The Last Days of Video (30 page)

People always tell you to be yourself around celebrities—so Waring would continue to be himself.

“Know any jokes?” Alex Walden said.

“No jokes,” Waring grunted. “I intend to get drunk tonight. That's all.”

“Cheers to that. Perhaps I'll get drunk with you.”

“Suit yourself.”

And even though another ripple of giddy nervousness passed through Waring, he stifled it with a sip of dark beer.

Alaura and Match were
lying in bed, in Match's hotel room at the Siena. They were on top of the sheets, fully clothed. A movie played on his gigantic television: Truffaut's
Bed and Board.

Over the past few days, Alaura had cleaned the room. She'd picked up various papers off the floor and had done her best to organize them. She'd thrown away all the take-out cartons from Lee's Chinese, Pizza My Heart, etc. And she'd even, that night, forced Match to shave. He'd been reluctant, but submissive, and the result, unfortunately, was a too-great revelation of his jowls, giving him a Peter Jackson look that would have been better left masked by a full beard.

“Match?” Alaura said.

Match's eyes were closed. He hadn't spoken in quite some time.

“You're not drinking the juice I ordered you, Match.”

“I'm not thirsty.”

“Did you take your pills?”

“Yes.”

“You're not watching the movie.”

He sighed. “I'm listening to it,” he said. “It's nice just to listen, even though I don't speak French. But if I open my eyes, I see him.
Hitchcock. And I have to prepare for tomorrow. Mentally prepare. We've got a big scene to shoot.”

“But . . . I thought you weren't seeing Hitchcock as much.”

“Oh,” he said, and he opened his right eye to glance at her.

His face was so sweaty that it looked like he'd just swam in the hotel pool. His one-thousand-thread-count pillowcase was soaked.

“I wasn't being completely honest about that,” Match said, his voice strained. Then he closed his right eye. “I
have
been seeing Hitchcock. But I knew you didn't want me to. I'm sorry.”

She shivered.

Had she been any help to him at all?

“Why didn't you tell me?” she asked.

“Because I have a lot on my mind, Alaura. There's just seven days left of principal photography. One week. But it's a big day on set tomorrow. A big scene for Tippi Hedren.”

Alaura took a breath. “Do you mean Tabitha Gray?”

“Huh?”

“You said Tippi Hedren,” she said, her voice a bit frightened. “But I think you mean Tabitha Gray.”

Long pause. All at once, Alaura wanted more than anything to escape. To be back at Star Video, working the floor, talking about movies with customers, giving Waring a hard time.

“Match?” she finally said.

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Okay.”

“I've noticed that whenever Tabitha Gray is around, you start getting, I don't know, different.”

“I do?”

“Yes,” she said.

Match rubbed his forehead, did not open his eye again. “Whenever I see Tabitha, whenever I even think about her,
things get kind of fuzzy. I don't know why. I'm sorry. I'm tired. I want you here, Alaura. You're helping me. You know I love you. We're friends.”

Alaura sat up on the bed. She shook her head. “I'm not sure you realize how confusing that all sounds, Match.” She reached across her body with both hands and massaged both shoulders. “I'm really worried about you, Match.”

“It's fine. Honestly, seeing Hitchcock . . . it sort of, it relaxes me. I like seeing him.”

Another breath escaped her. “You
like
hallucinating?”

“Well, it's just that, you know, it feels like I'm in a movie. Which feels good.”

Now she was tearing up. “Oh, Match, please don't say that.” Nothing she'd done had changed anything. “Match, if you say things like that, I'll have to call your brother. I'll have to call Finn.”

“Just seven more days,” Match muttered. Now he was scratching his chest, as if harboring fleas. “But wouldn't that be wonderful, Alaura? To
live
in a movie. Before they all go away. To jump inside a movie and live in it forever.”

Alaura covered her face with her hands. She thought she might explode. Finn was apparently flying to North Carolina soon. Maybe Finn could help.

“Please, Match,” she said. “Just rest.”

“I'm sorry,” Match said—though he didn't sound sorry. “I'll stop.”

“Just rest now, Match. You need to sleep. Keep your eyes closed. If you sleep, you'll feel better.”

She reached out and stroked his sweaty forehead.

For some reason, Alex
Walden was talking about his parents; Waring did not know how the subject had come up—he certainly wouldn't have brought it up himself.

“My old man was a champ,” Walden rambled in a Mickey-to-Rocky grumble. “A class-A champ. He worked the Hollywood system, you know. Didn't have the looks to be a star, but he mastered his craft and clawed his way into bit parts, eked out a living on the stage. You've never heard of him—”

“I own a video store, sir,” Waring interrupted, somehow employing playful condescension. “I've heard of your father.”

“Bullshit.”

So Waring quickly listed the all the films he could remember that featured George Walden, a supporting actor for his entire career. The list reached ten movies, twelve, and as Waring spoke, Alex Walden leaned back in his seat, raised a clenched fist to his wounded heart.

“He was good,” Waring concluded. “Even in commercials, he was good.”

“That's right, my friend. Even in commercials. He was an asshole son of a bitch, but he could act his way out of a paper bag—”

“Unlike most people in the business.”

“That's fucking-A right.”

Alex Walden and Waring shared a long, significant stare.

“What about your pops?” Walden asked.

Waring belched, looked stage left.

“Come on, Mr. Wax. I get it, you aren't the type to get all weepy.”

“Am I still
real
if I'm not weepy?”

“Fuck you, Waring, you magnificent bastard!” Alex Walden pounded the table. “This is what men do! We sit and drink and say meaningful things about our fathers!”

Waring shook his head. “Fine,” he said. “My father was a prick. A distant but demanding prick. He pushed me into finance, when all I really wanted to do was be a fuck-up and study film. He wanted me to get married, have kids, have a good job. The complete Manhattan storyline. So I tried that for a while, for quite a few years, but, well, you see where that got me.”

Waring held out his hands to his sides:
This
is where it got me.

“And your mother?” Alex Walden said—his gaze was fixed and intent, engrossed in everything he was hearing.

Waring took a deep drag of his cigarette. He thought of his mother, the failed actress. How she'd gotten pregnant too young, and how his father had thereafter talked her out of pursuing her acting ambitions. How she had never forgiven his father, and how she'd never been happy again, not for a second, except at the movies, with Waring.

“No,” Waring said. “I'm leaving.”

In utter astonishment, Alex Walden laughed. He called out: “And I'm coming with you!”

Waring and Alex Walden
and Walden's three bodyguards walked up the slope of Henderson Street, past the thirty-foot-long mural of a yellow number 2 pencil, toward the main drag of College. The bodyguards made Waring feel like he was visiting a politician in a war zone—but the man was not a politician, he was Alex Walden, and the two of them were joking, laughing, talking about movies. Walden clearly loved Hollywood. He referenced movies like a veteran video store employee, and he provided unbelievable insider tidbits about actors and filmmakers, people whom he had worked with over the years. But he also listened to Waring, egged Waring to tell him more about Appleton, about Ape U, about the history of this small town and about Waring's individual history, as if this place and this precious moment on College Street were worthy of study. And though Waring suspected, knew, that Alex was simply gathering material, either for
The Buried Mirror
or for some other movie, he didn't care—Alex Walden was laughing with him, and laughing genuinely.

They turned onto College Street, and in the distance, Waring saw a crowd of stick-figure college students waiting outside of bars. As
they approached the first line, in front of a shoddy West Appleton dance club called Olive or Twist known to serve underage drinkers, Walden continued talking to Waring and asking questions and listening with rapt interest and smiling, but Waring could see how faces from the passing mass began to turn in their direction.

The first of them to approach was a group of three sorority girls, eighteen if they were a day, and gorgeous. Excitedly they asked, all in unison,

“Oh my God, are you—are you—”

“Yes,” Alex Walden replied, smiling congenially.

And soon a swarm was upon them. The bodyguards were pressing people away, and though Walden and Waring continued to make progress up College Street, Waring sensed a sort of choreography about all this, how hands holding pens and bar napkins were allowed to straggle over for Alex Walden to sign, a torture to which he submitted with much humility, and how boys and girls ran in front of them and while backpedaling took pictures of the throng with cell phones, pictures of which Alex was the primary subject, centered in the frame as he often was on celluloid or digital video. There was even a hint of falsity in how Alex repeatedly apologized to Waring for this inconvenience (with a chagrinned smile). But Waring didn't care. The bodyguards repeatedly muscled the two of them together, protecting them from being ripped to shreds, and Waring was speechless, completely unable to step out of the moment, to look at it from above, to see the ways in which any of this was ugly, because he could not find a single ugly thing about it.

Meanwhile, Jeff had been
adopted by the crew of
The Buried Mirror.
All of them, every single one, were film nerds. Their referencing abilities were off the charts. The guy with the braided beard, whose name was Delaine and who was
The Buried Mirror
's Best Boy, had apparently taken on the role of looking after the young video store
clerk. So Jeff sat at the bar with Delaine and several other guys from the lighting team, and they talked, and they laughed, and they drank.

They bought Jeff drink after drink. They regaled him with stories from shoots around the world, with star gossip, with elaborate self-hyping descriptions of their upcoming projects. Several of the lighting guys would be on B crew for a new Spielberg movie (“A comedy,” one of them said, “A guaranteed bomb!”), but most would be working on independent productions for little or no money. They spoke of Los Angeles with off-handed reverence, as if it were a golden city. They didn't ask Jeff very many questions, but he didn't mind, because he was happy just to be in their presence, to absorb their passion. What most impressed Jeff, as he studied them, was that they seemed completely at peace with who they were. None of them were attractive, all of them were chubby and poorly dressed, but they carried themselves like visiting dignitaries. Every move they made, every word they spoke, implied that
The Buried Mirror
was paying them well and that they were emotionally invested in completing it and that they had no regrets about the course their lives had taken.

If only Jeff could find something to be so passionate about.

After three drinks, Jeff was feeling tipsy. He'd been drunk before, a few times in Murphy with his redneck cousins, as well as that one night, not long ago, at Alaura's apartment. It was nice to be feeling that again: like a warm blanket wrapped around his neck. He hadn't worked up the courage to insert himself into Delaine's conversation, but he was more than happy to laugh along with their stories. And he found himself laughing louder than he'd have ever thought was socially acceptable.

A bit later, Jeff felt a small weight on his right shoulder. A hand. It was Celia Watson. He realized that he had stopped looking around for her, stopped following her with his gaze as she moved from group to group around the room . . . his attention had half-drunkenly lapsed
into conversing with these cool guys. Now he smiled at her. Celia was wearing a white tube dress that ended high on her thighs and low on her chest, that held her body like a latex glove, and that was way too expensive for a bar in Ehle County called Hell. But her smile was as cool and casual as everyone's in the lighting crew.

Celia was speaking to him. But Jeff could barely hear her voice over the roar of the bar:

“. . . come . . . you . . . outside.”

“Whuh?” Jeff slurred.