What Movies Made Me Do (9 page)

“Sure thing,” I lied, grabbing the phone.

“I’m leaving. Walk with you, Sammy?” Michael asked quickly.

“No, I got to talk to Carol.”

Michael’s face crumpled. Then the door chimes rang, and he ran to answer. If it was room service with the champagne, they’d missed the party. Then I heard Rosemary apologizing in the vestibule. “I kept calling, ’cause I got Carol’s appointments for tomorrow morning.”

She appeared, lugging my stuffed briefcase, her eyes asking obvious questions.

“Sit down,” I said, “we’re winding up.”

She stood looking awestruck at Sam.

“Goodbye,” Sam said meaningfully to Michael.

“Talk to you soon, boy.” Michael swung his palms together like a nervous football coach. He gave me a fast Hollywood kiss, buttoned his cashmere topcoat, and then he was gone.

The whole room relaxed with Michael’s exit and a new kind of tension crept in. Sam sprawled back into the couch, opening his legs. Rosemary perched on the coffee table facing him. “You really start directing in college?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re my favorite.”

Sam buried his nose in his coffee cup. He didn’t like me seeing how much he craved this kind of talk. We broke up when I learned he was sleeping with every aspiring starlet within a hundred-mile radius of Houston, where he was shooting a rock horror movie.

“You read
Prophet
?” Rosemary asked him cautiously.

“Yeah, it’s dull.” Sam looked at me pointedly.

Rosemary looked bewildered. But she kept going. “I love your split-screen images.”

I dialed Barry’s telephone. No answer. Then I called his
Princeton laboratory. Then my lobby. The doorman said a doctor waited on the yellow couch for twenty minutes. “Oh, am I in trouble,” I said aloud.

Rosemary rested her chin on both open palms. She was laughing her squeaky chuckle. “I got to get home,” I said to both of them.

“Here’s today’s incoming calls.” She handed me my briefcase.

“Let’s deal with that tomorrow.” I clasped the handle. It was heavier than usual.

“Ahm, Carol, tell Anita, will ya, it’s just business.” Sam sucked on his lips, looking more guilty. “If it wasn’t for my divorce, I wouldn’t touch this project. I got cash-flow problems.”

“Cool it,” I said briskly.

“Carol, I’m sorry.” I heard some of the old feeling in his voice.

I sighed theatrically. “Better you than somebody who didn’t care about me once.”

“I still care about you.”

I am ruthless when I need to be. “Then keep me posted. I need any information I can get.”

“Want to grab some dinner?” he asked, looking at Rosemary out of the corner of his eye.

Rosemary looked at me admiringly.

“Nope, I got to pack a suitcase.”

I patted her head and kissed him goodbye above his beard. I liked him but I had to plot and scheme and use my brain and anything else I had to stop him from taking over in Israel.

Twelve hours later I was in one of a hundred yellow cabs skidding away from icy Manhattan streets. I clapped my tingling hands. This was an adventure. In the international terminal I spotted Rosemary draped across the ticket counter on both elbows, her lower lip stuck way out. “You look like a hippie,” she said without making a move to help me lift my old suitcase to the counter. A smiling clerk began to type my ticket.

“I like traveling like this.”

“Where’d that bag come from?” Rosemary asked after a minute.

“London. I bought it at Harrods on my first trip.”

“It sure looks historical.”

I wrote out my insurance form and wondered if Rosemary would find out how close she came to being a beneficiary of thousands of dollars. It would ruin her life if I perished in the air; all the money would probably make her an instant decadent.

“You better be back in three days,” she said crossly.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to blow anything.”

She shook her head and looked down at the floor. “Michael’s trying to fire you.” She was twisting the string handles of her shopping bag filled with screenplays for me to
read on the plane. “He told some agent yesterday on the phone while you were in the bathroom.”

“Arnie?”

“Yeah.”

My heart hammered. “What did he tell him?”

“That he was sending you to Israel to position you.”

In agent talk that meant I was going to fire Anita and then be in line to be fired for the failure.

“I guess that’s what he thinks he’s doing.” I started grinding my teeth.

“Yeah.” She kept shaking her head and looking down at the floor, chewing her lip.

“Rosemary, you okay?”

“I’m scared he’ll fire you, and then what happens to me?”

“You’re in great shape. Worse comes to worst, you get another job at the company or I take you with me on my next job.”

I didn’t say that nobody would hire me to make movies after this messy public defeat.

She raised her head. “Then why are you so freaked?”

“I hate long trips,” I lied, jamming my ticket into my bag, “and my God, I just remembered. I want you to keep calling Barry’s lab today. I missed him last night. I bet he took it off the hook. Tell him I left, and I tried to call him.”

Rosemary nodded. “The usual fight?”

“No, this time
I
want to break up.”

She groaned sympathetically.

“I hope Rocky doesn’t get into trouble,” I said. She was taking care of him at my house.

“I got a lady poodle lined up.” She smiled finally. “I hope he does.” She hesitated. “Does Sam Falco have a girlfriend?”

“He’s getting over his marriage breakup,” I said, trying to read her expression. “He’s playing the field.”

She handed me the bulging yellow shopping bag. “I got you two guidebooks in case you go exploring with
somebody.
”

“Somebody?” I lifted the bag of screenplays.

“Jack, of course.”

“Don’t be silly.” I tried to control a secret delight. I couldn’t wait to see the admiring look on his face when I marched onto the set.

She was skimming pages of notes. “Here’s what I typed at six a.m. It’s a list of everybody on the payroll there, their credits, the crew, the cast, and those documentary boys from NYU film school making the movie about Anita making the movie. Here’s the latest production reports. I see she hired her mom for a week as a location scout.”

A woman on the loudspeaker began announcing the transatlantic flights, ending with my Tel Aviv flight that stopped in Paris. I felt a burst of elation, headed for adventure. Rosemary pulled more typed pages out of a manila envelope. “Here’s all the interoffice memos. Requests for dry ice, balloons, purple parrots, plus her contract. You better read it.”

We were running to the departure gate. “I better pray a lot.”

“Work on your attitude,” she said, smacking my back. I waved once from the airplane ramp. The stewardess took my boarding pass. I felt bad watching Rosemary squint up at me. I had been so busy worrying about my own peace of mind I had negelcted to notice hers.

I decided to fast to avoid jet lag. Drinking water, worrying over my mission, and reading Anita’s production reports, I finally fell asleep jammed against the thick airplane window. I was girding my loins for a power struggle with my oldest and best friend.

When we landed at Orly, I wandered past the duty-free shop and remembered Marilyn Monroe gushing in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
: “Pardon me, is this the way to Europe, France?”

The other El Al passengers were wealthy Arabs in fitted Italian suits except for my old review editor at
The New York Times.
When I lurched past him on the way to the door marked “Femmes” he peered over his half-glasses. “Kiddo, what are you up to?”

“Secret business, Ronald. And you?”

“My son took a house in the Jordan Valley. I had a couple of days coming to me. He’s paying the rent.

“Come sit,” he added. He looked the worse for wear in a crumpled cotton suit and loose tie. The glasses magnified his melancholy green eyes. He had been my first editor in New York and I worshipped him. These days we meet for deli lunches and I try to make him smile. He prefers pining after William Carlos Williams.

I saw he was writing a poem on a yellow legal pad.

“More bureaucratic despair?” I slid past his knees to the window seat.

He nodded. He had written a passionate short book of poems about the life of an office worker yearning for heroism. He wrote late at night under the influence of searing straight bourbon. By day he stood by his cluttered desk and babied writers on the phone, crossed out their words, tending to literary and movie tradition, and playing office politics.

“I’ve been saying Kaddish for my father,” Ronald said, clicking his ballpoint pen, “ever since my mother called from Florida to tell me I’m fifty-five and a failure.”

“You’ll turn it into a great poem,” I said, touched.

He pulled at the oriental tuft of gray hairs at his chin. “You look tense. It’s the job, no?”

I lowered my shoulders. “Could be.”

“When you get tired of the crap, come see me.”

“What for?”

“I can toss you a free-lance movie review.”

“I’m no starving critic. I’m making a serious religious movie where finally Jesus will be somebody Jews can identify with.”

“This too shall pass.” He began to draw circles with his pen. I laughed and inched past his knees to the aisle. Nobody was banking on my future in the movie business.

Wide-angle camera tracks Arab boy with bare chest skipping along black tarmac past small airplane. Sky is blinding, unreal blue.

The pure desert heat sucked my breath. I jumped out of the yellow plane elated to be back in Israel even if it was just this little sand island off Tel Aviv. Around the airstrip loomed a row of ancient granite houses. They looked sacred and from another world, but it felt like I was coming home.

Inside the cement airport office, our production manager, Paul Riley, was waving a bare arm at me. He sat at a green Formica car rental counter eating plump black olives next to an old man in a white turban. I waved back, feeling my face stretch into a huge smile, my taste buds tingling.

“What brings you here?” I asked, dragging my suitcase to him. I was happy for the breeze from the laboring air conditioner.

“Your secretary phoned and we’re not shooting for another hour at least,” he said, pulling me against his damp tee shirt.

“You going native?” I asked, surveying his thong sandals, the white rag around his forehead, and khaki shorts.

“It’s my location outfit,” he said, reaching for my suitcase
handle. I didn’t let it go. “Carry it yourself, it’s too hot to fight another broad,” and he strode away, his sandals slapping the cement floor. My jaw dropped; he had lost patience with Anita, too.

I caught up with him at the door and relinquished the suitcase.

“I hear Michael sent you to give us the ax.” He looked worried.

“Nobody’s shutting anything down. He sent me to play Henry Kissinger.”

He sighed with disbelief. He’s been lied to a lot by people with jobs like mine. It was 6 a.m. and the street was silent. He spoke over his shoulder. “Two weeks ago, I’d say you had a shot.” He turned into a shadowed alley.

“And now?”

I peered up at a slit window in one massive stone house. I had a weird impulse to knock on doors and ask some local person for advice about how I should live out the rest of my life.

“Why should Jack let Anita walk all over him?” Poor Paul was really mad at himself—the studio’s cop on the movie, Anita had made a fool out of him.

Inside the heated car, he turned the motor.

“The two of them speaking?” I asked as we passed sun-bleached gravestones behind a mosque that looked thousands of years old, overrun by tall purple sage. I recognized a setting for one of her miracle scenes.

“Nope, he won’t come out of his place.”

“Whose fault is it, do you think?”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “She’s a ballbuster and he’s a self-indulgent brat.”

“Who started it?”

He shrugged. “It’s chemistry.”

“Sounds like sex.” My heart hammered like a silly girl’s.

“More the opposite.” He grinned. “Those two couldn’t mate if the species depended on it.”

Then he changed the subject. “Israeli since 1982.” He waved a hand at the uninhabited sand hills. I kept looking at them. They cleaned out my mind. They loomed huge and shone white. I licked salt off my upper lip and inhaled the fragrant air like a newborn baby. My hair blew all over.

I lay my head back on the warm seat and rubbed my eyes at the miles of dazzling sunstruck dunes. “You talk to Michael?” I asked.

Paul shifted gears with a terrible crunch. “When he calls, I pretend I got a bad connection and hang up on him. Been ducking studio executives with that one for years.” He grinned again. I liked the flash of his gold fillings.

The car smelled of gasoline and Paul’s working sweat. My neck ached. I needed a cold drink of water. Back home, nobody besides Rosemary knew I was speeding into this valley. I dropped my forehead in my hands. My head was spinning slowly, like the tilted metal globe in my parents’ house with the orange mass marked Israel in the blue sea and the small yellow thing near it that was now bleached by hot sun. Our tires shot loose stones off the dirt road as we descended into a valley of bright rippling sand.

I put my head on my knee. A minute later he touched my wrist. I sat up, my eyes blurring black.

“You tell Anita I’m coming?”

“Nah, you need the element of surprise.” He pointed beyond the bright sand dunes at something like a huge mirror. It was a piece of the sea.

“Buck up, don’t hide your face,” he said. I smiled weakly, crossed my fingers, and held down my flyaway hair. My ears clicked. We spun downhill past miles of dunes toward distant shadows of mountains that looked like uneven line drawings sketched by a child. The landscape looked big and
empty and old. Everywhere I looked I pictured Bible patriarchs. I had to hand it to Anita. It would make a magical film.

“Any more local problems?” I asked.