However, by Sunday night the only crossed-out item would be something like “Find Jane Fonda low-impact video,” which, instead of inserting into the VCR as I’d pledged to myself, I’d inserted into the garbage can. All I seemed able to do was clean house. Along with the cassette I’d toss out stuff I’d previously been unable to part with: a bag of potting soil from around the time of the Reagan-Carter-Anderson race, five thousand pounds of Gourmet magazines, Bob’s collar stays.
Anyhow, Joey took me to a new, hot restaurant near his apartment. The waiters, in white, short-sleeved shirts, black slacks, and skinny black ties, looked like funeral directors from Tuscaloosa. The food, however, was not southern but a trendy fusion, Californian and Cuban, which seemed to mean vertical stacks of rare fish, greens, and assorted legumes over al dente rice. Joey had not only heard about Crabapple Films but had actually given their latest release, a film set on Staten Island but based on As You Like It, four and a half out of his five stars. But he said no, I could not call and ask Zee if she was interested in being fixed up with him. And no, movie critics do not casually saunter into production offices and ask half-Chinese, half-Jewish PA’s for information on their latest projects.
When I got home, I weeded my flower beds and vegetable patch until it was too dark to find weeds. It wasn’t only the loss of Bob, the change of my status from wife to widow, that made weekends so tough. It was the other loss in my life—Nelson Sharpe. For twenty years I’d spent too many Saturdays and Sundays in a reflective fog, summoning up every episode of our relationship—and there were plenty of episodes. Worse, the previous year when I’d accidentally bumped into him for a total of three seconds: I compulsively replayed that scene again and again, choosing it hands down over anything the present had to offer.
Okay, the scene: It had been almost twenty years since Nelson and I had last laid eyes on each other. Suddenly there he was, walki
ng right past me. The truth? He looked semilousy. His salt-and-pepper hair had hardly any pepper left. His face was the chalky, indoor color of a lifelong civil servant, though later I tried to tell myself he’d simply gone pale with shock at seeing me. While I had neither the time nor the presence of mind to give him the once-over, his body still looked fine. His eyes, still beautiful, large, and velvety brown, were wide open—with amazement or horror. For those three seconds they did not leave my face.
It’s amazing how long three seconds can last. Naturally, I immediately thought there was some ghastly flaw he’d spotted, one of those hideous imperfections of middle age I’d missed because my eyesight had gone to hell—a giant hair growing out of my chin, an entire cheek covered by a rampaging liver spot. I held my arms tight to my sides so as not to reach up and feel for what was wrong. But then I reassured myself that for someone who, in her youth, had assumed that by her mid-fifties she’d resemble Albert Einstein, I was still fairly attractive. However, before I could think of something unmortifying to say, or offer him a serene nod, he had passed me by.
When I reported the encounter (in encyclopedic, adolescent detail) to Nancy, she made me swear not to do anything crazy like call him. I swore. Nevertheless, she insinuated I’d try some cute trick to get around my oath—like faxing him Bob’s obituary—so I slammed down the phone.
Actually, it was Nelson who called me the next morning. He explained he hadn’t meant to be rude, but was so shocked to see me he couldn’t think of anything to say. We talked for just a few minutes. He told me there was a new political regime in the department. He was out of Homicide and head of a unit called Special Investigations. He also said he and June had gotten divorced fifteen years before. He’d been married for three years to a woman named Nicole, a high-school guidance counselor. Naturally, being the Compleat Schnook, I asked how old she was. Thirty-nine, which technically made him old enough to be her father and untechnically made me speechless with something pretty close to despair. He filled the silence by asking what I was doing, so I told him I’d gotten my doctorate and was teaching college. I didn’t say a word about Bob. Nelson said, Maybe one of these days we could get together, have a cup of coffee. I said no, I didn’t think that was a good idea.