The Shimmering State

by Meredith Westgate

  Each time Lucien wakes after a trip on his grandmother’s Mem, he is ashamed. Ashamed for taking what belongs to her, and moreover for how the thought of not having these pills, of one day having to say goodbye to his mother again, for good, makes his hands shake and his throat tighten.

  He takes a sip. Another bite. He feels pathetic, but insatiable.

  * * *

  Back to Dinosaur. Black coffee to go. Hair so blue it’s velvet.

  Can color be enough to beckon? Its tone tempts him like a siren’s song; to dip his eyes under the waterline, to let go of whatever keeps him from being fully submerged. Another call from Liv vibrates in his pocket. No voicemail, one text. The low level of Florence makes him feel drunk, loose. He watches himself double tap to <3 it without losing a minute, without changing the screen. Easy.

  He hasn’t seen Liv since they spent the day together in Venice, but he is too numb to express his annoyance. Letting his feelings show would only lead to further conversation, when really there’s nothing to discuss. He has nothing for her, and maybe he never did. He’s so tired, of all of this. Every moment in his own body feels heavy. Every thought a waste.

  Back to the same line of customers, impatiently wasting time on overpriced coffee. Back to the well-balanced pour over that burns his hand through the cardboard in a familiar way that takes away the pain. Can anything so routine feel fresh enough to hurt?

  The blue barista hands him his coffee, the sadness in her eyes better than a smile. He takes a sip and is pulled back into his body, into the room.

  “Lucien, the painter,” she says.

  “Close.”

  He takes another sip.

  “Damn,” she says.

  “And you’re…” He tries, but his mind is still yellow sunshine in an open room. “Sorry.”

  “Remy,” she says. “Wait, don’t tell me—that artist I meant to look up. Lucien…”

  “Freud. Though he’s Lucian with an a,” he says, talking more than he realizes. “Painter, not a writer, my mother.”

  “Like the psych guy? Now we’re getting dangerously close to my mother.”

  “Actually—grandson of the psych guy.”

  Another sip of coffee. Another taste of himself.

  “I was totally joking,” she says. “What a family. So your mother named you after a painter and you don’t even paint?”

  “My mother’s the painter,” he says. Bless contractions, for hiding the past. “She loved his portraits that were obscure and deformed, where nobody comes out looking very good. She loved his ability to see. That’s why she named me after him, she wanted me to see.”

  Lucien laughs abruptly.

  “So you can see, then?”

  Lucien tips his cup toward the girl, then slides over to grab a lid so he can get back home. Back to the discrete memories that deliver him out of body. As he looks for the right size lid—how many sizes can there be?—fumbling with the stack, still yellow inside him, sunshine everywhere, he overhears a conversation.

  Words blowing the cloud off his hot-coffee brain.

  These shoes? I got them in India, they were like three dollars. I know, cute, right? But the airport in Mumbai is a total disaster, and the line for security—well, because none of the women travel alone, I think.

  I wouldn’t do another retreat there, the friend says. Not if you paid me.

  Lucien nearly trips over a guy with a low ponytail squatting on a stool as he turns for the exit. He apologizes, still moving, but the conversation seems to follow him. Or maybe it’s a new one. Same voices, different hosts.

  What’s the difference between migrant workers and refugees? Is there one?

  He feels like a character trapped inside a campy horror movie, when other people’s words slow and distort, with everyone around him in slow motion and Lucien unsure of why, exactly, their words are getting him so riled up. He surveys the rest of the room; how does everyone act like this is normal, can they not hear? Lucien misses those regular moments on the subway—the kindness one could catch between strangers, even amid chaos. A simple look, a nod. The humanity.

  He feels himself unraveling, yet keeps pulling at the loose strand. Has spending time in his grandmother’s memories made him less tolerant of his own generation? Are her eyes, inside him, influencing how he sees? Or is this him, breaking through her kindness?

  Back to the side streets, stop signs every block. From his car, each view looks flat and colorful like a Hockney painting, with that impossibly blue sky. Back to his apartment, quiet on the stairs to make it up without alerting Liv. His apartment feels different lately, like it finally holds pieces of home. Or is it him, now, who holds the pieces?

  Lucien goes straight to the kitchen, to his coffee bag of pills. He wants only his mother, only the ones that matter. And he wants them faster. His friend Tanner had a coke habit-slash-addiction, and at one point started dusting cocaine under his tongue, rather than snorting it. Something about the high concentration of blood vessels delivers it faster, stronger. Lucien cuts a pill and taps its dust under his tongue. Then he snorts what’s left off his fingertip.

  Back to his bed.

  Back to his mother.

  Back into Fleur.

  * * *

  Florence is at the Pasadena Playhouse waiting for friends by the bathroom during intermission. Helen and Daphne are girls from the editing room, where she recently transitioned from the switchboard. They are the only other two girls in the entire department. The courtyard is twinkling, with people gathered and discussing the play in a low, excited hum.

  * * *

  Home from Wellesley with her beau, Henry Willis III, a Harvard boy. Her father, Dr. Gabriele Benedetto, is practically levitating with excitement. Her mother keeps asking to see the ring, then clutching her chest. Once Florence hears the last door shut in the house, the last light out, she sneaks away in the middle of the night. Catches the first train. She asks the man next to her with a cap pulled down low where they’re going. He says Los Angeles.

  * * *

  A tall man stands beside her at the Pasadena Playhouse, waiting for someone as well. The line is long and unmoving, the second act starting soon. He looks older, but has wavy, wild hair that seems to defy age. When he catches her looking past him to the courtyard, he leans forward and asks what she thinks of the play so far. Florence only realizes once talking that she has many thoughts, to say the least, on the female lead. The man loves the fervor with which she speaks of the characters, the story, the arc. Florence’s friends come out of the ladies’ room arm in arm and whisk her away, asking who the handsome man might be. His name is Conrad.

  * * *

  Florence on the switchboard, at Catapult Pictures. Her first job, thanks to Betty Parsons, who she sat next to on the train. God bless Betty Parsons, with her tight bleached-blond curls and red lipstick. She recently got them all an extra half hour for lunch. She even found Florence a room in the same building where she and the other girls live, on Franklin Avenue.

  * * *

  Florence never answers a single letter from Henry. One day she mails his grandmother’s diamond ring back to his parents’ home in Hartford without a note. She cannot explain herself; Hank is wonderful, but she is unwilling.

  * * *

  Her switchboard lights up, demanding decisions in a fraction of a second. It’s a rush and a buzz and she’s good at it. She wants more. She wants that same rush from solving real problems, connecting the dots through storytelling. The editing room, everyone says, is where women go from here. Stitching film is a job women do well, given the handiwork.

  * * *

  She runs into Conrad at Catapult and he asks to join her for lunch in the cafeteria. Everyone lights up around him; Florence assumes it must be his talent. A director, maybe, who’s already made a name for himself.

  * * *

  The editing room is storytelling, crafting narratives and character from existing materials. Florence befriends Avery Gregor, one of the more sym
pathetic men in the room. He is about her age and an aspiring writer. She helps him with his script, cutting entire sections and suggesting ways to make his characters more human. She adds to the female characters wherever she can. He squints as she delivers feedback, his script sitting between them on the cafeteria table, covered in marks. But soon he sits back in his chair. Well, shit, he says.

  * * *

  For days, she is in her trailer in the desert with a fever; it must be the heat, the long days, the pressure of thinking five things at once while they shoot. Transferring her ideas to Avery without stepping out of line, without anyone else knowing. One day, during a shot in the High Noon Saloon, she faints. When the doctor comes to the set, he tells her, in no uncertain terms—she is three months pregnant.

  * * *

  Florence sits across from Avery again, her own script now between them. She could hardly let it go when she gave it to him days earlier in this same spot. He’s quiet, and she wants to run away or crawl under the table. When he finally speaks, he is in awe. He’s already shown it to a friend in production, who showed it to his boss, who wants a meeting. Florence leaps up from her seat and throws her arms around his neck. But Avery has to take the meeting for her, he explains, if she has any shot of the script being taken seriously.

  * * *

  The set is in the strange landscape near Palm Springs, a Western facade with nothing else around it. Pioneertown, as it’s called, is arid and dusty. The dust gets everywhere, in her eyes, in her hair, her scalp, under her fingernails. When she takes her socks off at the end of the day, it looks like she is wearing a lighter pair underneath. She showers and watches the dust fill the basin. Then she keels over, vomits.

  * * *

  Florence’s script sells in the meeting, and Avery never returns to the editing room. Over lunch of tuna melts and floats at a diner in Beverly Hills, he promises her everything, everything but her name.

  * * *

  A week before they leave to shoot, she hears some people whispering by the production offices. Everyone else, it seems, knows about Conrad’s wife but her.

  * * *

  An American Cowboy premieres. Florence goes alone, doubly emptied, while her mother watches the baby. The baby, no name yet. To leave the hospital, Florence wrote down Baby. The day after she sees the film, she tells her mother she is keeping it. Her baby. Isabel.

  * * *

  Florence shows Conrad the script she wrote, the one that sold. She confides in him that it is hers, not Avery’s. An American Cowboy, written by a woman. He roars with laughter, the ice in his old-fashioned rattling, like this is the most fabulous story he’s ever heard. Then he takes Florence’s head in his hands and kisses her. Beautiful Fleur, and a talent. He loves her, he says. Beyond that, he loves her work.

  * * *

  Conrad insists she should be on set; it’s only fair, he says, with both hands on her waist. He gets her put on as a writer’s assistant, to discreetly oversee the shoot. Avery’s assistant, on the film she wrote. She feels their eyes on her, the assumption that the reason she’s there is for being Conrad’s girl.

  * * *

  Florence watches everything disappear by the biology of her body; it doesn’t matter if it was her fault or not. She has the proof growing inside of her, undeniable. The baby is in her, not Conrad. And it would be there whether she wants to deal with it or not. There’s no running away from a baby; even if she does pick up in the middle of the night, the baby would go with her.

  * * *

  When the baby is born, Florence thinks, A girl. A girl I’ll teach not to flee but to run toward the things she wants.

  * * *

  Florence tells Avery to stop every message from Conrad, to alert her if he comes to set. Her body shivers with shame, foolishness. She is trapped. In every scenario she runs through, her future is forever tainted by this relationship. She loves her job at Catapult, but now people will think she got it because of him. She got nothing from him. She throws her cone of paper filled with water at the mirror, then rolls out enough paper towels to clean the whole sink.

  * * *

  The crew takes care of her, bringing water and wet washcloths for her face. No one knows. And that night, as she has done before, Florence packs her things. Then she disappears.

  * * *

  A check comes from Avery, and she has no idea how he found her. She tears it up.

  * * *

  An American Cowboy wins three Academy Awards. Conrad is onstage in a tuxedo, his wild hair combed down. He stands, surrounded by the cast, accepting the award for Catapult Studios. He thanks everyone.

  * * *

  Must be nice to be a pretty girl in this town, Charlie in the mail room says to her.

  * * *

  Florence gathers her things from the room on Franklin. She says nothing to the other girls on her way out. Never sees them again. She thinks of the shoot finishing in Pioneertown without her, but Avery will do fine. He knows the script as well as she does by now, having had to pass it off as his own so many times.

  * * *

  With the advance Avery gave her, money she had planned to save, she buys a small cottage in Los Feliz.

  * * *

  Florence sees Avery’s films, every last one in the decades that follow. She always has notes, even keeps a diary. She doesn’t blame him; what he did was generous, in a way. He did what he thought to be in her best interest, regardless of how it benefitted him, too.

  * * *

  It’s a guesthouse to a larger estate behind it, right off Los Feliz Boulevard, built around its own tiny courtyard. There, among the mansions and landscaped lawns and private gates, she feels safely unseen. The small house feels both isolated and part of something larger, which she likes. The older couple in the back doesn’t ask questions. But the first morning she wakes up there, a tray of muffins sits outside her door.

  * * *

  Another check from Avery, but her belly is larger. She cashes it. And the next.

  * * *

  Florence will give her mother the baby. She calls, and her mother agrees; she surprises Florence with her capacity for love, forgiveness. Florence is twenty-four, no husband, no job. Her mother is only forty-three. No one would ask questions. She has the baby with her mother by her side. Her father doesn’t make the trip.

  * * *

  Avery’s final film is about a young man who finds a notebook that belongs to a beautiful woman who cannot speak. She is mute and lives with an older, married sister. The man publishes her novel as his own, and later they marry. The Proposal is nominated for an Academy Award.

  * * *

  Florence wonders, every day, what might have been had she only taken that first meeting herself. Had she not gone through the network of faces that could pass her work off as something it wasn’t—the product of men. Subject to men. Isabel will be the product of her alone.

  * * *

  Lucien’s apartment comes into focus, and he reaches for the water bottle beside his bed. Like a dream that is clear for a few moments and then disappears forever, he remembers everything—for now. All this time he has been using his grandmother to see his mother, to settle his own sadness, never realizing his grandmother had her own secret pain. And Lucien has felt like a stranger in this city, when in fact, his grandmother’s work contributed to the industry it is built on. Her contribution to the canon, still on all the lists of classics, made Catapult Studios what it is today. And Catapult made film what it is. Lucien’s mother was not an anomaly; she had been born from an artist, an award-winning screenwriter who never saw her name on-screen. And Lucien is not an addendum to his mother’s legacy, but another in a longer line.

  What if all this happened for a reason, to lead him here, to discover this for his grandmother, for his mother? Lucien isn’t a horrible person; he hasn’t just stolen from his ailing grandmother and begrudged her for what he wanted to find. No, none of that was true if what he found now has a purpose. Florence had been forgotten, and wh
at if Lucien, and Lucien alone, could make it right?

  He grabs paper and a pen from his backpack and writes as quickly as he can, connecting the dots as he goes. He takes another long sip from the cloudy, sparkling water and it burns his parched throat on the way down.

  He’ll get his grandmother the credit she deserves; he’ll need to find confirmation beyond this proof he can never share, but he’ll look wherever he has to. He’ll talk to everyone. This is how it feels, then, purpose! First, he wants to look into her eyes and tell her he knows. That he’s proud of her. So proud to have a piece of her in him.

  No more Mem. Not even the pills he has left. Well, maybe just that. Just to wean himself off of them, but no more. No one will steal from her anymore.