She Is Me (7 page)

Sometimes Elizabeth noticed how handsome Brett was. His eyes were soft, pale gray. His hair was soft, pale blond. Unconsciously, at least she thought it was unconscious, he wore pale gray sweaters or soft pastel shirts. He was the most harmonious of persons, melodious and silvery, a willow in a soft breeze.

Elizabeth smoothed his hair. “Forget you? You’re nuts.”

She kissed him. “Mrs. Norman Maine,” she said. His arms were around her. They pressed into each other. Forget you? Forget this feeling? Never, she thought. Never ever. His hands moved up inside her T-shirt. She felt them on her breasts, then pulling the shirt up over her head. She stiffened for a minute. What if Harry . . .

“He’s with your father, remember?” Brett said, not even bothering to ask what was the matter, and pushed her down on the couch.

“Baby, I love you,” she whispered afterward. “How could I forget you?”

“Even before I was on the circuit,
with
my mother as chaperone,” Lotte said, “there was Talented Children of America . . .”

Greta sat across from her mother at Lotte’s little dining-room table. Josh sat beside her, anxiously touching Greta’s arm now and then, as if to make sure there was still flesh and bone beneath the sleeve of her sweater. He had urged her to stay home, to rest or retch or whatever the chemo dictated. But she had washed her face with icy water, dressed as nicely as she could manage, and he had driven her over to visit Lotte, who was, as usual, without help. Lotte fired anyone they hired to help take care of her. Her reasons shimmered with the extravagant implausibility and inevitability of Greek myth. “She watches me, day and night, watching, watching . . . how can I trust a woman who watches?”; “She sleeps, like a lump. For this I’m paying?”; “She prays. It frightens me, a religious fanatic in my living room.”

On a plate in front of her, little sandwiches were neatly stacked, Lotte’s specialty, each with a single slice of slimy turkey breast. Greta felt ill. She prayed that Lotte would not now describe how she had become a Talented Child of America.

“You know how they were in those days?” Lotte said. “Don’t ask. Off to the doctor! Four years old! The doctor with his red face. And that nose of his . . .” She paused. “Bulbous.” Then, leaning toward them, confidentially, she whispered, “He drank.” Then she resumed. “The doctor says, ‘Constipation?’” She paused, again. “Dancing lessons! The doctor prescribed dancing lessons.”

“A star was born,” Greta said. She tried to smile.

Lotte was no longer clear, if she ever had been, what sort of an organization Talented Children of America was. What she remembered were thirty or forty children, every Sunday, dressed in their Sunday best, exhibiting their talents.

“Anyway, who cares?” she said, slumping, suddenly tired.

Greta forced herself to get up. She got a glass of water for her mother.

“I care,” she heard Josh say.

I don’t, Greta thought, surprised at the thought and the bitterness behind it. But her mother’s stories had become too familiar to hold any mystery, any promise. And Lotte’s theatrical pretensions were still, even now that Greta was a grown woman who was the mother herself of a grown woman, a source of embarrassment to her.

She brought the water back to the table and absentmindedly took a sip of it herself, then gagged until her eyes watered.

“That drunk,” Lotte was saying, handing Greta a tissue, “with his dirty rotten red nose . . .”

Los Angeles had no center, as Larry Volfmann had said. But what did? Not life, that was for sure. Life was a queasy twisting path, circling back on itself, but circles did not mean centers. To Elizabeth, a circle usually meant she was lost, and she was frequently lost in L.A. But today Brett was driving. She could daydream and squint at the bright sun without worrying about missing a turn. Being in a car was so relaxing, so private. When she did drive, she particularly liked to be caught in traffic. In traffic, there was plenty of time to consult the map and the compass. You listened to the radio. To CDs. The sky was blue. The air conditioner was on. The cars moved at a gentle pace. No honking.

“Just shooting,” Brett responded when she tried out this theory on him. “Maybe we should get married in the fall,” he added.

“Shh,” Elizabeth said. She pointed at Harry, asleep in his car seat behind them. “And then when you’re late,” she continued, “you just call on the cell phone and say, ‘Oh, I’m stuck in terrible traffic.’ Of course, you’re just late, but you have observed the proper formalities.”

“Your parents would like it. Your grandmother would definitely like it.
I
would like it . . .”

Elizabeth put her sunglasses on, then took her sunglasses off and cleaned them on her shirt.

“What’s the big deal?” Brett was saying. “We’re as good as married as it is.”

“See? So why bother?”

Brett scratched his chin. Elizabeth saw he had forgotten to shave. Or had he done it on purpose? To look like a movie star now that he was in Hollywood?

“You can buy vodka in the grocery store here,” she said, a little manically, she realized, to break the silence. “I love that. Don’t you love that? I even like Lincoln Boulevard.”

They were on their way to Malibu, driving along Pacific Coast Highway, cliffs to the right of them, beaches to the left, but Elizabeth thought fondly of Lincoln Boulevard, a street as undistinguished as any other swath of strip malls cutting through any city, town, or suburb in the country. But there was something special about Lincoln Boulevard’s dismal monotony, its density or maybe just the intensity, that made Elizabeth feel that here, in this dazzlingly grim tunnel of billboards and ghastly neon signs, here the culture of America had been born.

The traffic was at a standstill in front of them. Brett slammed down the brake, hard.

“Jesus,” Elizabeth said.

Harry was still miraculously asleep.

“Jesus, Brett.”

“I just don’t see what you have against fucking marriage,” he said.

Elizabeth thought this over, as she had done so many times before.

“I don’t, either,” she said, sadly, returning her attention to the road.

The house was right on the beach, a big, airy, modern house of glass and polished wood, the floors a pale gray concrete that mimicked the sea. It was not a mansion, which both relieved and disappointed Elizabeth. It was a house—a rich man’s house, but still, a house.

The director of
Doll,
that edgy little comedy that made such a splash at Sundance, sat on a chair constructed of polished chunks of wood, its cushions wooly sheepskin. At first Elizabeth thought the frowning woman curled up and biting her lip must be Volfmann’s wife. Then she was introduced.

“I have no idea how I got here,” Daisy Piperno said, holding out her hand. “Do you?”

Elizabeth shook Daisy’s hand.

“No,” she said.

Daisy smiled. Her hair was black. Her face was a little bit round and pouty looking, with dark arched eyebrows and narrow, sleepy brown eyes. Those eyes rested on Elizabeth. That was how Elizabeth experienced it—they rested on her. And yet the other features of Daisy Piperno’s face were almost ludicrously animated. She bit her lip and looked around her, this way, that way, craning her neck, screwing up her face.

“Emma Bovary bites her lip,” Elizabeth said. “Like you.”

The agitated twisting stopped. Daisy turned her head and gazed again at Elizabeth. It was an unhurried appraisal, a look of thorough and sedate curiosity. Elizabeth blushed.

“I know,” Daisy said.

What on earth made me say that? Elizabeth thought. Had she offended the auteur? She caught Volfmann’s eye. He gestured like a parent urging a shy child to join the birthday party—Go on, go on, have a good time. Brett appeared at her side and Harry pushed his way between her legs. “Mommy, it’s a Flintstones chair,” Harry said, pointing at the chair Daisy still sat in. “And there’s scary men.”

Daisy laughed. Elizabeth noticed several African masks on a shelf, one of which looked a little like Larry Volfmann.

“Hey, Harry,” said Volfmann. “They’re not real men, Harry.”

Harry shrugged. “Pretend scary men.”

“Like me?” Volfmann said.

“You’re not a pretend man,” Harry said. He was disgusted. He went off in search of a television. On the way his elbow bumped a vase full of flowers, which fell to the cement floor, spilling and shattering. Harry began to cry. He began to scream. Elizabeth picked him up. His face was sticky with tears and mucus. Volfmann hovered apologetically above them. Brett hovered apologetically beside them. Elizabeth, calming Harry, both mortified and defiant on his behalf, glanced up at Daisy. Daisy was still watching Elizabeth with her strange expression of contented scrutiny.

“You can dress us up . . .” Elizabeth said.

“Harry, want to look for whales in the telescope?” Volfmann said. Elizabeth gratefully watched him carry a happy Harry away to the telescope set up at the window. She wondered if he had children. How old would they be? How old was he? Older than Brett, younger than her father, an age that was not part of her world.

Elizabeth cleaned up the mess with paper towels she found in the kitchen.

“You missed a piece,” Daisy said. She pointed at a sliver. She had not moved from the big chair. For someone so jumpy, she seemed oddly lethargic.

Brett kneeled beside Elizabeth with a wet paper towel, getting the smallest slivers. It was a routine they knew well, were good at after so much practice. He leaned across the gray, soggy paper towels in their hands and gave her a kiss. He smiled, unperturbed. She envied him. Her face was burning with embarrassment, with a sense of personal responsibility and despair for the broken vase, the spilled water, the flowers strewn across the floor.

“I guess they should live in Milwaukee,” Daisy said.

Elizabeth looked up from the floor. “Who?”

“The Bovaries,” Daisy said, lighting a cigarette.

“Os!” Harry said. He was back, staring with a fascinated admiration at Daisy’s lazy, drifting rings of smoke.

three

I
t was four
A.M.,
earlier than even Greta liked to get up. But she sat in her garden, surrounded by roses dripping with fog. She sat on the wet ground, the damp seeping through her robe. She had woken up, stifling, sure she was choking. Quietly, careful not to wake Tony, with whom at that moment she felt she could not bear to exchange even one explanatory word, Greta crept from her warm, soft bed to the cool, sodden garden. The cold felt good: the freshness of the hour and its damp perfume.

I have cancer, she thought.

What she craved, what all this talk of cancer had reminded her of, was a cigarette.

“Oh, come off it,” Elizabeth had said when Greta confided this craving to her daughter. Greta heard the fear and tension and boredom. She recognized that tone. Elizabeth sounded the way Greta sounded with her own mother. Impatient, desperate, disgusted. “You’re totally perverse. You haven’t smoked in twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-nine.”

“But, okay, now you’ve confessed,” Elizabeth said, her voice softening. “You can relax and put it out of your mind.”

Greta wanted to explain that she had not confessed. She did not feel guilty, did not need to unburden herself about cigarettes. She had simply wanted Elizabeth to know what she knew, if only for a moment, for the moment that she wanted a cigarette: She wanted Elizabeth to know that she was still alive. She wanted Elizabeth to know that she still had the wherewithal, still had the power, to do as she pleased, even if she pleased to start smoking again.

But I don’t really have power, Greta thought. I am a slave of this illness. It tells me what I can eat and when. It tells me that I can sleep, that I must sleep, or that I must not. It tells me that if I smoked even one cigarette, I would vomit.

At least I have my hair, she thought. She tucked a strand behind her ear. Maybe the chemo would turn it from the indistinct light brown it was now back to her childhood blond. She had so many treatments to go. There was still plenty of time.

Plenty of time. She repeated it to herself. She heard a mockingbird sing. She heard her own breath.

What would Lotte say if Greta did lose her hair? Would her mother shake her head in bemused disappointment, the way she did when Greta turned up in her gardening clothes? Lotte was tall, particularly for a woman of her generation. She had loomed, a giantess of a mother, in Greta’s life. Greta suddenly remembered walking along the sidewalk in the St. Louis suburb she’d grown up in. She had reached up for her mother’s hand and Lotte had smiled down at her as if from a mountain. What a funny little memory. So ordinary. A girl reaching for her mother’s hand. Greta could hear the leaves swishing beneath her feet, swirling around her ankles. Autumn leaves. Her mother had towered, out of reach, as high as the trees, her beautiful blond hair so comfortable, so at home among the golden leaves. Lotte had not been a bad mother, just an eccentric one, taking Greta out of school sometimes when she wanted company at a movie matinee, refusing to allow Greta to ride a bicycle, fainting noisily whenever Greta scraped her knee or got a bee sting. Greta had learned not to tell her mother when she fell, to wash the cut or extract the stinger herself, to steal bicycles out of neighbors’ garages for an afternoon, then put them back before anyone noticed. And she had seen a lot of movies. Her father had been the tender, affectionate parent, her favorite when she was a child. But she had come to appreciate Lotte over the years. Eccentricity has its value. Lotte loved her, and she was, if nothing else, amusing. Amusement was something Greta valued more and more.

She wondered if Elizabeth thought of her the way she thought of Lotte. With annoyance, pleasure, contempt. With awe. With good-natured condescension and longing. With such need that it frightened her. With dread. What a horrible idea. Yet wasn’t that all just another way of saying Greta loved her mother?

Lotte was the palest person Greta had ever met. She saw, for a moment, her mother’s large, pale feet. Did they really tag toes at the morgue? Did everyone go to the morgue? She didn’t want her mother to die. She didn’t want to die. She dug her own bare toes into the dark soil. The sprinklers went on and she let the spray wash over her.

Larry Volfmann was appalled by Elizabeth’s initial attempts at screenwriting.

“What the fuck have I done?” he said, shaking the one measly page of dialogue at her, as he had earlier shaken the issue of
Tikkun.
“What is this? Only one page and I’m already bored? What’s with the first wife? She’s history, she’s nobody,
she’s
not the Madame Bovary we’re interested in. You’ve got one hundred pages to tell your story, you understand? One hundred fifteen tops . . .”

“Well, but it’s not an action picture, it’s —”

“I know what it is. And it’s not
this.
” He looked sadly at the sheet of paper. “I was sure that here was someone I could count on not to be literal minded . . .”

“I’m not even a screenwriter . . .”

“You wrote this. You wrote it under contract. You’re a screenwriter, all right. A
bad
screenwriter.”

She was so angry that for a second she had nothing to say. She wondered why she didn’t just walk out. Oh, yes, she reminded herself. This is what comes of being a whore.

“You’re scaring me,” Volfmann said. “How can you write like a hack the first page out? It’s like your screenwriting program did this.”

Elizabeth thought of her screenwriting program, so polite, so attentive, so quiet. She wished it was sitting on the soft sofa beside her. Better yet, instead of her. It would have just the right response.

“You don’t know anything yet—how can you have absorbed so much banality so fast?” Volfmann began pacing around on his thick carpet. “I hire a virgin, I get a . . .” He stopped himself.

“Whore?” Elizabeth said.

“
I
didn’t say it.”

Elizabeth stood up, grabbed the paper from his hand, crumpled it, and threw it in the wastebasket. “I don’t know you well enough for you to be this rude,” she said. She headed for the silver doors.

“Oh, calm down.” Volfmann sat, leaned back in his chair. “Don’t go delicate on me, for God’s sake. You think screenwriting is beneath you so you write beneath you. You think it’s formulaic hackwork so you write formulaic hackwork. You think it’s easy, so you write shit. Big fucking deal. It happens.”

Suddenly, he leaped to his feet, his face dark red.

“But I don’t want shit!” he screamed.

Elizabeth stared at Larry Volfmann, who was right about her, but had also pounded his desk and stamped both his feet.

“I see you are very upset,” Elizabeth said, softly but firmly, using the method she’d learned in a women’s magazine for dealing with three-year-old temper tantrums. What an asshole, she thought, meaning Volfmann and then, on second thought, herself. “You are very angry at me. You feel I have let you down.” Acknowledge the child’s feelings. Okay. Done. Now, she was supposed to suggest they have a snack. “Would you like a bottle of water, Larry? I think I would.”

Volfmann nodded his head without looking at her, just as Harry would have, although there was no visible pouting and no sniffled up tears. He pulled two bottles of water from a small hidden refrigerator.

“You know, some writers have a gift,” he said.

Elizabeth smiled, waiting for the healing compliment. “A gift,” Volfmann continued, “for putting in every scene that shouldn’t be there, and leaving out every scene that should. Don’t do that to me, Elizabeth. Don’t make a fucking fool of me. Okay?”

Elizabeth drank from her bottle of water and thought this over. She noticed a loose thread on his expensive jacket.

“Yeah,” she said finally. “Okay.”

CHUCK BOVAINE, a mild-looking young guy, sits on the edge of his wife, GAIL’s, bed. She is a little older, vegetarian gaunt, her face marked by perpetual anger. Her arms are entwined around his neck, but less lovingly than like a poisonous vine.

GAIL

Z-z-z . . .

CHUCK

Xanax?

Elizabeth had been working at her parents’ all morning. She had listened with envy to the sound of Harry and Josh splashing in the pool. At lunchtime, Harry had been so tired he fell asleep beneath the kitchen table beside the cat. Harry usually preferred the coffee table in the living room, but Elizabeth left him where he was. She went into the living room and sat down next to Josh on the couch. Josh had a finger hooked in a tear in his T-shirt. His hairy legs and big feet were stretched on the coffee table. He was staring into space.

“You okay?” she said.

“It’s ridiculous,” he said.

He sounded sad in the same way he had sounded sad when he was a child. That Josh was a man with hairy legs still surprised Elizabeth. She tried to imagine how her mother felt looking at Josh, how Elizabeth would feel when Harry was a man.

“Who wants an orange?” Greta said, appearing from the kitchen.

“Don’t wait on us,” Elizabeth said.

“Me,” Josh said at the same moment.

Greta handed him a plate of oranges cut in quarters.

“The smell seems to soothe my stomach,” she said. “This week, anyway.”

“
I
am generous enough to give you the pleasure of waiting on me, your only son,” Josh said.

They sat on the couch for a while, the three of them in a row. No one spoke. Elizabeth listened to the sound of her brother eating. The orange scent was fresh and energetic. She closed her eyes. She was angry at her mother. She was angry at her brother. Didn’t they get what was going on? Elizabeth was conscious of a tangled sense of superiority and exclusion. She felt a hand on hers and opened her eyes. Josh clutched her hand. Her mother’s eyes were closed and she seemed to be sleeping. Josh’s face was contorted and red. He was crying, without making a sound.

When the doorbell rang, Greta opened her eyes but did not even attempt to get up. Josh, the plate of orange peels balanced on his stomach, wiped his eyes with his fists and looked helplessly at Elizabeth.

Elizabeth opened the door to a young man with wavy dark hair, rather long, that would have been considered romantic in a far-off era and stylish in another. Elizabeth did not recognize him until he smiled and blinked, and she saw that it was her brother’s best friend, Tim. When he was in high school and lived with his mother, Laurie, next door, Tim had been an ordinary-looking nerdy kid. Now he looked like he’d wandered from a poetry slam to a nineteenth-century English vicarage. And back.

Elizabeth envied Josh having his friends around. She had been the first of her friends in New York, was still the only one, to have a baby, which had distracted her from friendship, to say the least. But even when she was neglectful of them and rarely saw them and forgot to call them, she always knew her friends were there, going to bars and breaking up with their boyfriends, quitting their jobs, moving to Brooklyn. Only now that she was three thousand miles away did the distance from her friends seem real. Maybe she could be friends with Tim.

“I brought your mother a book,” Tim said. “From my mother. She said it’s soothing.”

He went into the living room and threw himself on the couch beside Greta, who was awake from her nap. Tim hugged her and kissed her hand, which made her laugh. Elizabeth remembered how easy he had always been with her mother. He handed Greta the book,
An Unsuitable Attachment
by Barbara Pym, and made small talk while Josh sat glumly on the other side of Greta, and Elizabeth watched, fascinated, from the doorway. Tim’s manner was trusting and open, like a child’s, and as smooth as a ladies’ man. He leaned his head on Greta’s shoulder. He took a tiny Snickers bar from the pocket of his T-shirt and tossed it to Josh. But then he stared at Josh for a minute, stood up and circled the room, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, and the ladies’ man disappeared.

“Are you okay?” Elizabeth said. “What’s with everyone today?”

“Well,
I
have cancer,” Greta said. “Since you asked.”

Elizabeth was shocked at her mother’s tone. Cold. Angry. It had not occurred to her that her mother might be angry. That’s my job, she thought.

“Yeah, she does,” Josh said. He unwrapped the candy bar and bit into it.

“Thank you both,” Elizabeth said.

“And that’s what’s wrong with everyone,” Greta said.

Tim started laughing. “Shit,” he murmured. He sat down again.

Greta patted his head affectionately as she left the room with her book.

Tim slid from the couch to the floor.

Elizabeth sat in the indentation he had left behind. She pushed Tim with her foot. “Why are you sitting on the floor?” she asked. “It’s no safer down there.”

Tim took hold of her foot. Elizabeth looked down at him and she felt herself overwhelmed by a feeling of intense, vast, dizzying relief at being touched by someone who didn’t need her. His hands massaged her foot. It was a casual, easy gesture that bestowed peace, as if he were a priest giving her absolution, or a trainer patting a skittish horse. She wanted to thank Tim. You are a priest, she wanted to say. And I am a mess. But she was afraid she might burst into tears.