A Stranger Like You (4 page)

“Sit.” He pointed to the chair with his gun. He thought of Jean-Paul Belmondo in
Breathless.
Early in the film the actor had aimed his gun in jest—later it was the very thing that caused his demise. But in Hugh’s case, the gun was only a prop; he had no intention of using it and, for that matter, had not even loaded it. He found it pathetic, of course, and very sad, that it was the only way he could get this woman to meet with him.

Just now he had the producer’s full attention.

“Look,” she said. “I’m sorry about what happened, all right? It’s not like it’s a big deal, it happens all the time. Rogers and I had different ideas,” she tried to explain. “We had different ideas about things. Anyway, he’s dead.”

“And you’re in charge.”

“That’s right.”

“We had a deal,” he said. “We had a green light.”

“We’re not doing those sorts of pictures anymore, Mr. Waters. We have a different philosophy now. I’m sure you understand.”

“I don’t think I do.”

“Violence, for one thing. I think the American people have had enough of it.”

“You sound like a politician.”

“I read all these scripts—the stuff that goes on, the things people write . . .” She looked at him. “All the incredibly sick things people come up with—people like you, Mr. Waters.” She gave him a cold look. “It’s very disturbing.”

“It’s what people want,” he said. “It’s what people want to see.”

“I’m not so sure.” She pulled herself up dramatically like a woman about to break into song. “To be brutally honest, Mr. Waters, your script—it just wasn’t any good. I didn’t buy it for a minute. The ending in particular. That business about the kidnapping, parking the car at the airport. I had a hard time believing that nobody
heard
her.”

“She was in the trunk,” he stated in his underwriter’s voice.

“Screaming!”

“Your point?”

She shook her head as if he were too stupid to understand her. “The device of the trunk—it’s been done. It’s a gangster cliché.”

“It works, that’s why people use it. It’s convenient.”

“Convenient?”

“Everyone has one. It’s a good place to put someone.” He looked at her carefully. “There’s a certain irony in that.”

She squinted at him as if the sight of him was hurting her eyes. “Irony is such a cheap writer’s trick. I didn’t buy it. I didn’t buy it for a fucking minute. And they weren’t going to buy it in Toledo, either!”

He could feel the sweat on his back, dampening his shirt. He swallowed. His throat felt a little sore. He could feel his feet inside his shoes, heavy as door-stops. He could feel his legs, their weight, and his large hands on his thighs.

The phone rang.

They sat there listening to it. It rang and rang.

“That’s my boss,” she said. “I have to go. I have to get to work.”

At last her machine picked up. Hugh recognized the voice of Chase’s assistant, a man with a British accent. “Harold’s been waiting over an hour, Hedda. He’s leaving for the airport in fifteen minutes. He’s really getting pissed.”

“I’m afraid you’ve kept Harold waiting.”

“He’s going to fire me.”

“And then what will you do?”

She looked up at him almost hopefully then seemed to catch herself. “He’s not going to fucking fire me,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

“It doesn’t matter now. It’s better not to think about it.”

“What?”

“I don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

“I don’t understand.”

He got up and took the phone off the hook. There was something intensely menacing about the sound it made and he could see it registering in her mind.

“You don’t understand my boss. He gets insulted if I’m even a second late. He takes it personally.” Her cell phone began to vibrate inside her pocketbook. “Look, I really need to get to work.”

“You’re not going to work today.”

“What?” she said. “What?”

“By law you’re entitled to a sick day.”

“But I’m not sick.”

“You’re looking very agitated.”

“Well, I
am
agitated.”

“I have some medication for that.”

“You what—I don’t understand.”

He took the pills out of his pocket and showed them to her. “You seem very anxious.”

“Look,” she said. “You need to go. We’ve had our meeting. There’s nothing more to say. You said you would go.”

“I know what I said. But I’ve changed my mind.”

“What? Are you
crazy
?”

He didn’t like the question. “I thought we’d try an experiment. I thought it might be fun.”

“Fun? Did you say
fun
?”

“I thought it might be fun to do a little test. To see who’s right.”

“You’re crazy. You’re fucking insane.”

“You have a very nasty mouth,” he said. “Why can’t you be nice?”

“What?
Nice?”

He picked up the gun. Again, he showed her the pills. “It’s just some Valium,” he lied, “to calm you down.”

“I don’t want to be calm,” she shouted and stood up and started for the door. He was quick—he grabbed her. He wrestled her to the ground, her little chest heaving. It was odd being on top of her. Her breath smelled of coffee. She looked at him; she refused to look.

“You’re going to have to calm down.” He pulled her up and pushed her back into the chair. “Take the pills.”

She shook her head.

“Look,” he spoke as if to a toddler. “Either you take the pills, or I shoot you. You decide.”

“You’re going to shoot me over
this
?”

“I’m not myself,” he admitted. “I’m feeling very,” he hesitated, “unbalanced.”

“You’re not going to kill me,” she said in a patronizing tone. “Even I know that.”

Just like the scene he’d written in his script, he pressed the gun into her temple and cocked it. “Are you sure?”

“I don’t know what you want,” she said, her voice quavering. “I don’t understand what you want from me.”

“Make me happy.” He smiled like a banker.

She looked at him.

“Take these.” He opened his hand. The pills sat in his palm like snowflakes. He handed her a glass of water. She just sat there. “Don’t make me shoot you,” he said, “because I will.”

Maybe she saw something in his eyes, something that he didn’t know he had, some menacing affect, because her fingers crawled into his palm and grasped the pills and then she took them and drank all the water and put down the glass and glanced at him with contempt. That was all right; he didn’t care. “I’ll get you back for this,” she said. “Don’t think I won’t.”

“We’ll see.”

“You’re dead. You’ll never work in this town.”

“All right. If you say so.”

He sat back down in his chair and watched her. Now her face was pale, almost beautiful. If she tried harder she could be beautiful, he thought. He didn’t understand why some women who could be perfectly decent looking didn’t make more of their looks.

At length he said, “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Her eyes were glassy, vividly blue. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“I’m glad.” He smiled. “I’m not a very scary person.” He laughed.

“You realize this is a mistake.”

“Perhaps.” He tilted his head and smiled, thinking of his therapist back in Montclair, the way they’d sit together on adjacent couches in her office while the tops of the birch trees swayed outside the second-story window. They were such solemn trees, he thought. Looking at them always made him melancholy. His therapist had a tender smile and yet she was the sort of woman who would smile even if you’d told her she’d just swallowed a cockroach. When all was said and done she gave him very little advice. Sometimes, when they sat there in the quiet room he’d try to smell her; he’d try very hard. But she had no scent. No scent at all, he thought it was strange. He’d wonder what she was thinking—whether or not she was actually listening to him, or whether she was reviewing a grocery list in her head or her schedule of errands after work. Once, he’d followed her home after their session, taking care to drive several cars behind. In her backyard, he’d stood in the bushes and spied on her through the window of her white Cape, eating supper out of a bowl in front of her Facebook page.

“You think you know me,” Chase said bitterly. “You’ve made assumptions about me. You think I’m this horrible person, right? But you don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”

He shrugged. “I know enough.” He looked at her. “I know that you’re very sad.” It was something his therapist had said to him.

Her eyes flashed, but she said nothing. Then she said, “You writers are all the same. You come into my office, trying to butter me up. And you know what I’ve learned? Ideas? Everybody’s got one—they drop out of the sky like bird shit. The truth is, you can turn any idea—and I mean
any
idea—into a movie. You can work a screenplay like tailoring a suit. It’s not fucking brain surgery. We could have made your movie. And, yeah,
somebody
would have liked it. But after a week or two, it would have disappeared—collecting dust in some video store.” She looked at him hard. “To be perfectly honest, Mr. Waters, I’m tired of making films that make women look like idiots or Barbie warriors—I’ve tried some of those moves and they’re impossible, I couldn’t get out of bed for a week. Then one afternoon I’m sitting with my friend’s sons, they’re twins, fourteen, and it occurs to me that they’ve witnessed rape and murder in gruesome detail more times than I like to think about. I’m wondering how they process it. I used to be okay with it, but I’ve changed; I’m not that person anymore. You might say I experienced an epiphany.”

Hugh remembered the word from an English class back in college, but just now the meaning escaped him. He tried to think of something clever to say, but the look on her face, her eyes glassy as a dictator’s, rendered him speechless.

“I want to tell meaningful stories,” she said. “I want to make people feel better about things, not worse. . . . I want to make people feel . . .” Her voice drifted off.

“Feel what, Ms. Chase?”

“Feel—” But her eyelids began to flutter and a moment later she went limp and dropped to the floor. When he’d bought the pills on the street, they’d told him this would happen—they’d told him not to panic. Eventually, the drug would wear off and she’d be fine. He stood over her, looking down at her motionless body. It was strange because her eyes were open. It worried him; he felt a little desperate. He got up and gripped her under the arms and shuffled backward as he dragged her into the living room and pulled her up on the couch. “Are you all right?” he said, fixing the pillows, but of course she couldn’t answer. Her eyes seemed to scream
what have you done?
He sat down gingerly, the way one sits at the bedside of a very ill patient. He held on to the arms of the chair as if something was about to happen—an earthquake—a nuclear bomb. But of course nothing did. He watched her closely, the rise and fall of her chest, grateful to see that she was breathing.

There is the dream of something and it is a beautiful dream, he thought. And then there’s what’s real.

He was beginning to feel bad and he didn’t want to feel bad. He stood up, looking down at her. He could leave now, he thought. Just walk away. Go home to his wife. But when Hedda Chase woke up she would call the police. They’d come after him, he’d be arrested. He imagined the look on Marion’s face as they put the cuffs on him. His life would be over.

No. He couldn’t take that chance.

He had started this; he had to finish it.

It occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten for a very long time. His stomach grumbled and he felt dangerously light-headed. He went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was empty save for a loaf of white bread and a jar of green olives with beady red eyes. He took out the bread and a tub of margarine and found a knife in one of the drawers. He brought the food back into the living room and laid it out on the coffee table. He ate a butter sandwich and washed it down with the quart of milk only to realize after he’d drunk down half of it that it was sour. He spat some of it out onto the floor, making a puddle. “For
fuck’s
sake,” he said.

Hedda Chase did not move.

He went to the kitchen sink to wash out his mouth then washed his hands thoroughly, using the soap on the windowsill. He didn’t know why he was washing his hands, but he felt it was necessary. The soap was green and had a strong, masculine scent. The sun came bright at the window. He heard the sound of a chain saw and looked out and saw the neighbor trimming the lilac hedges on the other side of the concrete wall. The man was Mexican, shouting in Spanish to someone inside the house, whose hands could be seen in the window. They were the gnarled hands of an old woman, presumably the man’s mother, and they were gesturing sharply at the areas of the hedge she wanted him to trim. The man seemed angry. The woman shut the window and the lace curtains fell back into place.

Hugh dried his hands on a dishtowel. The clock on the oven seemed to be broken, with the big hand stuck upon the little hand. In Hedda Chase’s kitchen time had stopped. Time was irrelevant. He went back into the living room and looked at her again and looked away. He glanced into her bedroom and saw the unmade bed. An ashtray full of cigarette butts on a pillow. Trapped under the same pillow was a little stuffed teddy bear, its fluffy legs sticking out. Instinctively, he reached under the pillow and pulled it out and set it gently into place. Now that it could breathe, the bear seemed to smile at him. A photograph on the nightstand caught his eye. It was of Chase as a small child, wearing a little plaid jumper. Perhaps it had been taken on her first day of school. She had chubby thighs, a barrette in her hair. She was not smiling. The photograph made him feel sad. For a moment, he considered lying down on her bed. He thought of closing the door and staying in her room and never coming out, but of course that wasn’t realistic.