My Liar Page 5

  “She’s not very smart,” said Laura, “but there’s something really cool about the script—it’s funny and sad at the same time.”

  “That’s my favorite thing in movies.” said Annabeth. “Did you ever see Signs of Life?”

  Laura dropped her jaw theatrically. “That Gypsy! The king!”

  “I know. The way he dances at the end just kills me.”

  “And that car shot, with the clouds of dust?”

  “Fucking Werner Herzog—why is he so inconsistent?”

  Laura laughed. “God, Annabeth, you’re so cool. Why can’t you be my writer?”

  Annabeth laughed too. She was thrilled by Laura’s remark. After her grin died down she thought to ask, “What do you mean, she’s not very smart?”

  “She just doesn’t seem to get that movies have their own momentum and logic. Anytime I want to change something about the main character, she starts whining about how that’s not the way it really was and I just don’t know enough about how people think in Nebraska, Kansas, whatever—as though anyone is interested in the True Story of Ramona Engel.”

  “So it’s autobiographical?”

  “Isn’t everything?”

  “Well, I’m not a writer…”

  “Do you want to read it for me? I really think it’s just a tweak away from being ready to go.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “I think it’s about striving,” said Laura. “And the culture of fame.” Annabeth nodded but found this to be a completely opaque answer. Laura saw that she’d lost her audience and began again: “It’s about a girl from the Midwest who comes to L.A. to find fame and fortune and winds up dead on the side of the road.”

  “Not a comedy, then,” said Annabeth.

  Laura smiled and continued: “She’s a stripper, and she lives with this guy Trip, a loser—he’s got a drug problem, he can’t keep a job. And she borrows money from her boss to get Trip’s car fixed after he totals it. Meanwhile, she meets this actor at the strip club. He’s, like, a little bit famous from TV and he tells Bunny—that’s her name, I love that—that he’s going to set her up with his agent and get her an audition and all that. Anyway, long story short: her boss starts wondering where his money is and Bunny starts sleeping with the actor and…you know, the ditch.”

  “Is she a moron, or do we like her?”

  “Oh, no, we totally like her. We have to.”

  “Right,” said Annabeth, wondering if that would be possible for her, given what she’d just heard.

  “Malkovich might be interested in playing the agent,” said Laura. “It’s a cameo, but that will help us get a real actress for Bunny.”

  “Wow,” said Annabeth, thinking, She said “us.”

  “So, I’d love to hear what you think.”

  Annabeth drained the last tiny slurp of café au lait under the foam in her cup and entered a brief fantasy of herself cutting a sequence with John Malkovich in it. She had a feeling he was one of those actors whose faces never went dead, who always had something new to bring. She would love to work on something with someone that good in it. She picked up the dessert menu—she didn’t want Laura to see whatever was going on on her own face and she feared it was transparent. Once, Janusz had shown Annabeth how, just by letting a shot run an extra dozen frames or so, he made Ellen Barkin’s vulnerable-looking smile become that of a likely betrayer. The suspicion never paid off, and the character’s potential duplicity wasn’t even in the script; it just made the scene, and therefore the movie, more interesting. Sometimes David would look at her a little too long, or too nakedly, and she would start to wonder if he was really the entirely trustworthy guy he usually seemed to be.

  When she glanced up from the laminated list of desserts, she said, “You know how when you get up in the middle of the night to pee and then when you come back to bed the guy you’re with sort of half wakes up and makes room for you, or opens the covers or something? Sometimes I think the only time I really trust David is then…Do you think that’s crazy?”

  Laura, though trying to appear earnest and interested, was a little bit embarrassed by Annabeth’s confession. “Well, physical intimacy is pretty important…” she said, and Annabeth nodded more vigorously than was called for.

  “It must be an occupational hazard or something,” she said, trying to rewind the conversation. “I mean, I look at everything too closely. I’m always wondering where I can lose a few frames, you know?” It was a stretch as a joke, but it covered the awkwardness of her last remark—at least she hoped it did. Laura had her her head tilted and a kind of indulgent, or maybe just condescending, look on her face.

  In fact, Laura was wondering if she, herself, seemed like extraneous footage to Annabeth at that moment. Maybe she had been coming on a little strong? Why was she trying to sell this other woman so hard? It really shouldn’t matter what Annabeth Jensen thought. Who was Annabeth Jensen anyway?

  They paid the check and cut through the back of the café to the clothing store. Annabeth was almost completely absorbed in fantasies about the comments she might make about the script she had not yet read. She pictured herself getting to the heart of the matter—the problem would be something about Bunny, something the author couldn’t see because she couldn’t see herself and that Laura couldn’t name because she was too focused on…well, something else.

  Laura, meanwhile, had fallen under the spell of an artfully cut blue-black jacket. It said Dior “new look” to her but would work well with jeans. She called Annabeth over as she slipped it on in front of a nearby full-length mirror.

  “Isn’t this perfect?” she asked.

  Annabeth had to agree that it was. She couldn’t help wondering why she never spotted anything that suited her the way this jacket suited Laura. They were almost exactly the same size, after all, despite their differences in build and coloring.

  “Should I get it?” Laura asked, pulling the price tag into view.

  Annabeth’s answer was hardly necessary, however, because Laura was already carrying the item up to the register, where there was a line. Annabeth looked at her watch and calculated the time remaining on her parking meter to be dangerously short. But it would be unfriendly to dash off just at that moment, so she followed her new friend to the cashier, where Laura was gazing at the array of credit cards in her wallet. She smiled at Annabeth and then made a mock frown.

  “I can never decide which one to use,” she said. “Do I want the mileage or the tax deduction?” Then, approaching the register, she withdrew what appeared to be a Corporate American Express card. Annabeth wondered if film directors were allowed to deduct a certain amount of their income for wardrobe purchases. It seemed highly unlikely. Especially fifteen-hundred-dollar jackets—for that was what the blazer cost. Annabeth had never spent that much on anything that wasn’t a motor vehicle. Laura, she realized miserably, was not just beautiful and talented, she was rich.

  But Laura was only acting with the eternal optimism of the hustling young director. She had no offer on the table that justified the purchase of a fifteen-hundred-dollar blazer—she hardly had a script. She had met with dozens of potential producers, including the suddenly elusive Simpson, but it was unclear now—after almost four years of schmoozing—if she could get Trouble Doll made at all. The producers were always at the wrong point in their production cycle, or not certain enough of the foreign markets, or felt that the script—any script—might not be adequately “castable.” Laura kept these setbacks from derailing her by granting herself a “clean slate” every six months or so. She always said the script needed “one more draft” because there was no point in saying two, or three, or four more. The next “official” draft had to be good enough to submit to actors—that was all she knew. Laura was glad to have come across Annabeth, though. A smart editor was crucial. She had been sincere in her interview with the Weekly insofar as she thought cutting film was the best way on earth to learn how cinema works. She would cut all her own films, if she could be
two places at once, but second best would be to have an editor who was smart, competent, and completely in her pocket, immune to the influence of studios, actors, awards ceremonies, et cetera. So if Annabeth’s last picture—the title of which she kept forgetting, probably because Annabeth hadn’t yet learned the trick of saying Golden State instead of “the feature I cut”—was any good at all, she was pretty sure she would hire her to cut Trouble Doll.

  Annabeth’s parking meter had expired when she finally got back to her Honda and there was a ticket for almost fifty bucks tucked under the wiper.

  “It’s weird,” said Laura to Greg, a few days later. “I feel like I’m dating her.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Greg wasn’t interested in his wife’s latest lunch date—they all seemed the same after a while.

  “Well, she’s not really someone I need to cultivate professionally, and she can be a bit…snarky, but sometimes there’s this, I don’t know, momentum when we talk, like when you have a crush on someone in high school…It’s just weird.”

  Greg nodded and looked at his coffee cup. He wished he had a job designing coffee cups. He’d make them gray-green and translucent, the color of seawater on a cloudy day.

  “For a second there, I thought you were interested,” said Laura.

  “I have a short attention span,” he said. He looked up at his wife, who was beautiful—even first thing in the morning, no makeup, scowling at him. It filled him with wonder for a split second, and then too quickly with resentment.

  Laura didn’t know what he was thinking, but her exquisitely sensitive appetite for flattery could slurp up even an infinitesimal flicker. “I realize this is magical thinking or whatever, but I feel like she was put in my path for a reason, like she has something to give me,” she said.

  “Like what?”

  “Ideas, maybe. She’s a real movie nerd,” said Laura and then, after a pause: “She doesn’t know how smart she is.”

  Greg’s eyes were now tracking along the sports page, though he nodded and, noticing her pause, looked up to ask, “So are we going to Montecito this weekend?”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Not really,” said Greg. “I need to spend some time in the studio,” which was what he always said when he meant “I don’t think I can last that long without a jag.” A jag was an anonymous sexual encounter, the pursuit of which was what kept his mind occupied for almost half his waking life. (The rest of the time he spent hating himself.)

  Laura nodded and picked up her coffee cup to put it in the sink. She knew he wasn’t doing much painting lately, but there was always the possibility that he’d start up again. The first time she’d seen his work, in a group show somewhere near the Bradbury building downtown, it had taken her breath away. The pictures were fluid and delicate-looking, rendered in what looked at first like pencil, but up close was revealed to be the artist’s fingerprints. They were portraits of the faces of condemned men, but Laura had not recognized that at the time. Later, Greg had destroyed dozens of these drawings, saying they were cynical and gimmicky. He had then begun to make paintings that he sometimes said were about torture but were really only different-sized rectangles of uniformly applied, carefully blended paint: gray, red, and blue. They couldn’t have been very much fun to make, and now he rarely made them anyway. His annual allowance paid their living expenses (just barely), so what was the point?

  Part 2

  CASTING

  8

  Whenever the phone rang during the early months of their acquaintance, Annabeth imagined that it was Laura calling to announce the commencement of her new life. She was not quite waiting by the phone, but she did hesitate to call Laura first, and when a few weeks went by with no word she felt disproportionately crushed, forgotten. Then, one Saturday morning, the phone rang and the voice on the other end was Laura’s. Annabeth’s fantasies were reanimated in seconds.

  “Hey, I was having brunch down here at Hal’s and I thought I could swing by and drop off a copy of the script on the way home,” Laura said, as though three weeks of silence had not passed between them. “I’ve been having smoke blown up my ass by this Simpson guy and I need a reality check.” She’d actually brought the script to give to the newly re-interested producer but, during the course of their brunch, she had decided to hold off. Once you give someone a mediocre script, you can’t get it back. There was no danger of killing Annabeth’s enthusiasm, though, and if Simpson could really get the thing to the people he claimed he could get it to, she wanted to make sure he got the version that would do the trick.

  Annabeth read Trouble Doll twice that afternoon—and again the following morning. David read it on Sunday evening while Annabeth made dinner. In his eyes, it was a melodrama…The Perils of Pauline, except that in this version, Pauline cursed a lot, her boyfriend had tattoos, and the train finally ran her over after all.

  “Am I crazy, or did that kind of suck?” David asked as he seated himself on their back steps with a beer. Annabeth was grilling tuna steaks.

  The remark stopped Annabeth in her tracks. Her desire to have a job on Laura’s movie and for that movie to start shooting sooner rather than later had enabled her to see an appealingly quirky coming-of-age story shimmering behind the melodrama.

  “Well…I kind of liked Bunny.”

  “Really? Maybe I missed something. She seemed pretty lame to me.”

  “I think that might be the point.”

  “That she’s lame?”

  “That she doesn’t make any real decisions about her life until it’s too late.”

  David considered this statement. It certainly sounded like a movie plot, at least in terms of the brief summaries he was used to reading on the backs of video boxes and in the TV listings. On the other hand, it bore little resemblance to the script he had read. But this was Annabeth’s area of expertise and he trusted that she knew more about it than he did—a little bit, anyway. Plus, she’d read the thing three times.

  “So, what are you going to say to Laura?”

  “I’m not sure. I thought I’d write up my notes, though. So she has something in her hand to refer to when she talks to the writer.”

  “So you’re pretty sure you’ll have at least a page worth of something to say?”

  She paused, uncertain. “Well, if nothing else, I can point out which scenes I think are really carrying the story and make suggestions about how to consolidate some of the better character stuff into them.”

  “Like what? I mean, what did you think was good character stuff?”

  “Well, like the way she makes sure to exchange all her tip money for larger bills—so she won’t have to use the fives and ones those creeps handled to buy her groceries and put gas in her car.”

  “I wondered what that was about.”

  “Yeah. It would make more sense if you saw her doing it right after the scene in the strip club. Anyway, stuff like that.”

  David looked impressed, so Annabeth felt reassured and later that evening, she came up with more than two pages of additional suggestions. It was easy to see that the story’s intended resolution (Bunny disappears, but since she’s told everyone she’s going home to Tulsa, no one in Los Angeles realizes that she’s been killed) was kind of a cheat. It was hard to believe even stupid Bunny was stupid enough to double-cross Sasha, the club owner. The script ended with an homage to All About Eve, a bit wherein a new girl goes through the motions of Bunny’s onstage routine, preparing to take her place. It was clever, but not at all satisfying emotionally. Annabeth felt the audience would spend the last minutes of the film wishing for more information about Bunny—who she was, why she acted the way she did. It wasn’t the worst place to leave an audience, but not if you did so just because you couldn’t figure out how to leave them with a sense of closure. Resolution, after all, is one thing that movies reliably do better than life.

  She called Laura the next morning and left a message saying she had lots of notes, but after three days, Laura ha
d still not called back. Annabeth began to brood. Did she really want notes, or just encouragement? In film school at U.T., Annabeth’s classmates had tended to bristle and spit at anything she said that would have required them to rewrite or rethink. The only comments they seemed to find acceptable were quibbles about dialogue or the confusing use of a prop or some continuity issue, things that would easily be corrected if you ever got to shoot the thing. First you needed a story that could hold the audience’s interest, not to mention one that made sense. Even in paraprofessional L.A., it often seemed that all writers really wanted to know when they gave her their scripts to read was “Do you love me?” Still, Laura had not written Trouble Doll and this Ramona person was nowhere in sight. In all likelihood, Laura really did want to make the script as good as possible, and thus maybe she really did want to hear Annabeth’s thoughts on the subject.

  Annabeth decided to start with the note that would be most flattering to Laura as the director: that the script needed to be more visual—to show the viewer who Bunny really is, how she lives, and the fantasy world of L.A. that seems just out of her reach. When she called Laura again, Laura picked up the phone, but on recognizing Annabeth’s voice, the first thing she said was “Want to come with me to LACMA? They’re showing that Stones movie Cocksucker Blues.”