Misery Loves Cabernet (13 page)

“Yes, and I told him that was very poor form, and not to do it again. I mean, where would our civilization be without the ample use of white lies: the bride is beautiful, what an adorable baby, it was a mutual breakup . . .”

“Mom, there’s a motorcycle cop behind me, I’m gonna have to call you back,” I lie, hanging up the phone.

I promptly say into my Bluetooth, “Call Dad’s cell.”

Dad picks up on the first ring. “Did she tell you she wanted me to go to St. Louis to see those awful people?”

“You can’t call Grandma and Grandpa that. They’re my family, too.”

“I’m sorry,” Dad says, not the least bit sorry. “But I cannot stand by another year, and watch them treat your mother like shit. I’m one step away from punching your grandfather dead in the face.”

Mom calls back in. “Hold on,” I say to Dad.

“No need,” Dad says cheerfully. “I’m calling from the seventh hole, and everyone’s waiting for me to tee off. Love you, bye.”

“Dad don’t hang . . .”

And he’s gone.

Damn.

I click back to Mom. “Yes?”

“Don’t be mad at your father. My father has always rubbed him the wrong way, and Thanksgiving is unpleasant enough without a fistfight breaking out.”

“I never realized your family was Irish Catholic,” Drew says offhandedly, his eyes still glued to his script.

I turn to him. “What?”

“I can hear your mom on the phone.” Drew says, not looking up from his work. “Fistfights breaking out at a family function. I didn’t know you guys were Irish Catholic.”

I furrow my brow at him. “That’s a stereotypical—”

Drew puts his foot on the dashboard, and lifts the jeans on his left leg to reveal a two-inch scar. “I got this one at the Boston Thanksgiving, 2005.”

Stereotyping is wrong
.

Though, when talking about your own family, it is freakishly tempting.

“Oh, is that Drew?” my Mom asks, her voice suddenly lilting and cheery. “Hi, Drew!”

“Hi, Mrs.—”

I vigorously shake my head no. Drew notices.

“Miss—” he corrects himself.

More mad head shaking from me.

“Ms.—” Drew thinks a moment, then says in his most seductive voice, “Hey, sexy.”

To my mother. Oh, puke. Someone find me a bucket.

Mom giggles like a geisha. “Ask Drew if he wants to come with us to St. Louis.”

“No, he doesn’t,” I say firmly. “He’s spending it with his family.”

“Damn,” Mom says. “So I guess it’s just you and me this year. Anyway, I talked to your grandmother, and we’ve decided that we’ll go to St. Louis for Thanksgiving, and then your grandparents and your Mawv will come here for Christmas.”

“Whoa. What do you mean it’s just you and me this year?” I say, trying not to let the panic creep into my voice. “What happened to Jamie and Andy?”

“Andy can’t come this year. She and Hunter are going to New York for the holiday so they can tell his parents about the baby in person.”

“Wait a minute. Why do I have to go to St. Louis and sleep on a fold-out couch while she gets to lounge around the Upper East Side of Manhattan?”

“Because she’s carrying around my genetic material and you’re not,” Mom answers succinctly.

“So, Dad gets to go to New York with her, but I don’t?” I ask incredulously.

“Don’t be silly. Your father’s not going to be with Andy on Thanksgiving. He’s seeing his mistress in Brooklyn,” Mom reminds me.

“Okay, well, I’d still rather go to New York and see everyone . . .”

“Honey, don’t be hurt, but your dad is going to need a little private time with Catherine. He hasn’t told her yet that I might be pregnant, and you know how much it upset her the last time, when I was pregnant with Jamie.”

Drew laughs out loud at that. I turn to him and glare.

He immediately shuts up.

Wise man.

“And to answer your next question,” Mom continues, “Jamie has to go to Aspen to meet his new girlfriend’s parents.”

“Jamie doesn’t have a new girlfriend!” I insist.

Mom responds by ticking off a list. “You’ve lost weight. You’re the biggest I’ve ever had. Oh, your choice to live in a trailer is so offbeat and whimsical . . .”

“Are we back to acceptable white lies again?” I ask my mom irritably.

“Yes. And you know your brother. I love him, but let’s face it, he’s a slut who can’t stand to be hated by any of his former paramours. I’m sure he’ll meet
someone’s
parents this Thanksgiving. Now, I’ve got us booked for the Sunday of Thanksgiving week . . .”

“Sunday?” I whine. “Why do we have to go so early?”

“You said Drew wasn’t working that week, so I figured that would give us some quality time, just the two of us.”

What could I have possibly said in the past fifteen years or so that would make her think I’d want that?

“Besides, the only first-class tickets I could book were for Sunday,” Mom continues. “And there’s no way in hell I’m getting off that plane and into my mother’s soul-crushing universe without a lot of glasses of Veuve Clicquot under my belt.”

“Okay, Mom: In the first place, on the off chance you’re pregnant, you shouldn’t be drinking.”

I can practically hear my Mom’s head fall. “Crap,” she whispers to herself. After a few moments collecting her thoughts, Mom begins again, a resolve I haven’t heard in her voice since she vowed to take up skydiving. “Okay, still not a problem. I have booked us a suite at the Ritz-Carlton for six nights. This year, for the first time in my fifty-five years on this planet, we are doing Thanksgiving my way.”

Famous last words.

“And what do you plan to tell Grandma when she insists that you sleep in your old bedroom, and I sleep on her fold-out couch?” I ask Mom.

“She won’t find out what I’m doing until it’s too late. As far as she knows, we’re not coming until Wednesday. By the time she knows what’s up, we’ll already be settled in the hotel, eating room service instead of Spam. When she huffs and puffs, I’ll just calmly tell her that, what with your grandmother’s aunt Ethel staying with them, not to mention all the grandchildren and great grandchildren running around, I didn’t want to impose.”

“At which time, she’ll ask how much money you’re wasting on a hotel.”

“Look,” Mom snaps at me. “St. Louis is an absolutely elegant, beautiful city. They have an art museum, a symphony, a Neiman Marcus. Everything we’ll need for a perfect Thanksgiving week. And I am not going to let my family fuck it up for me again this year.”

I shake my head. “Mom, the words ‘perfect’ and ‘Thanksgiving’ bump up against each other in this family about as often as the words “transgender” and “Republican.”

“You leave your Uncle Colin out of this. Anyway, lots of people have perfectly lovely, drama-free family holidays.”

“Not in our family they don’t!” I blurt out, trying to suppress an amused chortle.

Dead silence from the other end of the line.

Shit. I can practically
hear
my mother glaring at me through the phone.

“Be at my house at eight
A.M.
sharp that Sunday,” Mom finally says, signaling to me that the discussion is over. “And pack for rain.”

“Mom, you won’t know what the weather will be like until at least a few days before the trip.”

“I know what the weather will be in my heart.”

At this point, I finally stand up to my mother. “Mom, I’m not going.”

Mom’s silent on her end, so I take a deep breath and continue. “I know your feelings are hurt, and I’m sorry. But I am not going to put myself through a week of hell just to make you feel better. Let’s just stop the annual insanity and have Thanksgiving here, with just our immediate family.”

I can hear Mom take a deep breath over the phone. When she speaks, her voice is much softer, almost that of a little girl. “If we have Thanksgiving here, your grandparents won’t bring Mawv here for Christmas. Mawv is ninety-five. I don’t know how many more times I will be able to see her before, you know . . . .”

There comes a moment in every fight, a time of silence, where the next one who speaks, loses. Learn to recognize that moment
.

Our moment of mutual silence has come. I am determined to win this argument, and I know if I say anything else, I will lose. So the two of us stay deadlocked in silence as I drive for a block and a half.

Finally, Drew breaks the silence. “No matter how famous you are, or how significant your mark on the world is, one day you will be forgotten. It may take a hundred days, or a million years, but eventually we will all be forgotten.”

I turn to look at Drew, who says to me sincerely, “What matters in our lifetime—the only thing that matters—is who we touch when we’re here. The rest is just footprints in the sand.”

I narrow my eyes at him. Bastard.

“Fine,” I practically growl to my mother. “I’ll go to St. Louis. But I’m not drinking in the garage again this year!”

“Oh, I love you!” Mom says brightly. “I’m calling the airline right now to confirm.”

“I love you, too,” I say angrily, in a tone that makes it clear I am snarling one of those gracious white lies she’s been talking about. “E-mail me the confirmation. Bye.”

As I click off my phone Drew looks at me quizzically. “Why would you drink in the garage?”

“Grandma has a rule: No drinking in the house,” I explain. “Grandpa has had a few bottles of Budweiser every night of his life. At some point during their sixty years of marriage, they compromised: people can drink, but only on the porch, or in the garage.”

Drew just looks confused by this.

“I know. They’re nuts. But I’m sure you’re right, and that the only thing that matters is who I touch while I’m here. So I’ll go.”

Drew knits his brows together. “When did I say that?”

“Just now.”

Drew looks at me like this is the first he’s heard of it.

Then suddenly he remembers. “Oh, that!” he says. “I was just reading one of my lines.” He holds up the script for me to see. And I read his character’s line:

BEN

No matter how famous you are, or how
significant your mark on the world, one day
you will be forgotten. It may take a hundred
days, or a million years, but eventually we will
all be forgotten. What matters in our lifetime—
the only thing that matters—is who we touch
when we’re here. The rest is just footprints in
the sand.

Oh, for the love of . . .

Drew flips through his script. “Here’s another line I like: ‘Trying to write on a deadline is like trying to have an orgasm with a gun to your head.’ ”

Drew gives the line some thought. “Actually, that’s not as tough as it sounds.”

Avoid the 101 Freeway
.

I spend the next hour driving from Drew’s house through the crush of downtown traffic to Angelino Heights, a residential neighborhood located a bit off the 101 Freeway, and famous for its nineteenth-century Victorian houses.

Shooting a low-budget movie is very different from shooting a blockbuster. With a blockbuster, the studio will pay a few million dollars for script rewrites alone, and that’s after paying the original screenwriter a seven-figure salary. You have a month or two of rehearsal time. You get five or six months to get the best performances out of the actors.

In a low budget movie such as
A Collective Happiness
, the few million dollars pays for your entire crew: the writer, the director, all of the actors, and all of the “below the line” people, meaning your grips, your costume department, makeup, sound, props, and so on.

A blockbuster film budget also allocates millions of dollars for locations and sets: If you’re spending more than a hundred million dollars to make a movie, you can afford to shut down Griffith Observatory for a few days, maybe even close off a freeway or two. And when you’re ready to shoot your “interiors”—which basically just means the insides of houses, offices, and such—you head back to the studio, and get a production designer (basically, what we call the movie’s interior designer) to make a soundstage on the lot look like anything from a 1950s kitchen, to a 1980s real-estate office, to the perfect spaceship from the future.

Not so with a low-budget movie. Many low-budget movies are shot completely on location, usually in the houses of people who rent out their homes to film crews in exchange for thousands of dollars a day. (Still what I consider a lot of money, but chump change by Hollywood standards.)

And if the movie is really on a shoestring budget (like
A Collective Happiness
), someone on the crew inevitably gets talked into letting the crew use their house for free.

I’m not sure who that sucker is. Personally, I would never allow a bunch of crew guys to scratch up my floors while they move around cables, pockmark my walls while they move around furniture and props, and clog up my toilets doing God knows what they do.

But whoever it is who got talked into housing Armageddon has a truly exquisite three-story, gingerbread Victorian, complete with round tower and wraparound porch.

As I pull up to the large house, I am struck by its intricate beauty. Like most of the neighboring houses, this Victorian is painted in a bright color (purple), with blue and white trim throughout, and dark blue shingles atop its tower and roof.

However, unlike most of the houses in the area, this one also contains at least a dozen cars parked in the front yard, and a grip-electric truck, a camera truck, a generator, and a catering van parked in the backyard.

As I pull my car up to the house and park, a woman wearing jeans, black Prada boots, and a black Prada jacket over a crisp white T-shirt, walks up to Drew’s side of the car, and waits for him to open his door so she can attack him with her eagerness.

“Good morning, Mr. Stanton. I’m Whitney. I’m one of the film’s producers,” she says efficiently as she takes Drew by the arm and begins pulling him toward the house. “Our director, Mr. Donovan, would like me to show you to the costume department. He’s made a few changes to the script, and we start shooting in an hour, so we need to get you through there, then into the makeup chair.”