How It Ended: New and Collected Stories (33 page)

A chilly truce prevailed through the afternoon. He trimmed the boxwoods, something he'd been promising to do for two weeks, and later took her to the Barnes & Noble at the mall, where she picked up a book called
Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy
.

That night, they sat in the den together and watched
The Sopranos
and then
The Tudors
, a ritual that suddenly seemed fraught with peril. Carly tended to take her movies and TV shows very personally, to generalize the behavior of individual characters. As a married man, Bryce didn't want to be represented by Tony Soprano and Henry VIII. When Tony had been sleeping with the Russian babe back in season three, Bryce somehow got blamed for Tony's behavior. “You guys are just slaves to your dicks,” she said. And, yes, okay, he'd been guilty as charged back then. Fortunately, Tony wasn't screwing anyone this week, although, astonishingly, he killed his nephew Christopher.

“I can't believe he did that,” Bryce said. “I mean, how could he do that?”

“He was a hopeless drug addict,” Carly said.

“Well, yeah, but still.”

“Not to mention a cold-blooded killer.”

“I guess.”

Bryce was comfortable dealing with the major crimes and mortal sins of others. He tried to remember whether adultery was a mortal sin.
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife
. It didn't seem like it should be right up there with murder. Carly didn't have much to say about Tony's latest offense, but she pitched a fit when Daisy jumped up on Bryce's lap. “Get her away from me!” Under normal circumstances, Bryce might've stuck up for his cat, but tonight he put her outside without protest.

Shortly after Anne Boleyn professed to be insulted by Henry's offer to make her his one and only royal squeeze, Carly said she was going to the kitchen to get a snack. Bryce said he'd see her upstairs.

He raced through his ablutions in the master bath and managed to slip between the sheets and pick up his book before she ascended the stairs. For a moment, as she paused in the bedroom doorway, he was certain she would challenge his presence there, but when he finally allowed himself to look up from his book, she was standing in front of the mirror, rubbing her belly and observing her reflected image, as if trying to verify and fathom the great mystery of her condition.

Ten minutes later she climbed ponderously into the bed beside him. “I can't have Daisy dragging mice and birds all through the house in my condition,” she said.

“She's a cat,” he said. “That's what cats do.”

“I can't have it.”

“Maybe we can keep her inside for the next few months.”

“No,” she said. “She has to go.”

“Go?”

“I'm having a baby, in case you haven't noticed.”

“You want me to give her away? She's been with me for ten years.”

“She's had a good life. You said yourself she's getting old. Didn't the vet just tell you she had arthritis?”

“You want me to put her down?” He could hardly believe it. But when he looked over at her, her face had a hard glaze of implacability, with which he was all too familiar.

“I don't think this is too much to ask when I'm carrying your child.”

“Maybe I could find a home for her.”

“If you can't do this one thing for me, after what you've put me through …”

Seeing the tears welling in her eyes, he realized she was serious and he understood that it would not be enough to find another home for Daisy. “Don't cry,” he said, sliding across the bed to take her in his arms. She tried to pull away, but eventually she buried her head in his shoulder, sobbing inconsolably.

He could have tried to find a home for her—that was what haunted him later. But he was genuinely sorry for his betrayal and felt bound to honor Carly's wish, cruel and unnecessary though it seemed to him. This, apparently, was the price of his transgression.

He postponed it a few days in the hopes that Carly might soften, but he could feel the tension whenever Daisy entered the room, and then again at bedtime. After he found a baby chipmunk in the hallway, he called and made an appointment for the following day.

He gave his name to Susanna, the vet's receptionist, a freckled blonde, whose normally bouncy manner was appropriately subdued on this occasion; it was she who'd given Bryce the appointment after he'd explained its purpose.

Despite his previous diagnosis of arthritis, the vet was somewhat reluctant. “We've been getting good results with glucosamine,” he said. “Unless you think she's been suffering.”

“I really think it would be best,” Bryce said.

Given the choice, he opted to stay with Daisy and hold her to the end. The vet shaved a patch of fur on her foreleg before injecting her. Bryce would never forget the way she looked at him as the vet inserted the needle into her vein. She hissed in protest and tried to squirm out of his grasp, as if she knew what was about to happen. It was over in seconds. Daisy relaxed in his arms as the light faded from her eyes. He felt her exhale and then she was suddenly heavier in his arms.

The vet excused himself and told Bryce he'd give him time to regain his composure.

A few minutes later, Susanna came in, opening the door gingerly and tiptoeing forward. “I know how hard it is,” she said, placing a hand on his cheek and wiping the tears away. “I went through it myself last year.”

That night, Carly made love to him for the first time in weeks. As bad as he felt about Daisy, he believed that he had atoned for his transgression and righted the imbalance between them. After all that had happened, they were tentative and tender with each other, and he woke up the next morning feeling as if they had weathered their crisis. He was certain that with time he would forget about the grim transaction. But in fact, as Carly grew larger with their baby, his sense of injustice and of guilt about his own cowardly acquiescence seemed to intensify. Sometimes when they were watching television and she would rub his hand over her belly, he would wonder why he couldn't have found a home for Daisy, why Carly'd been so brutal as to close off that option. What kind of a person was he married to? Hell, he could have asked Julie to take the cat. His anger toward her had faded in recent weeks, and he had to resist the urge to call.

For years, even before she was pregnant and had the excuse of hormones, Bryce had lived in fear of his wife's dark moods, but now he found himself losing patience with her complaints and her piques. “Jesus Christ, you'd think you were the first person to have a baby,” he snapped one day after she moaned yet again about her swollen ankles.

He waited until after the baby was born to call Susanna, from the vet's office, who'd given him her number that day.

2007

The Business

I'd heard all the jokes before I moved out here. But still, you think Hollywood will be different for you. You say to yourself, Sure it's a jungle, but I'm Dr. Livingstone.

I graduated from Columbia with a degree in English lit and went to work for a newspaper in Bergen County, just across the river from Manhattan, keeping my cheap apartment on West 111th Street, where I lived with my girlfriend. My thesis was a poststructuralist analysis of film adaptations of major American novels, and within a year I'd wangled the job of movie reviewer and entertainment reporter. I love the movies, always have. The idea of being a screenwriter came to me during a group interview with a writer-director who was in Manhattan flacking for his new picture. It wasn't the fact that he didn't seem particularly bright, or that he made his ascent sound so haphazard and effortless, but something more visceral—the way he looked sitting there smoking a cigarette with the light coming through the window of the fortieth-floor corporate tower. I could see the pores in his skin and the stubble of his beard, and there was something green stuck between two of his teeth. And I suddenly thought, That could be me sitting there with two days' growth and a green thing on my teeth.

I didn't quit my job that day or anything, but I did start writing screenplays, renting films I loved and studying their structure, thinking about what they had in common. I was abetted in this by my aunt Alexis, who once had been a contract player at Paramount. She'd been in a couple of Westerns with John Wayne and was briefly married to a director. After the divorce she moved to New York; the director had made her quit the movies, she said, and it was too late to go back, but she still talked as if she were a member of a warm extended family called “the business.” She claimed as friends some relatively famous folks, and she read
Variety and
the
Hollywood Reporter
faithfully. I knew from our actual family that she'd been somewhat badly used out there, but she wasn't bitter. Now she gave acting lessons and occasionally did community theater. When I moved to New York, she more or less adopted me. My parents were divorced, receding into the orange sunsets of Arizona and Florida, respectively.

Alexis lived in faded elegance in a grand prewar building over near Sutton Place, a duplex she'd occupied for years, the first couple with her third husband, and which she couldn't have afforded if not for rent control. Even with a severely depressed rent, she'd had to sublet the more luxurious lower floor, which was separated by two doors from her own quarters upstairs. The centerpiece of the downstairs apartment was a spectacular canopy bed replete with rose-colored chintz drapery. Alexis herself slept in the upstairs parlor on a pullout sofa. The lower floor was occupied by the manager of a rock group, who was burning holes in all the upholstery. Alexis knew because she sneaked down and snooped around whenever he wasn't home.

Alexis encouraged my screenwriting ambitions and read my earliest attempts. She also provided the only good advice I've ever gotten on the subject. “Dalton Trumbo once told me the secret of a screenplay,” she said, mixing herself a Negroni in the closet that served her as kitchen, pantry and bar. At six in the evening the dying light was slicing through the mullioned windows at a forty-five-degree angle—that second-to-last light thick and yellow with doomed bravado—and making the dust swimming through the apartment seem like movie mist. “He was a lovely man, much misunderstood. That McCarthy stuff—terrible. But as I was starting to say, Dalton said to me one night—I think we were at the Selznicks'—and I said,‘Dalton, what's your secret?’ and he whispered something in my ear, which I won't repeat. I gave him a little slap on the wrist, not that I really minded. I was flattered and told him so, but I was still married to the fag—before I found out, of course. So I said to Dalton,‘No, no, what's the secret of a great
screenplay?’
And he said,‘It's very simple, Lex. Three acts: first act, get man up tree; second act, shake a stick at him; third act, get him down.’”

When she was really in her cups, Alexis told me she'd call Swifty Lazar or some other great friend of hers and fix me up, the exquisitely carved syllables of her trained speech softening, liquefying like the cubes in her glass. But the fact is, she didn't have any juice in the industry. I didn't mind. I eventually landed an agent on my own, at which point I figured it was time to make the leap of faith. Plus, my girlfriend announced that she was in love with my best friend and that they'd been sleeping together for six months.

I sublet my apartment and rented a place in Venice, three blocks from the beach. This was in February, and I loved exchanging the frozen, crusty city for a place smelling of flowers and the ocean. At the same time, more than anywhere else in Southern California, Venice reminded me of New York, with its general shabbiness. There were plenty of bums, just so I wouldn't get too homesick, and the crime rate was also pretty impressive. But basically I felt the same way about California that Keats did about Chapman's Homer. I quit smoking, ate plenty of fruit and vegetables, started sleeping regular hours.

One thing I didn't do was rush out to join AA, which was just then becoming really hip. If I had, I probably would've met some girls. But I was still under the thrall of the writer-as-holy-lush idea. Who could imagine Raymond Chandler sober? One of my favorite stories involved Joseph Mankiewicz, the other genius behind
Citizen Kane
, who arrived drunk one night—not uncharacteristically—at an elaborate A-list dinner party. He then got drunker, and finally evacuated the contents of his stomach all over the table. As the other guests looked on, horrified, Mankiewicz turned to his hostess and said, “Don't worry—the white wine came up with the fish.”

In Venice, my second-story studio had a little terrace off the back. I'd wake up early most mornings and take my computer out there, overlooking a tiny courtyard choked with cacti, palms and flowering bushes. Having grown up in the intemperate zones, I'm still a little thrilled by the sight of a palm tree. My landlady believed that nature should be allowed to take its course and she just let it all grow. The couple across the way believed in nature, too; they fucked at all hours with the shades up, and I couldn't help seeing them, usually her bobbing up and down on top of him, facing me. I guess she was performing. Maybe she thought I was a casting director. … Anyway, I appreciated it, since that was as close as I was getting to carnal knowledge.

My second screenplay opens with this very long scene, close on couple making love, girl on top, camera pulling back out the window, reverse angle on the guy watching from his terrace. Eventually, the girl and the guy on the terrace—a writer, of course—meet and have this incredible affair. She decides to leave her boyfriend, but of course he turns out to be a coke dealer involved with some very heavy Colombians, and the girl knows enough about the gang to implicate them in a murder. Except she doesn't realize it until …

Believe it or not, this screenplay attracted the interest of a fairly important producer. That was when I first met Danny Brode. The producer had a first-look deal with the studio where Brode was the new vice president of production. The meeting Brode scheduled for me was my first with a studio executive. I spent about three hours that morning trying to figure out what to wear and whether to shave. Finally I shaved and put on a white shirt, tie, blazer and jeans. Brode made me wait an hour, and when I was ushered into his dazzling white office, he shook my hand and said, “What, you got a funeral or a wedding today?” When I looked baffled, he said, “The tie, dude.” So I knew I'd worn the wrong thing, and knew he knew I'd worn the tie for him.

Brode was wearing jeans and a work shirt that barely held him in. Standing about five six, the man weighed three hundred if he weighed an ounce. He had D-cup cheeks, and his chin would've made another man's potbelly. Not exactly the guy to be handing out advice on appearances. Anyway, he told me he'd been running late all day and had to drive out to the Valley to check on a film in postproduction, and asked if we could take the meeting in his car.

We went out to the parking lot and got in his car, which was this four-door Maserati sedan. I didn't even know Maserati made sedans, but I figured Brode was too big to drive around in one of the sports models. On the drive out to the Valley, he spent most of the time on his car phone, but in between he listened as I pitched like crazy. Finally he said, “Instead of a writer, how about if this guy's an artist? We move the thing from Venice to San Francisco, and he's got a humongous studio filled with canvases—and right out the window he sees the couple screwing. The art thing's very hot right now, and this way we'll get a lot more visuals.” I don't know, I probably would've made him into a female impersonator. I was dying to get into the game, my savings were exhausted, my Subaru needed new brakes and I had yet to meet a girl who wanted to go out to dinner with an unemployed screenwriter. My ex-best friend had just written to say he and my ex-girlfriend were getting married and that he hoped I didn't have any hard feelings. After pretending to think deeply about Brode's suggestion for a minute, I said, “I like it. I think I could make it work.”

He dropped me at the gate of the soundstage and gave me a business card from a car service. “We'll work it out with your agent.” I stood around baking in the sun for an hour before the car finally came to take me back to the studio. That night I bought a bottle of Spanish bubbly, which I knocked back on the terrace while my neighbors traded orgasms.

I called Alexis in New York, and she told me that I was part of the big family. We talked for an hour, and for once I believe I matched her drink for drink. Then I thought about calling my old girlfriend, imagining her chagrin when she realized what she'd given up, but passed out instead.

“Martin, babe, I'm going to make you a rich man,” my agent told me a week later. She'd grown up on Long Island and had been out here only a couple years, but she talked just like something out of
What Makes Sammy Run?
They must give you a copy at LAX or something, I don't know why I never got mine.

The deal was two drafts, plus revisions at scale, which, if not a fortune, was more money than I'd made in a year at the newspaper. And I was thrilled to have a foot in the door. “Danny Brode's really big,” my agent said without a trace of irony. “That man is going places, and he can take you with him.”

“I don't feel like going to the fat farm,” I said.

“You better start watching your mouth around this town,” my agent said. “It's a small community, and if you want to be part of it, you've got to play by the rules. Bill Goldman and Bob Towne can afford to be smartasses, but you can't.”

“Could you send me a list of these rules?” I was so happy, I couldn't help being full of myself. The next week she took me to lunch at Spago and introduced me to several people she described as “important players,” calling me “Martin Brooks, the writer.”

Then I started writing the draft that would transform my hero into a painter. I flew up to San Francisco for atmosphere, talked to gallery owners and artists. Just dropping the studio's name opened doors, and I implied that a major star was interested in the lead. Back home I was able to get an interview with an LAPD narcotics detective, who filled me in on the inner workings of the drug cartels.

Ten weeks after the papers were signed, I handed in my new draft. The next day I got a FedEx package with Danny Brode's card attached to a bottle of Cristal. Only his name—no title, studio, address or phone number—was printed on the card.
Danny Brode
. No need to wear a tie around here. Anyway, drinking that bottle of Cristal was the high point of the whole experience.

The hangover set in a couple weeks later, when my agent called. “Basically they're thrilled with the script. Ecstatic. But they want to talk to you about a couple of little changes.”

“No problem,” I said. “We're contracted for two drafts, right? I mean, I make another ten grand or so for a rewrite.”

“Don't worry your genius brain about it. Just take the meeting and we'll see what they want.”

What they wanted was a completely different story. Having fallen in love with his idea of the art-world backdrop, Brode now wanted a movie about how commerce corrupts artists. Columbia had an art project in development, and he was determined to beat its release. We could keep the drug element—the big-shot gallery owner was also involved in the coke trade. I sat in Brode's huge white office, trying to figure out where the white walls ended and the white leather furniture began, trying to see the virtues of this new story and to recognize some shred of my own script.

Nodding like an idiot, I practically called him a genius and said I didn't know why I hadn't seen all this potential in the first place. Back home, though, I called my agent and screamed at her about the stupidity of studio executives and the way art was corrupted by commerce. She listened patiently. Finally I concluded, “Well, at least I get paid to be a whore.”

She said, “Try to pick out the virtues in his concept. I'll work on the money.”

“What do you mean,‘work on the money’? It's in the contract.”

“Of course,” she said.

I sat down again and tried to be professional about the whole thing, which is to say I tried not to give a shit. Three weeks later I delivered the new draft. I'd just bought a new car, a little Beamer, with my first check. When my agent called one morning to talk about another project, I said, “When do I get paid for my second draft?”

“We're calling that a polish instead of a draft.”

“A
polish?
It was a
whole new story
, however stupid. I knocked myself out. Are you trying to tell me I'm not getting paid? What about the contract?”

“Look, Martin, you're new at this. Brode says it's a polish, and he wants you to do one more polish before he shows it to the head of production.”

I was beginning to understand. “You mean I get paid for a second draft, but it's not a draft unless Brode says it is.”