Stars Screaming (12 page)

“Small and dark, with big ears. That’s how I imagined you.” Those were Maria Selene’s first words after Burk walked into her office. “I guess I was wrong.”

Maria held out her hand and Burk sized her up. She was pretty but older than he’d imagined, at least forty-five, with salt-and-pepper bangs and a big sexy mouth.

“Producers hate tall writers. They’re harder to intimidate. You sit here,” she said, pointing at a low gray couch against the far wall; then she followed him across the room and sat in an armchair facing him. On a glass table between them were a bowl of mixed nuts and a pile of movie scripts. Burk’s draft of
Zoomin’
sat on top of the stack with an official Rheinis and Robins label attached to the cover.

Maria pointed at the script. “Don’t get your hopes up. I can’t sell it. It’s way too bizarre.”

“Most of it’s true,” Burk said. “It really happened.”

“So did the plague.
Zoomin’
goes in the drawer,” Maria said sternly. She reached for a handful of nuts and popped several into her mouth. “However, we would be extremely interested to know what you’re planning to write next. Any ideas?”

“Nothing full blown, just a character I’m interested in.”

“Yeah? Tell me about him.”

“His name is Smart Art. He’s a street mime in San Francisco. But what he likes to do best is work plastic.”

Maria leaned forward a little. “‘Work plastic’? What does that mean?”

“It means he’s the world’s greatest credit card counterfeiter,” Burk said, forgetting to add that this character was based on a true story he’d read in
Crimestoppers
, the monthly magazine for the National Association of Police Chiefs, that he’d picked up earlier in the week at his father’s newsstand.

Maria was silent for a few seconds. “A street mime who counterfeits credit cards,” she said, beginning to nod her head enthusiastically. “That’s a character we haven’t seen before. Do you have a title?”

“
Mr. Plastic Fantastic.
”

“Nice.”

Burk shrugged. “Now all I need is a story to go with it.”

Maria grinned. “You know what nine out of ten screenwriters have engraved on their tombstones:
finally
,
a plot.
”

Burk finished the first draft of
Mr. Plastic Fantastic
in eight weeks. “It’s not perfect. The third act still needs to be fine-tuned,” he told Maria Selene over the phone. “But overall I think it works.”

Withholding her excitement, Maria said casually, “If you can get a copy to me today, there’s a chance I could get to it over the weekend.” Burk said he would send it over by messenger, and they made an appointment to meet the following Wednesday. “That’ll give the boys a chance to read it too. It sounds like a winner,” Maria said, and when Burk hung up the phone in his den he could hear Louie furiously pedaling his Big Wheel up and down the driveway next to their house. A moment later when he pulled aside the curtain and the sweet, smiling face of his son passed by the window in the waning light, Burk felt something deep and warm stir inside him, a feeling he could only describe as a father’s love.

It was nearly eight o’clock when Sandra arrived home from Hollywood Park. “I got stuck in traffic,” she said to Burk, as she nonchalantly opened her purse and dumped a thick wad of cash on the dining room table. “I know I shouldn’t have stayed for the ninth, but I had a hunch on the exacta.”

Burk heard the refrigerator open and close, and when Sandra entered the living room she was holding a bottle of ginger ale. She took a seat on the opposite end of the couch and put her feet up on the cushion, giving Burk a brief look before she began to browse through the latest issue of
Rolling Stone.

Sandra had been on the wagon for over a month, and her dirt-dark eyes—without the glaze of alcohol—sparkled in their deep sockets. Her body, too, seemed more alive. Gone was the fat around her hips, and her legs, long and lean, fit snugly inside her faded blue bell-bottom jeans. For the first time in weeks Burk felt himself become sexually aroused, but when he reached out to caress her ankle, Sandra drew back her foot and swatted his hand away with the magazine.

“Where’s Louie?” she asked, without looking up.

“Sleeping.”

“Already?”

“He was tired.”

“It’s not even nine. He never goes to sleep before nine. I didn’t even get a chance to say good night.”

“You weren’t here.”

“I know that, but still . . .” she said, her voice dying away as she stood up and walked into their bedroom.

After she did her nightly exercises and took a long hot shower, Sandra reentered the dining room and started to add up the cash that was now stacked in neat piles on the table. “One hundred and sixty-five and change. I already counted it,” Burk said from the couch. “That’s almost two grand in six weeks.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Sandra took a seat at the table and began filling out a bank deposit slip. “I guess I’m on a hot streak,” she said.

“You’ve won thirty-four days in a row. That’s not a hot streak, that’s amazing.”

“I’ve got a system, Ray. I told you that,” she said irritably, then she pulled a copy of the
Daily Racing Form
out of her purse. “See?” Inked in the margin next to each horse’s past performance were odd symbols and complicated algebraic calculations. “Here,” she said, pointing. “This is how I do it: Speed divided by claiming price times a factor of two, plus or minus weight allowances and track variants, equals this number. Each horse gets a number,” she said, and she snapped a rubber band around the money and dropped it into her purse. “The higher the number, the better the horse. It’s that simple.”

At first Burk thought she was joking, expecting her at any moment to break out laughing. But when he tried to encourage her with a smile she said, “What’s so funny?”

“Nothing. I was just—”

“Don’t you get it?”

Burk stared at Sandra, wondering if she was going insane, a thought that had crossed his mind more than once over the last six months. “Yeah, sure,” he said finally, nodding. “I get it.”

On Tuesday, the next racing day, Burk decided (somewhat guiltily) to follow Sandra when she left for Hollywood Park. Sitting upright and holding the steering wheel in both hands, she drove south on the San Diego freeway, passing La Tijera, the exit nearest
to the track. At Century Boulevard she got off and made a quick right. She drove two blocks and pulled into the parking lot behind the Paradise Lounge.

“It was one of those sleazy cinder-block dives near the airport,” Burk told Gene, when he called him later that night. “It reminded me of the Bat Cave.”

Gene said, “I think I know what you’re gonna tell me, Ray.”

“I’m gonna tell you that I don’t think Sandra has a system for picking horses, okay? That’s one thing I’m gonna tell you. And I’m gonna tell you I understand now why she bought the new Creedence album last week. You know why? Because up there on stage, shaking her tits to ‘Green River,’ is Sandra Burk, my wife. And you know something else, Gene? Even with all those scars she looked good. Trim, tan, sexy, with a big smile on her face. You hear me? A
big
smile. Then you know what she did? She dropped her bikini bottom and walked to the edge of the stage and hit ‘em with the pay dirt, stuck her cooze right in their faces. Can you believe it, Gene? Can you fucking believe it?”

After a short silence, Gene said, “What did you do?”

“Nothing. I just walked out.”

“Did she see you?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. If she did, she didn’t say anything when she got home. Just dropped the cash on the table like she always does, like she made another score at the track.”

“She’s doin’ it for you, so you can finish your script.”

“She looked really happy up there, Gene.”

“Don’t overthink it. At least she’s not drinking.”

“She’s developed a following, too. Clyde, the owner, said there’s a whole shitload of men who get off on women with scars.”

“Ray, I gotta go.”

“What am I gonna do?” Burk said. His voice was desolate.

“Forget about her, Ray. Just take care of Louie and keep writing. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“‘Bye.”

“You first,” said Rick Rheinis, glancing at Maria Selene, who was sitting next to Burk on the red leather couch in Sid Robins’s office. “Can you hear us okay?” Rheinis said, leaning forward in Sid’s chair to adjust the volume on the speakerphone.

“Loud and clear,” said Sid’s voice, patched in from New York, where the night before he’d attended the Broadway opening of
Big Fellas
, a new play by Joshua Flood, a Rheinis and Robins client.

“I had a problem with the piece,” Maria said.

“We all did,” echoed Rheinis. “But that’s not to say there weren’t things we liked. Right, Sidney? . . . Sidney? . . . Sidney, you there?”

“What?”

“I said—”

“One sec, Rick, I got a room service guy in here with my lunch.”

Burk nervously fumbled for a cigarette, dropping it on the carpet before he could put it in his mouth. When he picked it up he glanced at Maria. She started to speak but was interrupted by Sid’s voice.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m back.”

Rheinis said, “We were talking about Ray’s script.”

“Refresh my memory.”

“
Mr. Plastic Fantastic.
”

“Oh, yes, of course, some wonderful stuff. Ray?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You are an extremely talented guy.”

Burk smiled. “I’m glad you liked it. I wasn’t sure if—”

“Whoa, wait! I said you were talented, not that I liked it.” Burk flushed. He glanced at Maria, trying unsuccessfully to catch her eye. “To be candid, I couldn’t make it past page forty-eight. It was too . . . busy.” Maria and Rheinis stared at the speakerphone, nodding. “I recommend we don’t send it out.”

Careful not to look at Burk, Rheinis jingled the change in his pocket for a few seconds. “I’ve got a meeting at Fox at noon,” he said, checking his watch as he stood up. “I’ll call you this afternoon, Sidney. Say hello to Joshua.”

After Rheinis left the office, Maria said, “Without the solid development of a single story you’ve got nothing, Ray.”

Burk felt his face burning. “I thought I had a story.”

Maria said, “So did we. But it got lost in the side issues and subplots.”

“Maybe Smart Art—”

Maria shook her head. “Smart Art worked fine, Ray. So did Lily and Rockabye Ralph. So did the car chase through Chinatown and the shoot-out on the Golden Gate Bridge.”

“But it lacked flow, coherence. I didn’t hear that tom-tom beating underneath the words. I didn’t know who to root for,” Sid’s voice said. “And without a rooting interest there’s no climax potential. No climax potential means . . . no climax . . . and soft box office.”

For several seconds, the only sound in Sid’s office was the hiss of long distance. “It was just a first draft,” Burk finally said, feeling shamed and outraged at the same time. “I could do a rewrite.”

“That’s up to you,” said Sid’s voice. “But it might not be worth the effort.” Then, changing the subject, he said, “Maria, I spoke with Jack Rose. I think he’s ready to commit on the Berliner project.”

While Sid and Maria openly discussed agency business over the speakerphone, Burk idly flipped through a copy of
Daily Variety
. He let fifteen minutes pass—by then the color had left his cheeks and he’d almost retrieved his pride—before he stood up and walked out of the office.

“Basically they agreed with you,” Burk told Sandra when he came home that afternoon. They were sitting in armchairs on opposite sides of the living room. Outside the wind swirled and a light rain was falling. “They said it was garbage.”

“That’s not what I said. I said it was too complicated.”

“Too complicated?”

“Right.”

“Fuck complicated.”

“You asked me and—”

“I worked hard on that script!”

“I know you did. I
saw
you,” she said loudly. “I was here, Ray.”

“No you weren’t. While I was writing and taking care of Louie, you were down on Century Boulevard, dancing naked for a bunch of fucking perverts.”

Burk stood up.

“Ray, wait—”

“Fuck you, Sandra.”

Sandra stared at Burk, and for the first time in their marriage she saw real hatred in his eyes. After a long silence, he walked past
her into the dining room. “I’m going to pick up Louie,” he said, in a voice that was unforgiving, and he could not see the sadness erupt in her face as he picked up his car keys and walked outside.

Sandra’s car was gone from the driveway when Burk came back from the Goodtime Nursery School. “Mommy’s left. She’s not coming home,” Burk heard his voice say, knowing this even before he saw that her suitcase was missing, along with her shopping bag filled with old racing forms.

Louie suddenly looked frightened. “For how long?”

“For just a little while,” Sandra told Louie later that evening. She was calling him from a motel in Riverside. “I’ll be back before you know it.”

“It’s raining. It’s not safe to drive in the rain.”