by Dan Bevacqua
“She’s one of the leaders of the mutant rebellion. A figure the others look up to. A kind of sexy matriarch. She shoots lasers out of her forehead.”
“Picture this: Your daughter is mute. Your plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness. There’s a number of bears. How do you survive?”
“I’m old now?” she’d asked Diane one day. “Is that it?”
They were getting hers and hers massages in her living room. Molly’s masseuse said he had a light sensitivity. He kept his eyes closed the whole time.
“You’re thirty-nine,” Diane said. “Right there Oh. Wow.”
“You’re forty,” Molly said.
“I can be as old as I want to be,” Diane told her. “We’re not talking about me. Why don’t you take one of the deals they’re offering you? Do the mutant one. Make it contingent upon The Last Century.”
“Because I’m thirty-nine,” she said. “I don’t think it’s ridiculous for a grown woman to decline mutation. I don’t want to sit in a makeup chair for six hours a day having scales applied to my tits.”
Molly felt a tap on her shoulder and flipped over onto her back. She had slices of kiwi taped over her eyes. Her neck was slathered in honey.
“But what about the money?” Diane asked.
“I don’t care about the money,” Molly said. “I just want it.”
“God.”
“I know what you’re thinking—I’m spoiled, I’m rotten, and maybe that’s true. But this movie is my child. This is what I want to put out into the world. Not some goofy-looking thing that cries all the time. I want to direct.”
“But what if you did want to have a baby?”
“I’m not in the mood for this.”
“I mean it,” Diane said. “Imagine if you wanted to have a baby.”
“I don’t. But I’m imagining.”
“Don’t get mad at me here. Just listen to me.”
“All ears,” she said.
“Did these guys sign something?” Diane asked. “Did you guys sign something?”
“Yes,” one of the men said. “We did.”
“You’re not married,” Diane said. “You’re not dating anyone. Nobody’s on the horizon. But all of the sudden you want to have a baby. What do you do?”
“I just have the baby. I get a donor. I adopt or whatever. I just do it.”
“So just do the movie,” Diane said. “What’s the difference? You’re sort of rich. Kind of. Sometimes.”
In Brooklyn, she bull-horned her men over.
“No rain?” Tomasz asked. “I had conceived of rain.”
“You’ll have to conceive of it differently,” Molly said.
She and her DP had gotten along well at first. Tomasz Eggles was Hungarian. Years ago, they’d met for dinner while Molly was promoting a film in Pest. Tomasz had walked her through the old quarter, pointing out buildings where his family used to live, gesturing at a square that had once held public executions. She admired his work. He had a way of framing shots in such a manner so as to make them seem elegiac. He understood how the past lived in the present, the way it clung to shadows. What better eye to see The Last Century with? They’d kept up an email correspondence over the subsequent years. Theirs had been a warm, professional exchange, but when Tomasz arrived, he’d been irritated with his accommodations. He had not traveled all the way to New York to stay in Brooklyn, he said. Only the day before he’d accused her of micromanaging him, of not allowing him to do his job. This may have been true.
One of Molly’s fears was that people would think Tomasz was her ghost director, and so, when he framed a shot in his usual style—tight, contained, the actors had to hit their marks exactly just so—she would sometimes ask him to pull back, to give her the dark hallway to the left, some emptiness. He always agreed—he nodded his head in the old bloc Communist style—but first he bitched.
“This is not at all what I had envisioned,” he said. Tomasz was sixty. His gray skin reminded her of a leaky faucet. “There is no hope for the machine?”
“None.”
“We cannot readjust the hoses?”
“It’s not the hoses,” she said. “It’s something with the motor.”
“Motor?”
It was incredible, the times he chose incomprehension.
“What is this?” he asked. “Motor?”
“You know what a motor is, Tomasz,” Molly said. “Don’t fuck with me right now.”
“I’ll let everyone know,” Ray Odette chirped in.
Her first AD was a man-boy in the last throes of his fake humility. In a matter of years it would either be real or he would have succeeded enough to stick it to everyone who’d ever crossed him. These types were cute at first, Molly thought, sort of like baby wolves, but then there comes that morning when you wake up and your throat’s been torn out. Ray’s uncle was a producer named Vincent Odette. She had a passing friendship with Vince. They’d had a single decent conversation at the Golden Globes a decade ago and had been trying to rekindle it ever since. “You should try my nephew,” he’d said to her at an Alzheimer’s benefit. “He’ll work for cheap. He wants out of commercial.”
“What about the talent?” Ray asked her. His brain was stuck in Nike, Chanel, Velveeta Mac & Cheese.
“I’ll talk to the actors,” Molly said.
“Actors, right,” Ray said. “Sorry.”
Her leads, Ashley Peele and Dom Kirkwieler, were smoking by the makeup tent. They were both twenty-two. Ashley had grown up Hollywood. At age nine she’d begun starring in The Warriors of Time series based upon the YA books of the same name. The series was about a group of human-alien-hybrid children tasked with… Molly had never seen it. She liked the way the girl carried herself. Like the character she was playing, Ashley was without apology. At the audition, Molly had put a table close to the door where the actors came in. She placed it so that when the girls entered the room, the door would hit the table. Five, six, seven girls walked in, banged the table, and apologized. When it was Ashley’s turn, the strength she’d used to open the door knocked the table to the floor. She gently closed the door behind her, turned to Molly and Ray Odette, and said, “That’s a terrible place for that.”
Dom Kirkwieler had been in one other movie before this, a low-budget mumble-core directed by his brother. He was untrained, in over his head, and everyone he met on set intimidated him. He was perfect.
Molly sloshed through the water in the road, hopped up onto the sidewalk and over to them.
“Would you call this a no-rain delay?” Ashley asked.
She was lovely and knew it. Her shoulder-length blond hair was all angles and messy, something the stylist had called “late-late punk.” For the months leading up to the shoot, Ashley had studied the early 1990s, its music and fads. She’d decided her character would probably have a secret soft spot for the era’s more mainstream music. “Outwardly, she’d be all Sonic Youth and Nirvana,” Ashley had said to Molly over the phone, “but come on, really? In the shower? Who’s going to sing ‘Rape Me’ in the shower?
“ ‘All I can say is that my life is pretty plain,’ ” Ashley sang, in perfect pitch. “ ‘You don’t like my point of view, you think that I’m insane.’ ”
“He was a babe,” Molly said. “That was sad.”
At Molly’s urging, both Ashley and Dom had handed over their cell phones to their assistants. She’d wanted them to experience actual downtime in the same way their characters would have. She wanted them to understand true boredom, true solitude. One unfortunate side effect of this character note was that both Ashley and Dom had begun to smoke an incredible number of cigarettes. Molly had a feeling the sound guys were to blame for this. It was always the sound guys. The sound guys were always up to something.
Molly herself would have killed for a smoke, but no. No. No.
“How are you, Molly Bit?” Dom asked. He always said her whole name. Everybody loved him. He still looked awkward maneuvering the cigarette to and away from
his lips. Molly was glad for that. She liked the green of him, his sweetness.
“It’s going to be a late night,” Molly said. “This will push us back, and then there’s Grand Central. That’s gonna be more complicated.”
“No sleep ’til Brooklyn,” Ashley said.
“No sleep ’til we’re back in Brooklyn, yes. But you feel good?”
Ashley gave her the hang-loose sign.
“I feel great,” Dom said. The cherry of his cigarette had a lopsided burn going on. The smoke blew into his eyes. Molly knew it must have stung. “I feel awesome.”
She spent the next few minutes telling them how wonderful they were. The importance of this could never be underestimated. When an actor spoke of how incredible it was to work with a director, it was because that particular director had told them they were God’s great gift to performance. To speak, to say, “Terrific…” with the subtle direction wedded in, was also exhausting. It too had the added effect of putting Molly’s own career into strange relief. How much of her life was the result of a man or woman blowing smoke up her ass so they could move on to more important things—like where was Tony and his crew? Like why wasn’t anyone brooming the water down the sewer drain? Like come on. Like what the fuck?
The film adaptation of Greg Watson’s novel, The Last Century, had proved a challenge to shoot. Her old college friend had published a weird first book. It had taken him forever to write, and it wasn’t even that long. Hardly anyone had read it. The plot followed a young, confused writer (played by Dom) and his sister (Ashley), a performance artist. Most of the book took place in New York, but then it jumped around to LA and San Francisco and even Boston. The first thing she’d done when she’d hired Greg to adapt it was to have him cut all that out.
“But I mean—” he’d said over the phone.
“Cut it,” she’d told him. “It’s strange enough as it is. I love it. I love the creepy atmospherics, the dialogue, all of it. We don’t need the time jump. Let’s keep the focus on when they were young. Trust me, New York is enough.”
Molly was hungry. She thought to text Diane, but then she remembered Diane was off with Susan, who would—sooner or later—take Diane away for good. For the thousandth time, Molly reminded herself she needed to be calm about it when it happened. She needed to be happy for Diane. She couldn’t act like a selfish bitch. She liked Susan. She did.
Molly stood in the middle of the street and looked around for the craft truck. Everyone was either doing their job or pretending to do their job. Instructions had been handed down via Ray. Crew members were deliberately avoiding her in case she might want them to do something.
The truck was down the block, in the direction of McCarren Park. Walking, she felt the water splash around her boots. The sound of a pump started. The draining, sucking sound began to echo off the buildings in Greenpoint, which in the script wasn’t actually Greenpoint, but Williamsburg in the early ’90s. Times had changed. One thing looked like the other now. Or if it didn’t, it would.
A few extras wearing oversized MC Hammer–style parachute pants stood by a table stocked with vegetables and deli meat. They stepped aside for her. Each of the extras offered Molly a kind, closed-mouth smile. She tossed it back at them. There you are. Here I am. Over the last several years she’d grown worse at performing this gesture. She didn’t trust people. She didn’t care if the letters weren’t being sent anymore. When it came to fans, strangers, normal people, she had to work at producing kindness and a sense of human feeling.
Up in the craft truck window, an older white woman leaned with her elbow on the counter. She typed into her phone. Her face held the familiar glow.
“Hi,” Molly said.
“Hey there, honey,” the woman said. A real New Yorker didn’t blink at her. They were all actors. “How’s the movie comin’?”
“Pretty good. Pretty good.” She was tired. What was she supposed to say? Something memorable?
“We’re all rooting for you over here,” the woman said. “What’ll it be?”
What she really wanted was a cheeseburger, but she ordered an egg white omelet with mushrooms and green peppers. Molly stepped back and looked at the apartment building behind the food truck. It was one of the few apartments on the street. In one of the top windows, she saw a shirtless man smoking a cigarette. He waved at her. She waved back. A purple cloud roamed across the moon as one long strip of weather.
“Here, honey,” the woman said. She handed over the Styrofoam box. Molly admired her arms. The muscle definition was almost upsetting.
“You know, I wish you’d a come on another night. We gotta kid working with us. He’s a big fan, this kid. Works hard. Real nice kid.”
“I’ll be around,” Molly said. “I can’t go anywhere.”
Molly thanked the woman and walked back toward set. She hooked a quick left down a side street. All of the trailers—the tech, the personal, the Porta-Potties, the otherwise—were parked on the right. She went up the steps of her own trailer. Placed upright against her door was a thick red and black FedEx envelope. She grabbed it and brought it into the trailer with her. Even though Molly wanted to be cool about it, act like no big deal, whatever, she zip-ripped the-whatever-it-was-called and pulled from out of the envelope the script for—she could not believe Abby had kept the title—Echo Chamber.
She began to read it immediately.
* * *
In June, she had gone to see Greg Watson. She’d been in New York to do a location scout and took a car two hours north to Kingston. She only had the afternoon. Greg’s house was nearby, close to the river. It was his mother’s father’s place—it was something like that. Greg’s mother moved about the house in a long, flowing dress the color of a lilac. His wife had on a pair of very chic overalls. His father wore a Hawaiian shirt. “He lost a bet,” Greg explained. The five of them ate lunch on the porch overlooking the Hudson and slapped mosquitoes against their arms.
“The kid’s napping,” Greg said. “If you’re into that sort of thing, we can go in and stare at him later.”
None of them could believe the movie was actually happening. Greg’s mother was a painter. His father was a writer too. They seemed to expect the whole deal was going to fall apart. Disaster felt inevitable.
“Nothing’s going to happen,” Molly said. “I’ve put the money up. Everyone will show because they want to get paid.”
“But what about the other backers?” Greg’s mother asked.
“Hydrogen owes me.”
“How many theaters do you think?” Greg’s father asked. “What do you think it will gross?”
For some reason, writers always thought they were film business experts. It was both annoying and hurt her pride. They had it pretty much figured out. It wasn’t NASA.
“A few hundred theaters, I imagine,” Molly said. “The gross? I don’t know. I have to make it first. You can never tell anyway.”
Greg’s wife reached her hand out and touched Molly on the shoulder. She had a cool, calm way. “You’ll do great,” she said. “I know it.”
“I hope so,” Molly said. She was terrified.
After lunch, Greg drove Molly back into town. Her car and driver followed them. Kingston felt familiar. It was as though her hometown in Vermont had been zapped with a ray gun, some superhero bullshit that magnified and multiplied zombie buildings and deserted factories. But the downtown was from another time, the eighteenth century. It had been refurbished with weekend-getaway cash. Kingston was close enough to New York that the locals going about their business on a Saturday pretended they didn’t care about her. In the hipster coffee shop Greg had chosen, at a table in the back, forty-somethings who’d grown up with her face beamed into their lives peeked over with a look that said, “How do you like that?”
They drank their coffee for all of two seconds.
“Gimme a cigarette,” Greg said.
“Secret smoker.”
“Until I die.”
There was an alley
out back. Graffitied on the cement wall opposite them was a neon green sentence that read September 10th was a hoax. Molly bummed Greg a cigarette and then she told him he looked exactly as he had in college.
“Please,” he said.
“You do.”
“Flatter me,” he said. “Go ahead. I love it. I’ll be forty this weekend. That’s why we’re up here. A birthday getaway. I’m getting old.”
She didn’t want to hear about getting old or talk about getting older. Driving down from the house, Molly had felt young—or, if not young, at least happy not to be discussing age, time, or what to do about these things, as if anything could be. Southern California tried to rob you of your deep interiority. LA did. Hollywood. It was impossible not to lose at least some of it, for shallow thoughts and conversations to cast a spell that sealed a layer off. For six months she’d been contemplating an ass lift. Her dermatologist had told her about a new procedure that lasered ten years away. There was no possible way her teeth could be any whiter; if they were any whiter, they wouldn’t be teeth. All of this considering took time. All of her focus. All of her ambition. All of her success.
“I’m really into kindness now,” Greg said. He exhaled a locomotive plume. “I meet so many assholes. If someone is courteous to me, or just not a dick, I want to buy them lunch.”
“Everyone I meet is nice to me,” Molly said.
“Sounds great.”
“It’s not. It’s annoying. It’s like they think there’s something wrong with me. ‘Hel-lo. How are you to-day?’”
“If I could do it all over again, I’d be a movie star,” Greg said. “Not being a movie star was the single greatest mistake I ever made in my entire life.”
“There’s still time.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think that ship has sailed.”
The back door to another restaurant slammed open. An overstuffed black garbage bag sailed out, and landed in a puddle. The door closed again.