What Movies Made Me Do (3 page)

Then I waved goodbye while her cape sucked wind on a runway at Kennedy Airport. She was deep into pre-production—studying Renaissance paintings and screening Bresson and Rossellini’s religious stuff. She had filled two cargo planes with old American movies on cassettes, hundreds of paperbacks, props, new German computerized cameras with video screens, and cartons of diet Dr Pepper. We made a deal with the Israeli government to shoot exteriors in the Old City of Jerusalem and do half of the principal photography on a small desert island off Tel Aviv where we restored an ancient Roman town.

We had 251 people going over, including actors, crew, her mother, and two gifted young documentary-film makers who were in love with her and set to shoot a movie about her making a movie. The last I saw of her she was climbing the steps to her airplane blowing kisses and waving a green champagne bottle. While I snapped her picture with my old Rolleiflex, she kept shouting, “Bon voyage, Carol Young.”

Now I watched Barry pull three dollar bills out of his wallet. I was insanely jealous of Anita; I was dying to go to Israel. “Is dinner expensive?” I asked, trying to remember what my first meal here cost.

Barry laughed bitterly. “Why can’t you let me play the man? You want all the marbles—a woman’s vanity and a man’s control.” His moist eyes searched my face while he threw a new hundred-dollar bill on the pile. I reached out both arms, smoothing his hair. “Barry, let’s go home and try to hug.”

His words came out in a singsong. “We have big problems and you won’t face them.”

I clucked my tongue. He was always in pain. He loved fighting—it was sexy for him—but he was wearing me out.

“Barry, I love you, it’s my goddamn birthday, can’t you table your injuries?”

“Be kind to yourself,” he said in his martyred voice. Two red spots of anger stood out on his cheeks.

Then he stood up, trying to compose his face. He kept smoothing his lapels, working up his anger.

“Please don’t walk out, Barry. If you do, we’re finished.”

He faced the front of the restaurant. He looked terrified, squaring his shoulders. He rushed past the maître d’ without seeing his outstretched hand. I felt like wailing like a deserted baby. I twisted to watch him push open the brass front door.

The waiter hovered over the cash pile. “That’s it, m’dame?” he asked in Haitian-accented French. I slumped down in my seat, wanting to run out and throw my arms around Barry’s tense shoulders. Sometimes I shake him and shout how I love him, until he laughs at the silly spectacle we make.

But tonight was different. Dammit, it was my fortieth birthday. I wiped my mouth. I was too old for this. My heart pounded. I knew he was headed for a late-night chat with his wife over their former kitchen table. My stomach hurt.

The waiter wheeled the dessert cart, and the swirling creams and fruit tarts twinkled at me. I raised my head—I am a Hershey bar addict. “Chocolate mousse.” Nothing kills my appetite. The waiter fluttered his hands. “Enjoy.” He smiled.

Years ago, I’d have been humiliated by Barry’s exit. I closed my eyes, sighing as the chocolate dissolved on my tongue. Heavenly.

I licked my spoon and deposited another bill on Barry’s pile. I could hop a cab and be waiting in his lobby. But I realized I didn’t want to. I was tired of his fights. I was tired of admiring his mind and feeling unnurtured. I retrieved my briefcase and raccoon coat and went to the ladies’ room. The black tile walls glistened. I changed into my sneakers, avoiding my eyes in the smoked mirror.

Happy birthday, baby, I told myself, as the chilling street air and wet snowflakes hit my face. I turned home, my knees aching, the end of a sugar rush from the mousse. Barry and I weren’t going to make it. Dammit, why should I bind my feet for him? The good parts weren’t worth the fights. He’ll never understand me, even though he’s got such a fancy mind. In fact, he’s a glamorous movie star of an intellectual.

I pick the wrong men. I’m doing something wrong. My whole life I’ve been running after glamour. Barry dazzles my mind, but he’s a one-man band. As with my other former beaux, I let him pick me, he was so persuasive. I didn’t have to decide anything.

But years ago I did propose—to my high school sweetheart—and we lasted ten years.

Since then, I win the award for the fascinating monster collection. Before Barry was Sam Falco, a demonic movie director more charismatic than a football hero, and great on the seduction. Alas, his attention span is short—unless a three-picture deal is riding on it. I did pick up superb career management during the year we lived together.

I stared at wilting pink azalea blossoms in a flower shop. Forty years old and time is passing. No time left to build a family. Face it, when I got divorced I traded away a shared personal life for ambition. But ambition is like cotton candy—it
looks pretty and huge until you take a bite. I dashed past several men waiting for the red light to change. I saw myself on my sixty-fifth birthday, bent over, skinny, in black sneakers and with a long cane, teetering all alone into that fancy French restaurant. Of course I’d be welcome. The waiter would grasp my arm and tears would spring to my eyes then too; nobody will have hugged me for months.

I suddenly saw my life with a beginning, middle, and end, like a good shooting script. I broke into a run at the last traffic light, making it across in front of two accelerating trucks. Snowflakes stuck to my raccoon coat.

Now I walked into a snow flurry and onto Central Park South, as usual the only respectable solitary woman on the sidewalk. I was three canopies from my own. I missed Anita. I missed my project. And now something was wrong. She always takes my calls.

I sighed as I entered my austere lobby. Suddenly I didn’t want to take the elevator up the sixteen floors. No kids, no husband at home waiting to shout happy birthday. Am I a biological failure? I buried all my lonely feelings for the last decade because my marriage breakup hurt so badly. Maybe I actually became a tough cookie.

I turned the key to my front door, and in the dark I smelled fresh laundry and felt better. Rocky, my three-and-a-half-foot woolly standard poodle, hurled himself in welcome. I dropped my briefcase to the marble floor and scratched his throat while his tongue lolled out of one side of his grinning, loony mouth. Rocky, who was named for the box-office sleeper I knew would succeed, galloped into the kitchen. I felt along the butcher-block counter for his treat box. Then the satisfying sound of his teeth crunching his birthday biscuit.

I walked slowly into my warm living room, savoring the wood and marble floors glistening with reflected skylight, the outlines of large plants, everything in its place. I am a woman
of experience working for a living in New York. I am capable of great solitude. I am almost never bored. Everybody thinks I’m sophisticated. Until tonight it was fine. John Wayne wouldn’t cry. Bette Davis would lift her head proudly while the homecoming music swelled.

I leaned against a leafy Flemish tapestry woven by young girls centuries ago for dowries. I looked out the big windows at the snow-filled gray north sky. Look, you have had a great life, I said aloud. I have sailed in gentile yacht races. I work for a major Hollywood studio. I have heard complaints more interesting than novels from other women’s husbands. But I am no longer young. I am no longer the Bryn Mawr scholarship student, the virgin bride of a college English teacher, the awed Philadelphian determined to make it in Manhattan.

In the bedroom I slipped on my flannel nightgown and then slid under the heavy covers wiggling my toes. It’s taken years to get the room this cozy the way I like it, soft and inviting in the dim streetlight. Rocky jumped up on all fours. He turned in concentric circles until he nested at my feet, his head resting on my ankles, his tail wagging. “We still got each other,” I said, switching off the lamp, closing my eyes, listening to my rushing uneven heartbeat.

Panicked, I fell asleep and began dreaming I was trapped inside a satin-lined coffin. I poked my finger at my eye, but it passed through the flapping skin of my eyelid into my empty skull—my brain had rotted away.

A ringing jarred me awake. Gulping air in the dark, I grabbed at the phone.

The operator announced Jack Hanscomb with tight Hebrew vowels, and then a man’s voice burst on the line. My throat closed with shock.

“Hey, Carol, you sleeping?” he whispered, his voice sweet and cocky like he was lying in bed next to me.

“Not anymore. Why are you calling me?” I was shaking. Rocky put his cold nose in my palm.

“I hear you never wear miniskirts anymore.”

“That was years ago,” I said, trying to wake up. “How’s it going? You steam up the camera today?”

“You alone?”

“Yeah, and I’m scared.”

“You’re allowed to be scared in the middle of the night,” he said in a soothing voice.

I must be dreaming. Jack had called me twice in the office to complain politely about Anita, but he doesn’t call me at home. It had to be serious. I flashed back to the one-night stand we had six years ago, the night my marriage broke up, when I spotted him and tailed him up Madison Avenue like a nut. I remember how he lifted my ankle to my shoulder, my knee huge and white next to his famous face. I barely felt the friction between my legs. I’m leery of him even now. He’s a huge movie star, the Prince of Charm. A real wild card.

“Good thing you’re human,” he was saying. “I can’t stand those modern women who never flinch.”

“I had a nightmare.” Fear flooded my chest and I sat up, hugging my knees and rocking in my nightgown. I held my breath, clutching the phone. “I dreamed I was dead. I felt like a vegetable that didn’t exist.”

“Nightmares make you appreciate life in daylight.” He sounded like he was speaking from experience.

“I’m talking like a refugee from an Ingmar Bergman movie.”

“Yeah, his characters are always dreaming their own funerals.”

“Never meant much to me before,” I said, perking up.

“Whistle something,” he commanded.

“No.”

“Come on, it’ll distract you.”

Then over the instrument I heard the beginning of a song from
The King and I
, “Whistle a Happy Tune.” He whistled with vibrato: “whenever I feel afraid …” It was silly, and a
little California, but I smiled in the dark and pursed my lips. As I joined in for the second verse, Rocky leapt up, cocked his ears, and left. I felt better, whistling: “…  convinces me that I’m not afraid.”

I turned on the light, squinting at the framed photograph of Jack Hanscomb standing behind me at a studio party.

“You under the covers?”

My whole body flushed. He played seduction games like other people did crossword puzzles. “I’m in bed. Where are you?”

“What are you wearing?”

“My nightgown.”

“I wish I was there right now,” his voice teased me, “but I bet it’s cold.”

“Why are you calling? More problems on the set?”

“Is it all buttoned up?”

“No, the buttons got lost in the washing machine years ago.” I tried to sound annoyed. “What are you wearing?”

“I’m lying in the sun and I’m so
hot
I can’t stand it.”

“Don’t talk funny,” I snapped. Sometimes he sounds like a cheap vamp. I forget that when I spin fantasies.

“No kidding,” he said slowly. “I’d like to see you in the sun.”

“Yeah, sitting on the beach watching you get tan.”

“You still sound sad.” The bullshit was gone. Thirty seconds of silence went by.

“I hear you’re knocking them dead at the studio,” he said.

“It’s not about my job.”

“What else do you want?”

“I don’t know. I’m scared I’m off the track.”

“Well,” he sighed, “I always meant to have some loving people in my corner. I just don’t know where the time has gone.”

“You got it made,” I said, putting on my glasses so I
could really see the photograph of him. He was wearing horn-rims, laughing, and flicking a milk mustache off his upper lip. He gave off light. It was the big gala the studio threw when they hired me five years ago.

“How awake are you?” He sounded more anxious.

I was stretching and pointing my toes. “You do a great wake-up call.”

“Good, because we got bad problems with our picture.”

I punched a pillow. It was a goddamn business call after all. This birthday was the worst.

“You see dailies?” he asked.

“I see a weekly reel.”

“You didn’t happen to notice I’m not in the movie anymore?”

“Well, she
has
been shooting around you.”

He snorted. “I ask her not to wear red on the set, it’s bad luck for me. She wears nothing but. Your girlfriend Anita’s flipped out.”

My pulse pounded. Jack Hanscomb was the star; he got his way, or else. But nobody could tell Anita what to do. “She’s trying too hard to be the boss,” I said.

“She’s stoned every day.” He sounded stern.

“She has a steel psyche.”

“She never gets crazy?”

“Nope,” I lied. “What else’s going on?”

“It’s been six weeks of hell,” he said shortly. “She tell you she’s rewriting the script?”

I groaned. She hadn’t said a word. “Sure, sure, I’ll talk to her.”

“Too late, kiddo, you got two hundred and fifty people sitting around doing nothing.”

“What?”

“I’m telling you, Anita’s gone off the set, and I’m not hanging around here anymore.”

“How long has she been away?”

“Forty hours.”

I gasped. No wonder I couldn’t reach her. Our production manager never bothered to tell me; he was probably covering up. His first lady director, Anita, had him dazzled. If I found out nobody was working, it was my job to move in and try to save as much money as I could. But Anita was a professional. Unless she was playing some weird power game, she’d drag herself to the set if she was bleeding to death.

“Anita’s hurt?” I’d never forgive myself if something happened to her.

“For all I know, she’s lying in a dune with her neck broken.”

“Don’t say that.”

I jerked the telephone cord and the whole instrument clattered to the floor. Rocky came bounding back into the bedroom, his dinner bowl between his teeth. He was mixed up, poor dog. All this chatter, he thought it was time for his morning kibble.