The Italian Lover

  “I thought we were talking about a film?”

  “We’re going to make this film, if it’s everything Dawn’s been telling me, and I hope it makes a fucking ton of money for all of us, but for Christ’s sake lose the attitude along with the coat.”

  “You know, Gordon,” Esther said, “if you kick me in the ass, I’ll kick you right back.”

  “Who you talking to?” Gordon pretended to look over his shoulder.

  Dawn intervened. “Can we hold off till the meet?”

  “What meet? We got a meet?”

  “Yeah, Gordy, we got a meet, in about fifteen.” She looked at her watch and kept looking at it till Gordon was out of sight.

  “What the fuck is the matter with you?” she said to Esther.

  “Did you hear the way he talked to me?”

  “Everybody talks like that around here.”

  “I’ve been around here for a long time . . . I never heard anybody talk like that. Not to me. Nobody talks like that to me.”

  “Well, you’d better get used to it if you want to make a studio movie.”

  “Look, Dawn, I’m sorry, but . . .”

  “You made me look bad, Esther. You could cost me my job.”

  “I’m sorry,” Esther said again, but she wasn’t sorry. She was just being polite. She wasn’t sorry at all, because she knew now that she could walk away from this deal if she had to, and that gave her a boost; it reminded her of something that everyone in Hollywood knew but generally forgot. She’d known it from the beginning, when she first started out with Harry: power isn’t money; power isn’t reputation or a string of hits behind you; power in Hollywood is passion; power is belief; power is love; power is knowing that nobody in the whole world could make this film the way you want to make it. And Esther had all these things: passion, belief, love, confidence. She knew that The Sixteen Pleasures would make a great film. That she would make a great film. An Esther Klein Production.

  Cancer

  From his new ergonomic chair in the new apartment on West 74th Street, Michael Gardiner could see, through the floor-to-ceiling window, the Hudson River and parts of New Jersey. If he leaned forward far enough, he could see the dog walkers in Riverside Park. It was a special chair that was supposed to be good for his back. It wasn’t as comfortable as the Barcalounger he’d sat in at Macy’s, but his wife, Beryl, would never have permitted a Barcalounger. Even though he was dying of cancer. Prostate cancer. He’d skipped his PSA test two years running, and the cancer got away from him and from the doctors. He’d had chemo and then an operation, but the cancer had metastasized to the bone, and his doctors at Sloan-Kettering did not hold out the prospect of death with dignity: weakness, loss of appetite, organ dysfunction, enzyme systems breaking down, pneumonia, urinary infections.

  Beryl, a cradle Episcopalian, hadn’t offered to pray for him, but he knew that she would anyway, and that she wouldn’t tell him. And he was glad for this, glad that she wouldn’t tell him, so he wouldn’t have to protest.

  It was Beryl who’d bought the new apartment and who was fixing it up for their last years together—correction: last year. It was Beryl who’d mustered the energy to move back to New York. Los Angeles had never felt like home. There was no center in L.A., no life on the streets the way there was in New York; people in L.A. didn’t understand city life. Yesterday his son had taken the train up from Princeton, where he worked as a computer programmer, and they’d bought ham sandwiches at Zabar’s and eaten them in the little park by the Natural History Museum. This afternoon he’d bought a plum on his way back from lunch with Esther Klein. The divorce hadn’t slowed Esther down. Maybe she’d made some bad choices. But she knew how to line up financing and how to keep department heads under control and how to bring a film in under budget. Basically good-hearted. Big-hearted. She liked to cook for people, liked to bring people together. She was taking the divorce pretty hard. He and Beryl had tried not to take sides, but it hadn’t been easy. Calls from both Harry and Esther in the middle of the night. Harry coming over drunk at two o’clock in the morning. And Harry wasn’t a drinker. Esther trying to hang on. Asking Beryl for help. Begging her to talk sense to Harry. To lay down the law. You didn’t just throw a marriage away, not after thirty years. You’d think a thirty-year marriage would be like a big tree in the forest. Safe for a while. For a long time. Thirty-year marriages in Hollywood were like towering redwoods in a scrub forest. You marveled at them, and you grieved when one of them fell. No more Esther and Harry Klein Productions.

  He hadn’t told Beryl he was meeting Esther for lunch. Not that there was anything between him and Esther, or that Beryl didn’t like Esther. But he’d known that Esther was going to make him an offer, and he’d known that he was going to accept it.

  Workmen were still doing things in the apartment. Painting, hanging pictures in the wide hallway, which Beryl had turned into a gallery with recessed lights that could be adjusted to show off her collection—Zulu warrior masks, like the ones that inspired Picasso; a Chagall; an early Barnett Newman (a small one, but floor-to-ceiling nonetheless); a Rembrandt etching; two Japanese prints; a pointillist picture of a dog barking at a man who seemed to be conducting an imaginary symphony, done by their daughter; framed posters of half a dozen lectures she’d attended; still photos, some of them signed, from all of Michael’s films.

  State-of-the-art projection equipment was being installed in a state-of-the-art screening room that seated twenty people in comfortable chairs. A film library contained his life’s work: seventeen feature films and a dozen documentaries, good prints—his own cuts, final cuts—and, for convenience, videos too. The reels were stored in a special closet, like a wine cellar. The piano was being tuned. Mr. Hammond, the owner of the gallery on Ninth Avenue, where Beryl had taken a new acquisition to have it cleaned, had come to deliver the painting and to supervise the installation: Jesus Restoring Sight to Blind Bartimaeus. Lots of seventeenth-century chiaroscuro. Beryl, who’d studied art history at Smith, was convinced it was a Michael Sweerts, worth much more than she’d paid for it. Sweerts was somebody not quite famous—at least not famous enough for Michael to recognize the name, though Beryl said he had a painting in the Accademia in Venice. Just as Michael had an Honorable Mention from the Venice Film Festival for his first film, an adaptation of Chekhov’s The Lady with the Pet Dog.

  Mr. Hammond had brought a carpenter with him to hang the Sweerts, which had cost as much as the piano, a rebuilt Bechstein, that Beryl had gotten at an estate sale on Long Island, where she’d also bought the Sweerts.

  Everything in the new apartment was intended to cheer him up. There was beauty everywhere. A certain kind of beauty. Nothing to suggest vulgar uplift, but Michael got the message: in the midst of life, we are in death, but it’s okay. He was going to take up the piano again. Learn to play Chopin’s “Ocean Wave Étude.” He wasn’t particularly depressed, didn’t really need cheering up. He was glad, in a way, that it was over. Almost. He was ready to go. At age sixty-five most men might look forward to a few more years, but he’d had enough.

  He’d been a “middling” director. Middling. That’s the word that critics used when they got around to mentioning one of his films. Middling. He’d always worked, and he’d always handed the money over to Beryl, who’d managed it, which was why they were rich now; but his first film had been his best—Chekhov’s The Lady with the Pet Dog in New York and Atlantic City and Princeton instead of Yalta and Moscow and S—. It had been a remarkably “mature” film for such a young director. What he understood now, however, at age sixty-five, was that at age twenty-seven he’d been prematurely mature; he’d been middle-aged from the beginning. Point and shoot. Walk and talk. Nothing artsy-fartsy, Esther had said at lunch. Just tell the story. That was Michael: nothing artsy-fartsy.

  He’d been too old to join in the creative revolution staged by the movie brats—Coppola, Friedkin, Carpenter, Lucas, De Palma, Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Spielberg. He’d been forty-three when Denni
s Hopper’s Easy Rider opened. He’d known something was up, but he hadn’t been able to get on board. He could tell a good story, and his fortunes revived with the return of the old Hollywood in the late seventies and eighties.

  Mr. Hammond didn’t trust Beryl’s sketch showing where she wanted the Sweerts. Michael didn’t know what to tell him, except to wait for Beryl. The piano tuner had finished up and wanted a check. Michael assured him that Beryl would send him a check in the mail. He’d be back in two weeks, he said. It would take a while for the piano to settle in. The computer person wanted to show him how to get the computer in his study to talk to the computer in Beryl’s study. Voices were coming out of the screening room, a man and woman quarreling.

  What a lot of work, Michael thought. What an enormous effort. Telephones in every room. John Widdicomb furniture. Two stoves in the huge kitchen, two refrigerators, two sinks. For entertaining. As if they were starting out their marriage (with a lot of money) instead of finishing it. How different from their first apartment on the Lower East Side. But Beryl was tireless, and she was fixing up this place for him, because she knew he wanted to come back to New York, back home, though he’d grown up in the Bronx, not Manhattan.

  Mr. Hammond decided to wait for Beryl, who was at a meeting, Michael didn’t know where. They’d been back in New York less than a month, and she was already active in the American Cancer Society antismoking campaign, she’d been elected to the vestry at St. Francis Episcopal Church, and she was volunteering at Sloan-Kettering, where Michael’s cancer was being treated. Meetings upon meetings. She was a type that was becoming extinct: a rich woman who took money seriously and didn’t feel guilty about it, a woman who invested shrewdly, volunteered tirelessly, gave generously, raised two children, cooked like a professional chef.

  The first thing Beryl saw when the elevator door opened—it opened directly into the apartment—was the Sweerts. It was on the floor, leaning up against the wall. The second thing she saw was the scowling face of Mr. Hammond from the Hammond Gallery on Ninth Avenue. Every two or three years she bought something new and expensive and wildly different. She was always interested to see how the new piece would fit in. How it would change the configuration of the whole ensemble. Michael never thought the new piece would fit, and everyone else she knew, including gallery owners, always agreed with Michael. And at first it wouldn’t. But then it would, and everything would be changed.

  Besides, she’d always had a good eye for bargains. She’d gotten a bargain on the Bechstein. And she was convinced that the painting would turn out to be a bargain too. If it really was a Sweerts, of course.

  She’d just come from St. Francis, where she’d tried out the new kneelers. They worked just fine. She didn’t see why everyone had gotten so worked up about replacing the old ones. Martin Haddam, the senior warden, had wanted to replace them with fat little cushions, but Beryl liked the traditional kneelers because they reminded her of the stool in her mother’s kitchen that had a little foldout stepladder in it.

  She’d knelt on a kneeler in the back of the church, by the Bowton Chapel, and prayed for her husband—not for the cancer to go away, not for him to have the strength to deal with it (he didn’t need that). Her prayer was more like giving thanks for so many years with such a good man. Beryl never asked for things. She didn’t even make suggestions. It was part of the deal she had with God. She didn’t ask for things, and God never made her feel guilty for being rich and happy. She was always amazed at how people couldn’t handle happiness. Like her father, an Episcopal priest. If the house got too comfortable in hot weather, he’d turn up the thermostat a little. If it got too comfortable in cold weather, he’d turn it down. So you were always just a little bit uncomfortable.

  She didn’t ask for things, but she couldn’t conceal her hopes and fears. Not from God. What she was hoping for was that Michael would have a good death. Nobody wanted a messy death. What she was afraid of was that his illness would come between them, pull them apart instead of bringing them closer together. Michael was having trouble dealing with the aftermath of the operation.

  Neither one of them was afraid of death, though for different reasons. Michael wasn’t afraid because there was nothing to be afraid of. There was just nothing. And Beryl wasn’t afraid because her deepest experiences of life were full of meaning and purpose, and she expected death to be full of meaning and purpose too.

  Florid-faced Mr. Hammond was scowling because he was unhappy. He held his shoulders up, as if he were worried that his neck was too long, like a Parmigianino virgin. She could hear her husband at the newly tuned piano. Trying it out. Chopin. She’d tried to get him interested in other composers. She’d like to hear some Mozart once in a while, or The Harmonious Blacksmith. She’d given him the music. He’d start to learn new pieces, but he always went back to Chopin. It wasn’t healthy.

  “Now then, Mr. Hammond, what’s the problem?”

  “You can see for yourself, Mrs. Gardiner. You’re going to have to find another space for the painting. You can’t hang a seventeenth-century religious painting on the wall between these African masks and the movie posters. You can see that for yourself.”

  “That’s what Mr. Fischer in L.A. said about the Chagall,” Beryl said, “when I wanted to hang it next to the Japanese prints. And now look. My theory—no, it’s not a theory, it’s a fact—is that no great works of art are incompatible. Maybe no works of art are incompatible. Sometimes I think that the Met would be a better place, a more interesting and exciting place, if they rearranged all the paintings in alphabetical order by title. I have a friend on the board. I may suggest it to her. You’d have lots of startling juxtapositions, and isn’t that what art’s all about? Startling juxtapositions? Doctor Johnson said something about the metaphysical poets yoking heterogeneous ideas together by violence. Something like that. I’ll have to look it up.”

  “Mrs. Gardiner? What am I doing here?”

  “You’ve put this painting in a lovely frame, and now I want you to tell me that it was done by Michael Sweerts and that it’s worth fifty times what I paid for it.”

  “You know I can’t tell you that. Not without a thorough investigation of the provenance. How much did you pay for it anyway?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.” Beryl laughed.

  Beryl had experienced a small epiphany while she was praying, but she hadn’t been able to bring it into focus. She’d come up to the edge of some insight, up to the edge of a cliff, but she hadn’t been able to look over. She experienced the same sensation when she looked at the painting again. Jesus restoring sight to blind Bartimaeus. What does Bartimaeus see at that moment? Why does he look so surprised? As if he was seeing something he hadn’t expected to see. Had he been blind from birth? No. He asks Christ to “restore” his sight. Maybe he’d had cataracts.

  Michael was playing the opening arpeggios of the “Ocean Wave Étude.” She went into the living room and sat next to him on the piano bench and turned the pages for him while the carpenter hung the painting. The étude was a difficult piece, too difficult for Michael. But so beautiful. They had several recordings: Horowitz, Rubinstein, Vlado Perlmutter.

  They were going to watch one of Michael’s films that night if they could figure out how to operate the new projector. They would sit in the dark and she would hold his hand.

  He came to the end of the étude. “Esther wants me to do another film,” he said. “She wants me to direct.”

  Beryl looked at him, her eyes open, like Bartimaeus’s eyes—seeing something she hadn’t expected to see.

  “In Italy,” he said. “Florence. The Sixteen Pleasures. She already has a script. She wrote it herself when she and Harry had the option, about fifteen years ago.”

  “Could we go to Venice too? I’d like to look at the Sweerts in the Accademia.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “We could stay at that little hotel out on the Lido, like we did before.”

  “We could st
ay at the Cipriani or the Daniello,” he said.

  “Oh, Michael. Let’s stay on the Lido. Hotel Buon Pesce. I have a picture of it somewhere. It’ll be like a second honeymoon.”

  He took her hand and she started to cry. Silently. So this is what she wanted, she thought. And all the time she’d thought it was something else.

  Miranda

  When Miranda Clark read in Variety that Esther Klein was going to make a film of Margot Harrington’s The Sixteen Pleasures, she knew that this was the sign she’d been waiting for. She knew with all her might that she had to have this role, knew with all her might that she could play Margot better than anyone. She’d read The Sixteen Pleasures her sophomore year at Smith, right after her mother’s death, and it had saved her life. She’d dropped French and switched to Italian; she’d dropped Biology and enrolled in Mr. Tonarelli’s course in modern Italian Cinema: Rossellini, de Sica, Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni.

  She’d been sick of her old life then and had wanted a new one. Ten years later she had a new life, but she was sick of that one too and wanted another new one. She was tired of making the same mistakes over and over again—career mistakes, relationship mistakes—and this was a way out. She called her film agent and left a message. And then she sat at the kitchen table and poured herself a cup of coffee.

  She’d been in Los Angeles ten years. Twenty years earlier she’d have been a starlet, groomed and kept in one of the studio stables waiting for her big race. Today she was a working actress with a film agent, a commercial agent, a manager, an entertainment attorney, an accountant, an acting coach, and a therapist who practiced creative visualization. She’d been in nineteen movies, twelve of which had had theatrical releases, but no one had noticed her. She was invisible: the girlfriend of a minor character; the girl on the beach who notices that the heroine is drowning and starts shouting; the girl—in Heavenly Days, an Esther and Harry Klein Production—who sidles out of the bedroom clutching her clothes in a bundle in front of her and is never seen again; the nurse who tells the doctor that the next patient is ready. And she’d done hundreds of commercials because she had a lot of the white-bread perkiness that sells mops and toothpaste and toilet paper, so she had what her accountant called an income stream. Things could have been worse: she wasn’t waitressing at a diner; she hadn’t done any porn flicks or teensploitation flicks, though she’d had some tempting offers. So she didn’t want to complain too loudly.