61

Bruce Ward stepped gingerly over the tangle of cables and rapped on the door of the Winnebago. An elfin fellow with a face framed by a receding hairline and a conscientiously trimmed beard, he had been Veronica Simmons’ manager for three years. And they’d had an excellent relationship, he thought, agreeing on just about everything. Bruce knew there were some problems with the script that the Whitman organization had sent, but those problems were more than outweighed by the accompanying offer. Two million dollars. Or one million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars more than Bruce had been offered for any of his clients, ever. Veronica had promised that she would be finished reading the script by this morning. It was almost 6:00 A.M. The Winnebagos and the rented Ryder trucks were lined up along Bleecker Street, and the lighting crew had almost finished setting up in front of the little Italian bakery where the morning’s shooting would take place.

Veronica would already be in makeup and costume, and Bruce hoped to have everything settled in the few minutes before she had to start work. He’d been in a state of mild apprehension ever since his alarm had gone off, and he would be relieved to have this over and done with. His face twitched when he heard Veronica’s voice saying, “Come in.”

Stepping into the Winnebago, Bruce was surprised to see Veronica in the kitchenette. She was ready to go all right—wearing that wig of black hair that looked like skeins of yarn piled up and the Marks-a-Lot eyeliner and the bakery uniform with its mini-apron—but she was not saying her lines to herself, which she was almost always doing at this point. Instead she was cranking away at that crazy ice cream maker of hers. The script from Whitman, Bruce saw, was sitting on the coffee table.

“Not more coffee ice cream?” he said.

“This is a special batch I’m making,” Veronica replied, in the voice of the character she was playing, Gina Iantosca. It was uncanny, even after you thought you’d gotten used to it. She actually could have been one of the women who lived in this neighborhood, with their daughters in the plaid parochial school uniforms and their cousins in the Mafia. As well as he knew Veronica, Bruce still felt a stranger to her in some ways. A talent like hers was and always would be unknowable, and inexplicable. That was why People magazine, profiling her, had wound up sounding like the Carvel guy getting through one of his commercials in fits and starts, and had been driven even to quote some bit-part nobody who’d known her in college to the effect that “being a star is like what Truman Capote wrote about Marlon Brando once. You sit on top of a mountain—made of ice cream.”

“Did you see Nan around?” Veronica was saying. “I’d like her to see if she can get some dry ice—that’s the only way I’ll be able to ship this.”

“No, I haven’t seen her,” Bruce replied. “Why don’t you just leave a note for her?”

“Yeah, I guess I’ll have to,” Veronica said. “There, this is ready. Could you hand me one of those gallon containers in the closet?”

Looking at his watch, Bruce said, “Why do you have to be doing this now.”

“You said you wanted my reaction to the Whitman project this morning.”

Bruce removed his glasses and looked at his star client as if she were making snowballs in a threatening way. “This is your reaction?” he replied. “Making more coffee ice cream?”

“I’m sending it to David,” said Veronica. “With my love. I don’t know what else to do.”

Bruce felt gripped around his throat. His glance fell to the script on the coffee table and rose again to Veronica’s placid, olive-skinned face, with its heavy, blackened eyelashes.

Already pleading, Bruce said to her, “What are you saying to me?”

“You’ve read this script,” Veronica replied.

“Of course I’ve read it. I know it’s not perfect…yet. I know it has some problems, but none that—”

“It has one central problem,” Veronica said. She was packing ice cream into the container, pressing it down hard with the back of a heavy spoon. “It’s no good,” she said. Then she licked her fingers.

Bruce sat down on the sofa, hard. He rubbed the indentations on the sides of his nose that his glasses had made.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said.

“I was really surprised, Bruce, you know?” said Veronica. “That you and Victor would hand me something like this. A woman whose truckdriver husband gets killed—that’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—who starts driving a truck herself, and winds up with a whole fleet of trucks and a daughter on drugs—that’s Mildred Pierce, roughly—then she’s presto on a ranch in a riding outfit giving orders to a bunch of cowpokes—that’s Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley. The only thing that’s original or interesting about this script is the dialogue, and that’s because it sounds like eighth-graders translating Latin into English.”

“So they can hire new screenwriters,” Bruce said. “I’m sure they’ll give you any changes you want.”

“It isn’t just the script, Bruce, it’s the people involved. This director—he works with detergents and underarms—and the rest of them, who are they, anyway? They couldn’t even have come from TV—and at least with television, what you see is what you get.”

“Honey, sweetie, let me try to explain my and Victor’s position here. Our position. Two. Million. Dollars. That’s what we’re talking, two million. That’s what you’ll get for this and that’s what you’ll be getting from now on, upward of two million, even. That puts you in another realm, Ronnie, in another dimension.”

“The Twilight Zone?”

“Let’s not try to be funny, huh, please? It’s not right, not when we’re talking this kind of dough. I have a wife, and kids. And Victor has Miguel.”

“I know. Who makes the ice cream for the kid’s birthday parties?”

“Put ice cream in their mouths and take away their college education.”

“Don’t try to make me feel guilty, Bruce.” Veronica threw the heavy spoon into the sink and pushed the cap down on the ice cream container with all her might. “I don’t have any kids, remember?” she said, her voice almost cracking—and her own, not Gina’s. “I’ve given up a lot to be what I am. I’ve given up any chance I might have had to be happy leading a normal, ordinary life. This is all I’ve got, Bruce. And I won’t compromise it, I won’t. Do you think I care about the money? My work is giving away—everything of myself. And it’s kept. They don’t give it back, you know. But they look at it again and again, and at least I can say that when they look at me they don’t see anything bad.”

“So what? So what if this thing bombs, for two million dollars? The public will forgive you.”

“But I won’t be able to forgive myself. You know what my personal life is, Bruce. In the past two years I’ve had three brief little affairs, one with a screenwriter on the make in every possible way, one with a shy, horribly insecure, defensive stand-up comedian, and one with my manager.”

Bruce looked at the door.

“I thought we were never going to talk about it,” he said.

“You force me to. Look at me, look at what I am. I’m nothing. I have no one. But I work every day, I kill myself, in order to become someone else, to be a real human being up there on that screen, to be larger than my miserable little life. That’s something, Bruce. To me, it really matters. And I’m not going to let you or Victor or David Whitman or anyone else take it away from me, not for two million dollars or twenty million dollars. I could never be paid enough, Bruce, because I’m the one who has paid.” Bruce sat there in silence on the sofa.

Veronica stood by the sink, her hand on the counter and her chest heaving.

There was a rap on the door.

“Ready, Miss Simmons,” a voice said.

“Okay, be there in a sec,” said Veronica, in Gina’s voice.

Bruce picked up the script that was lying on the coffee table. He straightened the pages and wrapped an elastic around it.

“All right,” he said weakly. “You win.”

He stepped down from the Winnebago. Across the street, the bakery was lit so brightly it bothered Bruce’s eyes, like the sun reflecting off snow. He looked the other way. Across the street he saw a crowd already gathering to watch. They were probably wondering, he thought, why the store had to have spotlights on it with the sun already up. He stepped carefully over the cables again, in the inadequate light of day.