Tuesday would be Carlton’s half-birthday He would have been three and a half. Julian started Cait’s demo again, set it to shuffle, lay on the living room floor.
In the course of his days, Julian still dutifully looked at all the parts displayed for him, the gratis glimpses from a city of sexual saleswomen: the thin cardigan worn over reactive skin; the groove along the outside of a seated and high-skirted thigh, toned and tanned; the coming spring’s fashion for high shirts and low waists, a landscape of abdomen and crevice. But nothing ever happened to him anymore, aged and wounded past surprise.
“Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me, please.”
Until now, well after midnight, in a darkened room, when Cait O’Dwyer’s voice, or just the sound of her breath, caressed him, and he lay on his floor primally swollen like a howling teenager, for the first time in more than a year.
RACHEL WAS HAVING
the same dreams as always. The spacious-house dream, for example, was always a blessing. It usually prophesied a positive change in her life. In its simplest form, Rachel would rise from her bed and walk through whatever home she happened to occupy at the time—a dorm, a studio, her apartment with Julian—and be pleasantly surprised to find that there were many, many more rooms than she had realized. Each new floor, wing, or tower fulfilled some unnamed need. The tour of the new space ended as she lay back into bed—the bed she was actually in—and she would fall asleep in her dream.
But now her dreams were narrated, not lived, and she woke more tired than she’d gone to bed. Carlton would stand and speak to her, as before a stage set. She would have no particular feeling for him. He would say, “Okay, the spacious-house dream. Let’s see, you’re walking around here, and over there, behind that door”—he would point to a locked door—”is a bunch of rooms.” Tonight Carlton, bored, stepped up and said, “The spacious-house dream.” And that was it. “The can’t-wake-up dream, then the Julian-with-the-models dream, then the mice-circling-the-dying-vulture dream.” He recited most of her repertoire. “The kindly-mullahs-offering-brownies dream.” He shook his head condescendingly at her disappointment, as Julian used to do when he thought she was being ridiculous. It hurt much more to see Carlton do it. “The endless-love dream,” he said with a hint of Julian’s sneer, but on her baby’s face with that tone in his mouth of all mouths, it left her desolate when she awoke to gray light.
She had tried everything, and still she was sinking, buoyant only for that brief period when she nursed Aidan. Before and since, she gulped antidepressants without shame (though her father had raised her to believe in self and choice, still clucked at society’s collapse into “psychopharmacoddling”). The pills never helped much, nor did grief therapy groups or individual therapy with an unmarried, childless woman ten years younger, who furrowed her brow and nodded gravely whenever Rachel talked about the bubbling pain in her gut.
Her hopes for Julian were very limited. She had not one romantic illusion, she told herself with a quiet, mature pride her father would have approved of. She had burned through a fair sampling of manhood trying to find someone, not to make her “happy”—that wasn’t the point—but to cauterize her relentlessly dripping wounds. Julian—for all his flaws, his crimes and omissions—was not only hers but to a degree was
her
, as if only with a transfusion of him could her own system function. He looked like Carlton, of course, and Carlton was alive to the extent that she saw him in Julian’s eyes. He was alive, too, if the family he’d been part of survived. Better a reduced family that mourns together, rather than each of them wandering alone, abandoning all the spaces where Carlton had existed, denying Carlton the places that had been his.
Beyond that, Julian was her history, her young wifehood, her motherhood, her as a victim and her as a slut. Her life’s joy was from now on sharply limited, but if there was joy to be had, Julian was the only man left who might remind her what it looked like. Julian would provide the rest, too, the vast majority of life that wasn’t even close to joy.
“At the funeral,” she told her nodding shrink, “I loved Julian so much. I watched him drowning, and I knew we were together. But after, really soon after, he was thinking it might pass, you know?”
“I do.”
“He was still in pain, obvious, but I could see he thought he might someday get over it. And that felt like he wanted to shake me off so he could get over it. And then, another couple months, he wasn’t really any better, he just got better at pretending, left me alone while he acted like he was on his way. And then—”
“Mm-hm.”
“—the worst was when he started to act like he’d passed
through
something, and now he could help
me
. Like,
having finished
, he was now ready to be
my
strong support. Like he had a
plan
.”
“I see.”
She remembered her sorrow and anger disguised as boredom, at the end, just before she left. She remembered watching him, blurry and faceless through the misted, dimpled toilet glass of the shower door, sawing his buttocks apart with a new brick of green soap, and she remembered feeling at that instant that she was allowed to do anything she wanted with anyone on earth so she wouldn’t have to feel one more second of that. So she’d been wrong.
“How were you wrong?”
“I want
him
. I
want
him to be a strong support. I can’t walk around like this. He’d show me how to fake it better, how to pretend to forget now and then.”
“You want to go back?” asked the therapist in Rachel’s head, whom she hadn’t gone to see in weeks.
“No. Just to go on. I’m done.”
She lay in bed, Carlton’s dream and the therapist’s voice fading. She reached for the phone and dialed Aidan’s cell from memory.
THE END OF A SHOOT
. The cubical studio was empty but for him and Maile, cross-legged on the floor, Bach Cello Suites on the speakers, and shiny orange Chinese food in white, tin-handled boxes on cherry-red Chinese-zodiac place mats, greasy from the spots on the floor where the daily beauty’s red hair had been combed out thirty-eight times, conditioned strands plopping dollops of the Product onto the black wood, sounds partially masked by the Rolling Stones played loud over the speakers to give the client and agency people the pleasant sensation of a day not only out of the office but shot free of corporate life entirely (thus encouraging future business with Julian Donahue).
“Can I say, today you seemed like a real director?” Maile said.
Julian laughed. “I
am
a real director.”
“I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I meant a film director. No offense.”
“None taken. ‘Real,’ unlike my entire existence and your salary.”
“Oh, my God, this is not coming out how I meant. I meant to say that you’re better than this. Than ads, I guess I mean.”
“You think you’d like Hollywood people better than ad people?”
“I know, everyone’s selling something. But movie people are at least
also
trying to make something, right? I sound naive to you, don’t I?”
“A little.”
“Well, that reflects badly on you, then, doesn’t it?” she said, with sauce.
There was an answer to Maile’s kiss-up compliment disguised as smart-ass challenge, her flirtatious treatment of her boss as an underachieving child lacking only an inspiring woman. The answer, though, was not likely to impress a temporarily semi-infatuated production assistant.
He’d been embarrassed, years earlier, in front of film-school friends who’d done well enough in Hollywood, that his “talent” or “vision” hadn’t been strong enough to resist the offer of his first television commercial, and then, even more, when his talent was too weak to overcome the inertia of continued offers. He couldn’t even claim he’d failed to make a great film, as he had never tried. He remembered wanting to make one. He wished he still did, but he didn’t. He wished he were an artist, a great artist, but sometimes he also wished he was an astronaut. He even wished he could tell Maile he had a vision for a film that he was unable to make, for fear of failure, a subject of some regret… but that would have been a bone-deep lie.
The childish belief that he would someday direct great films had been replaced by a prickly adult wonder that such a goal had ever boasted its moral superiority, and he tried, jokingly, to explain this to the lovely girl sharing Heaven’s Pig and Enraged Life Crab with him. Why, he pressed her, was it better to direct a film? His work, stories told with haiku efficiency, provoked real emotion, too, but then they also produced—the ultimate tangible
proof
of invisible emotion—
action
, thousands of times over: purchases, votes, donations, changes in fashion. What Hitchcock film had such empirical evidence of its auteur’s prowess? Some people were scared to shower for a day or two? “If the true measure of an artist’s greatness is his influence, then I’m a genius.”
“I don’t think you mean that,” said Maile. She watched him as she slowly laid a water chestnut in her mouth and delicately crunched it with her lips apart. “You might think you mean it, but you don’t.” That matronizing sentiment—one Rachel used to flash from time to time—combined with the slow insertion of food into red mouth, was a hardwired tactic of the human female. They would offer themselves sexually at the same moment they insisted they understood their potential mate better than he understood himself. The praying mantis just bites her male’s head off, and only after the fun; the human insists upon dissolving her mate’s personality
before
the pleasure. Maile would
improve
him. She
promised
. And if he agreed to the procedure, he could have her, for a while, until the day when, aghast, she would realize she’d been swindled despite her best efforts, and he would stand before her, erect and unimproved.
“Let’s say you had all the money in the world,” Maile pushed. “What sort of film would you make?”
He asked her—as she plainly wanted him to—what her favorite films were and looked duly impressed when she cataloged dead maestros from cinema’s storied past. The whole game was one he’d played too many times, too long ago. Maile stood on the far side of a rushing river, in another country, waving her arms frantically, but the rapids drowned her voice, and Julian smiled and nodded. Later, Maile would render their conversation as:
MARIE
You think I’m naive. That doesn’t reflect very well on you, now does it?
HUGH moves to kiss her, but she closes the cab door and smiles at him through the window
.
HUGH
Well. It seems it’s time I became a better man.
MARIE
(slyly)
So it would seem.
(to the cabbie)
Onward, Mr. Singh, onward. The evening is young.
He had the studio for another nine hours, though there was no reason to stay. But the disarray at the end of a day’s shoot still attracted him, after years, one of life’s butterfly moments that left him pleasantly near-satisfied, a much better feeling than the dull, guilty bloat of fully satisfied.
“I’ll close up, Maile. Thank you for everything today.”
She didn’t hear, or pretended not to. She killed Bach and put her own CD on the system, turned it too loud for easy conversation. The first track was “Piccadilly” by Squeeze, and Julian laughed. It hadn’t shuffled up on his own iPod in months. The opening piano took him by surprise every time; he recalled (his body recalled) how he (it) had felt at age sixteen hearing this song, overwhelmed by the reference to a young woman putting on a brassiere:
“She hooks up her cupcakes and puts on her jumper
.” He had to yell from where he was sitting: “How do you know this song?” He sounded like a ninety-year-old impressed by a precocious toddler. Maile only smiled, turned away, busied herself with the work from which he’d excused her, played a little discreet one-handed air guitar.
The next song—an old shameful pleasure of his, only enjoyable if all social context, fashion, and history were suspended, though Maile was too young to be aware of this—lifted him out of his chair. He stepped toward her. She was still all the way across the square black floor, nearly to the far wall. She turned; she must have seen him stand in a reflection or a layered shadow. “Will you ever use that grip again? I couldn’t believe he—” She stopped when she caught his eye.
“You don’t have to stay, you know.”
“You keep saying that.”
She playfully climbed up a stack of canvas sandbags meant to stabilize light stands, and he saw all that would happen next. He would go to her and dance with her for a minute before touching her, and then this instant right now would be the last moment of mystery between them: lips, laugh, Heaven’s Pig on the breath (erotic tonight, off-putting and inconsiderate eight months from now), his fingertips on the black lace at the top of her bra,
hey, you have a tattoo
, the climax (or, more likely, the droopy return of his inability), and quickly on to
What does this mean? Who is this in the photo?
and
This isn’t working, is it?
She stood atop the little hill of sandbags and smiled at him. “Do you want to keep the breakfast meeting with Burgess tomorrow? He’s going to offer you another dames’ dam, I think.” And she slowly lifted one leg and brought her foot up to rest against her thigh, a yoga pose. “So what do you say, Julian Donahue?”
“You ask tough questions.”
And the next song on the CD was Cait O’Dwyer:
You’ve reduced me down to the dregs
You won’t seduce me, though I stand here and beg
I’m blithering, you’re dithering, I’m your slithering fool
.
If Maile had sneaked a look at Julian’s iPod, gone home and cannily burnt a CD while consulting
Cosmo
and
The Art of War
, each slot of the playlist carefully chosen to provoke a scheduled moment of desire, then here, batting cleanup, was the confessional song. But, oh, how badly chosen. She must have seen it on his face. She stepped down off the bags. “I’ll call his office first thing in the morning, tell them you were shooting late.”