Josie rehung the dresses on their hangers, she couldn’t stand seeing them there, discarded on the floor. It wasn’t their fault they were ugly and not big enough. She hung the stewardess number and the suit from Hong Kong on the rim of the mirror. She felt the hot eyes of the Goodwill stock boy watching her pull off her sweater, his arms full of clothes to restock hoping for a glimpse of tit or at least a bra. She took it off the rest of the way, happy to reveal a grubby tank top and the black hair in her armpits, knowing it would turn him right off.
She purposely tried the dresses first. The Pucci print was a perfect fit, in size 4 you could always get a good selection at a thrift store, women never stayed 4 very long, 2 and 4 were the universal recipients of used-clothing riches. The deep V of the wrap dress would need pinning, unless she wanted to go slutty in a black bra, an ugly cross. But she never chose to be ugly when she could be glamorous. There was no mystery to that, it was all right there and more than you wanted. The color-block was right on the money, sad that the mod colors taupe and blue and ivory would be lost in black-and-white, but the shape was just right, she looked like Jean Seberg, another lost cause. Finally, she took down the navy blue silk, unpinned the skirt, which didn’t frighten her so much. She rolled it at the waist to the right length, she would have to take it up, it looked hilarious over the leggings. A lady skirt, like something a teacher would wear. Then she removed the jacket from the hanger, and put it on without raising her eyes, fastening the grommets, tugging it smooth. She took a deep breath and looked in the mirror.
She had never seen anything so beautiful in her life. A suit no Tyrell had ever considered. She blinked at herself and saw a possibility that had so far escaped her. Of a woman more glamorous than any rock star. Even over torn leggings in the fluorescent light of the Goodwill. She was glad no one could see her there, no one she knew, it was a transgression. Her normal clothes always had a sense of kiddie dress-up, cute vintage dresses and stretched sweaters and half-worn-out boots. But this was elegance still in its prime. There was nothing camp about it, except the fact that it was being worn by Josie Tyrell. She felt a guilty excitement, even considering Made in Hong Kong for I. Magnin.
She gazed at herself, her impossible hair, imagining just a short strand of pearls, worn inside the neckline, a few showing at the nape. Patent pumps, black three-quarter gloves, and big sunglasses. A slim handbag, strap over her forearm, and the gesture Jackie Kennedy once made in a photograph she’d seen, crossing her body with her arm, touching the top of her purse.
How Michael would hate her to even be thinking this. It wasn’t part of the deal. Their deal was, she wasn’t supposed to want what he had. They were just a couple of bohemians, that was the story. Living on air, scornful of the comfort and power money could buy. She could never say it might be nice to see what it was like, to be one of the people who counted, who could read the signs and give the signals. Michael loved her because she was so far removed, he didn’t think she would even know enough to want it. One of the lies between them. Her rejection of all that was only a matter of self-preservation. Because they would never have her. And his self-deception, that she was what he really wanted. He would have gone back sooner or later. Yes, she knew this, though she pretended she didn’t.
She remembered a dream she’d had a few days ago. Michael with a refined girl in the audience of a concert hall, he wore a black suit and a silver tie and looked unspeakably elegant. They were sitting in the middle of the row, and Josie stood in the aisle, trying to get his attention, but he never looked over, he spoke quietly to the girl, their dark heads together. She knew, they’d known each other at Harvard. Josie tried to reach him, stepping over people’s legs as they glared at her, when the usher stopped her and made her come out, asked to see her ticket. It was for another part of the theater, he led her back there like a shoplifter being escorted from the store. They went through a door, into a back room of the concert hall, like a barroom, you couldn’t even hear the music, everybody standing and talking, quarrelsome, it was smoky and loud and people were stepping on her feet. Somewhere she’d even lost her shoes.
That dark-haired girl was the one he needed, a Harvard girl who knew what he knew, had what he had, on whom it sat well, a girl who could wear a suit like this and not as a joke. She looked at herself in the mirror in the blue suit, imagining not Josie Tyrell but Elena. A girl who would not have worked three jobs to pay the bills while her lover sat before the window night after night, drinking and shredding the arms of the chair. A girl who would not have waited for him to fall to pieces on her like that. He would have stuck around for a girl like that.
Who the fuck are you supposed to be? her father said suddenly in her head. His mouth downturned, the mustache curled around it. She put her sunglasses on. It didn’t matter what her father said anymore. She was a girl who didn’t give a crap, that’s who the fuck she was. She was someone who could have a little dignity, someone with something inside. This was what she should have been with Michael all along, something she hadn’t understood, she thought he wanted her because she was so unlike Meredith, but in the end, she was just a Tyrell, grubby and stupid and vicious as a rat. There in the mirror was the girl who should have been with Michael. And her name was Elena.
19
Topanga Shoot
Birds flew across the windshield like a page of music. In the extreme range of vision, she could make out the feathery foliage of an old pepper tree, its hanging clusters of pink fruit. This was what it was like to be dead. Staring through a shattered windshield, bent into an awkward but not painful pose. The soft sound of traffic from Old Topanga Road floated through the open window. No terror, no rage, no hope, no love. Just, nothing.
She was good at being dead. She’d played it often enough. It was the only way Jeremy knew how to end a film, the Girl lying on the floor of a train station with a bullet in her heart, or slumped against the wall of a living room, or facedown on a bed, a jar of pills in her hand. And here she was again, behind the wheel of a wrecked BMW. Dead again. Acting dead wasn’t hard, it was like modeling, finding an interesting arrangement of limbs and staying very still. She’d never felt like part of her body anyway. Even as a child, she could watch things happen to her and remain unmoved, like the time she cut her knee open, rolling in the spring grass, a hidden stick tearing her flesh, and she watched the blood flow, the pink of slashed muscle like a mouth. This was her secret, she wasn’t what they saw, a slight girl with crazy bleached hair. She was buried inside herself like a coin in sand, a whisper in a seashell. Her neck arched at an impossible angle, but she didn’t feel it. It wasn’t so awful to be dead. The stillness would almost be a relief. She wouldn’t want the pain, she wouldn’t want to be wounded or mutilated. She could never shoot herself, or jump off a building. But being dead was not unthinkable.
She could see Sergio through the windshield, the big 16-millimeter camera on his shoulder, as one of the two camera assistants, both named Bob, pulled him along in a shopping-cart dolly. A fly landed on the fake sugar blood Laura had painted onto her face. She could feel each of its six legs. The delicate curl of its tongue. But she didn’t move. What did a lifeless body care about a fly? The normally boring business of filmmaking had become a blessing. For the next ten days, there would be no time, only an empty horizon. Busy and blank, she could just think about space. Space without time. Maybe that was God. Her dead eyes registered Jeremy, the shock of blond hair bobbing in a side mirror. To think, Michael had been jealous of that. When Jeremy’s one thought was who he could get to see his film, could he get it into contention at Toronto?
Through the windshield, a chunky hawk circled high in the winter sky. She watched it jump as it passed along the jagged cracks in the glass. Perhaps it thought there was really an accident, and was waiting for the crew to leave so it could feed. She imagined a sharp beak tearing her indifferent flesh. Dilly dilly, come let us die. The fly wandered around on her face, its tickly feet, feeding on her sweet, sweet blood.
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Finally, the take was over and Bob Two opened the passenger door of the crumpled car—it was green while the real one was blue, but it would read the same in black-and-white. He guided her out into the weak winter sun. She felt like she was unfurling, like a butterfly in a science show, emerging from the cocoon all slimy and cramped, and then unkinking, to stretch fragile kite wings in the sun. Jeremy gave her a hug, as if she were a doll pulled from its box, a wonderful present. But he left his arm on her shoulder as he called for the next setup. “Magic hour, people. Two to go and then blacklight sombreros time.”
Magic hour, when film students scrambled to shoot as much footage as they could, while the sun lowered and the world glowed as gold as it could on a winter’s day. She cracked her neck, spinal segment by segment, small lateral moves left and right. Lifted her arms up and behind, stretching her shoulders, and in the process, dislodging Jeremy’s proprietary arm. Bad faith.
“That was brilliant, Josie. You’re a superstar,” Jeremy said, kissing her, squeezing her, handling her. He was always handling her. How upset Michael had been. When she tried to explain, Michael said she was deluding herself. It was bad faith to pretend you didn’t know something you did, bad faith to have someone kiss you and pretend it meant nothing, bad faith to dislike someone and stand there chitchatting. You had to be authentic. It was the only way to really know what you felt.
It was true, Jeremy took advantage. And she let him. It was his film, and she really didn’t care. It was just a body, like a rented suit. Michael had tried to make her feel differently about herself, that it wasn’t just for use by others, it was hers, she belonged to herself, she had to occupy herself. She had when she was with him, but now he was dead. She couldn’t remember why it mattered whether she let Jeremy paw her or not. What she did or didn’t do.
“We’re going out after, to the Guadalajara. You’re coming, aren’t you?” Jeremy stroked her bare arm. “You buy me drink, sojah?” It might be bad faith to let him touch her like that, but at least it was a human connection. Inauthentic, and yet sad and real in its way.
“Maybe,” Josie said, pushing back the white-blond hair that Laura had rebleached in her sink, eliminating the roots, turning her into a Hitchcock blonde with a touch of the futuristic.
Laura draped Josie’s coat around her shoulders. “You look fantastic,” she whispered, touching the corners of the spiky Veruschka eyelashes. “They stayed on fine.” Looking over Josie’s shoulder to where Sergio consulted with Jeremy, while two of Sergio’s girls moved equipment for the next scene.
The actor playing Conrad sat on the side of the road, settling into his role. A strawberry blond with clear blue eyes, built like a surfer, muscled but slim, he was a real Actor. Too bad for him. Doing a student film to “keep fresh.” He’d heard Jeremy was going places. It was always interesting to see who the student directors picked to play their heroes. You could make a movie just about that. It was always who they would be if they could. The actor was Jeremy without the goofiness, his self-absorption more physical, more photogenic.
While the crew set up for the shot, Josie climbed the hillside in her white patent boots and color-block dress, wading through dormant mustard and fragrant fennel higher than her head. She climbed into the low crotch of the double-trunked sycamore, its powdery white limbs glowing pink in the light of magic hour. A few hand-shaped shriveled leaves twirled on the white mottled branches. She liked it out here in Topanga, with its hippie country store and trees and stream. The film students all shot here, the closest to country you could get ten miles from Hollywood. The sky was the pale blue of old landscape paintings. The faint breeze tousled the long-leaved boughs of eucalyptus and peppers, as if they were boiling.
She wondered what Meredith was doing right now. She could feel her, in her house in Los Feliz, standing by the window as magic hour tinged the view gold. Only Meredith would understand how Michael had stopped time with that bullet. How it pooled now, lost its course, wandered like the malarial mouth of a river, leaving the two of them stranded together in a boat, like the end of The African Queen, lost in the reeds, waiting for rain.
On her hands, the resinous smell of the fennel clung. She imagined how nice it would be to lie on a bed of that fragrant ferniness. She rested her cheek against the powdery white of the sycamore trunk, watching the crew swarm over the spot in the road by the crumpled car like ants over a bit of spilled jam. All that attention—the crew of eleven, plus camp followers, camera, sound, the mike like a mop hanging off a fishing pole—focused on that one human being by the side of the road. The actor was about Michael’s age, full of himself, he’d had three weeks on a soap opera, big fucking deal. Right now he was Feeling His Way into the Scene, she could tell. Rocking himself back and forth, working himself into a state. It was the Method. She’d learned all about it from another boy on an AFI shoot. You came up with memories that made you feel what the character was supposed to be feeling. “The actor’s got to be thinking all the time,” the boy said. “You can’t just ‘stand here and look upset.’” And Josie had been embarrassed, because that’s exactly what she did. God knew no film student cared whether the Girl felt her way into the character. They just wanted you to “stand here and look upset.” Look scared, look sexy. And for Christ’s sake remember where you put your hands. Jeremy had convinced the actor this film was going to Toronto, a showcase, it would make his career. She didn’t tell him the truth. It was a fifteen-minute senior film, there’d be a screening at USC, maybe something in a festival in San Diego. It wasn’t going to make anybody’s career, Buñuel meets Hitchcock in Antonioni’s unmade bed. All of Jeremy’s heroes greased up and writhing, an orgy of influences, where nobody really came.
Josie never tried to feel it. She never memorized lines. She’d thrown the actor already in the precrash scene, not giving him the right lead-ins to the lines he’d learned. She didn’t ever act, she only modeled with movement. Maybe that was her problem. She didn’t feel anything. She simply imitated a feeling. A lot like Jeremy, really. Because whenever she felt it, it was too much, she didn’t want to feel things, and have people see it. A coughing fit seized her, and she clapped a hand over her mouth, quickly glanced down the hill to see if they’d started shooting yet, Gil the sound guy would throw a fit. He was always in a shitty mood, Sergio had the two Bobs and all his girl helpers, when Gil had jack shit. But they were only setting up.
She looked up into the great unleafed emptiness, the branches making a puzzle of the sky. Getting out of her life, coming onto the film, was just the right thing, like climbing out of the wrecked BMW. She was glad she’d told no one about Michael. If she was careful on this shoot, if she just stood where she was supposed to, ran where Jeremy pointed, if she held still and let flies crawl around on her face, the pain might be kept at a few feet’s distance, just for a while, she could see it, but not let it bloom through her skin like quills.
And somewhere behind those hills, and the ones behind them, Meredith sat in her house all alone, with all that was left of her son piled in a room she couldn’t bear to go into. Holding herself just as Josie did, arms across her chest, trying not to bump into the stiletto corners of grief. The hawk flew low over the hillside and the little birds fell silent.
“Speed,” Gil called, holding his mike out like a fishing pole.
“Rolling,” came Sergio’s bedroom voice, full of artistic ennui.
Jeremy pointed to Conrad. “And—action.”
The actor lay back in the grass and forced laughter from his throat. This was his read on grief. Josie thought doing nothing would have been more realistic. When your girlfriend dies in a car accident, it takes a while to believe it. The realization comes later, when you understand you will never see her again. When you go to wash the clothes, and there are her clothes, and you don’t know whether to wash them or not, and you think, not, because that would mean fewer particles of her existing in the world, the smell of her body which was now underground, that particular s
cent will never happen again.
After Conrad’s scene, Josie clambered down the hillside for the next one. She wiped off her white patent boots, and Laura brushed off the back of her dress. “Can you believe those pants?” she whispered in Josie’s ear, gesturing with her chin at the blonde in violet stretch leggings. “You could get away with them, but not her. Not with that ass.”
As Laura refreshed her lipstick, retouched her fake blood, Jeremy came over, glancing meaningfully at the others, and said softly, “Josie, we decided we’re going to try something different.”
Why was he looking at her with that sneaky smile? Jeremy’s entrée to a con. “Just tell me,” Josie said.
He gazed off toward the sea, flicking his hair from his eyes. “I’m seeing Elena, emerging from the wreck, walking down the road . . . a naked soul, heading into the Hereafter.”
She looked from Jeremy to Sergio to Bob One, and they looked blankly back at Jeremy, and she knew the “we” was simply his collective “me” with yet another grand idea. He wanted Elena in the buff. A naked soul, heading into the Hereafter. In other words, he thought a naked girl in the movie would give it a sexy edge—like the people who put a topless girl holding a muffler in a car-parts ad. It had nothing to do with vision. It was just bad faith. It was one thing to model for an art class, but to let him use her that way, because he knew she could do it, that pissed her off. “Hey, fuck you, Jeremy.”
“Oh, come on, Josie.” He flipped his hair from his goggly blue eyes. “You’re not hung up. You do it every day. Look, we’re all family here.”
She almost laughed. Clink, clink. The sound of counterfeit coins falling from his mouth like a payoff in Vegas. What in the world could Jeremy’s idea of family be? Something he’d seen once on TV?