by Dan Bevacqua
“White pants?” she asked him.
“I’m confident,” Leonard said, and kissed her on the cheek. “You look like all the money in the world.”
“And yet I haven’t any,” Molly said.
“How’s Andrew?”
“He’s in Rome.”
“Right. Right,” Leonard said. “How’s that going?”
“I don’t know,” Molly said. “I haven’t read the trades lately.”
They caught up for a minute. They spoke real things. How was his son? His wife? What did she mean she hadn’t read the trades lately? How was Andrew, really?
She didn’t tell him a goddamn thing.
“And what’s this?” Leonard asked. He touched the black plastic bag with this thumb and forefinger.
“Your next project,” Molly said.
She watched him pull The Last Century from out of the bag.
“Greg Watson?” he asked. “Never heard of him.”
“We went to school together. He’s good.”
“You went to school?”
“Read the novel,” she said.
He said he didn’t read anymore. He paid a kid for that. “He sits in a room all day,” Leonard said. “Who owns the rights?”
“Me,” she said. “I want you to read it.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“What’s it about?” he asked.
“A brother and sister. You’re already saying yes. You’re personally invested. You just don’t know it yet.”
“And you’d star?”
“I’d direct.”
“You?”
“Me,” she said.
Leonard didn’t appear pleased by the idea. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He pushed his hands into his pockets.
“It’s nonnegotiable,” Molly said. “It’s the deal.”
She looked across the party. Standing by the door was Zen. Standing next to him was Dylan Laughlin. Every time a woman passed by, Dylan would jump behind Zen in pretend fear and laugh. To him, the whole thing was hysterical. It was one big joke. It was the funniest thing in the world.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 2009
5
ONCE, BACK WHEN THEY WERE still friends and spoke to one another, Abigail Kupchik said to Molly, “It’s kind of a shame you have a father. It does you a disservice. It’s like, ‘Her too? Is that really necessary? Why?’ You shouldn’t have one. It would make a better origin story.”
But Molly did. She had a father. And it was Father’s Day. She decided she would give him a call. She was with Andrew on the western edge of Washington state close to where the Pacific Ocean flowed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The rental’s sea view was a chronic navy drizzle overlayed onto a barrier of fog. She had one week before she was due in Vancouver. It was a detective movie. Molly was the detective. She’d been inhaling books on procedure, protocol, the right angles of law and order. Every thought was a flash of certainty in need of hunting down.
“When was the last time you spoke to him?” Andrew asked.
A spot of gray had taken root in his beard. It was on his chin, to the right. She hadn’t made up her mind yet as to whether or not she liked this. She was leaning toward not. For some ill-advised reason, he was dicing an onion on top of a plate, but she decided to let it go.
“A few weeks ago,” Molly said. “A woman I went to school with was in a car accident. He thought I should know.”
“Were you friends with her?”
“No. She was a few years younger than me.”
“Weird,” Andrew said.
“Weird what?”
“That he’d call to tell you.”
“Why is that weird?”
“You didn’t know her.”
“I knew her,” Molly said. “Just not well.”
“Got it,” Andrew said. He scraped the onion onto a cutting board. It was louder than it needed to be. He started dicing again, with more force.
He’d never made her an omelet before. It was a gesture. They’d spent a year separated, Molly on set much of the time, flying here and there for long arguments and recriminations. Then a year married, but still apart, sharing a house, trying to smile at the people they’d invited over. Because of this routine, her face felt like it was going to fall off. Her mind, if not the decision, was made. She had the papers all drawn up. They were in her safe in LA. Something both very common and perversely Hollywood was going on between them. They shared friends. An action franchise. A complex and mutilated love.
“What happened?” he asked.
“With what?” Molly asked.
“With the woman you didn’t know.”
Everything was a movie with him. For the last two years, Andrew had been buying people. This was more than his participation in an IP trend. It appealed to him on many levels: the creative, the somewhat noble, the deeply fucked. He owned the film and television rights to nearly a hundred life stories. Not indefinitely. These were handshake deals or two-year contracts with loose language binding the parties. He owned the story of an American who’d escaped from a Siberian prison. He owned the story of the first one-armed woman to swim the English Channel. When Andrew asked, “What happened?” it was another way of asking, “Is it a feature? Would it sell?” Molly was sometimes swept up in it too. Who didn’t love the real? Who didn’t want to mainline actual experience? The tagline “Based on a true story” was a kind of foreplay. People heard it and said, “Oh, yeah. Give it to me.”
“She died,” Molly said.
“That’s awful. How?”
From her father, she’d gleaned the bare information: a two-day storm; a stretch on Interstate 91 like the tilting, curving ramp of a pinball machine; the woman and her daughter hydroplaning through the guardrail into the granite wall.
“You can’t stop,” Molly said to her husband, the owner of lives. “It was instant.”
“What was her name?”
It had required a Google search for the face to click, and even then Lindsay Ingram was hard to recall. In five minutes, Molly learned everything there was to know about her. Lindsay had been the director of a drug-prevention agency based out of White River Junction. Her master’s thesis at UVM had predicted the opioid crisis. She’d been married to the same man for twelve years. She was a licensed EMT.
“You see,” Andrew said. “That’s why I buy these stories. People live these absolutely exceptional lives. They live these exceptional lives—and no one knows about them.”
“What are you talking about?” Molly asked. “People knew. Her family knew. Her friends knew. The people she helped.”
“That’s not enough,” Andrew said. “A woman like that should reach a mass audience.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” he asked. “Why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t she get her moment?”
“What moment?”
“Her moment on the screen. Picture it: she’s slamming her hand down on the oak table. She’s shouting about the epidemic going on. Nobody gives a shit, but later she’s vindicated. Let’s give her a movie husband. Someone with rugged good looks who grief looks sexy on. Let’s watch her resuscitate a small child in the back of an ambulance out in the boondocks. Let’s all be inspired.”
* * *
The omelet was lumpy and over-fried but functional. Molly ate standing up near the kitchen island. Andrew was seated at the table. He ate methodically. He would cut the omelet twice, fork it up to his mouth, chew eight times, swallow, and repeat. She started eating with her fingers so as to break up the routine.
“What else did your father say?” Andrew asked.
When her mother called, it was always with news of cancer or terminal illness. Her father covered accidents, arrests, and natural disasters.
“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”
“Was there a flood?” Andrew asked.
“No.”
“Did the pharmacy get robbed again?”
“N
o.”
“Did the police chief have an affair with his brother’s sister?”
“You’re an asshole.”
Andrew liked to mock the place where she was from. He had an idea in his head about what it had been like for her to grow up there. It wasn’t necessarily right. It wasn’t necessarily wrong.
“A guy I knew was arrested,” Molly said.
“What guy?”
“Jesus. An old boyfriend.” She changed her voice to a country twang. “Ma high skool boy-friend.”
“What happened?”
“He beat someone up.”
“What for?”
“Money, a woman, maybe it was a Friday—I don’t know.”
“Okay,” Andrew said. “But what’s his story?”
In one way or another, this was always the question.
“Both of his parents are dead,” Molly said. “First his father, who was a son of a bitch. Then his mother, who everybody called sweet because they didn’t know the first thing about her. It was one long illness after the other. He took care of them as they were dying. You can’t make a three-act structure out of hospital bills.”
“Sure you could,” Andrew said. “What are you talking about?”
“How?”
“Parents die. Bills arrive. He pulls a bank heist.”
“A bank heist?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“No bank heist,” she said. “Or sort of. But in reverse. The bank robbed him. They took his house.”
She looked at Andrew. He’d been reborn, reenergized.
“This guy’s a gold mine,” he said. “I mean really. It’s exactly the kind of movie I want to make next. Financial crisis. Medical insurance. Home foreclosure. It’s relevant. It’s happening. It’s real life.”
“It’s sad is what it is,” Molly said.
“Of course it is,” Andrew said. “It’s terrible. I’m not saying it isn’t terrible. I’m not some sort of monster.”
“Noted.”
He began to clear the table. He wasn’t very efficient at it. Andrew had never needed to stack plates on top of one another, race across the dining room, swing through the door, and shout “Behind!”
“You scoffed at bank heist, but bank heist is the way to go,” Andrew said. “You can’t do real human beings in straight-up melodrama anymore. The Best Years of Our Lives would tank at the box office. It wouldn’t get nominated for a goddamn thing. If you want to get actual feeling across you have to wrap it up in genre. Thriller. Action. Heist. I’m partial to a good old-fashioned rags-to-riches story myself.”
She had once loved this about him—his knack for filling up a room with the power of an arbitrary notion and selling it for fact. In this way, he had explained to Molly the story of who they were, and, in particular, the story of their last few years. Because of how aggravating Andrew found her anger and sadness—because her moods annoyed him—the reasons for those feelings, the things he had done, had to be forgotten. In their place, Molly and Andrew lived inside a needless dynamic that, he logicked, Molly insisted upon. It had reached the point where Andrew was removed from the situation, and Molly was left alone to wonder who she was, and why her life had made her like that.
She no longer mentioned Kate Uppley. Not to Andrew or to anyone. The story surrounding the girl was too sad. Kate was like a death in the Hollywood family so horrible no one could bring themselves to speak of it. The silence made Molly sick.
The rumor was Kate had suffered a nervous breakdown. After the breakdown, she went to rehab. After rehab, she got a lawyer and filed a civil suit against a children’s show producer. She claimed the producer had raped her when she’d starred in her breakout series Kid City!, but nobody believed her (or if they did, it didn’t matter, for the fear of contagion had swallowed her whole), and she couldn’t get a job anymore.
Years earlier, when it was all said and done, when the picture of the kiss hadn’t been published after all, Diane opened her inbox one day to find a JPG of a check signed by Kate Uppley to OK! magazine. The girl had been the one to kill the story, and while Molly refused Kate’s other overtures (lunch or a phone call was out of the question), she remembered what it was like to be nineteen—the fog one had to constantly squint through, the posturing—and Molly had forgiven her.
She told Andrew to leave the dishes.
After a period of time in which both of them went to separate rooms and performed small acts of privacy the other wasn’t aware of, they took the long drive into the nearest little big town. Everything around them was saturated. A seething darkness pulsed in the mossy tree bark and inside the mud and in the brackish, gnatty water that seeped out of the forest side of the road. Molly couldn’t see the mountain range through the trees, but she felt it out there, disrupting the air, pulling the earth out of its gravity. On the left, the sea view came and went. She saw a line of kayaks paddling by. She saw a sailboat. Andrew turned the radio down.
“Maybe it’s not a bank heist,” he said. “Maybe I’m wrong. For argument’s sake, let’s say I’m wrong.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Molly said.
“Maybe you combine the two story lines,” Andrew said. “We’ve been thinking about it all wrong. What’s your boyfriend’s name?”
“‘We’ haven’t been thinking about anything,” Molly said. “His name is Lucas Hutton. Luke.”
“Maybe Luke Hutton is Lindsay Ingram’s husband.”
“No,” she said. “Luke is not her husband. He’s not going to find himself. Her death will not be a catalyst for personal revelation. Half of everything is a white lady found dead in a field. ‘Who killed the white lady? Let’s find the white lady’s killer. Let’s make the white lady’s death about us.’”
“You’re changing the subject,” Andrew said.
“Am I, though?” Molly asked.
“Yes, you are.”
“I’m swerving,” Molly said. “I wouldn’t say change. It’s the same conversation.”
They bumped onto a new kind of asphalt on the rural highway. She remembered to look out the window. She never tired of traveling to exotic locations and having encounters with different and more spectacular types of trees. They drove past a waterfall that was actually two waterfalls crashing into each other and having a total cataclysm in the air.
“ ‘Who killed the white lady?’ is the plot of your next movie,” Andrew said. “It’s the reason we’re driving down this road.”
“That’s different.”
“Horseshit.”
“Horseshit?”
“Horseshit,” Andrew said. “It’s no different at all.”
Maybe, baby, she thought, in the style of a PI novel she’d been reading to prepare. But maybe, baby, not. Wasn’t it a different scenario if she were the one doing the investigating? Weren’t the sympathies more aligned? The motivations? The end result?
“Can we get back to reality?” she asked him. “That would be great.”
“You’re in the wrong business for that,” Andrew said. “The old question has been answered. Life imitates us.”
Perhaps their entire marriage had been a series of idiotic statements like that, statements where he said it one way, and she refuted it and said it the other, and in the end who gave a shit, and who really fucking cared? Not Lindsay Ingram, no longer capable of questions. Not Luke, who’d bragged in high school about reading exactly one half of one novel, The Red Badge of Courage, in his entire life. He was not sitting around somewhere—was he still in jail? how long did you stay in jail for assault?—thinking about how he’d make a great character.
“He could be,” Andrew said. “Who are you to say?”
“His life is totally messed up,” Molly said.
“And that’s too bad,” Andrew said. “It really is. I feel sorry for him. But that doesn’t stop the urge to be on television.”
“Now it’s a series?”
“Movies, television—it’s the twenty-first century. What
’s the difference?” Andrew asked.
“I think there’s a difference,” Molly said.
“There isn’t.”
“I think there is.”
“I think I wanna crash the car off the road,” he said. “How about that?”
* * *
There was the mountain, closest to God. Andrew walked into the bookstore. Molly sat in the Land Rover with her Red Sox cap pulled down over her eyes. The most recent bodyguard had been left at home. She pushed her cap up and looked around. All the buildings were one- and two-story echoes of the lumber boom. Impossibly organized men had conceived of the design. The road the SUV was on drove itself right straight smack into the ocean and the end of the world. Families paraded their fathers, their grandfathers, their great-great-ones, across the street to brunch. They were so much trouble to convince. They didn’t like to shop. He just sees a bunch of stuff, mother said. The kids were thrilled to have him. What was he thinking? Did he like his watch?
Molly loved her iPhone. Even though she knew the number by heart, she thumbed down to find her father’s contact, felt the surge of unwanted memory, and thought of Luke, of the countless times he’d called her there. When her father had said Luke’s name over the phone, when he’d told her about the incident, Molly realized she hadn’t thought about him in fifteen years—at least not in any deliberate sense. She might have considered him as a matter of pure biology. She might have once told a girlfriend how he had blue eyes or described his extra-long eyelashes she’d always wanted to put mascara on. She might have said how he looked exhausted when last she’d seen him in Vermont (a Christmas many years ago, his father already sick), as if he’d been dragged through time by his ankles, hands behind him clawing at the walls. They’d sat together in his family’s decorated living room with a plate of elf-shaped cookies on the couch between them. She remembered feeling sorry for him. They spoke about the town they’d grown up in as if it were a dead person. He’d never left. She wasn’t yet famous. They could hear his father in the garage, coughing. She said California was a state of mind. She said it is. You don’t believe me, but it is. She laughed and touched his shoulder, but pulled back when she felt how much he liked it. In Washington state, lifetimes later, she remembered this. She recalled the exact sensation of the precise moment. For each of them there had been a tremendous amount of shame. Hers in knowing she had come to visit him out of a sense of charity. His in understanding that and wanting her there anyway.