by Dan Bevacqua
“Yes, I know. I’m starting to freak out over here.”
“When’s the plane coming?”
“It was supposed to be here by now. I’m supposed to be on a new plane, in mid-air, right now.”
“Do you want me to accept on your behalf?”
“Shut up. I’ll accept on your behalf.”
“I’m not going to win,” Molly said, but she didn’t really mean this.
“I’m not either,” The Prostitute said (ditto, Molly knew). “That psycho’s going to win. She’ll be all surprised about it too! ‘Little ole me?’”
In the late ’90s, Molly and The Prostitute had starred together in a horror movie called Funhouse. Last year, Molly had purchased a VHS copy of it on eBay for one hundred and sixty dollars and sent it to The Prostitute on her birthday.
“I had some people over the other night and we watched it,” The Prostitute said. “It holds up. I mean, it’s horror, so it’s, you know, whatever, but we were good. It was a sort of pre-Oscar thing I was having. ‘Before They Were Nominees’ was the theme.”
Molly asked who was there.
“Everybody,” The Prostitute said. “Why don’t you move to New York?”
It would have made sense. She wasn’t really an LA person anymore. All the New York people were moving to LA, so why shouldn’t she move to New York? When they were still married, during that time when they’d tried to make a go of it, Molly had suggested the idea to Andrew, and he’d been terrified. His career was going so well. What about the next project? The one after that? What kept them together in part was the way they were tapped into the industry: a deal would happen, and the tremor of it, the ripple, would set off an alarm inside one or the other of them. They were at the center of everything. Why would they leave that? Andrew asked. Because she was unhappy, Molly wanted to say. Because the stories of the other women had broken something in her. Not her heart, but her pride, a thing she had leaned on for years.
“You should move to New York, and you should get on Twitter,” The Prostitute said. “Your social media is a disaster. Do you know how much money you could save? Who does your Facebook? It’s a mess.”
“I don’t know,” Molly said. “Somebody.”
“I wonder how many times I’ll tell this plane story tomorrow night?” The Prostitute asked.
“A thousand,” Molly said.
Molly wouldn’t tell a story. Her mother on her arm, they would do the slow walk down the world’s longest red carpet, stopping here and there in the shadows of buildings and various press corps, the nervous, spastic energy of TV and internet correspondents forcing her to cross-step one way, and cross-back back, and twirl. “And who is this?” they’d ask. “My mother,” she’d say. “Hi, Mom!” And if it wasn’t so exciting and wonderful and addictive in its thrill, anyone would throw up from how ridiculous it was. They would vomit up all that went unspoken. And what about it? What could Molly say? This is my mother? I’m playing her? I found out her trauma was mine? I shook for two days after the movie wrapped? How uncomfortable does that make you feel?
Film was the secret art, Molly knew, the repressed medium, and all the celebrity bullshit kept it that way, hidden in plain sight. To be who she was, to act, to be free, all she had to do was lie most of the time.
“Oh my goodness, me-oh-my-oh,” The Prostitute said. “Ze plane.”
Molly heard it. The jet was like an asteroid in the distance. It was supersonic.
“I love you, Molly Bit,” The Prostitute said.
“I love you too,” Molly said, and ended the call.
* * *
She needed another cigarette. Clutched under her arm, she took the box back outside. The evening cold had come. She was in the high desert again. She went into the garden, sat on the low edge of the broken fountain, and lit her cigarette. Using her keys, she cut through the tape on the box. It was difficult. She had to saw into the tape, and some of the cardboard along the flap ripped.
“What’s that?” came her mother’s voice.
She slid the box around to her right and kept on smoking. She had been having a moment. Her mother didn’t need to be there for everything.
Sarah set herself down next to Molly. Always thin, she was beginning to gain weight in her hips; her jeans bunched up on either side of her. She shifted her knees a little so as to get comfortable, and then, once she was done moving, she sighed deeply, subatomically even, as if acknowledging that, yes, it had been she, she had been the one to give birth to the world.
“It’s one cigarette,” Molly said.
“It’s not that,” Sarah said. “I’ve made my peace with that. It’s your life. Go ahead and kill yourself. Don’t let me stop you.”
“What then?”
“Nothing.”
She exhaled again.
“What?”
“It’s just that you made such a good mother,” Sarah said. “Look how good. Oscar good.”
Hardly anyone understood what it was she did for a living, not even the people who celebrated her for it—not even those who made money off her. It was good luck the girls who’d played her daughters hadn’t been professionals. They were now, of course, and would be forever—you couldn’t go back—but before the movie, they’d been found in a national search. Molly was nervous beforehand, worried to work with children, but the fact that they had no idea what they were doing had worked in her favor. On the first day of shooting, she explained to them what a mark was and how it was okay to ask questions if they were unsure about anything—if they wondered “why?” or “how?” or “what about?” The movie was a little master class in acting. Unlike most adults, the kids still understood make-believe and how it wasn’t much different than real life.
At the wrap party, the seven-year old asked her, “Are we Method?”
The girl’s shiny blond hair was parted to the side with a green barrette. The movie husband walked around with the five-year-old on his shoulders.
“In a way,” Molly said. She told the girl they were the kind of actors who mapped their performances. They knew the why, but not the how until they’d done it. They did their research. They dreamt inside the brains of their characters. They knew every last little thing.
“But do you want to know a secret?” Molly asked.
The girl did. She really did.
“If you’re Method all the time, if you’re always in character—it’s selfish,” Molly whispered. “It’s for boys.”
The girl understood what Molly meant. She nodded.
“My brother never lets me call time-out when we play.”
“Boys are the worst,” Molly said. “Time-outs are important.”
Remembering this, she took a drag off her cigarette and looked at her mother.
“It’s a movie,” Molly said.
“Acting’s not just acting.”
“What is it, then?”
“I don’t know,” Sarah said, “but I know it’s not just that.”
“It’s not off the table,” Molly said.
“It would be nice to have a grandchild, is all I’m saying.”
“You have step-grandchildren.”
“Not the same thing,” Sarah said.
“Can we not?” Molly asked. “Tomorrow’s the biggest day of my life.”
“No offense, sweetie,” her mother said, “but every tomorrow has been the biggest tomorrow of your life since you were born.”
Why a baby? Molly wondered. It was absurd. The children of the famous were born into someone else’s daydream and spent the rest of their lives trying to wake up from it.
“This whole town is creepy,” Sarah said. “The privacy here. I find it creepy. Did I ever tell you that?”
“That you find me creepy?”
“Not you. I didn’t say you. Your privacy. I find your privacy creepy.”
“What choice do I have?” Molly asked.
“None. That’s true,” Sarah said. “But that’s how you like it. That’s what everybody here want
s—to be so famous that their privacy is a really big deal. They want everybody in the world to want them so badly that they finally have a good enough reason to say, ‘Leave me alone!’ I used to think it was E! News’s fault or whatever but it’s not. It’s the actors’ faults. You’re all so strange and creepy and weird. ‘Look at me! Stop! Don’t look at me! I need you! Get away from me!’ It’s bizarre.”
Molly pushed the box lightly with her hand. She assumed it was from her dad. It would be exactly like him to send a gift through the “proper” channels. John was her father, but he’d always let it be known that he was himself first, all alone and unattached. If most people sent gifts through the agency, then he would too—he wasn’t anyone special.
“You’re saying I’m creepy again,” Molly said.
“Am I?” Sarah asked. “So maybe I am.” She finished her wine in one long gulp and stood up, a little wobbly.
She looked at her mother standing there. Why did everyone have it out for actors still? You didn’t need to be an actor to be famous anymore, she thought. You didn’t need to do anything. Everybody knew that. The way the century was going, actors would soon be extinct, replaced by holograms, or next-generation CGI, or maybe only regular people with cameras pointed at them. Movies were bound to die, like plays, like books, like anything. And what then? What would happen to the people who played the people? What would happen when everybody, finally everybody, was famous?
Her mother walked back toward the house. Halfway there, she stopped and spun around.
“You know how I felt watching your movie?” Sarah asked. “You know how it made me feel?”
“How?” Molly asked.
“Tough,” Sarah said. “I felt tough for the first time in my life. Good job.”
It was the nicest thing her mother had ever said to her. Sarah went back inside the house. Molly finished her cigarette. It had been a good one, one of those that made all of the others, and the end result, worthwhile. Sitting by the fountain, she dragged the box closer to her. She opened the flaps and found it was filled with light-pink tissue paper, layer after layer of it. Finally, there was an end. The box was empty, there was nothing inside, she thought, but then Molly unfolded two sheets of paper apart and shook them, and the letter fell out. She recognized it instantly, the stalker’s letter—it was like an old idea, or the same recurring nightmare—and she couldn’t bring herself to touch it.
DEATH
IN MEMORIAM JUNE 2014
7
ABIGAIL WANTED A MOMENT. IT was what the dry-erase board was for. She wrote down certain terms and questions—Establishing Shot, Jump Cut To: Interior, How does time work?—zinged around the classroom like a lightning storm for fifty minutes, and then, when it was all said and done, stood with her back to their departures, erasing everything. Up-and-down, side-to-side, little circles: a mindlessness conspired. Years passed this way. Forget time signatures, she’d told them. Show a newspaper with the date for godsake, or a website, or a phone. No need for an interstitial Eight Months Later. It was a gimmick, anyway. It meant that part’s over, but a certain shadow will remain. This was what she felt as she erased. It was almost charming. She erased the professor and became herself again. Abigail’s panicked energy released. Her dead mother, the teacher, watched her. It was a silence of I told you so, look how well you’ve done, and sober, honey! Her dead mother brought along her dead father, and her dead father, her dead brother. All of her dead people watched her. All of her dead people, except for Molly Bit. It was too soon after Molly’s murder, only eight months, and there was no getting used to that.
“Professor Kupchik?” said a voice behind her.
It was the summer program, or what the college called the Institute for Interactive Thinking and Advanced Learning. Every summer, the institute made three million dollars’ profit, out of which Abigail saw $1,311.13 after taxes. Unless one was a small child or indigent, this wasn’t very much. Still, it supplemented her visiting professor’s salary during the regular school year. And what was she going to do about it? Complain? And say what? They paid her to talk.
“Abigail’s fine,” Abigail said. “Call me Abigail.”
She set the eraser on its rail and spun around. It was Christine Gallagher, one of the older students, perhaps sixty, a close-to-timid-but-not-quite woman who’d come out of a marriage, or a long illness, or some life event as equally bone-draining with an old revived dream to write a screenplay in her hand. She had a terrific bob.
“Sorry,” Christine said. “Abigail. It won’t happen again.”
“It’s okay.”
Minus a few, rare exceptions, Abigail liked all of her undergraduates. With the summer students, her reactions were more like those she experienced in civilian life. Some students she liked. Some students she didn’t. Some students she didn’t think about at all.
“I have a question,” Christine said.
She held her spiral-bound notebook tight to her chest. There was her real life right there. This was going to be a thing, Abigail knew, and whatever the thing was going to be, she didn’t have time for it. She needed to catch the train into the city. She had plans to meet up with Diane, catch the screening of Trust, and then there was the Q&A to cap off Molly’s three-day memorial tribute.
“Of course,” Abigail said. She couldn’t help herself. “What is it?”
“Do you think I belong here?”
They were so heartfelt. You couldn’t turn them away.
“Why did you come?” Abigail asked. “What were your reasons?”
Her husband had died. All of the time and all of the money belonged to her now. One thing led to another, and on a certain day Christine realized she’d been sitting at a computer writing scenes for the past two years.
“About your husband?” Abigail asked.
“God no,” Christine said. “About these two people who work at an aquarium.”
“That sounds good,” Abigail said, and she meant it. The movie would practically film itself. She could see the manta rays undulating in their tanks. Their need for freedom.
“No one here likes the idea,” Christine said. “They say I should write something more marketable. They say no one cares about aquariums. All I hear is superhero, vampire, werewolf.”
“Zombie, witch, Navy SEAL,” Abigail said. “I get it.”
“So what do you think?” Christine asked.
After her brother overdosed, Abigail had her second moment of clarity in as many years. She couldn’t stick around Minnesota, taking care of the dead and the dying. She would need an actual existence, because the very real, but simple joy of sobriety was no longer enough. She needed a job. And since there was only one thing in the world she was any good at or had any experience with, she called up an old friend who taught film, apologized to her about the time she’d made out with her dad, and asked for a favor.
Almost upon arrival, she met a man who was so nice to her, and so good in bed, and who was able to put up with her moods in such a way that she still had respect for him, that it took a year to realize she was in love. Tom asked, why don’t you write again? Just for you? and she said, I don’t think I can. But she tried it, and he was right. To hell with everybody, she thought. She wrote and wrote. She didn’t like it. She threw it out. She did it again. She tossed it. And once more. And in the end, from the time she started the script until she got the call for the greenlight, it took seven and a half years. There weren’t any werewolves, vampires, or superheroes in her movie either, and she didn’t know if it would get distributed or if anyone would care about it if it did, but she’d done the thing. She’d put her life back together. And it was good, and her movie was too.
She said all of this to Christine Gallagher, who, it turned out, she liked.
“So that’s what I think,” Abigail said. She mentioned they could get coffee the next day, but she had a train to catch.
“The tribute?” Christine asked.
“Right.”
“It’s te
rrible. It’s horrible. She was a friend of yours, wasn’t she?”
“We were friends,” Abigail said. “A long time ago.”
* * *
It was an hour-and-a-half ride coasting along the Hudson, little bridges and goats in the yard, three blue suits in her car drinking beer out of paper bags. At 125th Street, she remembered a man she used to love. The train went down under the earth into Grand Central. She took the 4 uptown to Eighty-Sixth Street and ascended the stairs into the last good day of summer.
Diane’s wife’s parents were rich-rich. A lot of their money was tied up with the construction of an island near Nassau—but still. Near Eighty-Fourth, Abigail took the elevator all the way up to the penthouse. When the doors opened, she was in the living room. It was the size of her entire apartment. She walked past two tan couches low to the floor and stepped up into the gallery between a pair of black marble statues, one a man, the other a woman, both of them on their knees, either praying or screaming. Diane was out on the patio, her back to the park. When they saw each other, they leaned fast into a hug. Without saying a word, both women held on for a minute, until Diane, the executrix, laugh-cried into Abigail’s hair, “She was so bad with money. Just so, so bad. She was like a rapper or something.”
Diane had been in New York for two weeks, setting up the tribute. Most of her time was spent on the phone, she said, and then in the afternoon she’d go down to the theater, or to a meeting with the director of programming. It was fifteen films in three days, the Q&A, plus a short documentary.
“It’s a rough cut,” Diane said, “but it’s beautiful. I’ve watched it about ten times. They found this old TV footage of her when she was a girl. She’s sledding.”
Years before, Abigail had written letter after letter; none of them had been addressed to Molly. Generally, she was decent at amends. To everyone else, she could find her apology. With Molly, it was more difficult. Abigail knew the truth: it was her own fault. No person interested in their health, sanity, or career would have committed to her movie, but her understanding of this would not split off from how she felt. The pain of certain breaks kept. Petty hurt creeped into the letters she composed to Molly in her head. There were stacks of them—but now the pettiness was gone, replaced with guilt. Wherever Abigail went, she took the letters along. She flipped through them as Tom raged all over again about his problems at work, or on the drive to Poughkeepsie for some research that went nowhere. All those blank moments when people believed they knew her position—thought she was right there, or would be soon—but she was somewhere else.