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Molly Bit

Page 12

by Dan Bevacqua


  The light on Peggy Guggenheim’s little island wasn’t nearly half that obliterating, but it was constant. It was heavy and everywhere. It wanted in bad.

  Zen approached. Beneath his feet, small pebbles crunched like something being eaten. Diane had tried, like Molly, to forget about what Zen represented. She had attempted to ignore the letters, but in the end she couldn’t. She wasn’t like Molly. She used her feelings for her life. She experienced them. With Diane, there wasn’t some weird alchemy at work where her fear and anger showed up in the mannerisms of a white supremacist on sixteen millimeter.

  “We’re behind,” Zen said. “She needs to stay on the boat when we get to Lido. I need to confer with the security there.”

  For two days straight, all Diane had said to the man was, “Okay. Okay. Okay.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Did you meet Andrew?”

  “Pardon?” he asked.

  “Did you meet her husband?”

  “He hired me. We had a meeting in Rome.”

  “She hired you,” Diane said.

  “She pays,” Zen said. “He hired.”

  Zen didn’t get angry, Diane saw. He suggested it. He tipped his head down at a nearly imperceptible angle. Otherwise, he was all sunglasses. Her reflection irritated her enormously.

  “Can I ask you something? I don’t want you to get offended.”

  “I don’t get offended,” he said.

  “Ever?”

  “Ever.”

  “You’ve never been offended in your entire life?”

  “Is this what you’re asking?”

  “No,” Diane said. He made her feel off-balance. She was sensitive. If you were a native of California, you could feel an earthquake before a transplant did. “Do you think you need to be here?”

  “This is not something I ask,” Zen said. “I don’t think about it. It is not important.”

  “What is important?”

  “The job.”

  Did all men with guns speak like they were in a David Mamet play?

  “I get it,” Diane said. “The ocean is vast. Never trust a dame.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “It was just a question. I’m sorry I asked.”

  What she wanted to know was whether or not her own concerns were warranted. She needed her own feelings to be validated for her. This had always been true, but it was especially true now. The letters had been coming for over a year. Nobody seemed to know anything. They were treated like the normal consequence of fame. Because of this treatment, their potency, their effect, had been diluted. The letters, and the paranoid worry Diane experienced over them, had somehow been folded up into the nature of business as usual. But they weren’t a script in need of a rewrite. They weren’t a new young star with her nose in a mound of coke. You couldn’t simply throw money at the problem in the form of a handsome Swiss bodyguard and clap your hands free of the whole mess. Didn’t the truth persist? Or had it stopped doing that?

  “The job is the answer,” Zen said.

  She stared at him in disbelief.

  “Is this the language barrier?” she asked. “Is that what this is?”

  “It does not make sense to ask why or if,” he said. “Molly is the job. The threat could be anything, everything. For someone like her, the threat is always. This is why I am here. I mean: Keep it away. All of it. Every last little thing.”

  “What about the letters?” Diane asked.

  “What about the letters?” he asked. “The letters are not important.”

  “But that’s why you were hired.”

  “I was hired because the threat exists.”

  “But the letters are the threat.”

  “No more than anything else,” Zen said.

  Molly had never gone out much. She did what she had to do—premieres, certain parties attached to the ends of certain events, dinner soirees thrown by somebody’s wife or boyfriend—but other than those afternoons and evenings, she kept to herself. Not in any real way was Molly Bit a social person. If anything, she used her charm to keep people at a distance. She used it to get jobs. For the last year, she’d worked constantly. Everything was a location. Morocco. Singapore. She’d kept the world away. It wasn’t any big surprise about her husband.

  “Everything is a threat?”

  “It is.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the world is as it always was.”

  Diane knew this wasn’t exactly true. The world had changed. It was different. For instance, Stephanie believed Molly was a narcissist. While this was probably true, at least Molly had gone about earning her adoration. It was an old fame she’d sought. Molly had been born in the ’70s. She’d had to learn what www. was. She’d had to invent a reason to be looked at. It hadn’t been invented for her. She wasn’t famous because she’d taken a picture of herself with her phone.

  “Here she comes,” Zen said.

  It was one thing after the other. Action zinged Diane this way; it zanged her that. It was never her life. She wanted a better love. She wanted someone who knew her.

  Molly and the writer came quietly chuckling out of the garden.

  “Hello,” the writer said. She gave Diane and Zen a little wave. She had long, slender fingers. Her hair was a mess. “I’m the lady novelist.”

  Molly laughed her actual laugh. It was an inside joke. How long had that taken?

  “I’m Susan,” the writer said.

  “Diane.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Susan said.

  “Ah.”

  The women shook hands. They looked at each other. What passed between them didn’t feel like ruin at all. It wasn’t anything close to doom.

  * * *

  She hadn’t eaten since seven-thirty that morning.

  “Here’s the thing: I know what it’s like to be a person,” Molly said. “I know what it’s like to be a woman. I started from there.”

  “But this woman is—I want to be careful,” the reporter said. From Film Comment, he was the first and only black reporter she’d seen all day. He was also the only reporter who’d gotten right down to it. The others, the white ones, had applauded her for her “courage,” lobbed a few soft questions, and then asked her what it was like to work with this one, and that one, and who’s-a-what’s-its.

  “She’s in many ways an awful human being,” he said.

  “Yes,” Molly said.

  “She’s a racist,” the reporter said.

  “That’s true,” Molly said. “She is.”

  He was very slim, and wore an old, ripped up jean jacket in a New York/LA way. If he’d been from anywhere else, it would have looked ridiculous. There was something about the precision of his haircut, the clean shine off his glasses, and the cuffed ends of his slacks that helped him to pull the jacket off. The hotel suite was bare and white and modern. The curtains against the windows had been opened. Molly glanced out to the sea. It was early evening on the Adriatic. The distance was blue. Then bluer. Then bluer still.

  “What kind of preparation did you do?” the reporter asked. “How did you get down to that level? She’s gruesome.”

  It was the sort of question Molly both wanted to answer and hated to. It was an actual question, and for that she was grateful, but it was also a personal one—more personal than any other perhaps—and it brought out her defensiveness. The question touched off in her a series of insecurities and worries and superstitions. Its answer was always the same: she didn’t quite know how she did it.

  “I like your jacket,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “I don’t think of it as ‘down,’ first of all,” she said. “I’m not in any position to judge her.”

  “Right,” he said, and wrote that in his small blue notebook. “But you’re able to get there. It’s a frightening performance. It was difficult for me to watch. Not in a bad way, necessarily, but still. I’m going
to assume there’s very little of you in her.”

  “That’s maybe fair to say.”

  He uncrossed his legs.

  “But not entirely fair?”

  “No. Not entirely,” she said.

  Paula came in from the other room. She said hello with her eyes, and went to a nearby table, where she pretended to look through the mail, as if there was any. She’d been on high-paranoid alert all day. Her publicity sense smelled something in the air.

  “I’m American,” Molly said. “I grew up in a very white part of the country. A very white and very poor part of the country. I know any number of people who remind me of this woman.”

  “And they’re racist?” he asked.

  Paula tore a piece of hotel stationery in half.

  “Yes,” Molly said. “But my character doesn’t think of herself that way.”

  “How does she think of herself, then? How do they?”

  “As not racist,” Molly said. “What racist thinks they’re racist? They think what they think. That’s what they think.”

  “And that’s accessible to you?” the reporter asked. “To think like that?”

  “It’s accessible to most people, apparently.”

  “To most white people?” he asked. “In America?”

  “Yes,” Molly said.

  “How many do you think? Percentage-wise?”

  “Seventy-five?” Molly asked.

  “You think seventy-five percent of white people in America are racist?” he asked.

  “Is that too low?” she asked. “Eighty?”

  “Okay! Enough!” Paula shouted. “This interview is over.”

  “Well… I mean,” the reporter said, already gathering up his tape recorder and pen.

  “Over,” Paula said. “We love Film Comment. Don’t we, Molly? Don’t we just love it? Don’t we love its dedication to true criticism? Isn’t it the Cahiers of today?”

  “There’s still Cahiers,” the reporter said, heading out of the room. “It’s still published.”

  “Good to know,” Paula said, closing the door behind him. “Bye.”

  Paula spun around with her hands up in the air and her mouth open wide.

  “That was bad,” Molly said.

  “That was very bad!” Paula shouted.

  How had Diane put it earlier? “The picture’s out of our hands?” That was certainly one way of describing the situation. Another way to put it was that her husband was having sex with a teenager, and soon the whole world would know. Another way to say the other thing was that maybe someone wanted her dead. During the press conference, Molly had sat to the left of Angela, and had politely deflected all questions to her friend. She’d played it easy breezy. She hadn’t wanted to come off as magnanimous, or as if she were doing anybody a favor. After awhile, it became a running joke—Molly Bit wasn’t going to answer any actual questions today. Everybody got it. It had then fallen to Angela, a fellow charismatic, and so private sufferer, to work the room.

  She told Paula about the photo. The publicist stood there for a moment. She didn’t say a word. Molly couldn’t take it.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m thinking,” Paula said. “I’m thinking many things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like blah-blah-blah, I’m so sorry for you, I’m furious you didn’t tell me, yada-yada-yada. But none of that matters. What matters is that this could be a good thing. You just called every white person in America racist.”

  “That’s not what I said.”

  “That’s what they’ll hear,” Paula said. “Trust me. That’s going to go international. We need damage control. We need to put that ‘white people are all racists’ thing in context.”

  Like certain other kinds of businesses—hardware, plumbing supply, animal control—the entertainment industry trafficked in certainties. Problems were meant to be solved. You ordered the part, you put the raccoon down, you let the photo do the work you could never do. Only then, once the customer was happy, once the water danced and flowed, once you’d had a little more nosh off the lavishly stocked food cart, did you walk the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival.

  Zen hung back. The resort air crinkled with camera light. Molly tilted her head in slight degrees. She stepped the left foot back. She put her right hand on her hip and made a triangle with her arm. In the lulls, when their attention turned off, she spoke quick asides with her costars. How were they? They were doing what? Her life was a series of meaningful gestures. Andrew was in Rome, she told them, but they already knew that. Zen stepped forward at a certain point. He touched her arm. There was someone in the crowd. He stepped back. It was nothing. Her costars pretended like he wasn’t there. A green firework exploded in the sky above the island and sizzled down in twenty or more sulfurous, trembling arcs.

  While the movie played, everyone who was involved in its production ate dinner in the hotel restaurant. They were seated at a giant table. Molly whispered to Angela what had happened with the Film Comment reporter. She said she was sorry.

  “For what?” Angela whispered back. “I’m sorry for you, but…”

  “But what?”

  Angela had a face like a church. It was perfectly balanced like that.

  “I hope they run the interview. Do you know how little money marketing will put into this? It’s pitiful,” Angela said. “But that’s bad for you, Mol. I’m sorry. If you call white people racist, they go insane. They lose their goddamn minds.”

  Molly ate a piece of bluefish and looked around the restaurant. Diane sat with Susan at a corner table. They weren’t exactly laughing, but they weren’t exactly serious either. Molly hoped Susan was forward. Diane needed to be pushed into her true self. The two of them should get a little drunk. If infidelity was in the air, it should at least help get rid of Stephanie. Dreaming of this (that she finally wouldn’t have to look at Stephanie’s stupid face ever again) and taking one sip, then two, then knocking back the rest of her wine, something strange happened to Molly Bit: she started to relax. She was a movie star, after all. She knew how to shake it off.

  “Who’s the tall bloke?” the Irish actor Dylan Laughlin asked her. He nodded at Zen over by the entrance door.

  “Security.”

  “Lovely,” Dylan said. “The world’s piss. Cheers.”

  Dylan was drunk, which was part of his charm. If he was like Peter O’Toole or Richard Burton—except Irish—who was Molly? He was at the festival to promote a detective thriller he was the star of. He couldn’t quite remember the title. They were in a corner booth with Angela.

  “Mine’s around here somewhere,” Dylan said.

  “Security?” Angela asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “But he’s shite.”

  “What’s going on?” Molly asked.

  “A woman,” Dylan said. “Either it’s a woman, or it’s a man—or it’s something else. This one’s a woman. She broke into my house in Dublin. I wasn’t there. Gave the maid a start. Who’s the big detective, eh? Who’s the big crime fighter?”

  Dylan took Molly and Angela by the arm and paraded them around the dining room. They said hi to a table of middle-aged directors, the last traces of their wonder-boy charm evaporating off them, the pressures of the marketplace and various drug habits having wrinkled them into a sudden old age. Through Andrew, through being around them, Molly knew the kind of shit they talked on actors. She wanted to moo at them, like a cow. She resented their auteur-ness, but at the same time wanted to be one of them. If she was crazy, and narcissistic, and too much trouble to bother with, and a vapid idiot, and a whore, and if she’d somehow fucked her way to that role, and sucked this one’s cock, and if a trained monkey could do what she did, then they were a bunch of assholes. The directors laughed and smiled and said how incredible she looked, and she laughed and smiled and said the same. It was the same wonderful, usual lie they performed. It was guilt-free, a little drunk, and splendid.

  Like assassins, high-powered executives were every
where. At best, their lives and livelihoods were tenuous. At worst, they were doomed. In private, Molly called them Humpty-Dumpties. Bloated with fear and need, each even minor gesture or decision they made could be the end, could be the failure that sent them toppling over the edge. She and Angela and Dylan said hi to all of them too. They were tough little pigeons who fluttered at the actors’ touch. One you had to stroke. One you had to coo at. One you had to tease. One you had to flatter. One you had to sit there with in near silence and wait for him to bless you with his word.

  When Leonard arrived, the room expanded. Molly saw him pass through the entrance that connected to the hotel. She tried to get Diane’s attention. She waved her arms around. She clapped her hands together. Nothing. Diane was lost over there. Finally, she sent a text.

  “Here,” Diane said, and gave Molly the book. It was in a shiny black plastic bag.

  “How’s it going with you two?” Molly asked. She raised her eyebrows a few times, Groucho Marx style.

  “What? We’re talking. She’s a very nice person.”

  “She’s pretty,” Molly said. “I like her laugh.”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?” Molly said. “Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, brother.”

  The night went on this way for a while, voices low to pollinate business deals and sexual misadventure. It was a good place to be, in a room full of people who aimed to please, who hoped for love more than understanding, encouragement more than faith. As the hour stretched to two, the dinner evolved quite naturally into the after-party held in the top-most suite. Through the window, Molly stared past her own reflection at the sea, and caught sight of Leonard Roth’s white pants striding through the door.

 

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