“You should get Denzel Washington,” she said at one point. “He’d be so perfect.”
I looked up from this notebook. “For what?”
“For the movie.”
“Huh?”
She sighed as if I were the thickest person in the world. “You’re writing about him, aren’t you?”
“Some,” I said, feeling slightly invaded.
“Well…”
“I don’t think there’ll be a movie, Renee.”
“Why not?”
“Trust me on this, OK?” I had tried to picture me and Denzel playing the big love scene on Catalina, under the directorial eye of, say, Penny Marshall or Ron Howard or any of those seventies kids currently making sensitive movies, and I just couldn’t do it. Times had changed, true, but not that much. Besides, the real thing had been too perfect, too exquisitely internal, to imagine its cinematic counterpart. Maybe that’s what happens when you’re having a life: the real thing is the movie.
The phone just rang, and Renee says it’s for me.
16
I’VE BEEN AT ICON ALL DAY—THE ACTUAL STUDIO, NOT THE theme park—where weirdness followed weirdness until I’m no longer sure of anything. It started yesterday with a phone call. Not the one that interrupted my last entry—that was from Neil, saying he missed me—but another, later at night, when I was almost asleep. It was Callum, asking if I’d like to be his guest on the set of Gut Reaction. They were shooting a crucial scene, and he thought it might be fun for me to observe. That’s what he said, anyway.
And get this: he sent a limousine for me. This vulgar white barge that looked as if it could accommodate a Jacuzzi pulled up outside the house after breakfast. Renee cooed and swooned over it, then ran back to my room to get my sunglasses. I put them on just to please her, but they felt so right somehow that I left them on for the ride to Icon. The driver was a buff blond named Marc, who pumped me shamelessly about my function at the studio. I wasn’t about to bill myself as a sightseer, so I took the easy way out and played mysterious. “Played” is the wrong word, really; I was beginning to feel mysterious.
I could tell we’d reached the gate when I heard Marc talking to the guard. In an eerie flash of déjà vu, I conjured up the days when Mom and I had done this very thing in the old Fairlane, bound for Stage 6 and the green plastic realm of Mr. Woods. It wasn’t the same guard, of course—the voice seemed younger—but I got a little shiver, anyway. I remembered my maiden visit: the first time I’d seen a backdrop stacked against a building (a piece of snow-covered alp) and spotted a star’s name (Mary Steenburgen) on a trailer and caught the rich, tarty scent of gardenias growing in the dust outside the commissary.
The driver took me to Stage 11, where I was met by a young production assistant named Kath—not Kathy, but Kath, she told me after I got it wrong—who led me into the dim, cavernous building and helped me into a deck chair near the action. Callum was in this scene, she said, which was taking way longer than expected, which, of course, was nothing new in this business. Her sweetly condescending tone annoyed me, so I nodded solemnly to show her I already knew a thing or two about this business, thank you, and the delays it entails. I wondered what Callum had told her about me.
The set was the psycho’s apartment, a city loft stocked with fifties furniture and barbells and—yes, Jeff—a poster of Judy Garland. It’s night. The only light comes from a Lava lamp and a strip of green neon blazing beyond the big, grease-streaked windows. Callum kneels outside the door, jimmying the lock in his cop’s uniform. The psycho hears him and rushes to open a hatch in the floor, revealing the coffin-sized space where Callum’s terrified kid brother lies captive.
In mounting panic, the psycho gags the boy with something that looks like an S & M device—a black-leather-and-chrome hood—then closes the hatch and pulls a Persian carpet over it. Clad only in a jockstrap, he shinnies up the wall into the shadows. Callum enters cautiously and crosses the shadowy room, stopping over the very spot where his brother struggles to be heard. The set is revealed in cross-section, so that the camera can move in one seamless, stomach-churning motion from the boy in the box to his oblivious brother to the fiend crouched above them both, watching it all from the rafters.
So far, according to Kath, there had been over a dozen takes, for reasons apparent to no one except the director. He was a real stickler, she said, a perfectionist of the old school. The cast was punchy as a result. When the psycho accidentally demolished a statue of David with a lethal flourish of the Persian rug, the kid under the floor—who, remember, had been munching leather all morning—broke into an all-out giggling fit. It spread rapidly, catastrophically, as those things do, first to the psycho, then to the crew and almost everyone on the set. Only the ever-cool Callum was a model of composure when the director finally called glacially for “a little professionalism, please.”
He got the shot he wanted on the nineteenth take. When they finally broke for lunch, Callum exchanged words with the guy in the jockstrap, then came over and crouched next to me. “Remind you of anything?”
“Oh, God,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Exciting business.”
I glanced at the director, hunched over a clipboard as he gave notes to an assistant. “And I thought Philip was anal.”
Callum smiled without showing teeth, committing to nothing, remembering where his bread was buttered. “Feel like a bite to eat?”
“The commissary?”
He nodded. “It’s not so bad these days, believe it or not.”
“Your taste has diversified, that’s all. You never ate anything but macaroni and cheese.”
He laughed. “You remember that?”
“I remember everything,” I said.
I barely recognized the commissary. There were new chairs and tables and a witty new mural, rendered in bright ceramic tile, that depicted all the great stars of Icon standing, one after another, in the cafeteria line. Mr. Woods was there, of course—the shortest diner by far, except for the cartoon stars—predictably elated over a bowl of rum raisin ice cream. Callum picked up trays for both of us and led the way down the line, telling me what was available. I settled on chicken Kiev with mashed potatoes and Key lime pie.
“You need something green,” he said.
I pointed out that the pie was green.
“The asparagus looks nice,” he said.
“Don’t be my mother, OK? It’s obnoxious when you’re dressed like a cop.”
He paid for the food and got a table for us next to the window. After a brief foray around the room, he found something for me to sit on: scripts on loan from a reader across the room. I settled onto them with a chuckle. “They call this coverage, don’t they?”
He chuckled too and took a sip of his iced tea.
“Who’s here?” I asked, looking around. “Anybody good?”
He shrugged. “Bridget Fonda.”
“Where?”
“In the corner over there.”
Sure enough, there she was, entirely recognizable, but smaller than I’d imagined. I wondered if she could say the same of me.
“She’s hot, isn’t she?” Callum, to my amazement, was managing a reasonable facsimile of a leer. “I’d punch her ticket in a minute.”
I gave him a friendly but pointed look. “You and who else?” Something flared up behind his eyes, but he extinguished it and reached for his iced tea.
“I know you’re on the lot,” I said, tucking a napkin into my Peter Pan collar, “but it’s just ol’ Cady here, remember.”
He was reddening noticeably. “You don’t know all there is to know about me.”
“I’m sure I don’t,” I said, and pointed at his plate with my fork. “The asparagus do look nice.”
He gazed down at them.
“I should’ve gotten those,” I said. “You’re absolutely right.”
We stayed off the Subject after that. I didn’t even bring up Jeff, though I was dying to get Callum’s angle on the affair.
I called Jeff this morning, by the way, thinking he might have been invited to Icon, too, and wanting his take on my own invitation, but he wasn’t home. I left a message, but so far there hasn’t been a peep out of him. For all I know, he and Callum are already kaput.
Over dessert, Callum said: “I had a nice visit with Philip and Lucy in Malibu last week.”
Lucy is Philip Blenheim’s wife of six or seven years. He was still a bachelor when I knew him, so to me Lucy is just another drawn shiksa face I see sometimes in paparazzi shots. She stays in the background as much as possible, dropping babies with long Old Testament names and decorating their three—count ’em: three—local mansions.
“Everybody says she’s nice,” I said.
“She is. Really down-to-earth. You’d like her a lot. She’d like you.”
“Well…if her husband did.”
Callum frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, you know. All that business.”
“What business?”
I filled him in briefly on my spat with our director: how I’d granted one lousy interview to a local trade sheet and Philip had put me on his shit list forever. “Everybody on the set knew about it,” I told him. “I can’t believe you don’t remember.”
“I guess I do,” he said, “barely.”
“Let’s just say we aren’t chummy anymore.”
“But he likes you, Cady. We talked about you a lot.”
My mouth went completely slack. “When?”
“Last week in Malibu.”
“You and Philip talked about me?”
He mocked my amazement. “Yes, Cady.”
“What did he say?”
“He’s very fond of you.”
“Oh, right.”
“I’m telling you, he was delighted I’d run into you. He said he’d lost track of you.”
I’m listed, of course, but I didn’t bother to point that out; I was too bowled over by what I was hearing.
“I’m sure he’d be hurt,” Callum added, “if he thought you were mad at him.”
“Me mad at him?” All I could do was laugh. “Have we just stepped through the looking glass or something?”
Callum laughed with me. “I wish you’d heard it, Cady. He had this elaborate theory about what you’d done for the character. Especially in the last scene. He said people were moved then because they realized—on a subconscious level, at least—that something had been in there all along, a living being that conveyed all these complicated emotions. He said you couldn’t do that with a robot, no matter how advanced the technology.”
I was eating this up. I put down my fork, in fact, and stopped eating my pie—something of a first for me. “And you didn’t record this? You didn’t call me from the nearest gas station?”
He chuckled. “I was sure you’d heard it a million times.”
“Not from Philip.”
Not from anybody, really. Not in those words.
“Well, he doesn’t hate you,” said Callum. “Anything but.”
I just sat there shaking my head.
Not only that, but five minutes later, who should saunter into the commissary but Blenheim himself! I examined him thoroughly before alerting Callum, just to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. All the familiar elements were there: the shiny bald dome; the ancient letter jacket and corduroy pants; the big, furry, slope-shouldered body. He stood just inside the doorway, surveying the room in a way that was both casual and precise, like some shrewd big-city antiques dealer at a roadside rummage sale.
“Guess who’s here,” I said.
Callum jerked his head around, spotted Philip, and immediately began signaling him.
“Wait!” I said.
“Why?”
I couldn’t think why; I was filled with panic.
“It’s OK,” Callum assured me. “I swear.”
Philip, I decided, hadn’t seen me when he started toward us, since he did a real doozy of a double take when he reached the table.
“Cady? Good God—Cady?”
I hate to think what a goofy look I must have given him.
“I can’t fucking believe it,” he thundered. “This is so time-warpy! The two of you together again! Jesus, you look terrific.”
“Thanks,” I said lamely. “You too.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Just”—I glanced over at Callum—“hangin’ with the stars.”
“Shit, this is wonderful!” Philip regarded me like a benevolent bear, then pulled out a chair and sat on it backward, turning abruptly to Callum. “You don’t mind, do you, kid?”
Callum smiled and shook his head.
Philip turned back to me. “He told me he’d seen you. I was so fucking jealous.”
I was tongue-tied.
“You’re singing now, huh?”
“Yeah. Some.”
“That is so cool. I told you your voice was something special. Didn’t I always tell you that?”
“Yeah, you did.” I just didn’t happen to remember it, that’s all.
“You should come out to the beach sometime. Meet Lucy and the kids.”
I told him I’d like that.
“Your mother passed away, huh?”
I nodded.
“Gee, I’m so sorry.” He ducked his head and let it swing a little, dolefully. “What a fine lady she was.”
“Yeah.”
“Really fine.”
“Mmm.”
“Well, kids…” He sighed and slapped his hands on his knees and stood up again. “I’ve got a script meeting across the lot. I better get my fat ass in gear.”
I laughed in a last-minute effort to seem friendly, suddenly annoyed at my own passivity. He was getting away, I realized, this legendary titan of film who had suddenly become my dear old friend again. “What’s the project?” I asked, throwing tact to the winds.
“Oh, a period thing.” He was already two tables away. “Sort of a musical. Gotta run, tantele. I’ll be in touch, OK? Does Callum have your number?”
“I’m in the book,” I yelled, as he made his exit, stumbling through a maze of grips eating doughnuts. They gazed up at him in weary, undemonstrative awe, like biblical shepherds beholding one more holy vision in the clouds.
Callum was tremendously pleased with himself. “You see?” he said. “Does he love you or what?”
What, I decided.
Definitely what.
I knew something was funny before lunch was over, right about the time Callum told me I could keep the limousine for the rest of the afternoon. The driver was booked for the day, he said, so I might as well make use of the limo, since Icon was paying for it and wouldn’t care. Anyway, the scenes of Gut to be shot after lunch would be boring as batshit, so there was no reason to hang around if I had places to go. I’m sure he wasn’t trying to get rid of me, either—just being nice. As unbelievably nice as Philip had been.
Marc was waiting for me where I’d left him, reading a Silver Surfer comic book on a bench in the sunshine, his biceps round as cantaloupes under the black polyester of his chauffeur’s jacket. He sprang to his feet when he saw me.
“Oh, hi. All done?”
“All done,” I said.
“Where to?”
I gave him Neil’s address in North Hollywood.
“You got it.”
He opened the door and lifted me into the back seat, following Renee’s example earlier. “Is that a production facility?”
“An apartment house,” I told him. “My boyfriend’s.”
He nodded.
“He’s not expecting me, so you might have to ring his doorbell for me.”
“Sure,” he said. “Or you can call him. We’ve got a phone.”
I hate to admit it, but this basic fact of modern life hadn’t even occurred to me, lowly pauper that I am. “Of course,” I said. “Silly me.”
So I called Neil as we were cruising off the lot, mostly to record the moment.
“Guess where I am?
”
“Where?”
“In the back of a limo at Icon.”
He chuckled. “What happened?”
“I’m not sure exactly. Feel like a little company?”
“The littler the better,” he said.
It took us over half an hour to get there, inching through terrible traffic. When we arrived, Neil was already out by the street, obviously curious as hell.
“Well, well,” he said, as Marc helped me out.
“Marc, this is Neil. Neil, Marc.”
The guys shook hands jovially, their forearms getting hard over it. There’s something really sexy about two guys holding each other off like that, sniffing each other out. I wondered if Marc had expected another little person, instead of someone like Neil, or if he was simply trying to picture the two of us—me and Neil, that is—having hot, pyrotechnical sex. I, for one, was picturing it already, since Neil was in a T-shirt and purple gym shorts and looked like a million bucks. Or whatever that sort of gorgeousness is going for these days.
“Want me to wait?” asked the driver.
I looked at Neil. “Do we?”
Neil’s lip flickered. “Oh, I think so.”
“How long can you wait?”
“Well,” said Marc, glancing at his watch, “you’ve got me until six.”
“Then, maybe…an hour or so?”
The driver smiled prettily, catching my drift. “Whatever.”
Upstairs, I kicked off my shoes and crashed on Neil’s bed. Neil lowered the matchstick shades until the light in the room was the color of iced tea. Then he unlaced his high-tops, tugged them off, and flopped down on the bed next to me. Rolling onto his side, he touched the tip of my nose with his forefinger and studied me with mild amusement.
“OK, where’d you get the footman?”
I told him briefly what I’ve just told you, except for the part where I called him my boyfriend.
He smiled when I was done, smoothing my hair back from my forehead. “What a morning,” he said, as if that were all the comment required.