Show Business Is Murder (27 page)

“Lisa? I'm Michael. I understand you're working on a picture out here?”

She nodded. “It's called
Transparent
. Science fiction. We just finished for the night, and I didn't even get into L.A. until one this morning, so if I seem a bit groggy, that's why.”

“Don't worry about it. Bill warned me.” He guided her to a corner table with a hand at the small of her back. “We'll go easy on you tonight.”

The meal was a blur. She didn't fall asleep in the soup, but by the time the waiter brought coffee with dessert, she grabbed at it like a life preserver. The conversation veered in her direction every so often and she answered questions about herself—Had she always lived in New York? What had she done for the stage?—with as much energy as she could muster. Bill spent the evening fidgeting in his chair and got up twice to take calls on his cell phone. The second time, Michael put his hand on Lisa's and said, “You look tired. Let me get the check and we'll take you home.” By the time Bill returned, Michael was helping her on with her jacket.

The topic of the new movie hadn't come up during dinner. Lisa was relieved when Michael stopped her in the parking lot and said, “Let's talk about
State and Main
.”

“Okay,” she said.

“Bill tells me he sees you as Celia, but I have to say, Celia is supposed to be what, twenty-three, maybe twenty-four, and very plain, real salt-of-the-earth, and I don't know, forget the age, that just doesn't seem like your type.”

“I understand.”

“Margo, on the other hand, twice married, working on her third, snaring men like flies, cosmopolitan, chafing at having to endure small-town life again—I could see you as a great Margo.”

Had he said what she thought she'd heard? A great Margo? She couldn't remember the last time she'd literally felt her heart beating in her chest like this. She felt like she couldn't speak, like one wrong word could shatter the fragile opportunity and leave her with nothing.

“Obviously, I need to bring you in to read for the producers, but we've worked together before and I'm confident they'll leave the casting decisions up to me. Except for Mitch, of course, since they've already got Russell Crowe lined up.”

She found her voice. “Michael, I'm very flattered. I really—I don't know what to say.”

“Let me send you a copy of the script, so you can read through it.”

“She can have the copy you sent me,” Bill said. “I have it at home. We can pick it up on the way back to her hotel.”

Michael nodded. “Sure. Sooner the better.” He shook Lisa's hand, held it between both of his. “I like you. I'm glad Bill introduced us. I hope this works out.”

BILL STEERED HER
back to the car and drove off in the direction of his house. “What did I tell you? Did I say he'd like you?”

“This is wonderful, Bill. You were right.”

“So the next time I tell you I know someone you'll believe me?”

“I believed you knew him, I just didn't think—oh, what difference does it make? You were right, you were right, you were right, I'll say it till you're satisfied.”

“I'm never satisfied.”

“Do you really think they'll let him cast someone like me as Margo?”

“Absolutely. They'd be idiots not to let him. You're going to make this picture for them.”

They drove for a while in silence. Lisa felt herself drifting
into and out of sleep, lulled by the motion of the car and the lights streaming rhythmically by on the side of the highway. She felt full: a long day's work, a good dinner, and for dessert, a job offer that could make her career. No, she corrected herself, not an offer, not yet. But an opportunity, and what an opportunity!

She woke up when the engine stopped. Bill led her up a half-flight of stairs to his front door and she stood in his foyer while he rummaged around for the script in a pile of papers. “Hold on, I know where it is.” He headed into the kitchen, then on to a room beyond. “Why don't you make a drink for us, we can celebrate.”

“It's too soon to celebrate. I don't have the part yet.”

“So celebrate making a good first impression.”

She opened the refrigerator, passed up some bottles of beer and a re-corked bottle of white wine—they still had driving ahead of them—and went for a carton of lemonade instead. She carried two glasses into the other room, which turned out to be a den set up as a sort of miniature screening room: large leather recliners flanking a matching couch, chrome cup holders mounted on the arms, grapefruit-size surround-sound speakers balanced on pedestals behind the pillows, a sixty-inch TV on the far wall.

Lisa swapped one of the glasses for the script Bill was holding out. He reached over to clink his glass against hers and took a sip.

“Lemonade! My God, you're adorable. Come on, sit down, we can look it over.”

She sat next to him on the couch and spread the script open on her knees. Margo was in the first scene—in fact, the voiceover that opened the movie was hers. “ ‘They say you can't go home again,' ” she read, “ ‘but what I've never understood is why you would want to.' I still can't believe I've got a shot at this part.”

He snaked an arm across her shoulders and pulled her
close. “You've got more than a shot, Lee. You've got me.”

She went on reading, not oblivious to the gentle pressure of his arm or the fact that he was shifting closer to her on the couch, but not focused on it, either. And when she did focus, she forced herself not to flinch away. So he was a toucher—she'd found that out last night, hadn't she? There were worse back in New York, God knows, and most were people with a lot less to offer her than Bill Fitch had. Anyway, a peck on the lips and a pat on the back she could deal with, even if she didn't much care for it.

But she dreaded what might be coming next. And when it came, when his hand started slowly, casually to descend, she wanted to scream. Why? Why did everything good always have to be tainted in this business? Why couldn't he be satisfied with what looked likely to be a real success for both of them? Why ruin it? She lifted his hand from her side, prepared to pretend it hadn't happened and praying he had the good sense to do the same.

But he didn't: Two pages later, his hand was back, this time resting on her leg, kneading her thigh.

“Bill, don't.” She moved his hand away, turned to face him, and found him leaning toward her, his face only a few inches from hers. “Please.”

“Lee, I've got to confess something, I'm crazy about you.”

“Come on, Bill. We're both excited about what happened tonight and we're both tired, and it's got you confused. Don't turn this into something romantic.”

“It's too late. You've got me hooked.”

“What, in one day?”

“I'm not joking.”

“You're my agent, Bill. Let's leave it at that, okay?”

“I can't,” he said. “You're so goddamn gorgeous I can't get you out of my head. I can't tell you how badly I wanted to give you a real kiss last night.”

“Okay, we're going to stop this right now.” His hands
had started to wander again. She batted them down and tried to stand, but he pulled her back with an arm around her waist.

“What? I'm not allowed to leave? You're going to keep me here by force?” She meant for it to sound like banter—self-possessed, annoyed, imperturbable—but she could hear the tears in her voice, the sound of frustration and fatigue and disappointment. He had relaxed his grip, but his arm was still around her, his fist bouncing impatiently against her thigh, and he was shaking his head. “I'm going to go now,” she said. “You understand? I'll drive myself. You can pick up the car tomorrow. We'll both get some sleep, and tomorrow we'll forget this happened, okay?”

He didn't move his arm. “I want you to stay with me tonight, Lee.”

“It's not going to happen.”

“You want the part in Michael's movie,” he said. “You deserve it. Why throw it away?”

“I don't want it this way.”

“Now you're being silly. You screwed Arthur, and what did he ever give you? Except my phone number, so maybe he did deserve it.” He pulled her toward him and shifted his weight, and suddenly she was looking up at the ceiling and he was on top of her. She pushed at his shoulders, but only succeeded in sinking further into the couch. She could smell his breath—he wasn't drunk, he didn't even have that excuse—and she could feel his erection pressing against her belly through their clothing. In this moment, her anger and frustration gave way to fear, the simple, physical fear that she wouldn't be able to fight him off.

“Oh, Lee, Lee, we have so much to give each other.”

“What's wrong with you? Get off me!” She groped around the back of the couch for something to grab onto, something she could use to lever herself back to a sitting position. A different thought sparked when her questing hand hit one of the
speakers. She couldn't see it and didn't know what it was, but it fit in her hand and, though it was heavy, she was able to lift it off its stand. “Get off me this instant!” She swung the speaker as hard as she could, hoping to bring it down squarely on his back.

But, feeling the movement of her arm, he raised his head, pushed her shoulders down, and started turning to look. The speaker caught him, hard, in the side of the head. He rolled off her with the force of the blow, landing face down on the wall-to-wall carpet at the base of the couch. When she looked down, she thought she saw his head move, but it was just an optical illusion caused by the steady flow of blood from his temple.

III

Arthur put the phone down and turned off his desk lamp. He could still see by the light from other buildings coming through his window, but there was nothing much he wanted to look at. Not the headlines, certainly—he'd already thrown the papers away, crushed them down at the bottom of the garbage along with the cigarette butts and used tissues.

Sandy had been the first to notice the story, and she'd hit him with it when he'd come home two days ago. “Have you heard what happened to Bill Fitch?” And: “Did you ever hear of this actress, this Lisa Brennan?” No, he'd said. Never heard of her.

He'd shut the door to his home office on the second floor and gone to one of the industry sites on the Internet to learn more. The coverage appeared under “Breaking News” first, then later under “Today's News,” then under “Updates,” and finally under “Obituaries.”

Lisa left him out of it when she told her story, or at least the papers left him out of it when they reported it. He
didn't have any illusions that this was because either Lisa or the writers wanted to protect him. His name wouldn't sell any more papers, and as for Lisa, how much had he really had to do with what had happened? He'd made an introduction. It's what people did, that's how the business worked. He was just doing her a good turn.

At least that had been the idea. She'd have been better off cast in
Goin' West,
stripped naked for a shower scene like Angela Meyer, nobody ever seeing her face. Oh, she had fame now, everyone knew who she was, and given the story she was telling, he supposed she probably wouldn't go to jail. But there was no chance anyone would ever hire her again. When they made the movie-of-the-week of her story, they'd cast someone else to play her. Maybe Michelle Glassberg.

Arthur carried his cigarette to the window, dragged deeply on it and watched the pinpoint of red reflected in the glass. The note he'd left pinned under his tape dispenser fluttered when he opened the window.
It's not you, honey. I can't stand this stinking business
.

He'd finished the casting for
Goin' West
. Corey Dunn was doing the picture, and on the phone just now Kreuger had been ecstatic to hear it. “You're the best, Arthur,” he'd said. “What would I do without you?”

Arthur tossed the butt and watched it trail away into the night.

“Oh, you'd get by,” he'd said. “You'd get by.”

GREGG HURWITZ

HE WOKE UP
with sweat washing over his body in tight chilly shimmers and the paddles of the fan whirring above him like a copter. He jerked out of bed and ran both hands over his face, top to bottom, then down around the back of his neck. They slid on the moistness of his skin, and he felt something less than human. Reptilian.

Crossing the tiny square that passed for his bedroom, he pulled the metal folding chair away from the stack of empty fruit crates. He sank into the chair and faced the small Smith Corona typewriter that sat on a slight angle atop the highest box. B
URSTIN
' O
RANGE
. F
LORIDA
'
S
B
EST
! the crate proclaimed.

He laid the pads of his fingers gently on top of the keys and slid them in the rounded grooves. It was “a laying on of hands,” as his father used to say when he spoke of New Testament tales when there still had been a New Testament or an Old. He felt the power contained in his eight little fingers perched on the starting blocks of eight little keys. A big door. It had always been. Trouble was you couldn't control what flew out when you opened it. The moon slid into view in the edge of the window as the earth continued its tedious rotation, and the straw-colored light fell patterned across his bare mattress. A big fucking door. He opened it.

It was the summer of the year and every year and yet there were no seasons, just time awash with a blend of the four. It was sometime in the sixties but then time never held when you were really alive or really dead and for the sixteen months of my tour I was both.

He stopped. “I am Janson Tanker,” he said softly to the four walls that he could all but touch from his seat at the makeshift desk. He looked around the room, noticing the spill of the moonlight turned metallic as it passed through the small window splattered with rain and neon. He had New York on his windows, and the rain couldn't wash them clean of it any more than he could wash the New York from his body with the small sink in the corner.

Do I really want to do this?
he thought.
It's not much. God knows it's not much, but at least it's familiar
. He raised the heel of his hand to his eye and rubbed, his eyelid pulling down in a droop.

We came over in units, but one by one, and we left all together. We left in a big mess—a human meat pie—with the leftovers of all our lives molded together until we could no longer separate whose limbs were whose. They always said that you come out a man, and I supposed that was true, but I never anticipated coming out as bits and pieces of a bunch of men which may or may not have added up to one of whatever I was before. You heard echoes and voices of all the men and you remembered them so clearly you couldn't distinguish their stories from your memories. And Tom from Minnesota with the girl he'd asked to marry dressed up like Santa Claus (“me not her”) and Jimmie Jankens from Baltimore who had a burn mark on the side of his face from a car engine exploding in tenth-grade shop (“already had a tour once, I told 'em, first when I walk in, and their mouths all drop not knowing my tour was through the shit engine block of a
'62 Chevy”) and Jessie who used to bite the skin off his knuckles when we'd wait in the leaves and you could barely hear his teeth clicking underneath the hammering rain. And which were their lives, their voices, their clicking teeth in the dark and which your own? Couldn't really tell then, let alone now.

And so I went into the jungle in a season of a year, and I left in a season of another year.

Janson paused for a minute, his fingers straining at the bit. Then the warm, warm rain brought back Henry Wilder running through the wet, and Janson's head dropped to the edge of the crate. He could close the door if he strained with all his might, if he bent all his energy to ignoring the searing pain it sent through his back. But it was a heavy door in a strong wind; once it opened, even a crack, everything outside fought and clawed to invade the warmth on the other side. And there wasn't much warmth to spare.

He had let the first breath of air get through, he had let in Jimmie Jankens from Baltimore and the long, ebbless tide of the hours and days, and he knew he couldn't go on. They were pooling at his feet and rising to his knees, and there was even less space in his mind than in the room. Slowly, he felt the panic gripping his heart with iron fingers again and again, like those decades spent on evening lookouts that still came to him in harsh whispers and the whirring, the incessant whirring of the blades of the helicopter as it moved ahead and out of the world.

He felt the tears pressing beneath the line of his cheekbones and his nose, and then he felt them spill over and down his cheek, but he couldn't feel the crying, only the moisture. He still wasn't used to the crying—he had not cried, not once, for the entire sixteen months of his tour or the empty box of the eleven years to follow, but after that he had started and then he didn't know what it was, much less
how to stop it. And so, with the flashing beer signs outside illuminating his room like blinks of a neon eye, with the slow rotation of the haunting fan above, with his forehead pressed tightly to the top of a BURSTIN' ORANGE fruit crate, Janson Tanker cried more tears of penance for the years when he could not.

“I'M TELLING YOU,
we got him. This guy's fucking unbelievable—he's like from a time warp,” Adam Diamond said, as he slid back from his large glass desk and clicked the fourth red button in from the left.

He tucked the phone against his neck, covering the mouthpiece momentarily. “Janice. Double cap, dry—and I mean fucking dry. If I wanted a latte I'd order one.”

With a deft movement of his shoulder, Adam brought the phone back up and against his ear. “Stable, not stable, who gives a fuck? He's brilliant. No, of course I haven't read him. Scott checked him out. Said he's like Faulkner and—I know, I know. So Faulkner was a failed screenwriter, but Scott's Ivy. What do you expect? It's his way of saying he thinks he's good.”

Adam listened for a while, working a set of jade duo balls back and forth in the palm of his right hand. They clicked now and again, but rarely touched, even when he rested his elbow on the table and raised them in his hand up next to his ear. His eyes didn't flicker when Janice came in and left his cappuccino on the desk next to a stack of phone messages.

“I'm not talking David Rabe. David Rabe was shit—for Christ's sake, who the fuck casts Michael J. Fox as a lead? I know . . . I know, Harvey. No one wants to see another Vietnam film, but I'm telling you I've got a longer line of thumbs up than a San Francisco bathhouse. We're talking
Platoon
here, Harvey. Okay, I know. But we'll check him out, get some raw material, see where we can run with it.
Rules of
Engagement
used Vietnam . . . Yes, yes it did. I don't care if it wasn't the primary line, it was in there and what'd that gross?” He whistled. “Holy fuck. And we're just talking domestic.

“Where'd we get him? We found him, Harvey. We found him. One of Scott's friends from his New Haven days runs a soup kitchen lower West Side. Regular guy comes in, always asks for a couple sheets of paper towel from the kitchen. Turns out—this is beautiful, Harvey—turns out he's been writing on them. Both sides, ink bleeding through and all.

“Scott's friend's a warm-hearted liberal from an Upper East Side family, so he goes and buys this guy a shit second-hand typewriter and some paper. Month and a half later, the guy shows up with four sheets, typed. No, no I'm not joking. Month and a half later, only four sheets. So Scott's buddy reads 'em—What? I don't know why he brought them in to him. Anyway, so Scott's buddy reads them and they're absolute crap, right? Some science fiction shit about a world taken over by machines or something. We're talking the first
Terminator.
So he sends the guy on his way and doesn't think twice about it. One week later, the guy shows up and hands him a sheaf, a fucking sheaf of paper. I don't know, like sixty, seventy pages. Scott's friend reads them, goes nuts and calls Scott and Scott drives down—I know, I know. In his cherry-red Z3 to a fuckin' soup kitchen.”

Adam broke off laughing. “He's dedicated, Scott. Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, when it's all said and done he drives down to that soup kitchen if he thinks it'll yield.

“So Scott gets them, these, however many pages, and they're gold. No, not gold. Platinum. They're fucking platinum. Best thing he's ever read, and keep in mind he's our novel guy. So I tell him to run it through the loop. All tolled, five reads, all give him four stars on style and writing. Wanted to wait for the big men to make the call on story, just because it
is
Vietnam. So it's up to you and me.

“Of course I'm waiting. Don't worry, no one else even knows where to find this guy. He's completely ours—he couldn't find his way to an editor if we left him in the lobby of S&S. We're waiting until we get the second half. It's a short novel, only gonna be about two hundred pages, all said and done. We'll wait on him, then we'll talk. We'll talk.”

Adam Diamond hung up the phone. It left his ear for the first time since 8:30 that morning, and it was well after 2:00. His lunch meetings often slid late, but this was late even for him, and he could feel his stomach complaining about last night's Scotch and this morning's caffeine.

He leaned over and hit the red button. Fourth one in from the left. “Get Cathy on the line, let her know it's still Baldoria, but it's gonna have to be three, not two thirty. You can reach her in the car if she's already left.”

Adam Diamond was remarkably good-looking for a forty-five-year-old man. His dark brown hair lacked even a hint of gray—“distinguished my ass, I want be dead and gone before they call me distinguished”—and it fell in short wavy ringlets over his smooth forehead. He had a cruel face, but it was a learned cruelty. The anger did not flower naturally from beneath the skin, but sat across it, etched in the wrinkles he did not have.

He switched the jade balls from hand to hand, turning his left hand over on top of the right as if to clap. Adam Diamond rarely clapped, however, and when he did, it was to punctuate a command, not to display appreciation. “Clapping is for fools,” his father used to say. “Take what you can from a show and run.” His father was a famous agent, almost a living legend in New York, a city with a lot of names. Then he died, and was just a legend.

IT HURT, IT
hurt like excising a cancerous growth, but once he started, he was steeped in blood too far to return, and so
he continued. He entered them all, entered the voices one by one, and felt their words as the breath in his throat. Janson Tanker felt as if there were steam running through his insides, but he still had several nights of burning to do before he was spent. He only hoped that the stack of paper, which was shrinking like water leaving a tub, would last until the words ran out.

He had written them, written them one and all—his fallen comrades whom he loved and hated as he did his own flesh. He supposed he was trying to exorcise them or purify them, not that there was much of a difference anymore. He had reassembled them, brought them back from their homes in Heads Creek, Louisiana, and Culver, Texas, from Little Rock, Arkansas, and Detroit, Michigan. Using no discretion (for the war had not either), he plucked them from their homes like babes from a tit and sent them all back to the jungle.

Yet the scariest part was pulling the nails from the coffins and prying open the lids. Was watching the skeletons grow flesh and rise. And Janson resurrected them so precisely, adding even the optimistic shine of their smiles, only to kill them again. And he wished he had only to kill them with bullets.

He went to bed when he faded from his chair to the bare mattress. He wasn't really sure when that was, just as he wasn't really sure when his crying crossed from waking to sleeping hours. But somehow he always fell asleep because he always awoke with his mouth shut and his body screaming under the whirring paddles of the fan. The sweat was awful, so awful he didn't even bother to try to clean his pillow in the little sink anymore because he knew it would be doused again the next night or the next sleep, whichever came first.

Sleep evaded and stalked him. It would slip away, fleeing through a tangled jungle path at night and drawing him inexorably along with it, through a waking hell. And then,
just when he got his feet under him and adjusted to the rhythm of his footsteps, it would turn and pounce.

He had come to fear the typewriter. The 1951 Smith Corona typewriter on the stack of crates. He would stare at it, sometimes for hours, with hints of sleep glazing his eyes. Even when he turned away, he always knew it remained, always knew where it was. But after they routed Mai Teng, he knew it wasn't the typewriter, that he would finish even if he had to write the rest on the walls in his own blood. He wondered what Barry's friend would think of the skewed type on the sheets that he passed along.

He had a meeting in the morning, somewhere across the city, and his check had run out so he didn't have money for a bus. He'd have to leave at 10:30 to make sure he got there by noon. He didn't know what exactly it meant, but Barry said he had a friend who might give him money for his story, and he needed money right now more than almost anything. Barry said he'd pay for lunch if it was a lunch meeting, and Janson would have walked an hour and a half across town just for a decent meal.