PART II
Production
Miranda Arrives
Miranda was twenty years old when she read The Sixteen Pleasures for the first time, shortly after her mother’s unexpected death. She’d flown home from Smith for the funeral and then flown back to Bradley International Airport, near Hartford. She hadn’t wanted to come back to school, but her aunt and uncle—who hadn’t understood why she’d gone so far away from home in the first place—had put her on the plane in Des Moines, and that was that. Someone had left a copy of The Sixteen Pleasures in the back of the shuttle that she took from Bradley to Northampton, and she started to read it on the way and kept reading till it got too dark to see.
Back at Smith, she was okay until someone asked her how she was, and then she’d start to cry. She even got to spend a day in the infirmary—almost unheard of unless you were running a fever of over 102 degrees. She missed her mother. Nothing was coming up in her life. She’d been unhappy at Smith from the beginning. She didn’t belong. She couldn’t afford the clothes she’d admired in the college issue of Mademoiselle. She’d never been to the Hamptons, never been to Boston or New York. As a junior in high school she’d played Emily in a production of Our Town, and then in her senior year she’d played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, but at Smith she’d been passed over for the role of Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, which she’d studied in her drama class.
She finished The Sixteen Pleasures in the infirmary and then she read it again instead of studying for her Art II slide test. She was in despair, but she couldn’t get herself to study. The exam was in Sage Hall. The room was dark and you got three minutes for each slide, during which time you had to write down everything you could think of about the ugly statues at the cathedral at Rheims or about Piero della Francesco’s Madonna del Parto.
The first slide came on and two hundred pens began to write in two hundred blue books. Well, 199 pens if you subtracted Miranda’s. She couldn’t stick it. She walked out, walked down Green Street back to Lawrence House. She lay down on her bed and started to read The Sixteen Pleasures again. The Sixteen Pleasures gave her a better sense than Art II of what all the fuss was about. The fuss about art, that is. The fuss about the Renaissance. But what she really liked was the way the plucky heroine— Margot Harrington—pulled herself up by her own bootstraps. The book articulated her needs, her mood, her longing for her mother. She knew that on every page Margot was trying to say what was true. She thought that if Margot hadn’t existed, she would have had to invent someone just like her.
Smith had been her mother’s idea. Kids from Mount Pleasant went to Iowa Wesleyan, right in town, or Iowa State in Ames, or the University of Iowa in Iowa City, or Grinnell.
A few went east and were never heard of again, but Miranda’s mother had read an article about women’s colleges in Reader’s Digest: it was better for girls to “compete” with other girls in math and science classes than with boys. And at Smith the editor of the newspaper—The Sophian—would be a girl. Ditto for Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke, which were also described in the article, but Bryn Mawr seemed too intellectual, too mannish, and Mount Holyoke too reticent.
What her mother had really wanted, Miranda realized, but not till after it was too late, was for her to become a certain kind of person—not exactly a “lady,” but a Smithie; not Julia Child or Sylvia Plath or Nancy Reagan, but Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who was assistant managing editor of the Saturday Evening Post and who’d been voted one of the Ten Most Admired Women in America by readers of Good Housekeeping, and who was married to David Eisenhower.
And that’s why her mother would have been heartbroken when she dropped out, at the end of her junior year, and moved to L.A. to take a screen test advertised in the back of a magazine. The screen test didn’t materialize, but Miranda stayed in L.A.— substitute teaching, working on the switchboard at a talent agency, doing audience work for a sitcom, laughing hysterically and clapping her hands all day long. And then she landed a handful of supporting roles and, ironically, commercials in which she played a younger, perkier version of her mother, immersed in a world of new products: mops, detergents, vacuum cleaners, shampoos.
Miranda sublet her apartment in Altadena and left Los Angeles just before Christmas. She was going to spend the holidays with her aunt and uncle in Mount Pleasant and then fly to Luxembourg on Icelandic and then go by train to Florence. She wanted to spend some time in Florence on her own, before the start of principal photography, to get a feel for the place.
She boarded the Southwest Chief in Union Station on North Alameda with three large suitcases, and three days and two nights later she was in Iowa. She’d passed the time on the train by imagining her new life. By the time the train got to Denver, her Oscar fantasy had lost its power to arouse, and she spent the rest of the trip concentrating on her Michelin Guide to Italy, which didn’t have any pictures. But it had maps, and she studied the principal piazzas, and she memorized Fiesole and Settignano, and the little Piazza San Pier Maggiore, where the convent was located. And once or twice, as she put the book down and looked out the window of the observation car, a force as powerful as the big diesel locomotives pulling the train thrust her back into adolescence. She was on her way home from Smith, instead of L.A., with her Harvard book bag packed with sandwiches and apples from Lawrence House, more than enough, full of joy at the prospect of seeing her mother again.
But of course it was Uncle Jack, not her mother, who picked her up at the station in Fort Madison, loaded her trunk and the three suitcases into the back of the pickup, and drove her to Mount Pleasant, past corncribs and hog enclosures and Dutch barns. The yard lights in the black distance were like lights on an archipelago or on passing ships. They drove past the Brenner farm where she and Todd Brenner and Jeremy Baker had shot at the hogs with Todd’s BB gun and they’d put Jeremy’s Saint Bernard, Rufus, in with the hogs and the hogs had chased him till he collapsed and would have eaten him if Todd’s dad hadn’t driven them off, kicking them away with his wooden leg.
“If you’d married Todd Brenner instead of going out East,” Uncle Jack said, “you’d be home.”
At home, everything was the same, except older, like her aunt and uncle. And like Miranda herself. Reader’s Digest Condensed Books sat on the shelf next to copies of some of the books Miranda had used at Smith, her Art II book among them. A paperback copy of The Sixteen Pleasures was sitting on the kitchen table. Aunt Lena had read it and had a lot of questions, especially about how they were going to do the flood, and how they were going to do the book restoration scenes and the sex scenes.
Mount Pleasant was the sort of place everyone had made fun of at Smith. And when Miranda had finally gotten settled in L.A., she’d decided she’d never be from Mount Pleasant again. But she’d been wrong. Mount Pleasant contained her life, and she’d been homesick for it in L.A., just as she’d been homesick for it at Smith—for the public library, where her mother had worked at the reference desk and where she’d done her homework; for Lincoln Elementary and Mount Pleasant Middle School; for the Van Allen House Heritage Center and Midwest Old Threshers Heritage Museum and St. Michael’s Episcopal and the Second Baptist and Saunders Park; for best friends and slumber parties and first love and football games and the occasional victory parades and Williford Cemetery, where her mother was buried, and her father too, and aunts and uncles, Clarks and Veneclausens.
But the reason she never got over it was that it also contained the life she might have lived, the life that her old friends were living, some of them, anyway. Married. Children. Her first love, Todd, who’d managed to pull her panties down in the backseat of his dad’s Packard. But she’d asked him to stop and he had, and after that there was no going forward. And if they had gone all the way, would it matter now?
Everyone was excited about the movie, for about two minutes. Miranda couldn’t keep the conversation focused on herself for very long, and gradually she forgot about herself.
On the morning of Chris
tmas Eve, she drove out to the cemetery, to visit her parents’ graves. When her mother was twelve years old, she’d gone out to the barn one morning and found her father, Miranda’s Grandfather Neumiller, hanging from one of the rafters. He’d climbed up a ladder, tied a rope around the rafter and around his neck, and kicked the ladder away. Miranda’s mother, whose name was Ellen, went back to the house and waited for someone else to find him—her older brother, Miranda’s Uncle Jack, as it turned out, who was married and lived about half a mile west of them on Highway 34. When Jack came into the house, about fifteen minutes later, he said there’d been an accident and called Doc Grainger. Doc Grainger came, and an ambulance from the Connelly Funeral Home, and the story that came out was that Miranda’s grandfather had fallen off a ladder in the barn and broken his neck. No one knew that Ellen had already seen him, swinging from a length of the three-strand rope they used to make halters for the heifers. What upset Miranda more than her Grandpa Neumiller’s suicide was the fact that her mother had carried this secret around with her for so many years. Had she brooded on it? Had she allowed it to poison her life? Had she shared it with Miranda’s father, who’d been killed in a tractor accident when Miranda was nine? It was as if she’d never known her mother any more than she’d known her father, never known the most important thing about her mother. It was as if a loose thread had been pulled out of a tapestry, unraveling all her memories, her picture of her childhood, her understanding of her own life, her own story.
But Ellen had told her brother Jack, in the hospital, just before she died, and Jack had told everyone, so her secret had become part of family lore, along with stolid Uncle Frank, who’d run a hardware store in Fort Madison and who’d left behind hundreds of passionate letters from a woman in Des Moines. Miranda had a distant cousin who’d been a bank robber and another cousin who’d embezzled a lot of money and fled to Argentina, and still another cousin—Cousin Johnny—who’d killed a man with a spade at the old Clarinda Asylum, back in the time of Polk Wells, the bank robber and Indian fighter. Miranda liked these stories because they spoke of passion and feeling lying just below the surface. But she didn’t like to hear her mother’s story trotted out. It was too painful, and that’s why she went to bed early on Christmas Eve instead of sitting up with her family and sipping hot cider laced with Applejack.
On the train from Luxembourg to Florence, Miranda became Margot Harrington, someone who was more real to her than the self she could see, when she didn’t have her eyes closed, reflected in the long mirror above the seats opposite her in her compartment, a mirror that was tilted slightly so that it cut off the top of her head. She was larger than this reflected self, wiser, more confident; she had the right touch on life. In this creative visualization, she was on the train from Luxembourg to Florence, but of course, she really was on the train from Luxembourg to Florence. She’d cashed in the open ticket from New York to Rome that Esther Klein had given her and flown to Luxembourg three weeks early, so she could try out her new self in Italy. She was following Margot’s itinerary: TWA from Chicago to New York; Icelandic from New York to Luxembourg; express train from Luxembourg to Florence.
Lying on her couchette that night, under a paper blanket, she counted down slowly from ten to one, breathing slowly and deeply, till she was standing on the threshold of Margot’s apartment in Santa Croce and Margot, the real Margot, was inviting her in and saying how exciting it was to meet a movie star.
She didn’t sleep well in the couchette, but she wasn’t tired when the train backed into the station in Florence, Stazione Santa Maria Novella. She struggled to get her huge suitcase down from the luggage rack. The conductor had helped her get it up there, but he had disappeared, and it was difficult to maneuver with six people in the compartment. Her other luggage had already been shipped, air freight, to the production office in the convent. Ex-convent.
Waiting in the crush of passengers in the corridor of the train, she was part Margot, part Miranda. But once she stepped off the train onto the platform, she was 100 percent herself again. She was totally unprepared for this experience. Not for being herself, but for being unable to communicate. Her semester and a half of Italian at Smith wasn’t going to do her much good. The platform was crowded. There were no porters. Other passengers had found luggage carts, but she couldn’t see any. And she had to pee. She should have peed on the train, but she’d been too busy visualizing herself at Margot’s doorstep in Piazza Santa Croce. What would Margot do? she asked herself. But Margot wouldn’t be in this predicament: Margot spoke Italian.
She tried to sashay like Dorothy de Poliolo in her favorite film, L’avventura, but it’s hard to sashay when you have to pee and when you’re pulling a heavy suitcase, and she failed to stir up the collective id.
Gabinetto was the word that she’d tucked away for emergencies, but now the language problem really came home to her for the first time. Everyone at the hotel in Luxembourg where she’d spent the night had spoken English, and so had the people in the train station, and the conductor on the train, and one of the passengers, a doctor from Germany who was coming to visit his son, who’d married an Italian. She looked around for him, but he’d disappeared.
“Gabinetto,” she said to herself. “Gabinetto.” What was she saying? Cabinet?
Her plan had been to take a cab to Piazza Santa Croce. She’d ask Margot to recommend a hotel, and Margot would either invite her to stay in her apartment, or she’d recommend a hotel.
“Taxi, taxi. You want taxi?”
A rough-looking man wearing a New York Yankees cap was talking to her.
She nodded.
“You come.”
He grabbed the handle of the suitcase and pulled it toward the exit. Miranda followed. Out of the station. Down a long flight of stairs. The suitcase banging on each narrow step. Down an underground ramp under a busy street.
The underground passageway, which branched off into other underground passageways, was bright and full of stores of all kinds. Miranda, in high heels, having trouble keeping up with the taxi driver, saw what she’d been looking for, a sign: WC. She shouted at the taxi driver and touched his shoulder: “Gabinetto.” But the taxi driver kept going, as if he hadn’t heard her. And then there were the gypsies, women in shawls, sitting on the pavement and leaning up against the wall of the underpass, holding pathetic-looking babies in their laps, making piercing sounds, and a whole flock of gypsy children, swarming around her like hornets, waving newspapers at her, pawing at her dress with their little hands, exploring her pockets, tugging on the strap of her purse. The cab driver gave one of them, a little girl, a savage kick and she fell to the ground. He shouted something in Italian. The gypsies backed away. Miranda was starting to panic.
They came to another fork in the tunnels. Miranda had had enough. She wanted to go back to the WC. “Gabinetto,” she shouted in the driver’s ear. “Stop.” She gave the suitcase a push so that it fell over. The driver stopped and looked at her.
“No taxi,” she said. “No taxi.” But the driver righted the suitcase.
“Fuck you,” Miranda shouted. “Fuck you, fuck you, you bastard.”
A crowd started to gather. The driver let go of the suitcase, shrugged his shoulders, walked away.
“Gabinetto,” Miranda said to a middle-aged woman in a black dress as people started to move on, but the woman shrugged her shoulders too, like the taxi driver.
Miranda backtracked. She wanted to find the WC without confronting the gypsies again, but she was soon lost. She came to a flight of stairs and managed to lug the suitcase up to the street. The sidewalks were crowded, and the streets were incredibly busy, but there were no taxis. She sat on the suitcase and tried to take her map out of her purse, but her purse was gone. The strap was there, but it had been cut at both ends.
It took her an hour on foot to reach Piazza Santa Croce, which she did by repeating “Dove Santa Croce?” over and over, as if it were a mantra. The suitcase had wheels that had rolled okay in the
underpass and that rolled okay on the sidewalks, but on the cobbled streets it kept tipping over. She would have followed her guidebook advice and stopped in a bar for a coffee and then asked for the gabinetto, but now she had no money to pay for the coffee. She’d lost everything: her money, her passport, her traveler’s checks, her return ticket.
When she finally spotted a row of taxi cabs, she was already at Piazza Santa Croce. She recognized the church at the far end of the piazza, but the statue of Dante was not in the middle of the piazza where it belonged. She was trembling, still on the edge of panic. But maybe it was just because she was so cold. She knew it was January, but this was Italy. It shouldn’t have been so cold. Her jeans kept her legs warm, but her feet were freezing. What will Margot make of me? she asked herself. Will she be glad to see me or will she be annoyed? What will I say? What will the real Margot be like? Will she be the same as the Margot in The Sixteen Pleasures? She should go to a hotel, she thought. Call American Express. Call the American Consulate. But there weren’t any hotels in the piazza. No pensiones. Nothing but leather shops and shops with postcard stands in their open doorways. And gold shops and a pawn shop. Only one bar that she could see.