Selling Out (16 page)

Then, wheeling and disappearing back into the projection booth, he was gone. There was first a general sigh, a sound of relief, like pent-up breath released at last, and then someone was clapping and applause spread throughout the little band of fellow workers and all at once everyone in the room was standing, whistling, and cheering, acclaiming Kenton, and Ned, and Perry, and themselves, saluting and praising the work, the thing they had made together, the story and the dream.

“Tell me, what did you
really
think of it, I mean, your honest gut reaction.”

Perry pulled Jane's hand away from his crotch and looked her straight in the eye. They had come home and opened a new bottle of good chilled Chardonnay to celebrate, and after a few sips Jane had leaned against Perry on the couch and begun to caress him with her hands as well as her mouth, slowly stroking him along the inside of the thigh while at the same time she made little fluttery butterfly kisses around his mouth.

“Darling love,” she cooed, “I told you already—it's absolutely wonderful.”

“You really think so?”

“Yes, and I know when it's really finished it will be incredibly better. All those slow, draggy parts will be gone.”

She started in stroking and kissing him again, but Perry pulled gently away.

“What do you mean, ‘slow, draggy parts'?” he asked.

“You know. Where you just see someone walk across a room, without saying anything.”

“I thought you understood this was the rough cut. That's the kind of thing you see in a rough cut.”

Jane giggled, and tweaked Perry's ear.

“I know, darling, but I couldn't help thinking how ironic it was—I mean, some of those drawn-out numbers reminded me of the kind of stuff that drives
you
up the wall in foreign films, where you wonder
when
the heroine is ever going to get to the door.”

She nuzzled up under Perry's chin for a kiss, but he dodged it.

“Maybe you'll be disappointed in the final cut, too,” he said. “I mean, Kenton isn't one of those razzle-dazzle sitcom directors.”

Jane reached over to the table and picked up her glass of wine.

“Well, I hope he doesn't think he's Fellini, for God sake.”

“You don't like his direction?”

Jane took a long sip of her wine.

“Is this the only thing we can talk about?”

“No, but I'm interested in your opinion.”

Jane stood up and unhooked her skirt, then shucked it off, and kicked off her shoes.

“My opinion is I might as well go for a swim. Or take a cold shower.”

“Hey. I'm sorry.”

“Don't be,” she said, stripping off her blouse and dropping it on the floor. “It's not your fault if I don't turn you on any more.”

“Don't do this. I said I was sorry.”

“I am too. I'm sorry the only thing in the world you can think about night and day is your damn movie.”

She turned and left the room. Perry started to get up, but instead refilled his glass of wine and closed his eyes as he gulped it down.

“Jane has a headache,” Perry said by way of explaining her absence that night for dinner with Ned and Kim.

They of course were incredibly gracious about it, pretending the age-old excuse was real. Perry was embarrassed, and depressed. In fact he really was more absorbed in the movie than anything else in the world, including lovemaking, and he feared it really was coming between him and Jane. He knew she was right when she said he would only be talking business with Ned and Kim, that she would inevitably feel out of it, a mere outsider.

They did talk business of course, going over impressions and ideas about the rough cut as they consumed one of Kim's delicious and seemingly effortless curries. Perry was so absorbed in the fascination of it that he didn't even think about Jane again till Ned poured him a second brandy. He was sure as hell glad that the new “wine only” policy he and Jane had pledged to keep as part of their California health and fitness plan officially counted brandy
as
wine.

The brandy really loosened him up. It loosened up his tongue, too.

“I'm worried about Jane,” he confessed to Ned and Kim. “There wasn't any headache, of course. If anything, it's an ache in the butt. I guess I'm giving it to her.”

Ned shrugged.

“It happens,” he said.

Perry took a hit of the brandy and shook his head.

“Not to us. At least not till now. I mean, the last couple weeks. I guess I'm too wrapped up in the show.”

Kim placed her hand on Perry's, giving it a reassuring squeeze.

“This business,” she said, “lays a heavy stress on people. On relationships.”

“You ought to get away for a while,” Ned told him. “Just the two of you. There's nothing you can be doing on the show now anyway. We've got to let Kenton do his thing. Let him and Kim come up with the next cut, and then we'll get back into it. I've got to go to New York, which I'm glad of, since I won't be tempted to keep looking over their shoulder all the time.”

Kim tweaked Ned's ear.

“Good boy. Stay at least a week.”

She turned to Perry.

“And you get out of here, too.
With
Jane. I know what she's feeling. She's a show biz widow. You've been married to this show. Now go off and concentrate on
her
for a while.”

“Where?” Perry asked.

He didn't know where people went to get away when they already lived in a sort of permanent vacationland. Ned and Kim exchanged a glance, and then Ned turned to Perry.

“Have you ever been to the desert?”

“No, but I heard about it. Palm Springs, you mean? I don't think Jane would like it—nightclubs and all that.

Kim shook her head.

“We mean the
real
desert.”

“Where's that?” Perry asked.

Ned gave him a nudge.

“Shall we tell him?”

“Do you think we can trust him?”

“If you swear a secret oath,” said Ned, “we'll tell you about our favorite spot. Our hideaway.”

“It's magic,” said Kim.

Borrego Springs.

You went to Palm Springs first, but only to stop for lunch. It was like an extension of L.A., a satellite of it, flung out in the space of sand and empty distance. Hotels and neon, nightclubs and swimming pools. You might run into Bob Hope or Gerald Ford. Civilization—Southern California–style. Show Biz. Shopping Malls.

You kept going south.

Into mountains. Mystery. Narrow winding roads with hairpin curves and purple horizons of rock and sage. Clouds merged into mirages. Cars became sparse as trees. The air thinned and sharpened. Spiraling, slowly, you rose, then saw below, breathtaking, a valley, spread out like peace, quiet and calming as sleep.

No neon here. No noise.

La Casa del Zorro. “House of the Fox.” The name made Perry smile. It sounded like the set for one of those old swashbuckler movies with swords and capes, closed carriages, and midnight escapes over moats.

Or the Hollywood name for a desert motel or resort. But it wasn't funky enough to be a motel, or fancy enough to be a resort. It was simply a cluster of cottages scattered over several acres beyond a main house with a dining room, and an unobtrusive swimming pool.

Each little house had a name, and Perry and. Jane were in
Mesquite
. It was cozy and private. They went into town and bought eggs and sandwich stuff and beer for the kitchen, and at sundown, sat outside on a little veranda and listened to the silence. They felt little need to speak. It was as if all the tension and muck and debris were being drained away and they were being washed clean by the desert air.

That night they made love.

Like new.

As of old.

Jane led them on nature walks, trails laid out in the desert with botanical names for varieties of cacti and flowering plants. Perry didn't mind the beating sun, and the sweat soaking through his shirts felt good, like being purged. They hiked into rocky valleys and discovered dramatic waterfalls and deep gorges decorated with bright exotic blooms, tropical pinks and blues. Giant palm trees grew in profusion, whole wild forests of them hidden from highways. It was like an imagined Amazon landscape, a child's Crayola dream.

“I needed this,” Perry said that night.

“I needed
you
,” Jane told him.

“You have me.”

“For a while I didn't. You were gone. It was scary.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be sorry. Be with me.”

“I am. Now. Always.”

“Even when we get back? To the show?”

“I won't let it come between us.”

“God. It sounds like a woman.”

“It's just a show.
You're
the woman.”

“You won't forget that?”

“I promise.”

They touched and clung, making love like a vow.

“You broke your promise! You went back on your word!”

Ned Gurney was furious. The veins in his neck were red ropes. His fists opened and shut, as if they were itching to grab the neck of Archer Mellis and squeeze.

Mellis himself looked cool, nearly Zenlike in his composure. Perhaps that image was heightened (even purposely) by the fact that he was wearing a flowing saffron robe, with thong sandals. He raised his right hand, palm up, in a gesture of peace and reconciliation.

“Relax,
amigo
. Amanda and her people understand.”

“Dammit, I know they say they understand!” Ned screamed. “They won't even know themselves how it affects them, or doesn't affect them, but without the music, it's going to be a bore. Believe me. The music is crucial to this show, more so than if it were cops and robbers or tits and ass. It creates the mood, it—it—”

Ned was wringing his hands as he groped for words.

“It sustains the action,” whispered Kenton, who looked as if he might cry.

Archer leaned back in his chair and jabbed his foot against his desk, hefted up his robe, and retied the sandal thongs that crisscrossed up his calf, tightening the whole system with determined concentration.

“When they see it again, with the music, they'll be all the more knocked out.”

“But today is what counts!” Ned shouted. “Today they'll decide its fate!
Without any music
.”

“
Our
fate,” moaned Kenton, mopping his brow with a big bandana.

Archer took his leg down, stood up straight, and winked at Perry.

“Sounds like your colleagues don't have much faith in your story
qua
story.”

“That's not the point!” Ned shouted, moving perilously close to Archer with a raised and trembling fist. Archer looked with detached curiosity at the fist, as if Ned were holding up some kind of art object for him to examine. Then he looked into Ned's eyes, calmly.

“Amanda and her people will not be ‘deciding the fate' of your project today, or any other day. The real decision will come from Max Bloorman and the East Coast network brass.”

“But Amanda and her people will decide if they're going to get behind it today, if they're going to push it when they go to the meetings in New York next week.”

“Precisely. And they'll be much more likely to do that if they've had a preview, if they feel like they're in on it. I've already kept them shut out of it for longer than maybe is even wise because of your ‘specialness' and your collective sense of artistic precocity. They've bought that from me up to now, but we can't keep them away any longer.”

“Not even for a week?” Ned pleaded.

“We'll have the music in five days,” Kenton said hoarsely.

Archer suddenly turned and hopped onto the top of his desk, drawing his legs up into the lotus position.

“Amanda and her people will be here in half an hour for the screening,” he said. “I suggest we take this opportunity to compose ourselves.”

He closed his eyes, took a gulp of breath, and bent his head forward in an attitude of deep meditation.

Ned, Kenton, and Perry looked at Archer, then at one another. Their very presence in the room now seemed an invasion of their boss's privacy. Bowing their own heads, either in respect or resignation, they tiptoed out.

In the darkened room, there was no way to read the network people's reactions. Every so often Amanda LeMay would emit a little giggle that was always followed a split second later by a hearty horselaugh from Todd Robbie. At other times, when nothing on the screen was supposed to be funny, a sudden guffaw would break forth from Harry Flanders. There were also moments that Perry considered hilarious, the height of wit, scenes that had simply cracked him up and practically sent Ned and Kenton rolling in the aisles, but now were witnessed by the network people in deadly quiet. Sometimes, in those awful stretches where music should have been, Perry could hear heavy breathing, and wondered with itching anxiety if any or all of the network people had fallen asleep.

Though this version of the film was almost a half hour shorter than the rough cut, it seemed interminably longer, and instead of producing the aura of power and massive meaning of the Russian novels, as it had before, at this viewing Perry felt his precious story must seem to the outsiders who were sentenced to watch it simply tedious and boring. He shifted in his seat, feeling as if battalions of tiny, invisible ants were skirmishing up and down his legs and under his rump. Suddenly, he realized he needed to take a pee. Why the hell hadn't he done that before the screening started? He couldn't go now, or it might seem like his movie couldn't even hold the attention of its own author, much less a national audience of millions of viewers!

At last, the lights went on.

Perry scrunched down in his seat, not even wanting to look at Amanda, not wanting to go through the agony of trying to read and decipher her expression. But any such apprehension was quickly ended, as Amanda's voice rang out loud and clear through the room.