What Movies Made Me Do (13 page)

The door slammed again. I closed my eyes with relief when I heard her stepping unevenly back to us.

He addressed her like she’d never left. “You can’t make the Mary Magdalene scenes kinky. I don’t think we were childhood sweethearts who almost went all the way.”

“Take a walk together in the desert and work on it,” I coaxed.

“I hate it when Mary tells Jesus why women can’t be rabbis. It’s too knee-jerk women’s lib,” he added.

I put my arm around Anita. Standing next to me, she felt wired, her eyes glued to him. Wearing her sunglasses for disguise.

“You’ll write together,” I said.

“We got no time,” Jack sighed.

“Ben Hecht wrote
Scarface
in six days,” I said.

Anita twisted away from me. “Give me a week to show my good faith.” She dragged herself in front of me and held out her hand to Jack. He stood poised, until she said in a
coaxing voice, “Let’s reshoot the crucifixion scene and I’ll light your face like Yankee Stadium at night.” He tossed his long hair off his face and nodded. Their handclasp was quick.

He backed down to the piano stool, and she turned to me and mouthed, “Okay, pal?”

I circled the piano, drawing her with me, and put my arms around them both. His back was too warm. “All set?” I beamed like Allen King at a bar mitzvah.

She echoed my tone of voice. “I’m going to do my goddamn best.”

I took a deep breath. This was my big moment. “Great, and Jack calls Michael and tells him to forget hiring Sam Falco.” I prayed, looking down at the top of his head. He leaned out of my grasp.

“Call Michael today,” I repeated.

He looked warily at me. I lost my balance, tumbling down into his nervous blue eyes.

“Anita, you’re on deadline.” He grimaced up at her, his fingers above the keyboard. “You get two whole working days to shoot my face,” he intoned sarcastically, “as God is my witness. Then I call Michael.”

Anita looked drained. “Okay, but try not to sound like a dime-store Bible salesman.”

“You’ll coach him,” I said, tugging her by her free elbow to the screen door. I looked around, trying to memorize the turning ceiling fan, the two single beds, and the bulky white piano.

He called out in an agitated voice, “Don’t worry, I’m a professional, I can take her criticism.”

“You’ll rehearse and rehearse, and then the camera won’t move from your face,” I shouted boldly into the dim room. I pinched her elbow.

“I won’t pick on you, I promise.” She waved back at him.
Then she pinched my wrist. “Get me out of here,” she whispered, “before I puke.”

Then he was right behind us. “Nice doing business with you ladies.” His teeth flashed white in the midst of his beard. The room lit up. Nice teeth. I’m always in trouble when I notice a man’s teeth.

My body jumped awake. I smoothed my nightgown over my stomach, yawning at a plumped yellow cat licking her tail. My brain was full of Jack Hanscomb. I had a silly feeling he liked me. I pulled the sheet over my face. I didn’t come waltzing halfway around the world to swoon over him—or did I?

The antique phone burped once. An Israeli operator had located Rosemary. I stretched out on the corn-husk mattress petting the yellow cat’s furry spine. I loved the worn granite floors and religious paintings in this huge strange bedroom. A pinpoint of light shone from an oil lamp in the stone house across the alley. It was late. Dammit, I’d slept through Anita’s afternoon shoot.

Rosemary’s sweet voice burst in uneven bits of sound. “Michael’s making big trouble.”

Yellow hairs floated off my palm, my nose itched, tension twinged my chest. “He can’t touch me. I won Jack over to my side yesterday, Rosemary. He never wanted Michael to fire Anita. What’s going on?”

“He’s taking all ten readers, your writers, and every secretary out for coffee, and he’s asking questions like do they like you, do you help them do better work? Wouldn’t they rather have a different kind of boss?”

I curled my toes. No rest for the wily. “He’s just retaliating.
If he’s drinking that many cups of coffee with my staff, I hope he’s got the runs.”

“Very funny. You better get back here.”

“Michael loves office politics,” I said. “God, he’ll prove I can’t fold memos.”

“He told me I could run the office better than you,” Rosemary sputtered.

My breath puffed out between my lips like a punctured balloon. “What did you say?”

“Listen, it’s not my fault, we were in the employees’ cafeteria and I got a big dessert and I said he was the only person in the whole world who could do a better job than you, and so why didn’t he move to New York and take a salary cut.”

I leaned my forehead into my palm. Don’t cry, don’t collapse; think big.

“He got real red and said how he hoped nobody lied to me about my job security. I just about died.” She paused. “He pulled a card out of his breast pocket with names on it and said he was talking to people about replacing you.”

“He’s using you to send me messages,” I said. “He’s trying to rattle me.”

“He doesn’t want
Jesus
to be a hit.” Rosemary sounded woebegone.

I started stuffing socks back into the suitcase. “I’m flying home tonight.”

“You
are
?” She sounded awed. “Listen, how’s your star?” Stretching the frayed telephone cord, I scooped my toothbrush off the tin bathroom sink.

“You see rushes,” I said. In the round shaving mirror, my face looked pale and bleary. “I’ll get on the next plane.”

I slammed the suitcase.

She lowered her voice. “And leave you-know-who? How is he? I bet he’s incredible in person.”

“Oh, he’s just like anybody else.” I latched the suitcase.
Then I opened it again. I was in a state. I hadn’t even changed my nightgown. I knew what Michael Finley could do when he wanted.

My door creaked. “Somebody’s here.”

“Is it
him
?”

Paul Riley came charging in, all nerves, tightening the white lizard belt on his white gabardine pants. He stuck his aviator sunglasses on top of his short silver crew cut. “Get your ass on the set.” He was completely out of breath. “The sun’s going down and you got personnel problems.”

“Hey, Paul, I’m not running location, I do the New York office.” I stood up. “Hang on, Rosemary.”

“Something bad’s going down,” he said. He looked away from the bodice of my worn nightgown and drummed his fingers on the rickety bedside table.

I dropped the receiver. “What’s going on?”

“Both those birds look like nervous breakdowns to me,” he said, buckling his belt.

I was pulling my dungarees on under my long flannel nightgown. My hands shook. “Rosemary, I got to go.”

“Better hurry.” She sounded reproachful. “I like my job. Vicky told somebody he’s closing down the New York office.”

“That’s a joke. Ignore it.”

“He was in here twice yesterday, snooping in your memo files.”

“Lock the cabinets. Don’t tell him anything.”

“My lips are sealed,” she said solemnly before I hung up. Paul turned away automatically when I reached into my suitcase for a clean tee shirt. I slammed it shut and fit a dangling bra strap back inside it.

“Anita’s a bitch on wheels today.” Paul was pacing. “I heard her ask him why he wears his loincloth tight like a faggot.”

“But isn’t he trying to take over as director?” I asked.

“Anything’s better than her barking orders,” Paul muttered.

“What did Jack say?” I sat on the suitcase.

“He cursed her out, and crawled the fuck back into his trailer.”

“What a mess, two prima donnas in sore moods. I can’t hold their hands.” I was thinking fast. No time to panic. “I’ve got to get back home to my office. You do the tea and sympathy routine tonight, Paul. I’ll give you stage directions.”

“Just help me now,” he urged. “I’ll lend you my car to get to the airport.” He unwrapped my fingers from the suitcase handle.

“Okay,” I said, letting him carry it, “but in two hours I split.”

We sprinted down smooth purple-veined rocks. I strained my eyes at the movie people scurrying on the sloping dune below me, dwarfed by the huge landscape. They wore dungaree jackets, turtlenecks, and sneakers like a bunch of people loitering on an island beach. But each of them was separate, specific. I watched the gaffer unfolding a silver reflector. The script supervisor sat on a folding chair, writing in the shooting script.

Beyond the miles of sand I saw shadowed mountains and the beginnings of a flaming sunset. “Where is he?” I asked. But Paul had disappeared behind the huge blue camera crane. I spotted a silver trailer; Jack’s dressing room. I sat down on a rock to wait.

The light was superbly bright and clear. No wonder people call it magic hour. I couldn’t look away from the huge bare crosses bathed in the red light. I suddenly remembered how frightened I was as a child of Christian symbols. My Hebrew teacher said the New Testament was dangerous. The eerie crosses reminded me of death. I felt the sadness of things
the way I did at the Martin Luther King parade. Why do people hurt each other? Why do they get angry? The crosses shimmered and I clutched the rock, unnerved. I was crying over the young rabbi and prophet who had faced the destruction coming at him without anger.

Tears ran down my cheeks. I was remembering how my grandmother hugged me and told me to run if kids at nursery school picked on me about being Jewish. “My mother lost her six beautiful brothers in one of their pogroms,” she whispered. “They kill Jews for sport.” I didn’t understand how the mutilated bodies of my young great-uncles in a faraway Russian town came from these empty crosses and what Jesus taught.

I hated it when the Catholic newspaper boy called me “Carol Christ-killer.” It gave me a terrible shamed feeling.
“Bubbe-mysehs,”
my grandmother scoffed, “he’s got it wrong, he was born without a brain.” I was in fifth grade. We lived next to an Irish neighborhood, and I was also ashamed because I was bigger than the newspaper boy, and what if we had killed Jesus? That was probably why everybody else was so angry.

I remember after I read the illustrated pamphlet my mother gave me about sperm and eggs and sexual intercourse how upset I got when I had to sit crammed on the bus next to the soft skirt and thigh of a nun who smelled of strong unperfumed soap. I kept staring at her lap under folds of black skirt. She made me wonder about sex more than any pictures of Elvis or Marilyn Monroe. My mom said nuns wouldn’t kiss a man or have babies or sometimes even show their hands; they were married to Jesus. I was dying to ask this nun if she felt gypped. I had just heard my first dirty joke, and it was about a nun and a candle. I hated the nun’s pasty jowls. I wanted to scream at her to break out of her stupid empty life. I’d never make a mistake like her when I grew up.

My mother turned away when I recited my new dirty joke about the candle. Religion was a secret in my house—I never got a straight answer about why we didn’t belong to a synagogue. My mother sent me to school on Jewish holidays; Catholics were crazy. She said the men drank liquor all day long. She warned me never to look inside the Irish bar near my house. Gentiles got drunk and picked fights and got violent in the middle of the day.

Now I was sitting in the middle of a desert, crying and picturing the nun on her knees, her face radiant, transfixed by belief. My mother thought the nun was a freak, but I want’t thinking like my mother anymore. I didn’t need the old bigotries to make myself strong. I didn’t mind suddenly that by my mother’s standards my life was as crazy as the nun’s. I haven’t had the children or the marriage that lasts forever. But I didn’t dislike the nun or my mother. I felt like the nun and I wasn’t a freak. It made me euphoric. It was a good sign the movie was working on me.

I blew my nose, watching Paul watch a crew member drag a long ladder to the crosses. They were setting up scrims over the lights for the next shot. I smiled to myself; I had to watch out or I’d get carried away by my own movie and convert myself.

Six stakes went up in flames. People moved back from black smoke that billowed up near me and made my eyes smart. I rubbed my eyes, searching the figures on the bare sand hill for a glimpse of Anita or Jack.

Two men started unrolling huge spools of black cable. Anita appeared behind them, poking the cable with her crutch, whispering to her cameraman. She looked up and saw me as she pointed her crutch at a gigantic fan, her white chiffon scarf blowing back at her mouth.

“I’m using a straw filter,” she shouted at me as two men lifted her high up into the seat of the large blue camera crane. “It makes him look like death.”

This was my fantasy in action. She sounded like she was on the track. But according to Paul, the whole project could still blow up in my face. I slid ten feet across the rock. “Good luck,” I shouted, as the crane lowered her down again.

Then I spotted Jack crouched on his bare hands and knees by his silver trailer. Bent under the weight of the cross, wearing only a loincloth, he crawled a few feet up the hill. Again I was mesmerized by the scene. It was silly, I knew it was just him, but I began crying again, feeling foolish, wishing for love that had no anger in it. It was silly to have been angry at Jack for six years.

“You ready?” Anita asked in her most formal voice. Her face was inches away from a gray video screen framing Jack. The screen showed what the camera was shooting.

“Let’s try it.” Jack’s voice sounded insecure floating over the crew. I held my breath. This was it. Chatter died down. The movie ritual had begun. I heard the night wind rising.

An a.c. ran past me holding the slate.

“Camera?” asked Anita.

Somebody sneezed twice.

“Rolling,” said the cameraman sitting high up on the camera crane. A moment went by. Jack waited patiently on all fours.

“Where’s the sticks?” Anita yelped.

The a.c. jumped behind Jack, holding the slate to his face. “Speed,” drawled the sound man, while the a.c. snapped the slate at Jack’s nose, yelling, “
Prophet
, take 1, scene 122.”

The night shooting had begun. I crossed my fingers. Jack crawled forward under his cross, and fell on one elbow. “Stop,” Anita droned without looking up at him from her video monitor. “I need you crawling to marks.”