Audrey’s Door (22 page)

If she had glimpsed along the hall, or stopped panting long enough to hear the tenants’ emphysemic wheezing, she might have reconsidered her course of action. Checked herself into a mental hospital, or called the police. Perhaps even joined Saraub in Washington. But she did not look, or see the cold eyes behind shut doors all down the fourteenth floor, that watched through the man-made slits of their skin.

After the elevator descended, the tenants opened their doors and began to clap.

M
onday morning, at the same time that Audrey’s phone buzzed in her pocket, Saraub Ramesh looked out the window of an American Airlines 767. His camera assistant Tom Wilson squeezed into the seat next to him, packed tight as compressed styrofoam. They were parked on a Dulles runway, headed back to JFK. The Eastern Seaboard was about to get hit with Hurricane Erebus, reportedly the worst storm of the season. Right now, raindrops smacked against his small, round window, and the skies above were black. Takeoff had been delayed thirty minutes so far, and they were waiting for an announcement from the captain about whether they’d be lifting off at all.

This hitch in the weather wasn’t surprising. Since Bob Stern had countersigned the contracts to acquire
Maginot Lines,
nothing had gone right. Not the movie, or his subjects, or his cameraman, or even Audrey Lucas, the first and only woman to whom he’d offered his heart.
The ring scratched inside his right trouser pocket. He wasn’t sure where else to put it, and it wasn’t beneath Wilson to steal it. So in his pocket it stayed. When Audrey had dropped it on the table of that greasy spoon in Lincoln, he’d been surprised by how small it was. Lighter than he’d remembered, too. He’d wondered whether she’d have parted with it so easily if the stone had been bigger than half a carat, and the band had been platinum instead of sterling silver. He’d also wondered whether he should throw it in her face.

Daniel’s advice now played in his head:
You’re Jell-O, dude. If you showed a little backbone, you wouldn’t have these problems. Kick her to the curb, and she’ll come crawling back. Better yet, get somebody younger who New York hasn’t beaten down.

That’s why he’d left her at the Super 8 Friday morning. Returning that ring had pushed him past his limit. He’d feuded with his family over her, eaten spinach for her, even let her arrange his pint glasses into crazy-ass pyramids on the kitchen table for her, but every time he’d surrendered, she’d demanded more. She’d trashed welcome mats, hidden comic books, shut doors as soon as he got home because she said she’d needed time alone. The weirdest part was the stuff she’d moved small fractions of inches when he wasn’t looking. A found-art tin-can vase recentered. A desk shifted slightly to the right. The coffee mugs moved behind the pint glasses, instead of up front like the week before. At first he’d thought he was going crazy. Then he’d thought she’d been waging a covert passive-aggressive war, only it was so passive he hadn’t even noticed. It was only recently that he’d understood that it was a compulsion for perfection. She was a girl who cared more about appearances than substance. Right then, he should have realized that they were doomed.

Sure, things had started good. They’d been a team. Nick and Nora without the dog. But by the time she’d
moved into his apartment, she’d already started treating everything he did with contempt, from shaking hands with strangers too enthusiastically (“Don’t be so eager to please!”), to his slumped posture (“Stand tall!”), to the way he was always winded by the time they got to the landing to their third-floor walk-up (“You’d better not keel over!”). Over time that contempt had translated into more closed doors, and more cleaning, and finally, packed bags. Sometimes he’d caught the contempt in her eyes as she’d frowned at him and understood that she was searching for reasons to leave. And how do you fight someone who doesn’t
want
to love you anymore?

So, yeah, you have to go after what you want. Yeah, love is all about patience. But maybe it was time he cashed in his chips and started over. He’d settle for lukewarm affection, even smiling but humorless Tonia, his former betrothed, so long as he didn’t have to be anybody’s doormat ever again.

Just then, the plane began to roll along the runway. Outside, everything was gray, like the rain wasn’t clear, but diluted black. Large metal cages in the air. It made no sense to him that these planes didn’t come crashing to the ground.

“What are your panties in a bunch about?” Wilson asked.

“Everything,” Saraub answered.

“What I don’t understand is how you didn’t see this coming,” Wilson answered.

At first Saraub thought he was talking about Audrey.
I didn’t
want
to see it,
he almost answered, but then he understood that Wilson was talking about
Maginot Lines.

Most of the calls had come over the weekend, pretty much as soon as he’d accepted Sunshine Studio’s deal. The head of public relations at the World Bank, Internal Affairs at Servitus, a member of the House from Oregon,
two farmers outside Buffalo, even the spokesman for the EPA. As if they’d been coached, they each said the same thing: they’d decided to withdraw their support for the movie. If he insisted on running their likeness in his film or promotional materials, they’d sue.

At first he’d argued—permission is permission, you can’t rescind it. Then he’d pleaded, because no matter what contracts they’d signed, if they wanted, they could tie the movie up in the courts for years. Finally, after call number eighteen, which he’d taken while literally lying between the starched sheets of the Comfort Inn’s double bed, he’d given up. By this morning, more than half his interviews had backed out, and out of the ones who’d stayed, only three were worth keeping. Not enough for a movie. Not even enough for a commercial.

“I don’t get people,” Saraub said, not so much to Wilson, as to the back of the seat ahead of him. “Some of these guys contacted me. They wanted to talk. They thought they were doing the right thing. What could change that?”

Wilson shrugged, and Saraub could tell that a part of him was enjoying this because it proved his cynicism. “Some asshole you don’t know from a hole in the wall, but whose boss is one of the main targets of your movie, buys your movie. Two days later half the people in the movie drop out. This is not rocket science. They used all your notes to contact your subjects and showed them some green.”

“I can’t believe they’d go to the trouble,” Saraub said.

“You fight city hall, city hall buries you,” Wilson said, then took a slug from the canary yellow Rheingold Beer can he’d filched from the service tray upon boarding the plane. It smelled bad, and Saraub decided that there were greater sins than taking up too much room in a seat; you could be Wilson.

“Three years of my life, all for nothing. I can’t believe this is happening,” he said. He wasn’t just thinking of
the movie, but of Audrey, and his white picket fence dreams that he’d been so foolish to dream.

Wilson half snorted, half laughed. The sound was too loud for public, and the woman in the row ahead turned around and glared. “Don’t play innocent. You pissed on ’em! Of course they came after you. You want the government to start regulating multinationals, and you’re pissing off the coal lobby, the oil lobby, and the big farmers who get subsidized irrigation while you’re at it. Servitus has fifty legal eagles on the payroll to deal with guys like you.”

“But it’s not like any of the footage is a revelation. Everybody knows we’re drilling faster than makes sense,” Saraub said.

Wilson shook his head. “Hear no evil. See no evil. If nobody has to think about it, it’s not happening. This is America, kiddo. Not Calcutta.”

Saraub frowned. The baby boomer generation; how quickly they’d turned. “It’s not right,” he said. “I’m not letting them get away with it, either. I’m running the footage as is. I don’t care what they do.” Even as he said it, he knew the threat was empty: he was screwed.

Wilson burped again. He’d been out drinking last night, and was still half in the bag. With the five o’clock shadow and oil-stained denim tuxedo he was sporting, he looked a lot like Ted Kaczynski, which explained why, for once, it was the white guy, and not Saraub, who’d been interrogated and searched at the gate before boarding.
If you hate firing people so much, you should just hand him a pink piece of paper the next time he shows up to work drunk,
Audrey had once teased.
Let him figure it out.

“Hey! Maybe it’s got nothing to do with the movie. They just don’t like you,” Wilson said.

“Thanks,” Saraub answered.

“A lot of you not to like.” Wilson chuckled in a mean way and didn’t bother to hide that he meant it mean.

Saraub sighed, thought about answering, then decided to look out the window instead. Four Air Canada 727s lumbered gracelessly through the storm and down the runway like dinosaur birds.

He could have hired a studio man two years ago, but instead he’d gone with Wilson, who didn’t need to be told when to move in for a close-up and intuitively understood the effects of light and shade. On the other hand, there was a reason Wilson had gone from Hollywood movies to television commercials to now, the lowest of the low, documentaries. He was often late and always high.

On Saturday, Wilson had shown up late to the Hart Building on Senate Row, and they’d almost missed the McCaffrey interview. He’d said his flight got delayed, but the truth was, he’d stopped at a few bars along the way.

To save money, he and Wilson shared hotel rooms. Because of that, Saraub had gotten to know Wilson a lot better than he’d have liked. His old-man stink after eating Chinese food was deadly. Worse, he smoked a joint every night to fall asleep. For the most part, Saraub kept his mouth shut and his eye on the prize. So long as the movie progressed, Wilson could order a team of smack-shooting trannie hookers dressed like clowns if he wanted. But last night, while he’d been trying to sleep, Wilson lit up. The sweet smell had itched his throat until it swelled, and he’d had a hard time breathing. With the movie spinning toward oblivion, and Audrey on his mind, he’d snapped. “Open a window while you smoke that, or I swear to God I’ll knock your teeth in,” he’d yelled into the dark room. Then added, “And thanks for asking me all those times, if I minded. Because I do. I mind.” Then he’d rolled over and pretended to sleep.

Old-man legs poking through crusty boxers and yellowed undershirt, skinny Wilson had stumbled
in the dark toward the window and tried to open it. But they’d been on a high floor, so of course, it stayed locked. After looking at the joint for a second or two, he snuffed it, threw on some clothes, left the room, and didn’t come back until the morning. Saraub tried to sleep, but couldn’t. In the grand scheme of things, he’d overreacted a little. No big deal. Problem was, he hadn’t been exaggerating. If Wilson hadn’t stubbed that joint, Saraub really might have gotten up and knocked him bloody. That was a little scary.

In the quiet of the empty room, he’d curled his hands into fists and punched the mattress, all the while wondering if Audrey had been right to be frightened of him, which had only made him punch the mattress harder.

“Come on, you’re a big guy. You know that,” Wilson now said by way of apology.

“Sure,” Saraub answered. Another plane in front of them lifted off. Its wings teetered from side to side, and for a moment it looked like it might flip. Instead, it caught its balance and soared. He marveled. How did they manage?

The silence stretched, and Saraub decided to make peace for the sake of tomorrow’s final Manhattan shoot. Sure, there probably wasn’t much reason to keep going, but he might as well finish what he’d started. “Sorry I snapped at you last night. Where did you go, anyway?” Saraub asked.

“Do you really care?” Wilson snapped back.

“Of course.”

“No. I don’t think you do,” Wilson answered.

Saraub looked at the back of the seat. They’d inched closer to the runway and were now third in line. Lightning streaked across the sky and made everything bright, and then dark again. Rain poured in translucent sheets across the glass. He knew he was supposed to apologize. After that, Wilson’s ego would be soothed and the shoot could resume. They’d finish the last in
terview and call it a day. That was how they’d always worked together. Wilson handed him bullshit, and he ate it all up for the good of the film. But this ring in his pocket was cutting his thigh, and after what he’d been through with Audrey, and now
Maginot Lines,
he was done with giving people what they wanted. “You’re right. I don’t give a shit,” he said.

The air turned to shards of glass, cutting and tense. Wilson’s eyes burned holes of rage into the seat ahead of him.

“Fuck you,” Wilson said.

Saraub crossed his legs, opened his mouth, closed his mouth. Rain pelted the circular window. Seeking a diversion, he opened his laptop and played the latest D.C. footage. Squinted at the screen and tried to make his vision small, so he didn’t have to look at Wilson.

The interview had turned out pretty well, though McCaffrey, the senior senator of West Virginia, sweated a lot, which never looked good on film. Saraub rolled the clip about twenty minutes in. Blue-eyed McCaffrey was wet as a noodle. “The problem,” the senator said, “is that regulating these companies starts to look like choosing flowers over bread.”

“But bread is a flower,” Saraub answered from behind the camera. “A grain. I just saw it in Nebraska. It grows out of the ground. We kill the ground, and it won’t grow. We won’t be able to eat.”

McCaffrey nodded. “That’s the other problem—no one is thinking about this in the long term. We’re selling our resources to the highest bidders, and in twenty years, we’ll look back and slap our foreheads at the idiocy of something like that—look at South Africa and Iraq, for God’s sake—but right now, because we see no serious consequences to our actions, or maybe because we’ve somehow lost our own survival instincts, we keep doing it.”

McCaffrey looked directly into the camera when he
said this. “We want to compete with the big guns like China. But they say in another ten years, the annual death toll in China from smog will reach three million. And the thing is, what they breathe, we breathe. The world spins, you know? Why can’t anybody ever recognize that the world spins?”

A shiver ran down Saraub’s spine, and he shut the laptop. The footage was good. No doubt. Which in its way amplified his heartbreak. His movie was dead. He couldn’t do this all over again. He was thirty-five years old, single, a slob. Nothing to show for his hard work except a dirty studio apartment. He sighed. For the first time in his life, the turkeys had him down.