by Dan Bevacqua
“She wished me luck.”
“I know that,” Sarah said. “But what did she say?”
Molly straightened up. Her face morphed into the smiling, overjoyed mask of a doll’s. In a Georgia accent, she crooned, “ ‘Oh, hi, hon. How you doin’? I just wanted to call, and wish you con-grat-u-lations. You were just sooo good. I know you won’t believe it, but I’m rootin’ for you. That scene near the end where the husband’s gettin’ outta jail, and you’re waitin’ there with those two little girls. It just about—it just about broke my heart.’ ”
The Nun was a part-time Scientologist and a quarter-time mother to three adopted Senegalese children. She was also a person without shame. She lacked the required number of synapses needed in order to connect action and consequence, and she would do—on set or anywhere—anything, and it was this sort of moral dexterity that made her an excellent actress as well as celebrity. In the last three months, Molly had seen The Nun twice. The first was at the Golden Globes, where Molly had witnessed The Nun pantomiming a conversation with Robert Duvall. He was asking, “What? What? What are you saying?” and she was moving her lips without making a sound. An NBC television camera was on them, and The Nun didn’t want to appear dull.
The next time Molly saw her was at a private luncheon thrown by a former CEO of a major multinational media corporation. The CEO was trying to get The Nun nominated by the Academy, and was doing everything within the scope of his almost unlimited power to make that happen. Molly had been invited as a guest of The Nun, and, although she didn’t want to attend, she had to, because Molly as well didn’t want to seem overly competitive or incapable of appreciating the talent of her peers.
A luncheon designed to get someone nominated was like a cross between a funeral, a wedding, and an Apple stockholders’ meeting. A top Disney executive got up and thanked fifteen or twenty people Molly knew for a fact he’d fucked over in deals. Then a clip of The Nun from The Nun. After that, the exec said things a person should only say about a cult leader. (“I wake up some mornings gratified by the knowledge she’s alive.”) Then they served lunch, during which The Nun rose and thanked everyone in attendance. “Molly Bit,” The Nun said, hand over her heart. “I’m just, I’m just,” and then nothing.
“She did not say she was rooting for you,” Sarah said.
“She did.”
“What did you say?”
“I told her I was rooting for her too,” Molly said. “What could I say? We lied to each other for a while. We’re always up for the same stuff. She’s fine.”
“I guess,” Sarah said.
In the month and one week since the nominations had been announced, Molly had spoken to all but The Prostitute. She’d watched the broadcast at 5:25 that Monday morning, and the feeling that overcame her as she heard her name was not unlike the reaction to news of a sudden death. She felt like she was escaping her body or as if it were falling away from her. And then, because it seemed like the thing to do, as if it would keep her limbs from shooting off, she locked herself into her safe room, slid the titanium bolt shut, and screamed with all her lunatic excitement.
At three o’clock, she called back The Twelve-Year Old. The girl’s incoming ringtone was the opening to the Goldberg Variations as performed by Glenn Gould.
“Why, thank you,” The Twelve-Year-Old said, her voice proper like a yardstick. “As I said in my message, congratulations to you as well.” She was in New York, doing Uncle Vanya. Molly would have to excuse her if she sounded tired, the girl said. Chekhov was a triathlon for the soul.
“Aren’t you excited?” Molly asked.
“As much as a person in my situation can be,” the girl said.
“What situation is that?”
“What I mean is, it’s ridiculous to believe that I’ll win, so it’s important to take that into account, I think. My manager says, win or lose, I need to conceive of this as a footnote.”
“A footnote to what?” Molly asked.
“To my career, of course,” The Twelve-Year Old said. “If anything, this could be a hindrance. It presents any number of obstacles. We all know the trappings of early success, the long list of clichés one would hope to avoid. Do I want a life ruined by drug addiction? Do I succumb to that tragic narrative? Or do I aspire for something more?”
The Legend, as was only right, was the one who called Molly.
“Oh, yes,” the older woman said. “That child is strange. We had her here once. She kept asking me about working with Marlon, but very odd questions, like how much did he weigh?”
The Legend lived in upstate New York on thirteen hundred acres of land that included a helipad and any number of horses no one was allowed to ride. These animals instead freely trotted and grazed every spring, summer, and fall, and spent their winters in Florida, where The Legend kept another home. Her husband was a world-renowned photographer-turned-local-eccentric. Molly asked about him.
“James is fine. He’s going around to all of our neighbors asking if he can take pictures of them while they shower,” The Legend said. “I don’t think it’s going to work, but he has this theory about showers…”
She told Molly not to be nervous.
“It’s wonderful,” The Legend said. “It’s simply the best time there is to be had. Everyone is thrilled to be there. Everyone is happy and kind. The first time you’re nominated is, really, the best time, because it’s all so new and fresh and exciting. You’re a little girl again. The second time is far different. I would say it’s even better. The third time is…”
Molly liked The Legend. Her four Oscar wins were well deserved. Despite her mythic status, she remained gracious and kind. Not that she had any other choice. Kindness and grace were what people had come to expect of her. It was merely good fortune that the instincts required for the role came naturally. Molly was more than happy—thrilled, in fact—to hear The Legend speak of her life. It wasn’t arrogance or conceit passing through the earpiece. It was the truth, and the truth didn’t bother Molly. No, what bothered Molly was the tone of postmenopausal confidence that certain accomplished women over sixty possess. They haven’t forgotten the decades of fear and doubt—the sympathy remains—but they have adopted that most annoying of masculine traits, that tic which seems to pronounce, ad nauseam, and merely through a hollow word or a twist of the mouth, “What’s the big fuss?”
“Have fun,” The Legend said. “Enjoy it. Forget about the competition. It’s just an honor to be nominated.”
On her couch in her medium-sized living room, Molly Bit recounted all of this for her mother. Together, they looked out at the pool. It was yellow from the house lights. As the wind picked up, the japonica newly planted around the yard’s edge twitched extravagantly. The silence was good, but then Molly felt the need to ruin it.
“How’s my father?” she asked.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Sarah said.
“Do what?”
“You know what. What is that? ‘My father.’ ”
A long moment passed in which they sat there in the telepathic silence of family life. Doing prep for Certain Values, she’d spent a week living with the girls who’d played her daughters. During their next to last dinner, she’d refused to speak to them. Her mother used to do this. Normally, it would last an evening. The longest stretch was four days. John had come home one night and pulled the screen door off its hinge. He’d kicked the kitchen table over. He’d put his fist through the bathroom wall right into Molly’s bedroom. When the police arrived, Molly stood on the porch with her mother and watched her father being cuffed out on the lawn. She’d gone to school that week—everybody’s favorite girl—but at home it was nothing but quiet, nothing but the loneliness of watching, until her mother put out her cigarette on a Friday night after McDonald’s and said, “I guess I’ll drop the charges.”
With the Certain Values girls, Molly felt bad about the exercise—she remembered how awful it was—but she needed to see what would happen. The lit
tle one cried. The older one forked her peas into the shape of a lopsided star, went into the kitchen, came back with a pint of salty caramel ice cream, and ate the whole thing.
“Fine,” Molly said. “How’s Dad?”
“He’s good,” Sarah said. “I called him before I left.”
“Do you think he’ll watch?”
“Of course, he’ll watch. He’s your father.”
“So because he has to,” Molly said. It was a child’s voice coming through her.
“Jeez.”
“It’s true,” Molly said.
“It isn’t.”
“It is,” Molly said. “I don’t like that woman. What’s her name?”
“You know her name,” Sarah said. “Catherine.”
“She’s too young for him,” Molly said.
“Ten years is…” Sarah started. “I’m glad he found someone. I’m glad he’s sober. I’m happy for him.”
“Is that your line now?” Molly asked. “Is that the line you’re going with?”
They hadn’t spoken about the role, how Molly had played her mother in a movie: the husband a drunk, the character a frayed nerve of stress, how every scene was about trying and failing and going at it again and how whenever the man showed up—he was all they wanted—he destroyed everything.
“You should go to Al-Anon,” Sarah said. “I’ve found it helpful. You should deal with certain things.”
“I’ve been,” Molly said. “I’ve dealt.”
“You’ve been?”
“No,” Molly said. “Since when do we talk like this?”
“We talk like this,” Sarah said. “Don’t we? Sure we do.”
“Not ever,” Molly said.
The doorbell rang.
“Doorbell!”
“God, Mom.”
“What?” Sarah asked.
“It’s just more packages.”
“Well, isn’t your life terrible,” Sarah said.
The last month hadn’t exactly been a breeze, she’d have her mother know. The press junkets had been absurd, and fairly often embarrassing, at least inwardly, deep down inside Molly’s stomach, where all her tension did its flexing. The car with her publicist inside would pick her up in the morning, and then it was the Standard, the W, or all afternoon at the Shutters in Santa Monica, room after room of print and web journalists and their pent up, adolescent rage. Like water balloons they hoped wouldn’t burst, the first few questions were gentle—and then it was attack, attack, attack.
“You recently went through a very long, very public, and very nasty divorce. Who will you be bringing to the ceremony?”
“As a thirty-seven-year-old, how do you feel about the dearth of roles for older women in Hollywood?”
“How does it feel to be you? Do you like you? What do you think of you?”
But the gifts, the flowers, the jewelry: these things were nice. Most of them were sent to the agency first, collected there on some intern’s desk, Molly imagined, and then couriered up to her in the hills.
She made sure to open all the letters. It had been two years since she’d received one, and never on Coldwater, but Molly remained afraid of the prospect. The detective said it wasn’t anything to worry about, that whoever it was had most likely moved on, maybe died. All investigators could ever say for certain was that whoever was writing the letters did so from inside California. He made his own ink. He used a typewriter that couldn’t be traced. That winter, just in case he’d switched envelopes, Molly opened all her letters wearing latex gloves. They were never from him. The rest of it—the orchids, the clothes, the lemon trees—she put in the dining room.
Usually, the agency sent an intern or an assistant over in a car, but sometimes they used a service. Molly went to the video screen to see which it was. There was no one there, no car in the exterior drive, nobody, and so she tapped the screen for the next camera angle. Molly saw a man in a hoodie at the street gate. It wasn’t the best resolution, and at first she felt the pure fear—the mindless, spinal shock—but then the man flipped his hood out of his face and Molly saw he was black.
“Marcus?” she intercom’d.
“The one and only,” her neighbor said.
She grabbed a cigarette out of a drawer and walked outside to the security panel. She tried four or five different code sequences before the gate opened. Marcus slipped in and started down the drive. His high-cut running shorts were way too short. They were also bright purple. She saw the box in his hands.
“Nice look,” she said.
“I’m training for a role,” he said. “The guy’s an ex-SEAL. This was outside.”
“Out there?”
“In the drainage ditch,” Marcus said. “Maybe the intern had a hot date. Dumped it. Peeled off.”
“Thoughtful.” She lit her cigarette.
“Please,” Marcus said, completing the distance. “Give me a drag.”
He took an ex-smoker’s pull. She watched all the old motions and memories come back to him. Marcus was handsome, and his wife was beautiful, and both of their sons were gorgeous.
She took the box from him. It was the kind of thing you put a hat in. It weighed practically nothing, but it was awkward to hold. She set it on the ground.
“What do you think it is?” Molly asked.
“A vase?” Marcus said.
“A vase?” she asked him. “What makes you say that?”
“I’m saying maybe,” Marcus said. “I’m saying it could be.”
With her toe, Molly nudged the box forward over the asphalt granules. “It’s not a vase,” she said. “But thank you.”
Marcus was on a TV show that Molly didn’t watch. It was a sitcom where he played a smooth-operating ladies’ man, and it aired on one of the newer cable networks. She couldn’t even remember the network’s acronym. When he wasn’t filming, he did plays: Chicago, London, New York. He’d pack the whole family up and they’d be gone for months at a time. His film credits were small and numerous: The Drug Dealer, The Gang Member, The Cop. He’d won an Obie Award for a play he’d starred in called The Rights of Man.
“Shouldn’t you be at some fancy dinner-drinks thing right now?” Marcus asked.
“My mother,” she said, and rolled her head back toward the house. “She’s in there.”
Last year, Molly had spent several weeks before the start of Certain Values with Marcus and his family. She went grocery shopping with them. She watched TV. She hung out in their backyard. She had hoped to steal a few behaviors from Alice, get an insight or two, but instead she became interested in how totally in love with her family Alice was. Molly’s character was a good woman, but never not pissed off. Not so with Alice. She moved about her day behaving as if she hadn’t been robbed of anything. Not her freedom. Not her time. Not her identity. In fact, Alice genuinely liked their company. She enjoyed asking them if they were okay. Was everything all right? What was the matter? Did they want to talk about it? She annoyed the boys with her affection, and they adored her for it.
Marcus gave her back her cigarette.
“How you feelin’?” he asked her.
“I’m very nervous,” she said.
“I bet. You want some advice?”
“No,” she said. “Go ahead.”
“Don’t trip on the stairs.”
Molly looked at him. She remembered they were true friends. She had spent the month of December in the Arabian desert and had lived in a tent half the size of a football end zone. At night, when she wasn’t shooting, she would sit outside the main flap and look up at the universe and rehearse her lines. A man came by in the morning with fruit trucked in from Europe. Kiwis. Mangos. She’d met a prince with five wives. But looking at Marcus she was jealous of his life. Not jealous of its exact details, but of its feeling, of what it must have been like to walk inside his home every day. She didn’t want a family, so much as the energy of one, like a room she could stroll in and out of whenever she wanted to, and maybe close the door on when it got to
be too much. Molly guessed the real truth was that she wanted to go on acting. It was her whole life.
He had to be on his way.
“Alice is making us throw a party. They’re gonna wanna leave gifts by your gate. Is that alright?”
“If I win, sure,” Molly said. “I don’t want consolation prizes.”
She took the box with her back into the house and set it on a table by the door. Earlier, she’d left her phone there. She depressed the circle and saw three missed calls and a voicemail from The Prostitute.
“You’ll never guess where I am, Mol. Not in a hundred million years. I’m in Boise, Idaho, which is surprisingly temperate! I think I might buy property here! That would be… oh, down-homey. Listen… the jet I was on crashed. Not really. But we did have to make an emergency landing. A goose flew into the turbine. That’s what the pilot said. ‘Sorry, ma’am, a goose flew into the turbine.’ I was half-asleep. I didn’t believe him. We’re waiting on another jet, or maybe just a regular plane. I would accept a hot air balloon ride at this point—” and then the voicemail cut out.
The Prostitute lived in New York and belonged “to the third generation of a hip avant-garde family,” as the Times had awkwardly put it last Sunday, stressing The Prostitute’s Village pedigree and turning what should have been a straight puff piece into an elegy—it was like they couldn’t help themselves—for old Manhattan. The Prostitute’s grandfather was a sculptor whose work had been included in four Whitney Biennials. Her grandmother was a performance artist and an off-Broadway legend. Her older brother died from a heroin overdose. And on and on. The photo that ran with the article was of The Prostitute under the arch in Washington Square. Was she smiling? Was she frowning? Was she having an orgasm?
She tapped Call Back.
“Where are you?” Molly asked, even though she knew.
“Boise,” The Prostitute said, all the excitement of her voicemail gone.
“I don’t know if you’ve heard,” Molly said, “but you’ve been nominated for an Academy Award.”
“Ha-ha-ha,” The Prostitute said.
“The ceremony is tomorrow.”