The Remake (5 page)

He went in, anyway.

Janine Wright was sitting on a settee that probably cost more than any car R.J. had ever owned. She was an elegant-looking woman with short blond hair and the hardest eyes R.J. had ever seen. She was dressed in a two-inch-thick terry-cloth robe and had a telephone glued to her ear, and as he walked
into the room she glanced up at him like he was a piece of second-hand furniture.

“Fuck that,” she said into the phone, “and fuck you.” She looked away, to a sleazy-looking, mean-faced little guy in a three-piece suit sitting on the opposite end of the settee. She snapped her fingers at him and he delivered a cigarette, then lit it for her.

Janine Wright looked back at R.J. And spoke into the phone. “No. You’re dead, you hear me? You don’t work, ever again. You want me to spell it? I own your balls now. Well, eat shit and die, asshole,” and she hung up. “Fix it, Murray,” she said to the weasel.

Her eyes now locked onto R.J. “Well,” she said, and her voice was doing the same thing her eyes had done, talking to him as if he couldn’t really understand words. “You look just like him.”

R.J. had expected to start off by telling her who he was. Now he hesitated. The way she had said that had boxed him in, dismissed him at the same time it identified him. He felt like a pet caught pissing on the rug.

“Well?” she prompted.

“A lot of people think I look just like him,” he said. “A little makeup, the right clothes, I
would
look just like him.” He was about to add, “And that could cause you some bad publicity,” but the weasel didn’t let him.

“Do you know how much trouble you’re in, coming in here like this?” the little guy barked. R.J. corrected his first impression. Not a weasel; one of those scruffy, obnoxious little terriers. The kind that only bites you when your back is turned.

She cut him off. “Shut up, Murray.” And then to R.J., “How much do you want?”

There she was again, pushing him off balance, jumping around so he would stay confused. He had grown up watching that technique used by people like her, and he didn’t like it, but it still worked. “How much
what
?”
he said, pushing back a little.

She blinked. “Who’s your agent?”

R.J. grinned. A stock comeback like that meant he’d won one. He had
her
confused.

“I don’t have an agent. I don’t believe in agents,” he said. “I like to do everything myself.” And he cracked his knuckles.

“That’s enough, asshole,” said Murray, and he stood up. R.J. took a step toward him and he sat down again.

Janine Wright frowned. The girl giggled. Janine looked at her briefly, coldly, then looked back at R.J. She shook her head, just twice, and turned to the girl who had let him in. “You let him in. Get this shithead out of here.”

“I’m not your fucking slave,” the girl said.

“Don’t use that language with me,” Janine Wright said.

“Oh, for God’s sake, what language am I supposed to use? All I’ve ever heard from you is fuck this, shit on that, piss on you—”

Janine Wright was up and across the floor in two steps. She slapped the girl once and the sound of it was loud enough to make R.J. jump. “I’m still your mother, you little bitch,” Janine Wright said.

The girl took a step back, rubbing her cheek. “That’s my problem,” she said.

Janine Wright hissed out a breath and raised her hand again. The girl didn’t flinch, just stared at her mother. Janine put her hand down.

“Sometimes you’re so much like your father I could puke,” she said.

The girl just looked at her. “Considering some of the things you’ve done,” she told her mother, “I doubt you could puke at all anymore, no matter what.” Then she looked once at R.J., and there was something funny going on in her eyes, a kind of idea or recognition that R.J. was being included in, but didn’t get. Then the girl turned and walked out of the room.

Janine Wright watched her daughter go. “Murray,” she said.

The terrier got up and scuttled away. “I’ll talk to her,” he said.

“Do you have kids?” Janine Wright asked R.J., without looking at him. “If you don’t, stay lucky. Never have kids. They’re fucking awful. The whole thing is a—”

Suddenly she turned and looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. “Who the fuck are you, anyway?”

R.J. stepped forward and handed her his business card. “My name is R.J. Brooks,” he said.

Janine Wright did a double take, looked at the card, and stared at him again. “Oh,” she said. “You’re that guy. That’s why you look like him.”

“That’s right.”

“I thought you were an actor.”

R.J. grinned at her. “Nope.”

“I thought you were auditioning.”

“No, I’m complaining.”

She looked at him for a full thirty seconds. Once again, R.J. felt like he was a wrinkled drapery, or a chair with a stain on the slipcover. Finally she nodded and said, “Sit down.”

She turned and moved back to the settee. R.J. perched on a chair that would probably make a down payment on a place in the Hamptons. He opened his mouth to start his pitch, but she cut him off.

“How much do you make?” she asked him.

R.J. blinked. “None of your goddamned business.”

“You grew up in Hollywood, right? Why’d you leave?”

“There’s no air and I hate the people,” he said, wondering where this was going.

“Ever think about going back?”

“Think about it? No, I have nightmares sometimes. Look, Ms. Wright, I’m not applying for a job—”

“Then why the fuck should I care if you look just like him?”

“I can’t imagine why the fuck. You brought it up, not me.”

A door slammed and Murray came scuttling back rubbing
his face. He slid into his place beside Janine Wright so fast, R.J. had to blink to be sure he wasn’t seeing things.

“I’ll pay you two thousand a week to come work for me,” Janine Wright said.

“I advise against that,” said Murray.

“Twenty-two-fifty,” said Janine Wright.

R.J. felt the breath leave him and for a few seconds he couldn’t get it back. Finally he managed to shake his head. “Can we start over? I don’t think we’ve been in the same conversation since I got here.”

“So what do you want?”

“I want to talk about this picture you’re making, the remake of
As Time Goes By
.”

“You don’t have a leg to stand on!” Murray barked. “We own all worldwide rights to this remake and if you think—”

“Shut up, Murray,” Janine Wright said.

“I’m not going to sit here and—”

“Yes you are,” she said, and looked at him briefly. He shut up. He seemed a little paler than he had been.

Janine looked at R.J. and smiled; not like she was happy or amused, but like he was a brain-dead kid she had to talk to. “Twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“Jesus Christ, lady, for what?”

“For looking like your father.”

R.J. could feel something happening on his face, almost as if he was watching it, not like it was his face at all. It was somewhere between a snarl and a sneer. Everything about this woman and her pet lawyer made his skin crawl, made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, made him want to grab her by the lapels of her $500 bathrobe and shake her till her teeth rattled.

“Listen,” he told her, fighting for control, “I’m not going to plug your remake for you. If I put on a fedora and call in the cameras, it will be because I want to stop the picture, not because you’re paying me to make people want to see a half-wit, brain-dead, watered-down, scummed-up, weak, sick, silly, stupid copy of something that’s more important to a hell of a lot of people than—”

“Including you?” she asked. She hadn’t even blinked at the name calling. “It’s important to you?”

“Including me,” R.J. said. “And since I do look like him, I think I can get you a lot of negative publicity if you go ahead with this thing.”

She just looked. “Negative publicity?”

“Yeah, you know. Look-alike son calls project a lame sack of shit, scion of great actor heaps scorn on greedy, brainless, soulless studio—that kind of thing. Get the fan magazines involved. Organize protests. Maybe a nuisance suit. Hell, lady, I haven’t even thought about it and I know ten ways to pee in your soup.”

Janine Wright smiled. “Okay. Great. Do it.”

“Gotcha,” said Murray.

R.J. blinked. He had thought he was getting somewhere, really felt like he was on a roll. “What?”

She leaned back. “I said, go ahead. Do it. Call your press conferences. Organize boycotts. Sue the shit out of me. You’re gonna do for free what I would have paid you for, shit-for-brains.”

R.J. was surprised to see his hands were trembling. He’d never wanted to hit somebody so badly. “You would have paid me to sue the shit out of you?”

“Absolutely. Including court costs. Now you can pay for it yourself. This is fucking great.”

“Why?”

She stood up. “I don’t have time to teach kindergarten to half-wits. You ever hear the expression, no such thing as bad publicity?” She moved toward the door.

“I’ve heard it.”

“Well, the way things are today, it goes even further. Bad publicity is the best kind. People hear you hate this movie, they’ll go see it just to find out why. They’ll buy a ticket just
so they can agree with you.” She opened the door. “Assholes. And they say TV is stupid. I wonder why. Get out.”

R.J.’s head was spinning. He felt like the private eye in an old movie, realizing somebody had slipped him a mickey. It was in the drink, he thought, except I didn’t have a drink.

“Come on, get out,” Janine Wright repeated. “Before I have to call security. Forget the white gloves, those cocksuckers are mean. Move your ass, ace.”

Murray jumped up and leaned around her, yapping at R.J. “Sue us, you dumb loser. You have to file in California, and that’s my private pissing grounds. I guarantee it’ll take you twenty years to see court, and you won’t have a penny left. And when you
do
get in court, it’ll be
my
court and
my
judge and you, you pathetic loser,
you
—”

“That’s enough, Murray,” Janine Wright said.

“Loser,” Murray yapped, and then he flinched away as if expecting a kick.

R.J. found his way to the door. “You’re a tough lady,” he said.

She gave him that look again, that used-furniture look. “You’re only half right, half-wit,” she said. She gave him a push and slammed the door.

R.J. stood in the hall and looked at the beautiful oak door.

She was right. She was no lady.

R.J. made it back to his office in plenty of time for the session with Reverend Lake and it was as bad as he had figured. The reverend wept when he saw the pictures and fell to his knees on the office floor, yelling out pleas for forgiveness and blubbering like a baby. Then he looked at the pictures some more, a little too long, R J. thought, and a little too interested, before he caught himself and went back to praying and snuffling on the floor.

R.J. sat through the whole performance without blinking. The check had already cleared. Even when the reverend got a little more specific than he should have about some of the
things he wanted forgiveness for—something about one of the teenage boys in the youth group)—R.J. just sat and watched. He’d seen it before. Besides, he was still churning over the whole thing with Janine Wright. He was so burned up about it that he couldn’t really enjoy the reverend’s performance as much as he should have.

And when that was over, he didn’t even enjoy banking the fat bonus check Reverend Lake left with him in exchange for the envelope with the pictures. The good man left, clutching the envelope like he would have paid even more for something that good. R.J. should have enjoyed the way the man’s sweaty knuckles turned white as he gripped that envelope, but he didn’t.

In fact, although he didn’t know it then, it would be a good long time before R.J. really enjoyed anything again.

CHAPTER 7

R.J. was in a long hallway lined with doors. There had to be a couple thousand doors, and his father was behind one of them. But inside the one he opened there was just a pile of bones, and then the door slammed shut behind him and he knew the bones were his father’s and as he tried to back off, the bones got up and danced and the door started to slam open and shut to set the beat for the dancing bones—

—and he woke up covered with sweat and somebody was pounding on the door of his apartment.

R.J. shook his head to clear it. It didn’t work. The pounding on the door didn’t stop, either. He got up and splashed some water on his face. Anybody who pounded on the goddamn door like that at—what was it, 3:45? Hell, let ’em wait.

He let them wait until he got a bathrobe on. Then he opened the door. There stood Detective Don Boggs.

Boggs was a square guy with a low forehead and a lower IQ. He had a widow’s peak that almost touched his eyebrows and was wearing one of the ugliest suits R.J. had ever seen.