A Stranger Like You (13 page)

Nobody says anything for several minutes. The air closes in, your cheeks flush. An awkward tension fills the room. And then Meyers asks, “So what would you change? How would you shoot it?” He chuckles as if over his own private joke then trains his eyes on you, lightly, as if you are somehow touched in the head. “How would you shoot it—let’s say from a feminist perspective?”

Just the way he says the word burns you up. You can feel your face turning colors. You scramble for ideas, but you are flummoxed, empty. You are beginning to feel embarrassed. Jim Gage whispers something into Meyers’ ear and they both snort with mockery.

“It’s not even about feminism,” you say quietly. “It’s about behavior. We just keep going over the same ground. The women are always at a disadvantage. I think it’s confusing, that’s all.”

“I think you’re overreacting,” Harold says, which feels like such a betrayal.

“Maybe.” It’s suddenly clear to you that they don’t really care. If anything, the discussion is purely academic. “Maybe I am.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Meyers says accusingly, his ego stinking up the room like a nasty fart.

“How would I shoot it?” You look at him. “I don’t have a clue.”

Meyers grunts as if he’s made his point. “Look, I can’t change the way people behave, that’s not my job. I’m in the entertainment business. That’s what I do. I entertain. And judging from my numbers, I’m pretty fucking good at it. As far as I’m concerned, that film’s in the can.”

Surprising everyone, he gets up and walks out. You stand there, feeling oddly ashamed. Harold is glaring at you. Without wasting another minute, you gather your things and walk out.

It isn’t until you’re in your car that you begin to cry and you hate your tears, you resent the ease with which you’ve come undone. It is so definitively female—and yet it may be the essence of your strength, you just don’t feel it now. Your colleagues always seem to bring the attention back to you, suggesting that your criticism is a consequence of some personal problem. They interpret the things you say as though you are speaking a different dialect of the same language—the subtle differences of inflection seem to weaken your position and they can easily rationalize and discount your opinions. It is, you admit, a sophisticated form of passive aggression.

Back in the screening room, you couldn’t possibly explain all of the reasons and ramifications of why that scene bothered you, because to do that you’d have to review the entire Western canon—you’d have to break out your old Henry Miller books, your Norman Mailer, in order to illustrate for them the myriad ways in which we have condemned women to living lives of subservience—even now, yes, even now! Centuries of cultural propaganda dispensed by a male regime!

You drive onto the freeway, trying to calm down. Maybe you should see your therapist. You try to breathe. How
would
you shoot it? Meyers’ question comes back to you—the way he’d said the word
feminist
, like it was some sort of disease. You review the scene in your head. First, the location sort of bothers you. Realistically, it is not the most conducive to sex—and yet, perhaps you can work with it—yes, perhaps the location is sexy, the implicit contrast, the seedy texture, the beauty of love in a brutal, impossible place. You’re not sure about the strange voyeur in the scene—what does it represent? The fact that we are all voyeurs in some way—that there is always some stranger in our midst, watching us—that we are never alone? Maybe, in some way, it’s a Jesus reference—it’s not impossible—but then you remember that the screenwriter is a Scientologist. You suppose, if you shot the scene, you wouldn’t have them actually fuck. You’d have them kiss. You’re thinking
From Here to Eternity
—the legendary kiss in the surf—you’re thinking
Witness.
Yes, you decide, that’s all they would do, they would kiss. You don’t really need the sex, it’s gratuitous. Not that you’re a prude—no. You remember having sex like that, standing up. First of all, it was awkward—you couldn’t get past the idea that your boyfriend was struggling to hold you up while attempting to fuck you—you were maybe twenty pounds heavier at the time, too—but then again, he wasn’t built like Antonio Ramirez. You felt like one of those acrobats in the circus, doing some elaborate trick, and you remember changing your minds and finding a bed, instead. Perhaps the lovers in the scene could lie down on the floor—but that appeals to you even less. Once, you had sex on a dirty floor—it wasn’t necessarily the most pleasant thing—you did in fact contract a strange viral rash—you’d had to go to the dermatologist for treatment. So, yes, you decide that if you were to reshoot the scene, you’d have them simply kiss, and it would be a wildly passionate, beautiful kiss—it would be enough.

On impulse, you get off the freeway and drive into Santa Monica, toward the beach. You turn down Colorado Avenue and head toward the pier. The sun is bright, the air warm—maybe you’ll take a walk. Thinking back on it now, you realize that much of your information about sex came from movies. Growing up in the seventies, you were empowered by films like
An Unmarried Woman
or
Kramer vs. Kramer
—even
Manhattan
seemed to encourage you to be sexual for the sake of your own pleasure—if Mariel Hemingway could have sex with a forty-year-old man, why couldn’t you? And yet, still, it seemed like the sex was for
him
. You remember not fully believing that she was as ravenous a lover as Woody said she was and, in retrospect, it reeks of wet dream. You were further confused by
Swept Away,
which had been directed by a woman, Lina Wertmuller—the first woman director you’d ever heard of. You remember feeling somewhat betrayed by her treatment of the female character, a wretched aristocrat, who, on a yacht in the Mediterranean, verbally abuses the impossibly sexy Giancarlo Giannini, a member of the crew, who later, when they are castaways on a deserted island, retaliates by depriving her of food and sodomizing her (another cinema first for you—you had not yet seen
Last Tango in Paris,
which had come out a year or two earlier). When you’d watched the Wertmuller film at Yale, the discussion by your mostly male classmates had revolved around the political implications of the film, the fact that the male character was a communist, and that the rape was a political act, not a sexual one—it’s a familiar argument, one you’ve heard since. But, to this day, you can’t get past the flagrant misogyny of
Swept Away
.

Now that you have succeeded in getting yourself into a state, you turn down a side street near the beach, looking for a place to park. You rarely come here—and you are slightly worried about being alone—but you are desperately thirsty and need to pee. Miraculously, you find a parking space and retreat into a dark little bar called Sullivan’s. Feeling a little lost, you use the bathroom, wash your hands, then go to the bar and order a drink. Vodka neat with half a lemon, just the way you like it. Just having the drink, having a reason to sit here in one place, alone, without anyone saying anything to you, without having to speak, is a relief. The bartender has the eyes of an undertaker. They haven’t turned on any lights and the place is dark and quiet. The windows glint with late sunlight. You notice the tail of a cat slipping under one of the tables. Somewhere outside you hear chimes. There are only a few people in the place, regulars. You like it here, nobody knows you, and you stick it out at the bar for a couple of drinks. At last you begin to relax. You think of going home, but for some reason you don’t want to be alone. Just as you are about to leave, someone taps you on the shoulder. “This may be awkward,” you hear him say. “But we were lovers for a while, back in film school.”

You turn to see Tom Foster. “Tom?”

“Shove over, sailor, and let a man buy you a drink.”

You move to a table in the back, near the games and machines. It is dark now and the place is crowded. Your conversation is punctuated by the smacking collision of balls on the pool table, and the cheesy, jubilant gush of the pinball machine. Although it has been nearly twenty years, Tom Foster looks almost the same. He is a big man, well over six feet, and yet he is thin, almost gaunt. His arms are long, his hands swift, powerful. The same dark, intelligent eyes. For so large a man, he moves with unusual agility, even grace. You remember his tendency to be slightly vain and yet, in fairness, it is part of what makes him interesting. And so you are not surprised by the beat-up leather coat and motorcycle boots, the twine bracelets around his wrist that resemble the delicate twigs of a bird’s nest. He tells you about a documentary he has just shot, about a homeless shelter in Hollywood, and you remember the expression on his face, the passion he has for his work, the particular shine in his eyes. In your twenties, you had been students together at the Conservatory. Somehow you’d fallen in step with each other and become fast friends. Your lovemaking was almost an afterthought—in truth you were better at being friends than lovers, mostly because you had a tendency to get jealous and resented the attention he paid to other women. He was like a peacock flaunting his feathers. He lived in an efficiency apartment on Franklin Avenue that had a Murphy bed. Making love, you’d hear the cats yowling in the Dumpster outside the bedroom window. He’d write his screenplays at the kitchen table on an electric typewriter. You both smoked Camel straights and drank too much bourbon. Once, he even made you dinner, pork chops and canned soup—you didn’t have the heart to tell him that, even though you were only a Reform Jew, you still didn’t eat pork. You were in your Lauren Bacall phase. You wore dark red lipstick and parted your long blond hair on the side and were fond of saying:
You wanna know how to whistle? Just put your lips together and blow.
You had a tiny apartment in Beachwood Canyon, on a strange little street called Glen Alder Terrace. The apartment was in a compound of crooked Spanish cottages, set into a canyon, with red rooftops and rusty windows without screens. A long paint-chipped stairway led up to a plateau where the little cottages stood under the avocado trees. Sprawling thickets spit their purple berries onto the steps; you would carry them inside on the soles of your shoes, dappling the floors with purple, star-shaped stains. It was a strange place with lots of spiders. Sometimes at night you’d hear coyotes. Once you caught one going through your trash. It was after midnight and there was nobody around and you were frightened, standing there alone with a wild animal. The coyote looked at you with the sheepish eyes of a drug addict, a jumble of tin foil in its mouth, and ran away. You had trouble sleeping in those days. Being alone made you anxious. Sometimes you’d wake in the night, sweating, feeling a weight upon you—the weight of a horny ghost. You’d watch TV late into the night; reruns of the old shows you’d grown up on, and drink until you were too drunk to think about all of the terrible things lurking out in the dark. Your neighbors were movie people: a script girl, a set decorator, a sales rep for Fuji Film; they ignored you. In one of the cottages lived Leo Zaklos, a bumbling iconoclastic lunatic who was now considered a screenwriting genius. Once, you’d knocked on his door to borrow some bug spray. He leaned there in the doorway, leering at you with his plump slippery lips, his stubby tobacco stained fingertips, and convinced you to come inside. You could scarcely walk, the floor was covered with filthy clothes, garbage, but he lured you out to his terrace in the back, a splendid enchanting place dripping with hanging orchids, where he convinced you that he was one of the smartest people you had ever met. You introduced him to Tom, and the three of you became an unlikely trio, watching movies every night together and ripping them to shreds.

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.