Skimming the pages for a second time, Claudia could see the glimmer of promise that had once lived at the center of this script—a sly inversion of gender roles, an examination of the meaning of parenting and domesticity in the twentieth century. What remained was probably just a remnant left over from the first draft of the script, before subsequent layers of development executives and producers and hundred-thousand-dollar-a-week script doctors took their stab at making the story more “audience-friendly,” the leads more “relatable.” Claudia looked at the title page again. There were four credited screenwriters, nine drafts dating back three years.
Was it still salvageable? With a new ending, and a dialogue polish, maybe it could be decent, if not great. Maybe Evanovich was hiring her specifically to salvage it; You can do a rewrite if you have ideas, he’d said. And yet—was it possible that he himself had played a role in the neutering of this script? Maybe he didn’t even realize it was bad; maybe he was deadly serious about his belief in the project after all. Because, to be honest—and as the clock ticked toward midnight, she acknowledged this for the first time—hadn’t Claudia kindly been overlooking the fact that he hadn’t produced a truly great movie in over a decade? Maybe he’d once been the undisputed King of Quality Cinema, back in the seventies, but his more recent filmography also included best-forgotten titles like Crazy Girls and Crazy Girls 2, Sherrie and Mary Go Shopping, and The Defeater. She saw him, suddenly, as a has-been clinging to the victories of his youth, regaling her with outdated wisdom in order to prove his continuing relevance. Aligning herself with him would get her nowhere.
And I gave Penelope that A for this, she thought. Then: Maybe this is what you deserve for doing that.
Nonetheless, it was a directing job. And a high-profile lucrative one at that. She didn’t have any other options. What was worse, directing a sub-par movie or resigning herself to teaching for the rest of her life? There were plenty of terrible movies made by great directors, she reminded herself, many of which were commercially successful. Undoubtedly the best business decision she could make right now was to direct a big marketable movie with a well-known producer. One for them, one for you, she thought. Maybe ten for them.
The clock clicked past midnight. Where was Jeremy? She imagined the things he might be doing (with Aoki?) that very minute: sitting in a trendy bar with an exclusive guest list, getting drunk with Pierre Powers; having an intimate heart-to-heart reminiscence about the old days at some all-night diner; even (she let this vision flash quickly before she banished it from her mind) having mind-blowing sex in Aoki’s suite in some hip design hotel in Beverly Hills. And yet. Jeremy had never cheated on a girlfriend in his life, he’d once told her; he didn’t have it in himself to hurt someone that way. Why would he start now? (Because you’re not Aoki, she answered her own question.) She flipped off the light and lay there in the dark, thinking. The night was silent—no helicopters, for once; no cars or alarms or police sirens—except for the wind that swept the fronds of their ancient palm tree across the roof, gently brushing back and forth across the charred shingles. Deep in the house, something was dripping, and she noticed a creaking sound from underneath the floorboards. The basic repairs on the house were almost finished—her parents were leaving in four days—yet something deep in the bones of their home felt permanently altered, irreparable.
The wind picked up outside, sending a loose palm frond clattering down to the almost-finished deck, where it rested for a minute, before dropping farther, into the shadowy depths of the canyon below. She picked up her cellphone and typed out a message to RC: Career advice required. Can I come over tomorrow eve and pick your brain? She sent it off into the night, rolled over, and closed her eyes.
By the time headlights splashed across the living room, signaling Jeremy’s arrival back home, Claudia had fallen asleep.
When her alarm went off at five-thirty, Jeremy was unconscious beside her on the air mattress, snoring and reeking of alcohol. She lay there for a while in the dark, watching him sleep, wishing she could read his mind, dreading what she might learn if she did. Eventually she rose and clattered around the house, brewing coffee, dressing for work, flipping through the paper. Jeremy rolled over on his back and flung an arm across his eyes to block out the light spilling in from the kitchen.
“Uggggh,” he muttered. “Can you keep it down?”
She stood in the doorway, watching him from a safe distance. “So was it fun? You got home awfully late.” Her words emerged stiff as planks.
“It was OK,” he muttered. The arm across his face made it impossible to decipher his expression. “I drank too much.”
“Obviously.”
“I had to take a taxi,” he continued. His breath was ragged and labored. “It was expensive. I’m really sorry.”
He moved his arm to squint at her with bleary red-rimmed eyes. The anguish in his face was clear even from across the room; Claudia softened, weak in the face of his misery. “God, Jeremy,” she began, and then stopped, knowing that whatever discussion needed to happen, it couldn’t happen now, when she was already running late.
“Really, I feel bad.” It sounded almost like a plea.
“It’s fine,” she said. “We may not have to worry about money for much longer.” She stood there, waiting for him to wonder what she meant by this; to link her words to the previous night’s meeting with Samuel Evanovich.
Jeremy pulled his arm back over his face. “Right,” he mumbled. He lay on the mattress, as still as a stone. It seemed vitally important that he remember to ask her about Samuel on his own, but as she waited it grew clear that he’d fallen back asleep. She gathered her belongings and made for the front door. Just as she was about to shut it behind her, she stopped, hearing Jeremy’s muffled voice drifting across the house.
He remembered, she thought. “What?” she called.
His words were muted, filtered through the skin of his forearm. “I love you,” he said, to the crook of his elbow.
RC’s house was an argument against the existence of gravity, a cantilevered modernist cube that seemed to float on the edge of a ridge overlooking Beachwood Canyon. The architect had avoided right angles entirely, designing the building as an interlocking puzzle of obtuse slopes and unexpected turns and circular steel staircases that seemed to hover without any support at all. The walls facing the view were floor-to-ceiling glass, which opened up so that the home’s inhabitants could live among the clouds (on hot days, the smog layer). Floors were poured concrete, polished until they reflected the sky. The swimming pool on the terrace melted into the horizon, vanishing against the Pacific in the distance.
It was a home that would have belonged on the cover of Architectural Digest, were it not for the chaos that reigned inside. The living room was a makeshift garage used primarily for the storage of skateboards and bicycles; smears in hues of grass, mud, Sharpie, and ketchup marred the slipcovers on the couches; a ring of smudgy fingerprints, waist high, encircled the glass façade. Tumbleweeds of canine hairs, shed from the twins’ beloved chow-collie mutt, drifted along the concrete floors whenever a draft blew through. Ten-year-old boys had wrested control of this house, and RC and her husband had long ago given in to that inevitability. “We’ll get it back someday,” RC had told Claudia. “For now, it’s a fight we’ll never win, so I might as well embrace the chaos.”
Claudia settled into a Corbusier lounger that was losing its stuffing—Claudia couldn’t quite tell whether the chew marks at the seam were human or canine—while RC fixed her a lemonade. She wondered how much RC paid on her mortgage every month and was depressed to realize that it probably wasn’t much more than her own, since RC had purchased this house long before the real estate boom began. Back when a million-dollar house was actually a million-dollar house.
“Mom! I need you to sign a permission slip. Mom?” One of the twins—Lucas or Otis, Claudia could never tell them apart—drifted into the living room, sucking on a grape popsicle. He was closely followed by
the dog, his focus trained on the ground by the boy’s feet. The boy’s knees were capped with raw scabs; his short brown hair was mashed flat from where he’d been wearing a baseball cap. While Claudia watched, a purple iceberg sheaved off the popsicle stick and landed on the floor; the dog swiftly lapped it up. (And that is why RC doesn’t bother with rugs, Claudia thought.)
RC appeared in the doorway, holding Claudia’s lemonade. “What for?” She passed the glass to Claudia and glanced at the crumpled paper in Lucas/Otis’s hand.
“Field trip?” the twin offered hopefully. “Just sign it.”
RC pulled the paper from his hand, examining it. “You want to go bungee jumping? When hell freezes over, darling beastie.” She tucked the paper in the pocket of her cargo pants.
The twin scowled. “Justin’s parents are letting him do it.”
RC kissed the boy on his rumpled head. “A valiant effort, Otis. Next time, try your father. He’s a bigger sucker than I am.”
“I’m a sucker?” Jason stood in the doorway, holding a can of charcoal lighter. He was bearded and tan from his travels, with ethnic cotton pants rolled up to his knees to reveal hairy calves and bare feet. “Thanks, honey. You’re supposed to be helping me convey manliness, not emasculating me in front of the kids, remember?”
“What’s emasculate?” Otis asked. The popsicle in his right hand sagged, and the dog dutifully lifted a tongue to finish the melting remains.
“It means your mother wears the pants in this family. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, considering her sartorial choices. Hi, Claudia,” Jason said. “I’m grilling steaks. Will you be staying for dinner?”
“Not tonight, but thanks,” Claudia said.
RC sat down across from Claudia, pushing aside a PlayStation console to make space for her legs on the couch. “I’m declaring the living room a no-tread zone for the next half hour, OK? Claudia and I need some alone time, so go create your vortex of destruction somewhere else for a while.” The twin conceded and ran from the room, the dog at his heels. Jason disappeared in the direction of the garden.
“Can I borrow your life for a while?” Claudia asked. “You make it look easy.”
RC laughed. “Look at my house. I live in a war zone. My children are conniving heathens. I sleep three hours a night. Nothing is ever easy.”
“I hope at least it gets easier.” Claudia knew she sounded bitter.
“Don’t kid yourself.” RC rolled a basketball underneath her bare foot, her brow crinkling as she registered Claudia’s mood. “It’s all about coming up with your own coping mechanisms. So what’s the crisis?”
“I was offered a job,” Claudia said. “A directing job, on a go movie.”
“And this is a crisis?”
“It’s not a good script.”
“Oh.” RC leaned forward, bracing her hands on her knees. “What’s the project?”
“Quintessence,” Claudia said. “Samuel Evanovich is producing. Know it?”
RC winced. “It’s been bouncing around the studios for years. In fact, I was asked to do a rewrite on it ages ago. Couldn’t do it because I was busy with pilot season. But I see your dilemma.”
Down the hall, the dog barked and the boys shrieked with pleasure. Claudia felt strangely safe here, cradled inside the familial chaos. “So should I take the job?”
RC kicked the basketball away and it rolled across the room, bouncing against the far wall. “Tell me why you wouldn’t want to do it,” RC said.
“Credibility,” Claudia began slowly. “Pride. The desire to make something great instead of something subpar.”
“Vanity.” RC nodded. “Idealism. Which is a good-enough argument, considering the soullessness of the industry we work in. OK, now tell me why you would take the job.”
“Money, obviously,” Claudia said. “Keeping my career alive, no matter the cost. Because I have no other options.” She hesitated, then bit back the last and perhaps most compelling reason, the one that had taken root in her mind that morning and grown ever since: Aoki. In a world full of Aokis, a mundane schoolteacher couldn’t compete. It was just a matter of time before Jeremy drifted off, caught in a more alluring wake. But Quintessence would keep Claudia in the game. No woman would dare steer her husband away from her if she were a wealthy, successful director. And if freedom from financial obligation was what Jeremy was longing for—and it certainly seemed like this was the case—she could buy it for him: With her salary, she could support him, let him quit his day job, help him go back to making music full time. It would bring an end to pretty fucking boring, once and for all.
RC was watching her, waiting. “And?”
“And that’s it.”
RC tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling, transfixed by a faded blotch that appeared to be dried orange juice. “Don’t take the job. It’s not going to be a good movie.”
Something heavy crashed at the other end of the house; followed by a suspicious silence and then a keening wail, which RC ignored. Claudia fell back in the leather lounger, realizing that this was not the answer she’d wanted to hear. “But maybe I could elevate the material. Rewrite the script. Hire great actors and an amazing DP. Put my own spin on it.”
“It’s possible,” RC said. “But I have to say, I’ve been paid to polish up bad scripts a hundred times and never truly succeeded.”
Claudia considered this. “And if I don’t succeed. Would it really be so horrible to work on a bad movie?”
RC picked up the PlayStation joystick and used the hem of her T-shirt to wipe a sticky smear off it. “Well. I’ve worked on plenty of awful projects over the years.”
“Yes! And you’ve survived,” Claudia pointed out. “In fact, your career is in great shape. You use a Golden Globe as a toilet paper holder!”
“But I’m fine, morally speaking, with lowering my standards every once in a while, and I’m not sure you are. And directing is different from screenwriting—as director you’ll end up taking full responsibility if the film bombs. It could kill your career.” RC dropped the joystick and leaned forward, her T-shirt falling around her narrow frame. “You’re still so young, Claudia. Do what you love while you still can, before you have to take kids and aging parents and all that into consideration. Do what will make you happy.”
“Right. Just do what will make me happy.” She tried to imagine what this might be. Happy had once seemed like a baseline emotion from which all other states deviated; but right now she couldn’t even remember what happy felt like.
Jason marched back through the living room, this time with a plate of meat in his hand. “I think the boys are trying to murder each other,” he said. He tipped the platter to show the steaks to Claudia. “Grass-fed beef. These cows lived a finer life than any of us have. You sure I can’t tempt you?”
A cloud of barbecue smoke drifted in from the garden. The familiar smell of carbon landed with a visceral twist, and Claudia was momentarily unable to breathe—something is burning!—until she reminded herself that her own house wasn’t on fire anymore. Looking at Jason, Claudia thought of Jeremy and wondered if he was also cooking her dinner right now. She realized that, for the first time in nearly four years, she didn’t trust that he would be there when she got home.
“No, I have to get going.” She pushed herself upright, removing a few strands of dog hair from her skirt. “Thanks for the advice, RC.”
RC stood. “I don’t think I was very helpful.”
“Of course you were.” Claudia lied, now aware that she’d made her decision long before she ever arrived at RC’s home. She thought of Evanovich’s words: Real life is just a never-ending string of compromises that you make in order to survive.
Her compromise would be her career ideals in exchange for her marriage. Honestly, wasn’t she halfway down this path already anyway? She just needed to take the final step.
She barely waited until RC’s front door was shut behind her before pulling her cellphone out of her purse. There in t
he driveway, her hands still shaky with charcoal-fueled anxiety, she typed out an e-mail.
Samuel—Read the script: great possibilities. I’m in. I’ll call your office tomorrow to get the ball rolling on the legal work. Thanks—Claudia.
Jeremy
SLEEP ELUDED HIM, DESPITE A HALF AN AMBIEN AND A PAIR OF earplugs, despite the black sock he had draped over his eyes to block out the sun that streamed through the sliding glass door, despite his complete and utter exhaustion. Claudia had departed for work hours before, her parents had been dispatched for the day with a phone call to their hotel, and the faint noontime bell had come and gone. He was really pushing it with Edgar, bailing on work yet again, and there was also the troubling fact that his car was sitting with a valet in Beverly Hills. But still Jeremy lay motionless on the air mattress, the afternoon passing as he parsed through the events of the evening before.
He tried to understand where everything had begun to unravel, but most of the night remained a blur. Perhaps that could be blamed on the two glasses of champagne he drank at Aoki’s opening; and then the bottles of expensive burgundy that he shared at dinner with her friends, at a French restaurant whose name he could not recall; and the multiple martinis that he polished off in the lobby of the Château Marmont, where Aoki and her entourage were staying. Or perhaps it was because of the adrenaline that raced through his veins all night, an obliterating high that had nothing to do with alcohol at all. Maybe it was the relentless stimulus of new people and places and sounds and ideas that left him so addled.
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