The Italian Lover

  But it wasn’t enough. She wanted to be funny and dramatic and glamorous. She wanted to see her picture up on the billboard where Jodie Foster, who was Miranda’s age, now looked down at the traffic on the Glendale Freeway. She wanted to make people feel what she felt, whatever it was. She wanted people to love her. She wanted to astonish her high school classmates and her college roommates. She wanted to please her mother, who had sent her to Smith, even though she’d dropped out without getting her degree and her mother had died without ever seeing her on the big screen or on TV. And at the same time she didn’t think she could face another audition, another look-see. And the funny thing was, when she’d been a senior in high school she’d dreamed about living in a dorm at Smith with roommates—being on her own, good friends, wild parties—and boys from Amherst and UMass and even Harvard; and then when she was living in Lawrence House she dreamed about living in an apartment in L.A. with a view of the mountains or maybe the ocean; and now that she was living in Altadena with a view of the San Gabriel Mountains, she dreamed about living at home with her mother—the woman she portrayed in television commercials, enthusing over a new detergent or a new kind of mop or wrinkle cream. And with her father, who had died when she was nine. She’d hardly known him, but she could still close her eyes and hear him in the kitchen with her mother, both of them laughing. What were they laughing about? She’d never know now.

  It was only nine o’clock in the morning, but she called her therapist at his emergency number. Her therapist, who answered on the second ring, reminded her that everything is energy— everything!—including our thoughts. When you creatively visualize something you want to see manifested, what you’re doing is simply connecting the two frequencies to bring that reality into being. If you can visualize something creatively, then that something already exists.

  Miranda wasn’t so sure, but she thanked him and put on some water to boil to poach an egg, and then she called her film agent again and left another message: “I want this part. I really mean it. You’ve got to get me a read. I really, really, really mean it. I don’t want any excuses. Do whatever you have to do. Remind Esther that I had a girlfriend role in Heavenly Days. Remind her that Harry kept the camera on my legs for a good ten seconds in a pan across the bedroom while David O’Neill’s passed out on the bed, and that you can see my face for a second when I bend over and kiss him.”

  At ten o’clock she got in her five-speed Mazda Turbo II and scooted from one freeway to the next, the Glendale to the Santa Ana to the Hollywood Extension. The Creative Talent Agency was on La Cienega Boulevard, on the border between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. She didn’t expect her agent, David Greenburg, to show up till eleven, but she wanted to be there early just in case. David might have been the model for Sid in Doonesbury—or maybe he’d decided to model himself on Sid. Except he didn’t smoke cigars. The doorman eyed her suspiciously. Not much foot traffic yet. Sunset Boulevard was empty. It was too early.

  She admired her reflection in the big mirror by the bank of elevators, imagining herself as Margot: a black jacket and man’s white shirt tucked into stonewashed jeans. And then she’s at the Academy Awards, backstage at the Kodak Theater, waiting to accept her Oscar for her interpretation of the role of Margot Harrington in The Sixteen Pleasures, Margot Harrington, the spunky feisty scrappy book conservator who takes Florence, Italy, by storm . . . “I want to thank everyone,” she said, improvising, not anticipating, not planning ahead. “I want to thank everyone,” she said. The hall was silent.

  “You talkin’ to me, ma’am?” the doorman asked.

  “No, sorry, I forgot where I was. Just daydreaming.” But she wasn’t just daydreaming. She was using her imagination to bring what she wanted into her life. Billy Crystal is calling her name. Miranda. Miranda Clark. She’s wearing a simple chiffon dress. Modest. All the other actresses look gaudy by comparison, their dresses in poor taste, their breasts pumped up like balloons. Miranda was just a simple country girl. Fresh and innocent. But perky—perky spunky feisty scrappy as hell.

  “Hey, Mir, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Since you don’t return my calls, I had to drive down to see you.”

  “I’m so fucking busy I can’t see straight, you know how it is.”

  “Well, I’m so fucking unbusy I can’t see straight. You know how that is?”

  “Hey, you got residuals up the wazoo. Your turn will come.”

  “I’m tired of playing my mother on TV. They sent me one of those mop contraptions. I can’t make it work. I can’t get the cloth part hooked into it.”

  “They’ll explain it at the studio. Besides, that’s not my department. Why don’t you complain to Billy.” Billy was her commercial agent.

  “David, I left you a message this morning, two messages, but this is too important to wait. Esther Klein’s going to make The Sixteen Pleasures. It’s a good role. It’s a great role. It’s just right for me.”

  “Slow down, doll. You’re going way too fast for me.”

  “Don’t ‘doll’ me. You sound like Esther.”

  “That’s her signature. A real gutsy lady. Too bad about Harry.” David shook his head. “We’ll see if she can make it on her own. Too bad,” he said again. “But that’s why you’ve got an agent to advise and counsel you: no mercy fucks. That’s the rule. Tell her to submit a firm offer in writing. That’s how we do deals, okay? Money’s got to change hands. Don’t do anything on spec. Remember, that property’s been on the market for fifteen years.”

  “I’m the one who needs a mercy fuck. I keep picking up my phone to make sure it’s working. I can’t tell her anything. Esther hasn’t called me. I’ve got to call her. You’ve got to call her. You’re my agent. I want you to get me a read. I did a good job in Heavenly Days. She should know my name. She should know who I am. She should know I work hard.”

  “Does she have the rights? Does she have financing? Does she have a script? Does she have a director attached?”

  “David, how am I supposed to know these things? That’s your job. I just saw the notice in Variety last night.”

  Foot traffic was picking up on the other side of a row of large potted plants that divided the lobby.

  “Why don’t you go get a facial at Ruby’s,” he said. “Get the whole works: facial, mud bath, cucumbers over your eyes, massage. You’ll feel better.”

  “I want you to get me a read, David.”

  “Yes, doll.” He laughed.

  “I really mean it, David. I’m not kidding you. I really, really mean it.”

  Miranda thought about going to Ruby’s. Was she getting wrinkle lines at twenty-nine? David had told her to get a facial. But then, he’d advised her to get her breasts done too. Was it that bad? She’d always told herself that she’d age gracefully, naturally—that she wouldn’t fight it tooth and nail like other actresses. But now it was make-or-break time.

  Instead of going to Ruby’s, she drove out to Laurel Canyon Park and sat on a bench. From there she could see the Wilson Observatory and the mountains beyond. Mount Wilson, San Gabriel Peak, Strawberry Peak, Evergreen. She stood up and drew the beauty into her body. This was one of her creative visualization exercises. She interrogated the beauty. That’s what the exercise was about. Not appreciation but interrogation. Not with words, but with her body, her movements. Every movement was a question. It was more like flying than dancing. Like the hawks moving over Devil’s Canyon, tiny specks in her field of vision. She drew them into her body. She felt light, weightless. She was overcoming the weight of her body and then returning to it. Every gesture was like the subtle pressure of wing on air. When she closed her eyes she was in Italy. She was walking to that little town that Margot always walked to. Settignano, looking down on the city of Florence. She’s coming to the little cemetery. She’s drinking a glass of wine with her mother in the Casa del Popolo. Then she and her mother are waiting in the little piazza for the bus that will take them back down to the city.

  She
looked at her watch. It was only two o’clock. Maybe she would get a facial at Ruby’s.

  Plot Points

  Margot rented a TV and a VCR and got one of her apprentices to hook them up for her and show her how to use the remote. Woody was going to help her write the screenplay. They were going to watch some movies together in her apartment. Woody had bought a book at Feltrinelli on how to write a screenplay. Margot admired his modus operandi: he learned how to do things from books. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to go to a bookstore and look for a book on how to write a screenplay.

  She was standing in the window, overlooking the piazza, waiting. It was eight o’clock. A few shops were still open. Esther had a director attached, someone Margot had never heard of, and a male lead—Giovanni Cipriani, a wonderful old commedia dell’arte actor whom she’d seen once in a marvelous production of Volpone at the Teatro Pergola, and in a movie called L’accalappiacani (The Dogcatcher). Giovanni, or “Zanni,” would play her lover, Sandro Postiglione, and she remembered sitting on an orange crate in this very window, waiting for Sandro to cross the piazza. Giovanni had been Mosca in the production at Teatro Pergola, and although the play was a comedy and was hysterically funny, he and Volpone, his partner in crime, had been pretty scary. Nothing had been able to stop them: not the fools they deceived, not the innocent Bonario and Celia, not the state itself. It was only when they turned against each other that they ran into trouble. But in L’accalappiacani, he’d been a kind of clown, a kind of Charlie Chaplin figure who shared the life of the dogs he captured.

  She and Woody had eaten out together two times at Trattoria la Maremmana—once with a couple of teachers from the American Academy and once by themselves—and they’d taken the bus up to Fiesole and walked to Settignano, a walk she’d taken with all the important people in her life: first her mother; and then Sandro; and then her father, who’d stopped on his way to India; and then Francesca—Sandro’s wife—and then an assortment of sisters and nieces and nephews and other lovers; and, finally, with Esther. On one of these walks, just beyond Maiano—she’d been with Francesca—she’d seen them filming the carriage scene for A Room with a View. There were no horses on the carriage and Helena Bonham Carter and Julian Sands had bounced up and down as if they were moving, and the driver too, Lucca Rossi, and the pompieri from the fire department used up all their water making the rain for the first shot and had to go back to Maiano to fill their tank. Later she’d watched from her window as they filmed the scene between Lucy Honeychurch and the guide in Piazza Santa Croce, a scene that was not, in fact, in Forster’s novel. She was replaying the scene in her imagination when she saw Biscotti bound across the piazza and scatter a cloud of pigeons. She stepped out onto the balcony and called: “Woody, over here.” She waved, and Woody called the dog: “Vieni, vieni, vieni mi qua.”

  The furniture in Margot’s long narrow living room was comfortable and modestly elegant. Two small leather sofas faced each other. A couple of armchairs sat side by side behind a coffee table. On the coffee table: a couple of Clairefontaine notepads. She already knew that Woody wrote with a Parker Duofold with a fine italic nib, and that was one of the things that attracted her to him. Her own Montblanc Meisterstück Le Grand, newly filled with Pelikan azul-negro ink, was on the table too. She never left the house without at least two fountain pens in her purse. She’d bought the Montblanc in Rome after Sandro had abandoned her. Next to the pen, a kitchen timer and a video of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura, which they were going to watch to get some ideas for their own screenplay. She imagined them sitting in the armchairs, notepads on their laps, fountain pens at the ready, taking notes as the movie unfolded. The TV and the VCR were on the floor between two tall windows that opened onto the piazza. Two smaller windows opened onto Via Verrazzano. Margot buzzed Woody in and opened the door to the stairwell. The dog arrived first. Biscotti. Cookie. Woody bounded up the stairs after her.

  Not much happened during the first ten minutes of L’avventura. Biscotti went to sleep. Margot worried that Woody might go to sleep too. The timer went off. Margot stopped the tape. Woody opened his copy of Syd Field’s Screenplay.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s the most important part. The first ten minutes. What do you think? What’s the hook? Are you hooked? Do we know who the main character is? Do we know what it’s about? Is the dramatic situation clear?”

  “I’m not sure,” Margot said. “Maybe we should have watched Casablanca or Shane or A Room with a View.” These were the only three movies they had in common, at least that they could remember. And Gone with the Wind.

  “Are they having an affair or not?”

  “Sandro and Anna?”

  “I think Anna’s the wife.”

  “What’s the other woman’s name? Claudia?”

  “Maybe we’d better watch a little more.”

  Margot set the timer for another twenty minutes and started the VCR. When the timer went off, she stopped the film again.

  “That should be the end of Act One, the ‘setup,’” Woody said.

  “Well, something’s happened. Anna’s disappeared.”

  “But why are they so bored? I mean, the look on Claudia’s face when they’re making love. You’d think she was doing the dishes.”

  Margot was expecting to go to bed with Woody that night, and she wasn’t bored. She was nervous, excited. She’d changed the sheets. She’d hung her clean clothes in the wardrobe and put the dirty ones in the hamper. She didn’t understand how people could be so bored or how they could find sex boring. She assumed Woody would make the first move, but she couldn’t be sure. He was an American, a midwesterner. He might need a nudge or a shove.

  “That’s half an hour,” she said. “Have we reached Plot Point One?”

  “Right,” Woody said. “I’ve got it right here: ‘Plot Point One: something swings the action out of the beginning and into the confrontation.’ It’s the same thing as the ‘dramatic hook,’ I think.”

  “Well,” Margot said, “they haven’t found Anna yet. We’re supposed to be moving toward the confrontation. I suppose they’ll have to look for Anna and that the main character— Sandro—will meet lots of obstacles.”

  “That must be it,” Woody said. “I’ll make a note. The counter on the VCR says thirty minutes, four seconds.” He wrote down “30:04” on his notepad. “But what’s it about? What’s the theme? Boredom? They’re so bored with each other.”

  “I liked the scene with the two women together after swimming. Anna and Claudia, I think. Where Anna sees a shark. Or pretends she sees a shark, and they start giggling. It’s a little moment of freshness. You think maybe there’s going to be something between the two women, but then nothing comes of it. Put that down: Moment of freshness.”

  Margot could see that Woody was having trouble writing. “Let me see your pen,” she said. She touched it lightly to the page several times, making a series of dots. But some of the dots were missing. “It’s skipping,” she said. “You probably need to realign the nib. I can do it for you if you’d like.”

  “It’s been driving me crazy. I’ve been meaning to take it to that pen place on Via Cavour.”

  “The Casa della Stilografica.”

  “That’s the place.”

  “That place has been there for fifty years. I know Signor Sacchetti. His daughter more or less runs the place now. She was a year behind me at Liceo Morgagni. But I can fix it for you right now if you’d like.”

  “You can adjust it? Don’t you have to take it apart? This isn’t the kind of nib you can just unscrew.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s a Duofold. I won’t be able to knock out the nib and feed because they’re not accessible from the back of the section. I’ll have to use pliers to pull them. Let’s go into the bedroom. I’ve got everything we need.”

  There was a workbench in her bedroom with a small toolbox for some bookbinding tools she liked to have on hand. There was a little sink too and a Bunsen burner. It was lik
e a high school chemistry lab. She picked up a pair of rubber-coated gripping pliers.

  “You won’t break it?”

  She laughed and ran some water into the sink. “I adjust all my pens,” she said. “Did you know that Arthur Conan Doyle used a Duofold to write the Sherlock Holmes stories?”

  “I didn’t know that,” Woody said.

  Margot emptied out the ink, flushed out the pen with tap water.

  “What’s the Bunsen burner for?” Woody asked.

  “You can heat-set some of the older pens,” Margot explained, “but you have to be careful. I had an old Patterson explode once. It was made out of nitrate-based chemicals. Really unstable. It’s still there, in my fountain-pen case.”

  “Jesus, Margot.”

  “The newer Duofolds,” she said, “have plastic feeds that tend to melt before they can be adjusted.” She pulled the nib out with her gripping pliers and examined it through a jeweler’s loupe.

  “You want to look? You can see that the left tine is sprung. That’s what’s causing your ink-flow problem. Did you drop it?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  When Woody looked through the loupe he could see that the tines were not lined up perfectly. He handed the nib and the loupe back to Margot, who adjusted the tines with her fingers, checked the alignment with her loupe, and wedged the nib back into the section with her bare fingers.