“Is there something on me?” is a question she asked a lot back then.
After several months of trial and error—mostly error—I finally realized Amy’s secrets are in her sounds.
When she’s anxious, her jaw clicks.
When she’s excited, her voice dips, counterintuitively, into a low rasp of a register.
When she’s annoyed, her breath hisses through her teeth.
When she needs to tell you something, something sad, something bad, when she can’t fully commit to the direction she wants the words to go, you can hear a soft flutter: the back of her tongue flapping against her epiglottis.
When she’s absolutely outraged—well, then she’ll stop breathing entirely.
Which is a real problem, because that’s a hard thing to listen for.
Right now I can’t hear her at all. Just the hum of the engine and the whir of the fan and the slight crackle that’s been on every call since I dropped my phone in a snowbank in Park City. This might be it. She might be as angry at me as she was at that manager who told his teenage clients he needed to supervise wardrobe fittings, and she’s going to banish me from her orbit as fast as she did him, and—
Her exhalation is rough and open-throated, from deep in her chest, and when I register the sound, I let out a great, gasping breath of my own. Thank God: This is the sound Amy makes when she’s angry for somebody.
“I’m worried Nell’s not telling you everything,” she says.
“Why would she? She’s my agent.”
A pause. “Just—it’s a lot, what you’re walking into. That’s all. It’s been a long time since you’ve done a feature with anyone but me, and big changes are, well—”
I finish the thought so she won’t have to. “Aren’t really my thing.”
Another pause. My fingers tighten around the phone.
“Well,” she says brightly, “No point second-guessing now. You’ll just have to call when you get in, let me know how it’s going.”
“Of course—”
“Promise?”
“Yes.”
“Even if you get your hands on dailies?”
I know better than to agree to that. “I’m hanging up now.”
“Knock ’em dead, babe.”
“Gosh, I hope not.”
A last pop of static and she’s gone.
FOUR
I rub my nose a few times and turn to look out the window. We’ve left the highway and are now passing through the mixed business and residential district of a smallish town. On the left is a filling station, a firehouse, a Presbyterian church. On the right, a series of neat two-story houses, some blue, some a pale dusky green, their front gardens filled out with phlox or hostas, depending on their orientation. Nearly every house has a porch-mounted pole and an American flag. They’re not so different from the house I grew up in, except our flag hangs from a pole in the front yard.
Just like this project won’t be so different from my last one, no matter what Amy might think. A few things might be moved around, that’s all.
A windowless room’s a windowless room’s a windowless room.
Which reminds me: I need all the vitamin D I can get. I let my body list a little to the left so I can catch the last rays of sunlight slanting through the rear window. I soak up the warmth for a few happy minutes, but then my smile settles into a sour crook, and an emotion I can’t immediately identify needles at my cheeks, at my feet.
I close my eyes and try to figure out what movie I’m thinking of.
Josh accused me once of having The Film Encyclopedia instead of a heart, and he would have been right if The Film Encyclopedia hadn’t been four years out of date at the time. Ever since my family got our first VCR, movies have been all I can remember—and I mean that more literally than you might imagine. For years we only owned two movies: The Right Stuff, which my parents saw on their first date, and Herbie Goes Bananas, because my mother figured a preschooler wouldn’t be interested in a 192-minute historical epic about the space program.
She was incorrect.
If you do the math (and I have), you’ll find that between the ages of four and seven, I spent about the same amount of time watching The Right Stuff as I did going to school, and sometimes I wonder if all that repetition crossed my wires. To this day there are times I’ll see a random photo, and I’ll feel a flash of recognition—a happy sunburst of hey, I’ve been there!—only to realize seconds or even minutes later that no, I haven’t been there at all, it’s just Edwards Air Force Base. It’s like if Proust bit into that madeleine, but instead of flashing back to his childhood, he saw Sam Shepard breaking the sound barrier.
It’s possible I’ve spent so much time watching movies that the language of film has infiltrated some primal, necessary part of my brain. I catch myself processing my own emotions in scenes, in shots, in dialogue. Like when there’s a burn in my sinuses and a sick clench in the back of my throat, but my brain doesn’t supply a single word (sadness). Instead, it offers up a two-second clip from Terms of Endearment: Huckleberry Fox, inconsolable, at Debra Winger’s bedside.
It isn’t easy, or efficient, or necessarily clear. It would be much simpler, certainly, if I’d only seen a handful of movies, and if those movies had been directed by Steven Spielberg. Maybe then my emotions would be more manageable, more straightforward, a line instead of a scatter plot. But like Josh said, I have a whole encyclopedia up in there, and Huckleberry Fox at Debra Winger’s bedside is very different from Troy Bishop at Debra Winger’s bedside is very different from Shirley MacLaine at Debra Winger’s bedside.
I press my ring fingers into the corners of my eyes and try, once again, to figure myself out.
Eventually, it comes to me:
A man in a bathroom. He’s sitting on the counter next to the sink, one knee pulled up to his chest so he can fit his foot under the faucet. He’s barefoot, bleeding, shirtless.
His walkie-talkie crackles.
“I’m here, John.”
He lifts the radio to his face.
“Look,” Bruce Willis says, “I’m starting to get a bad feeling up here.”
So that’s what this is.
Foreboding.
My eyelids snap open.
“Isaiah.”
His head tips in my direction. “Hmm?”
“Where are we going?”
A rumble of something that might be laughter. “I was wondering if you were ever going to ask.”
My ears heat. I knew it. I knew he’d notice. “I’m sorry—I’m not so good at talking to strangers.”
“Well, not much point asking now.” He lifts his index finger from the steering wheel and angles it in the direction of the horizon. “We’re almost there.”
My stomach tries to crawl out my mouth.
“That,” I say, “is the ocean.”
“What gave it away? We’re booked on a seven forty-five ferry.”
“You didn’t say anything about a boat.”
He shrugs. “You didn’t say anything about hating boats.”
My right foot flexes upward. I press it back down.
“Is there any other way to get where we’re going? A long way around, maybe?”
“Depends—did you pack a swimsuit?”
I slump in my seat. “An island. Even better.”
His gaze snags mine in the rearview mirror. “If it’s a problem, I’m happy to call Tony directly. I’m sure he’d love to hear all about it.”
His eyes are crinkled at the corners—is he laughing at me? Does he think this is funny? Is he really that kind of person? Or does he think I’m kidding. That this is a bit. That maybe I make a habit of playing at neurosis or clumsiness or hysteria to ease the discomfort of men in the presence of a more accomplished woman, and God, that might actually be worse. I’m not playing at anything
—and I don’t think I’m more accomplished than he is. No one should be intimidated by me, I’m a disaster. Not that I can tell him that. Because if I say I’m a disaster, it will seem like false humility, like I don’t think he can handle—
* * *
—
When Isaiah pulls into the ferry terminal parking lot, my thoughts are still stuck in the same loop, and in my haste to get out and into the fresh air and maybe to run in the opposite direction, I shove at the door of the SUV—which slams straight into Isaiah, who I hadn’t realized would be coming around to help me. I lean toward him without thinking, so when the door rebounds off his whiskey-barrel chest, it wallops me in the face. If there’s a metaphor in there, I’m in too much pain to put my finger on it.
A phrase I haven’t used in years pops out.
“Mothersmucker.”
I fumble around for my nose to make sure it’s still intact and wipe a tear out of the corner of my eye.
Isaiah kneels down and nudges my hands away from my face. He takes my chin between his thumb and forefinger and turns my head this way and that in a manner that makes me think he knows what he’s doing. It occurs to me that it’s very nice of him to look after me when I just tried to kill him with a car door, so I force myself not to pull away.
I do close my eyes, though. I wouldn’t be able to cheat by looking at the tip of his ear or at his eyebrows. Not at this distance.
After a moment, he pinches my nose and gives it a wiggle. I open my eyes. He’s taken a few steps back, giving me space.
“You’ll be fine,” he says.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter.
The corners of Isaiah’s eyes crinkle again, even though this time I know I didn’t say anything funny. I check my clothes again out of habit, but they’re all in the right place, and I haven’t had the chance to spill anything on them, so what is it? Did I pull a face? Did I make a noise? Did I do something weird with my hands?
What off-putting thing did Marissa do this time? The perpetual riddle of my days.
I rub at my sternum, no less aggrieved by the knowledge I’m being irrational. “You could apologize, too.”
He crosses his arms and looks down the bridge of his nose. “What do I have to apologize for?”
I tip up my chin. “For being a brick shithouse.”
His laughter this time is rich and full-throated, and I’m so struck by the sound, it takes me a full thirty seconds longer than it should to remember what we’re doing here.
I look past Isaiah, out to the water.
Mothersmucker.
Even as a child, even back when I could still stand swimming, I never liked the ocean. All the water did was chap my lips and tangle my hair, and the sand never stayed where it was supposed to.
I don’t like chapped lips.
I don’t like tangled hair.
I don’t like things that don’t—
“Is it boats you’ve got a problem with or water?”
I make myself turn back to Isaiah. “Water,” I say.
“You don’t swim?”
I slip my hands into my pockets to still them.
“Sometimes swimming’s not enough.”
“Stick close,” he says. “You’ll be fine.”
It’s more than likely I’m just desperate for a distraction, but his words—slow and certain and not too loud—set me thinking, and before I know it I’m taking a step back to get a better look at him, ignoring the way his eyebrow quirks at the inspection. At the airport I hadn’t had much reason to make a study of his face or posture or frame, but now I see how he holds himself: His shoulders are back, his knees are slightly bent, and he’s keeping all his weight on the balls of his feet.
A few years back, I cut a mob drama that used off-duty cops as extras, so I think I know what’s going on here.
“Are you ex–law enforcement or ex-military or ex-something you can’t even tell me about?”
He thinks this over. “The second one—and a little of the third.”
I chew on the inside of my cheek. I’ve figured out over the years that a response like this—quippy, vague, delivered with pursed lips and an indifferent shrug—is more often than not a polite way of saying “I don’t want to talk about this.” I know I should respect that. I should move on. But my mind has a way of latching on to questions, like a dog with a bone. A wagon with a star. A Kardashian with a revenue stream. The only thing that’ll work it loose is an answer.
Admittedly, it doesn’t have to be the right answer—
Harrison Ford considers the golden idol in front of him, weighing the bag of sand in his hand.
—just a plausible one.
“Are you a security guard?” I ask.
Isaiah sighs. “Something like that.”
“And now you’re a driver?”
“Among other things.”
“Do you carry a gun?”
“When I need to.”
“Are you paid to be evasive?”
“No—I just like it.”
Inside my pockets, my fingers curl against my thighs.
“Why would a mid-budget feature employ an ex-”—I squint at his neck—“Marine?”
He shakes his head very slightly.
“Ranger?”
He rolls his eyes.
“SEAL.”
His smile is slow to come on, like he’s enjoying the feel of his mouth moving into place. Like it’s more about the journey than the destination.
A SEAL. Good lord. I can’t believe I thought he was just a driver.
I can’t believe he knows I thought he was just a driver.
Not that there’s anything wrong with being just a driver! Jesus.
My hands scrabble for my ponytail; I comb my fingers through the ends.
“So what have you been hired to do?” I ask into my shoulder.
“You know that sixteen-page NDA you signed?”
I look up. “Yeah?”
He cups a hand around one side of his mouth and stage-whispers, “Mine was twenty.”
SUZY KOH: Marissa, I’m curious—
MARISSA DAHL: I’ve noticed that, yes.
SUZY KOH:—do you often find yourself working with Navy SEALs?
MARISSA DAHL: I guess, yeah. Ex-military get hired all the time in Hollywood—consultants, security, stunt men, what have you.
GRACE PORTILLO: So you didn’t think it was strange that Isaiah was working on the movie?
MARISSA DAHL: I didn’t say that, exactly. But given what I knew at the time, I wasn’t expecting the kind of action sequences that might require military expertise. [pause] That said, this is Tony Rees we’re talking about.
GRACE PORTILLO: What do you mean?
MARISSA DAHL: I mean, I could easily imagine a man like Tony thinking he needed a Navy SEAL on hand for—for any number of things. He’s an extraordinarily successful director. He gets to do stuff like that.
SUZY KOH: Ask for dumb-ass shit?
MARISSA DAHL: I’m not sure that’s precisely the term I’d use, but . . . yes.
SUZY KOH: And let me guess, the more dumb-ass the shit, the more powerful he is if he gets it?
GRACE PORTILLO: Right, ’cause, like, any normal could get a regular driver.
SUZY KOH: Ugh, totally.
MARISSA DAHL: Have you seen Fitzcarraldo?
SUZY KOH: Fitzcarr-what-now?
SUZY KOH: Marissa does this a lot—references random movies from eight million years ago.
GRACE PORTILLO: It’s not that old.
SUZY KOH: Oh yeah, I know, I just said that because I know it’ll annoy Marissa.
MARISSA DAHL: You’ve never heard of it?
GRACE PORTILLO: No.
SUZY KOH: It’s probably black-and-white, huh?
MARISSA DAHL: [extremely audible sigh]
SUZY KOH: I mean, let’s be honest, I say a lot of things because I know it’ll annoy Marissa.
MARISSA DAHL: It’s a Werner Herzog film—from all the way back in 1982. Klaus Kinski plays a guy trying to drag a 320-ton steamship over a muddy hill so he can build an opera house in the Amazon rain forest. And instead of mocking it up or using a model, Herzog ordered his extras to actually drag a 320-ton steamship over a muddy hill, even though his engineer told him there was a 70 percent chance the cables would snap. He put lives at risk. Hundreds of them. Just to get a shot he wanted. And to this day people still praise him for that decision.
SUZY KOH: But here’s the thing about Marissa’s extremely niche references: They always have a point.
MARISSA DAHL: So, honestly, I don’t know if there’s anything Tony could have requested that would have struck me as “strange.” He’s the director. If you’d told me before I arrived that he’d Amazon Prime’d a grizzly bear bell choir for the opening credits, I probably would’ve shrugged and said I looked forward to seeing the dailies.
FIVE
I regret to inform you the ferry won’t be repaired until tomorrow morning at the earliest.”
We’re in the terminal gift shop, where Isaiah’s rapidly losing his patience with the elderly cashier. According to her badge, her name is Georgia, and her skin looks like my fingers after a long bath. She’s garish, a rainbow: blue hair, orange lipstick, splotchy pink cheeks. I fiddle with the straps of my backpack and try not to let my eyes linger inappropriately on any one color.
She speaks entirely in monotone.
“If you’d like to reserve space on tomorrow’s ferry,” she says, “we will, of course, give you a discounted fare.”
“I’m afraid that won’t work,” Isaiah says.
Georgia lifts her chin so she can look down at Isaiah through her green half-glasses.
“Nevertheless,” she says.
“Another boat, then.”
A twitch of a heavily penciled eyebrow. “At this time of night?”
“We need to get there ASAP.” He ratchets his mouth into a smile. “Ma’am.”
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