A Stranger Like You

  Despite your efforts, you could never make Tom fall in love with you. He made it clear that he was not available for possession, leaving you continually frustrated. In those days, Tom was obsessed with the beat poets and the writer, James Agee, who’d come from the same place, Knoxville, Tennessee. Tom liked the fact that Agee had lots of women, a ruthless connoisseur, and yet, beneath the mythology Agee was unkempt and unhygienic—allegedly, he rarely brushed his teeth. Like Agee, Tom took pride in being enigmatic, aloof. Days would pass and you wouldn’t hear from him and he’d show up looking scrappy and hung over and stinking of cigarettes and perfume. Fresh out of the Conservatory, he’d sold his first screenplay, an action thriller, for over a million dollars—you’ve never quite forgiven him for it. After a while, you lost touch. You’d run into him from time to time at parties, always with some Victoria’s Secret model on his arm. You didn’t really care; he was an asshole. You’d heard he’d gotten married to some Italian woman, a poet, and had started making documentaries. You never thought of yourself as being the jealous type, but whenever you’d get a scrap of news about him—the wedding announcement in The Times, for example—you had to choke down your rage.

  “I’m looking for a producer,” he says to you now. “Trouble is I can’t find anyone with any balls. You wouldn’t happen to know anyone, would you?”

  “I might.”

  He orders more drinks and reaches out for your hand and holds it for a minute. His hand is huge and rough, a farmer’s hand. As much as you think it’s strange, you don’t pull away. “I remember these hands,” he says, then looks at you. “How’ve you been, Hed?”

  “All right, I guess. Working hard.”

  “You’re good at that.”

  “Too good.”

  “Married?”

  “Please. You?”

  “Sort of.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “We’re sort of separated.”

  “No such thing.”

  “She lives over in Rome.”

  “Italy?”

  “Another one of my impulsive mistakes.”

  The drinks come and you hope he’ll change the subject. He doesn’t. “She’s very beautiful. I guess you could say I fell in love with her accent.”

  A little stab of jealousy. “I’m a sucker for accents, too,” you say because you are drunk, because you like his, which is warmly southern and conjures in your mind the lazy summer afternoons of his childhood.

  “Look, Hedda,” he says. “I know it’s weird running into you like this.”

  “It is weird.”

  “But maybe there’s a reason for it. Something corny like destiny.”

  “I doubt it. I don’t believe in destiny.”

  “All right. I respect that. You always were brass tacks.”

  “That’s right, that’s me. I’m all about the bottom line.”

  “Look,” he says, impatient. “I got a story for you. You interested?”

  You really should go home—you are not in the habit of hearing pitches in seedy bars—but you say, “I guess I could hear it.”

  He finishes his drink and holds up his glass and the pretty waitress with the tits comes over. “Thank you, darlin’,” he says to her, handing her his glass, gazing briefly at her cleavage. You give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s like Pavlov, you decide, they can’t help themselves. He is a victim of the culture. Perhaps it’s not his fault, and perhaps it’s not the waitress’s fault either for smiling at him with encouragement, all too happy to forgive him for not knowing any better.

  But she does not smile at you. “Another round?”

  “Why the hell not,” you say.

  “That’s my girl.” He grins.

  You sit back, pretending to be interested. “Okay, hit me.”

  “I’ve been teaching up at Santa Cruz,” he tells you. “I’m a lecturer in the film studies program.”

  “La-di-dah.”

  He explains that after one of his talks a student came up to him, a Muslim girl, Fatima. “She’s wearing the hijab and abaya, you know, she’s covered. I can only see her eyes. And she hands me this story she wrote. It’s on loose-leaf paper, ripped out of a notebook, the most perfect handwriting I’ve ever seen.”

  Through a series of miracles, the girl had been chosen as an exchange student to attend UC Santa Cruz as part of a diplomatic effort called the Iraqi Student Project. Fatima had been living with an aunt in Syria, having been sent by her father after her mother’s death in a car bombing in Baghdad. The story was based on the real-life tragedy of a Baghdad woman, the mother’s best friend, who’d been accused of adultery and put to death. The girl did not think that the car bombing that killed her own mother was an accident.

  “My script is based on her story,” he tells you. “It’s a love story between an American soldier and an Iraqi woman.”

  “Is that even possible?”

  “The soldier and the woman were trapped inside a building for several days after a bombing. People thought they were dead. At first, they don’t speak; they’re enemies. Then, as time goes on, they become very close. They don’t want to return to their lives. They’d rather be trapped, together, than go back to their lives in the world.”

  “Then what?”

  “They get saved. It’s immediately assumed that they’ve been lovers. The fact that the woman was with this man for all that time—it’s assumed that the soldier’s taken advantage of her, that she’s succumbed to his advances.”

  “Has she?”

  “You’ll have to read it to find out.” He grins. He goes on to explain that the woman’s husband accuses her of adultery; the woman is found guilty and sentenced to death. One of the characters, an Iranian feminist lawyer, has committed her life to banning the stoning practices of the Muslim clerics. “She’s my Erin Brockovich character,” he says.

  “How does it end?”

  “Just the way it happened. She was stoned to death.”

  “You might have to tone down the ending,” you say, thinking of what Harold is going to say to you when you pitch this to him. Foster grins at you with his beautiful mouth. You ask, “How soon are you going to be done?”

  “Soon.”

  But several weeks pass without another word from Tom Foster. Through the grapevine you hear that he’s shooting a documentary in Hollywood. People have seen him with his crew. You begin to wonder if perhaps you imagined your meeting with him. And you resent the fact that it has brought up issues that you don’t particularly want to think about—not about him— no—we’ve already established that he has a form of attachment disorder, unable to fully embrace love, commitment; any expectations of intimacy will somehow be betrayed, or, at the very least, manipulated, and yet, still, your imagination has already begun spinning a sticky web of fantasy. No, we are not talking about Tom Foster here, we are talking about you—the pages from your repertoire of angst that you haven’t necessarily dealt with yet, the fact that you haven’t had the decency to marry some reasonable, perfectly acceptable man and given your parents grandchildren. Or the fact that your womb is like a tomb, swiftly closing its doors, sprouting toxic mushrooms and jagged barnacles. Or the fact that, on some occasions, you feel desolate, rubble-strewn, like a field after the apocalypse. Food has lost its flavor. You can’t seem to consume enough alcohol to take away the twinge of desperation—the fear that all of the people you have made promises to, all of the people you have taken money from will come back with their hands out, wanting their payoff. You don’t sleep—not really. You lie awake, anxious. You have fears you do not discuss, not even with your therapist. Whole scenes play out in your head each night. Intruders, rapists, killers. You are a very private person. In truth, you are shy, you are unassuming. You keep your real persona to yourself.

  People don’t you know. They think you are somebody else.

  In the privacy of your head, you review your conversation, reimagining the table where you sat, his large expressive hands, the faint
est smell of leather from his old coat. One drunken night, you dig out your old photographs from the Conservatory, ogling him like a schoolgirl, and you feel as though you are under a spell that can only be broken by seeing him again. But it is not likely. Although he is considered to be smart and talented, he is on the periphery of your social circle. The likelihood of his Baghdad movie ever getting made is slim to none, at least not in your realm. Perhaps a smaller independent company might take a chance on it, although you highly doubt it. Finding the money isn’t going to be easy. Not so long as there are wars going on.

  Still, you have to admit, the story got to you—and the fact that it is true makes it all the more appealing. Based on a true story. You can’t get out of your head the look in his eyes as he told it to you, intimate as a love poem, across the table of the noisy bar. On Google you find pictures of his wife, a beautiful woman with slightly bucked teeth, sphinxlike eyes, round breasts like pomegranates. You remember sensing his disappointment with your flat chest, your boyish hips. Still, that didn’t stop him from wanting you.

  For the first time in months, years, you feel a keen excitement—and a terror that you won’t ever hear from him again.

  And then, without prior notice, the script is delivered to your office by messenger on a rainy Wednesday morning in December. You tell Armand to cancel your meetings and hold your calls. With some degree of anticipation that is unavoidably personal, you curl up on the couch and begin to read. Tom always was a good writer, but this script is unusually powerful—it gives you a stomachache. You begin to sweat and your throat goes dry as if you are there in the Iraqi desert. You can almost feel the hot wind against your skin and you acknowledge the tension in your body, the result of being completely at his mercy. Three quarters of the way through the script you realize the hours have faded; it is nearly three o’clock. You feel as if you’re about to explode. Bedraggled, overwhelmed, you emerge from your office. “That good, huh,” Armand asks.

  You cannot bring yourself to speak. You bum a cigarette from him and walk out into the open corridor. The air is warm; the clouds seem to be brewing another storm. “What about lunch?” he asks. “Shouldn’t you eat something?”

  You tell him to order you lunch from the commissary; you’ll eat in your office. “I need to take a walk,” you say. “I need to think.”

  You walk across the lot, from one end of it to another. Your pace is quick, ferocious. You are like a disgruntled teenager, smoking defiantly, hot tears streaming down your cheeks.

  Your mind is jammed with disturbing realizations, not only about the war, the despicable mistreatment of women—but about your own pathetic complacency. Unlike Foster, you have forgotten what it feels like to be on the edge. Perhaps you traded in your ideals, your dreams, when you took this job. You have forgotten those early impulses that got you into this business in the first place—your desire to stir people from sleep! Yes, you know it’s dramatic—but you are in the drama business. It is entirely the point. When you consider the work you’ve done, the handful of films you’ve produced, you acknowledge their success at the box office—you are proud of their success—and yet, in truth, they are banal and unimportant. Standing there on the now-vacant set of a gangster picture, you reckon with the truth. You have gone off course. You have sold out.

  “These are the kinds of stories we should be telling,” you implore Harold in a breakfast meeting the next morning. “Not this . . . this crap.” You point to a stack of scripts on your desk about which Armand had written promising remarks. “These aren’t the reason I took this job,” you tell him. You hold up Foster’s script. “This is an important story. This is why you hired me.”

  Harold shakes his head; he is not convinced. “This is a loaded gun, Hedda.”

  “Fire it,” you say, and walk out.

  After a week of silent deliberation, Harold knocks on your door. “Okay,” he says. “We’ll do it. Get Foster over here.”

  You leap from your chair; you take the old man into your arms. You kiss his cheeks, tears in your eyes. “I love you for this doing this. I won’t let you down. I promise.”

  You celebrate with Tom in your empty villa. He picks you up in his old Ford Bronco and drives you out to Malibu. You let the windows down in the truck and the wind blows too loud to talk. The sun is low, the ocean dark. You stop to get champagne—ice-cold Veuve Clicquot—and sit outside on the broken stone terrace and drink it. The evening casts a golden light. The wind is swift, your hair sweeps about your face. All the trees are moving at once. The orchids and chimes that hang from their branches sing their love songs. Even from here you can smell the sea.

  “You gonna give me a tour of this place, or what?”

  Like a tour guide, you lead him around your house, a complicated excursion amidst the contractor’s tools, the stacks of flooring and drywall. “It’s on the map of the stars, you know. A very famous dog lived here once.”

  “What are you going to do with all this space?”

  The question jabs at your heart. It reminds you that you are alone, as if it’s something to regret. “I haven’t quite figured that out yet.”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something.” He stands at the French doors, looking out, his arms stretched across the open space. “That’s quite a view. The sky is orange.”

  “It’s a beautiful night.”

  He turns, comes toward you. “You’ve done well for yourself, Hedda.”

  The comment makes you unspeakably proud. “Harold wanted me to buy a house. He thought it would be good for me to put down some roots.”

  “So you bought a mansion.”

  You shrug. “I got a good deal on it.”

  “Mazel tov.” Since he’s not a Jew, you’re not sure how to take it. On the one hand, the words mean good luck; on the other, they mean something else. They mean: spoiled rich Jew, showoff.

  “It was a wreck when I bought it.”

  “It’s still a wreck.”

  “But it’s got good vibes.”

  “You’re the one with the good vibes,” he says. “You’ll make it beautiful.”

  You can’t help blushing; you look away, out the windows, down the sprawling hill to the ocean. “The ocean is rough tonight.”

  “Maybe it will rain.”

  “It’s windy. I love the wind, don’t you?”

  “Do you have any music? We could dance? It would be very Gatsbyesque.”

  “No, I don’t have any music.”

  “We have the wind,” he says. “The chimes.”

  The chimes clatter and sing. He comes closer, takes you in his arms. You dance slowly across the open space, the darkness spreading across the floor, silent as mist. “I’ve thought about you,” he says. “I’ve thought about you a lot.”

  “I’ve thought about you, too.”

  “You’re different. You’re different from most of the women in this town.”

  “Like your wife?”

  “Yeah, like my wife.”