Memphis Movie (29 page)

“Hm,” Sue Pine said. “Do you want to talk firearms or—”

“Eat,” Dan said.

“The spread here?”

“Maybe the spread there first,” Dan said, moving toward her and placing his gnarled hand over her pubic hair. “I'm glad you're hairy,” he said. “Not a big fan of the shave, or the wax. I don't know how that started but it's out of hand.”

“You've seen many,” Sue said, even as she grew lubricious.

“I have,” Dan said, his finger finding a wet groove.

“Ah-ah,” Sue Pine said.

Soon, they were both spread out on the picnic, feeding each other bits from here and there. Their faces grew slick with juices, their fingers sticky with sauces and grease. They touched each other often, between bites, and they rolled around on the floor with no regard to the waste of eatables. At one point, Sue, with fingers oily from fried chicken, wrapped her hand around Dan's pizzle.

“Oh, how big you are,” she said, stating the obvious perhaps, but how many of us compose sonnets during moments of passion?

“How good that feels,” Dan countered.

“Jesus, you just got bigger. I bet you taste like chicken now.”

“That's—huh—what the cannibals say.”

Sue Pine laughed but continued to minister to his engorgement.

“I think I shall eat you now,” Sue Pine said. She spread herself over Dan, kneeling over him so that her ass and crotch were over his mouth, and lowered her buttery maw over Dan's great
length of meat. Dan was careful not to push too far in. And he was grateful for the view.

He pulled her ass downward so he could employ his own oral action.

He paused for breath once to say, “Did I tell you I was Cancer, that my sign is 69?”

Sue used her laugh as an opportunity to remove the large undertaking from her mouth.

“Shut up and make me come,” she said, smiling.

Later, they went to sleep in the bed. The food lay on the floor congealing and stinking. Small creatures made their way toward such bounty. Dan slept immediately upon placing his head on the pillow, his snores a soft concatenation. Sue Pine lay beside him, replaying their lovemaking, and thinking about her newfound attention. She had been interviewed that day by someone named Beiffuss from the Memphis paper. Sue Pine recognized, there in the dim Peabody suite, with food rotting around her, that her life had taken a sudden turn toward the marvelous.

There was only one dark cloud that endeavored to edge into Sue's blue sky. Sue had lost the Raging Bull.

73.

When Sandy agreed to meet Luke Apenail “one more time,” she knew her defenses were crumbling. What was it about the creep that drew her, that hung her up like a summer dress on the line? He was sexy, in a sleek, water rat kind of way. He still dressed and combed his hair like Pat Riley. Of course, Pat Riley still dressed and combed his hair like Pat Riley. Sandy hated those kinds of men, normally. The cocky, snake-oil salesmen.

Yet, when Luke called and smoothly attempted to calm her ruffled feathers, promising that if she would just see him he could make her feel less like Judas, Sandy folded like a pup tent. She did want to see him again—she told herself so she could tell him to his face what a skunk he was, perhaps publicly humiliate him—but, really, in her vitals she felt the pulse of lust and desire. She desired him. No man had done that to her since Eric.

They met at Huey's as usual. He was already seated.

She pushed through the throng and sat without looking at him. She turned her face to the ceiling where toothpicks hung like petite stars.

“You not even gonna look at me?” Apenail said.

“I'm not,” Sandy said. Some of us are in the gutter . . . she thought.

“Sandy, look, it's not that big—let's eat first,” he said as a waiter came near.

“Turkey burger,” Sandy said, her head still upturned. At this rate she was going to have one helluva crick in the neck.

“Same,” Luke Apenail said. “Side of onion rings. Scotch.”

“Scotch,” Sandy said, as if mocking him. It was a poor gambit and she immediately knew it. She slowly lowered her eyes until they met his.

“Sandy, what upsets you so much about this? That you are involved in a doomed enterprise or that you passed on inside information?”

Sandy hated his lawyerly ways. She hated him.

“Either,” she said. “Both.”

“Ok,” Luke Apenail said, as if that had decided something.

Sandy felt herself softening. What she really wanted was a roll in the hay with this man, whom she had just decided she hated. She really wanted him to hold her and tell her she should be adapting Ionesco for the screen. She wanted to hear herself praised even if it meant Eric was damned. And she hated herself for this, too. But, why? she asked herself. Why do I need right now to hear I am a better writer than this film will show? It was a bedeviling question. It bedeviled her.

Now Luke Apenail took her hand. Now he smiled his soft smile. Now he relaxed his mouth, which seemed so desirable, wet like a dewy leaf.

Now she was putting her hand in his, her Judas hand.

And now they were talking of other things, the current monkey in the White House, the newest lawsuit concerning plagiarism, Julia Roberts's baby, Brittany Spears's baby, Angelina Jolie's babies.

And Luke Apenail asked, “What's the latest on Dan? Tell me how many women he has in this port.”

It is to Sandy's discredit, perhaps, that she thought this innocuous enough.

74.

Evening, an eggplant sky seen through an open screen door. Interior of Camel's home.

Camel is working on a new poem. He has one line so far but it's a good line.

Fido is lying in front of the door, watching for wolves. His attention is focused. His ability to concentrate highly regarded.

And Lorax is in the bedroom painting. She and Camel had gone to the Art Center on Union and there Camel had spread his arms wide and said, all this, all this. Whatever inspires you we will buy. Lorax, though overwhelmed, made her choices with respect and serenity and prescience and insight.

The stereo is playing a shaky version of “Cowgirl in the Sand.”

Camel is vaguely aware of Lorax singing along to the song. Her lyrics are her own and only occasionally do they tangentially touch on Neil Young's. Camel smiles and his heart expands. His poem wiggles about like mercury on glass. He watches it crawl around on the page. He tries to spear the one good line with the end of his pen but it evades him. He is not rushed; he is not panicked by the words' recalcitrant orneriness.

Camel's heart expands and he can feel it. Lately, he has been feeling his heart inside his chest as if it had just been born, as
if it were beating for the first time, a ragged tattoo. The truth is somewhat more prosaic though. Camel's heart is running on fumes. He does not have too many more days on this contaminated spaceship. Can he know, can he recognize his own mortality? He can.

Lorax, while vaguely aware of Camel's frailty, believes that he is immortal. She believes that her love makes him so. He cannot leave her. Not now that she has discovered her muse. They cannot be parted, not by this world's rickety designs. She puts paint to the canvas with the confidence of an old master. Her colors are muted, like the sky at sunset or sunrise, before it wakes to its own strength. Lorax paints as if Nature itself held the brush. Her canvas takes shape; an image begins to emerge and it almost startles her. She did not know she was heading in that direction. Yet she sees that it is germane, that it is just. Her painting is a reflection of something that has entered her life, something not exactly transgressive but transformative. It has to do with Camel and it has to do with—she cannot bring herself to see it clearly—something to do with that damned movie, that awful, corrupt, soul-killing movie.

But she faces her truth bravely. The movie is the shadow. She recognizes the shadow. And she does not turn away. Instead she decides to dance with it. The shadow, at first reluctant because it believes it is being trifled with, begins a slow dance, circling its partner, matching her faerie gigue, step by sparkling step. The shadow is
intrigued.

Something in the house of Camel and Lorax stirs. Something formerly hidden, something that belongs to the realm of, we can say it, magick. There it is. Art. Magick. The whole dance of existence, if that's not overstating it.

Lorax puts her brush down because she thinks she hears Camel calling her. She stops and listens.

Camel's pen is the contrapuntal sound to the record spinning, the needle stuck in its final silent black groove. Camel's pen is the only sound as he writes line after line.

75.

Monday morning, on set.

There is a noisy reverence to the bustle as sets are being dressed, actors readying or late, grips gripping what grips grip, cameras being checked, craft services keeping their almost religious silence over their tables, juicers juicing the juice, someone rattling in the scene dock, call sheets lost and found again. Sandy thought there was a negative energy to the set that morning. She didn't say it to anyone though.

She was arguing with one of the techs, something about continuity, something about the call sheets. She was doing someone else's job—she didn't know whose.

Eric sat by himself, studying the scene he was about to shoot. On the page it seemed so right. Yet, every time they rehearsed it everyone groaned. It just felt flat. Even Dan, working Dan's magic, couldn't find his way. Eric was about to excise the damn thing except that Sandy said it was key to working toward the denouement. Yes, they were close enough to use the D word. Dan's answer, whenever the shooting was going poorly was, “Don't worry about it. We'll put it on the DVD.”

Sue Pine lay languidly on a couch, her naked feet propped up. She was a new princess already measuring her new kingdom,
the one that would be hers once the Queen died. For once Dan was nowhere near her. He seemed to be lodging an inordinate amount of time in his dressing room.

Another problem with today's scene: it was supposed to feature Suze Everingham, who had simply gone missing. No one had talked to her. No one knew anything. Eric was contemplating using Sue Pine for the scene, though it would require some extra shooting. (“No golden time,” Eden Forbes had said on a number of occasions.) Actually, Eric was contemplating asking Sandy what she thought about rewriting the movie to put Sue Pine in this scene. Sandy had no use for Sue Pine, so that was prickly.

“Are we talking?” Sandy asked, sidling up to Eric.

Eric didn't stir for a moment. He was lost in his reverie. Sleepless and spaced-out, he was barely there. He turned his head, slowly.

“Yes, always,” he said.

“We've got a problem,” Sandy said.

Good old Sandy, Eric thought. She has been cogitating on this herself and already working on the solution. Good old empirical Sandy.

“I know,” Eric said.

“You know?”

“Yes, well . . . I mean, last night, I was—”

“Eden called you, then.”

“Eden? No, no, I didn't talk to Eden.”

“He's on his way to Memphis.”

“Fuck.”

“I know. The word is he's not happy. That article—”

“Fuck.”

“Ok. Calm down. Nothing's decided, I am sure. We can finesse this. You can handle Eden. You've been doing it all along.”

“I haven't though. I've been avoiding Eden, half-listening to his inane suggestions. You wanna hear the last one? Ferlin Husky. He wanted Ferlin Husky to do the fucking score.”

“Is Ferlin Husky alive?”

“Who knows? That's not the—”

“I know, I know. Eden's, well, he's harmless, mostly, don't you think?”

“Except that he's the money behind the whole damn thing. So he has the power to simply destroy my life. Other than that he doesn't bother me much.”

“Destroy your life. Cabbage, what would destroy your life? Losing this movie? Nah, c'mon. This is a way station only. Another on the road. We've been through rougher times.”

The use of “we” woke Eric fully.

“Have we, Sweetcakes? Have we? And is it still gonna be
we
after Memphis?”

Sandy's face twisted into a configuration that Eric would swear he'd never seen before. It spelled Doom, he was sure. They didn't ask each other such direct questions. It was part of their unspoken trust, now apparently breached.

“We'll talk about that later,” she said.

Eric's heart, already dyspeptic, sputtered.

He was about to offer some kind of supplication, some kind of whiny bridge-repair to Sandy when he saw the gun. The gun was as big as a wolf's foreleg and as shiny as death itself. And in Suze Everingham's hand, at the end of Suze Everingham's shaky, spindly arm, it looked like something straight out of hell, by way of Smith and Wesson. She held it out in front of her like a flashlight. She strode forward with the determination of one of Haiti's walking dead. Her face, set and unwavering, was a frightening thing to behold.