PLAYING NAOMI
PROSE SERIES 85
GUERNICA
Toronto – Buffalo – Lancaster (U.K.)
2009
PLAYING NAOMI
1
The house in Brentwood was a modernist cube, Lloyd Wright-inspired and paid for with royalties and studio contracts. It suited Naomi. From the curb, one could see only a glint of polished steel and tinted glass. There was no through-traffic on Holyoke. The road passing the house ended in a cul-de-sac. It was safe from intruders, enclosed by a stonewall, hidden from sight by the foliage of an old orange grove. Surveillance cameras were mounted above the gate, and a Bel Air Patrol sign threatened Armed Response.
The décor, once elegantly cool, had lost its crispness. Naomi did not mind the withered look. She wanted the house silent, bereft of illusion, with a stagnant air that didn’t disturb her thoughts, with furniture like ghosts, speechless and dead, a mood that encouraged sleep. Naomi wanted to close her eyes and slip away into sweet unconsciousness, sink to the bottom of her soul.
The curtains in the bedroom were drawn shut. It was mid-morning, and the darkness of the room had become transparent, but the black shag carpet was bottomless and made it easy to sink back into the void of profound sleep. The ebony headboard cast a shadow over Naomi, her body floating on the bed weightlessly, skeins of hair across her face softly blurring her vision. Reaching for nirvana, she stretched out her hand to the pillbox sitting on the side table. Her fingers rested on the lid for a moment, clasped it and let go again. She had promised herself to hold off and stay awake until the evening. She pulled away and sat up against the cushions, prepared to suffer consciousness. Her eyelids were drooping, heavy with ennui, but there was one more book to write: the story of her life. She had tried to tell the story once before, but it came out skewed. She couldn’t resist tweaking the facts to make them palatable. The story changed in the telling. She ended up writing about life as it should have been, the Hollywood formula that had brought her success – every word poignant, every action pre-ordained, survival guaranteed. The characters, evenly divided into heroes and villains, were familiar to her readers and worn thin by habit. The heroine of her own life, the woman she wanted to write about, remained a mysterious creature, unknown even to the author: forgotten, suffocated, buried under layers of time.
Naomi’s life was a Bildungsroman in reverse, a story of retreat from unacceptable truths. It made no sense. There was no moral, no lesson to be learned. The heroine’s name had been the first thing to go. Anna Darvo became Naomi Baum. The pseudonym cushioned the bedrock of her past. Next, she discarded love or, at any rate, exchanged one lover for another with diminishing returns, a streak of bad investments leaving her soul bankrupt. At last she hid in the house with the walled garden. She no longer wanted to be seen. She wanted to curl up, hide in a burrow. What was left now? Sleep, then death. But perhaps the retreat had started earlier, when she was a child, when she first visited Sol’s apartment.
Up close Sol smelled of Old Spice and solvent. He used to be a model, he said.
“A model?” she asked, incredulous. Weren’t models supposed to be glamorous?
Sol was avuncular, round faced with a hint of jowl and thinning hair, clothes rumpled as if he had just rolled out of bed.
“An artist’s model,” he said. “And sometimes I sat for a fashion photographer.”
He kept a shoebox of photos and newspaper clippings showing a man who may or may not have been Sol. It was hard to tell. The pictures were grainy, blurred. The captions were in Cyrillic script, but it did not matter that the words were unreadable. They were symbols. They stood for the life Sol had lived in the old country. In some of the photos he was nude, pale and hairy. In others he wore a tuxedo. Sometimes he read bits of the captions to the child. He sounded like a radio announcer pleading for donations, but the words meant “At the opening of the Vitosha Gallery” or “Nightlife in Sofia.” The photos were proof that Sol deserved a better place than a messy walkup.
Sol was unlike anyone in Naomi’s family. He did not go to an office. He did not stand behind a counter. He was an artist. He lived in a studio, a chaotic flat that contained the debris of his life: plates with half-eaten food, rags with caked-on oil paint, a week’s worth of newspapers spread over the table, a couple of books with warped covers. Sol’s clothes were carelessly piled up on a chair, layer upon layer, like geological strata. The walls had dabs of paint on them. Sol used them as his palette sometimes. His paintings, huge canvases propped up against the wall, were covered with writhing humanoid shapes, obscenely pink, with splayed fingers and toes, or tragically staring faces with mouths full of teeth.
“What do the pictures mean?” she asked him.
“Whatever you make of them, Starfish, that’s what they mean.” He called her Starfish when they were alone.
“But what do you want them to mean?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing in particular. I don’t think about what I’m painting. I follow the lead of the brush. It’s an urge. I can’t help it. I have to paint.” He said the same thing when he felt her up. It was an urge he could not resist. He smiled at her confidentially as if they understood each other, were made for each other. He offered her a candy bar. She accepted the sweet reluctantly, unwrapped it, chewed it morosely. She knew it was a bribe. She allowed the chocolate to dissolve on her tongue and the syrupy mess to gum up her mouth while Sol was watching her greedily. He laid her down on the bed and pressed his body against hers, and she turned her head away, resigned, closing her eyes tightly. As he nudged his way down her body, she furtively wadded the candy wrapper and stuffed it into her mouth, swallowing her screams.
That is when the lies began seeping into Naomi’s life, when she began disappearing little by little. The dream world, that ideal, perfect, buoyant world crowded out the real one with the defects and rough edges, the soiled world of Sol’s walkup, the furtive groping on his disheveled bed, the painfully probing fingers. The splendid world of fantasy opened up and took over then, a great production, the song-and-dance routine of a fake life, in which the predator hunts in vain, the guilty past falls away, the heroine is saved. Perhaps the new novel should start in a filthy apartment, with Sol pressing his body against a child’s.
There was a knock at the door. Erin came in with the tea tray. Her little idiot savant, her little slavey, her shield against the world.
“Oh, you’re awake,” Erin said. She put the tray with the two mugs on the table, opened the curtains, and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Why didn’t you call me?”
Naomi reached for Erin’s hands. “Your fingers are always cold,” she said and rubbed them between her palms.
Even wearing a bright yellow jacket, Erin looked washed out, as insubstantial as a speck of light on the wall. The elusiveness of her features gave her a vague, changeable quality. Her face was unlike the plastic cheerfulness of the maid and the gardener, their uncomprehending certainty, their mindless smiles, which made Naomi recoil.
“Erin,” she said, “remember when we first met? Have I changed much?”
Erin’s eyes were a deep pool, liquid blue with a dark rim. “For one thing, you’ve lost weight,” she said. She compressed her mouth into a wavy line of disapproval. “You should eat more,” she said. “You are just skin and bones. A skeleton. Pretty soon there’ll be nothing left of you.”
Those liquid eyes could see the future. “Maybe that’s what I want,” Naomi said. “To be nothing, to disappear.”
“I know,” Erin said evenly. “You’ve been trying to do that for a long time now. Hiding out in your bedroom. Refusing to see anyone. That’s as much as disappearing.” Right again. She was still holding Erin’s hands between her own. “If I ever wanted to disappear completely,” she said, “would you help me, Erin?”
Erin looked at her, unblinking. “How?” she said.
“By doing nothing.”
Moistness rose to the surface of Erin’s eyes and sank again, but she made no objection. She understood. Erin loved to obey. She was keen on instruction.
“Do nothing when it comes to it,” Naomi said again.
“But I thought you were feeling better,” Erin said. She withdrew her hands as if to reprimand Naomi. “I thought talking to Liz Morgan was a start, a step in the right direction. At least you were getting dressed and talking to someone other than me. ”
“No, Erin. Liz doesn’t count. She is nobody.”
“She is your dog walker. You picked her.”
“She is a washed-up actress. I picked her because she is nobody. She has no personality. She responds to cues. That’s all she does. If I treat her like a shrink, she responds like a shrink. She asks me little probing questions and says ‘I see.’ If I treat her like a confidante, she gets all chummy. She pats my arm and puts on a toothy smile. It’s really quite amusing. She is like putty, a character taking shape under my hands. I think I’ll stick her into my next novel.”
Erin brightened. “Once you get going on a new novel, you’ll be okay,” she said. “So have you got a plot line?”
“It’s going to be a surreal novel. I’m thinking of Pirandello. Or Unamuno. It’s a story in which the character meets the author.”
“Kills the author? Takes over from the author? Replaces the author? You want me to take notes?” Erin said eagerly.
2
It was one of those enigmatic spring days that could go either way, drizzle or sunshine. When Liz Morgan started out jogging, the beach was sodden gray and the Ferris wheel on Santa Monica pier sheathed in fog. By the time she turned back, the fog had lifted, and the Venice boardwalk was coming to life. The skinny Pakistanis rolled out their racks of T-shirts and took the plastic off the display cases stacked with sun visors. A carnival air was beginning to build around the cinderblock dens offering naughty postcards, beach blankets, and plastic sandals. A palm reader, jangling her bracelets, beamed a come-on smile at the first tourists, and the sidewalk cafés cranked up the music. An unconvincing mix of country and hip hop pelted down on the tables and sandwich boards advertising all-day breakfast.
Liz crossed Atlantic Avenue and danced up the steps of her bungalow, trying to feel light. In the living room, half a dozen birthday cards were lined up on the bookshelf, flashing “40” at her in garish spits of color, flaming red and school bus yellow. The display was supposed to be a joke, but the whole thing had turned into an act of penance, like wearing a hair shirt. Kenny ’s card rankled the most. “Hang in there, kid,” he wrote. “The great role is just around the corner.”
Sure, Liz thought, and in the meantime someone else is playing the lead in your life, Kenny, someone with fewer birthdays. Liz was becoming squeamish about her age, as if turning forty was an unsavory business. It was the age of cover up. She no longer dared to wear short shorts and tank tops. Her legs were beginning to look stringy. An ironic curve had appeared over one eyebrow, and shadows were lingering in the corners of her mouth. Perhaps none of that mattered if you were an accountant or a cashier at Savon Drugs, but it mattered if you were in a lineup at auditions, waiting for that iconic role to bewitch the masses.
The acting jobs were drying up. Liz could barely pay the rent on the faded clapboard cottage, a toy house fit for surf bums and unemployed actresses. It was laughably small and crowded, even after Kenny moved out and took his gear with him. He was a cad, but she missed him anyway. It wasn’t easy to find a new lover. Or someone to share the rent.
Liz went into the windowless kitchen, blinked on the fluorescent lights, and opened the fridge. The motor came on with a hum. With Kenny gone, there were only diet-wise choices. No ice cream, no bacon bits, no mayo. She sat down at the table with a bowl of fruit salad, allowing herself to feel virtuous. She scanned the headlines of the L.A. Times and quickly moved on to the entertainment section. Break-ups, link-ups, parties, detox clinics: only the trivial was important in Hollywood. The motor of the fridge stopped with a shudder. She looked up at the wall clock, the red pointer hopping the seconds in regular jerks, and folded the paper. Time to walk Naomi Baum’s dogs.
For a while she had supplemented her income with pet photography, but the owners were hard to please. Liz wanted to capture pet personalities. She produced images of foreshortened dog faces licking their chops with tongues crowding the camera, or cockatiels preening, self-absorbed and withdrawn from the viewer, amorphous feathery balls. The owners wanted prancing pet models in the epicenter of the picture, dogs in red Santa Claus hats and kittens in bassinettes. She gave up photography and switched to dog walking. The clients were more congenial, they didn’t tell her how to walk the dogs or where, as long as they came back happy from their workout. Besides, dog walking was a job that didn’t keep her from acting. Liz treated it as rehearsal time. She took the dogs for a run on Westridge Trail, but she also tried to look the part: hitting the right stride, keeping a certain amount of tension in the arm holding the leash, putting that look of windblown concentration on her face.
Liz got into her red Honda and drove past the small shops and walk-up apartments, turning onto Ocean Boulevard. She stopped for the lights at Colorado and watched the bums hanging out in the park, waiting for the Salvation Army handout. They stood around silently, shoulders drooping. Their faces were motionless, except for one crazy woman, who had an animated air. Her shoulders were twitching, her lips jabbering. Waiting for the lights to turn, Liz watched the woman carefully and twitched her shoulder in imitation. She liked memorizing gestures, just in case they were needed one day.
On San Vicente, the branches of the old coral trees were still bare, but the fiery red blossoms glowed like signal lights. The low-rise apartment buildings gave way to baronial mansions. Beyond the treetops, Liz could see the mountains, velvety green from the recent rainfall. By noon she would be on the backbone trail with Buffy and Lane. Walking Naomi Baum’s terriers was definitely better than her last gig, hawking vitamin supplements on the shopping channel.
Liz turned into the driveway of Naomi’s house and parked the car. Erin Miller, Naomi’s secretary, buzzed her in. Through the open office door, she could see her talking on the phone, a tiny youthless woman with a waxy complexion. Erin paused in her conversation long enough to wave to Liz, mouthing “She’s in her study.”
Everything about the house had a dated look. Naomi refused to have painters and decorators disturb her peace. The drawing room was like a vintage movie set. The walls were beginning to look drab, and the geometric pattern of the curtains had faded from black to charcoal. Only the Lucite and silver ceiling retained its glamour. It was a house made for entertaining, but Naomi lived in a melancholy funk and shunned dinner parties. She had no reason to be morose. Naomi’s latest book, East West Connection, was topping the charts. It took readers straight to where they wanted to be: the entrepôt of danger and passion. How did a recluse like Naomi know about things like car chases and steamy hotel room sex? Watching TV? There was a fifty-inch flat screen in her bedroom, the only thing in the house that wasn’t vintage.
When Liz came into the study, Naomi was waiting for her. She was draped in black, a slim figure, mysterious and ageless like a goddess, more onyx than flesh. She stretched out her arms, and the folds of her loose gown undulated, as if moved by a heavenly breeze.
“Do I have bony hands?” she said, holding them up for inspection.
Liz took a perfunctory look. “Not really,” she said. Perhaps she should have feigned more interest. Was “not really” the right response? It depended on how you defined your role. As a confidante, she might have said more. As a dog walker, she kept comments to a minimum.
“Do you think there is a connection between physiognomy and character?” Naomi said.
“Never occurred to me.”
“Sol was convinced of it. Bony fingers betray an inclination to jealousy, he said. Or was it envy? I can’t remember which.” She pulled up her legs and arranged them becomingly on the sofa. It was a marvelous piece, lime green with gray fish swimming through a sea of orange and black donuts. The effect was psychedelic.
Who the hell is Sol? Liz thought.
Naomi fluttered her eyes. “What was I talking about?” she said. “My mind has suddenly gone blank.”
Liz wondered whether Naomi was losing her grip on reality. There was a character named Sol in East West Connection, a secret agent. Was Naomi mixing up fact with fiction? She was on a cocktail of drugs to control her mood swings, to lower her blood pressure, to help her sleep, to help her concentrate – a rainbow hued assortment of pills and capsules, obtained from a Hollywood doctor with a large clientele of self-medicating patients. The general effect was paranoid withdrawal. There had been no signs of delusion so far.
“You were talking about someone called Sol,” Liz reminded her.
“Oh, never mind him,” Naomi said.
It’s going to be a long morning, Liz thought. Her job was morphing into something she hadn’t applied for, a hybrid job: dog-walker cum therapist to Naomi Baum.
3
Ted Hillman handed the car keys to the valet and ignored the smile of recognition. He was used to attention. His talk show was popular, but popularity came at a price: humoring the fans. He was tired of small talk and requests for autographs.
Ted walked into the gallery and surveyed the collection of doorframes and the plastic body parts strewn on the floor, leaking acrylic blood. An usher encouraged the guests to interact with the installation. Ted had to enter the labyrinth of doors cobbled together from barn board and plywood before being allowed to collect a drink. He stepped briskly through one of the structures. The ramshackle display was at odds with the pristine walls of the gallery, the glistening pot lights, the haute couture crowd, the waiters serving canapés. The opening reception for Miro Bogdan’s installation ENTRY/ EXIT was packed with A-list clients.
The brochure described Bogdan’s oeuvre as “remaking the real.” How did they come up with descriptions like that? Did the PR guys sit around a table, brainstorming? “Let’s see now, how can we put 3-D goggles on those schmucks and make them see things? We can’t very well say: Miro Bogdan piles up used lumber. So let’s make it recycles. No, that still sounds like garbage. How about remakes? Miro Bogdan remakes used lumber? Please! No one is going to pay big bucks for scrap. Let’s call it material, no, substance, no, wait, reality. That’s it!” Wild excitement, high fives all round. “That’s what we’ll put into the brochure: Miro Bogdan remakes the real.”
The event had been organized to create hoopla and to leverage Bogdan’s market value. The Bulgarian was a rising star on the art scene. His edgy installations had given him international status. ENTRY/EXIT was shaping up as an unqualified success. It was Euro-chic. The crowd was abuzz with rumors: a wealthy collector with a taste for raw art was negotiating to buy the whole system. He wanted to have it re-installed at his ranch in Santa Barbara, but he was worried: would the structures stand up to the elements? Trust the spin doctors to come up with a reassuring answer: Allow nature to continue the process of interaction. What could be more natural than collapse and decay? The installation will grow more authentic every day until it is at one with the land, a timeless piece of art.
I should do a show on spin doctors, Ted thought. Their stuff is stand-up comedy for intellectuals. Intellectuals? Hold it, Ted. The I-word has crept into your thoughts again. Better not open your mouth when you go to production. They can smell intellectual on your breath.
A pile of Bogdan’s books, Desert Stones, was sitting on a display table. Ted picked up a copy and scanned the introduction. He leafed through the pages. The black-and-white photos of rock installations were intriguing, but the poems left him cold. Maybe they were just fancy captions. Ted rechecked the title page. No, it said “photographs and poems.” The first was a rhapsody in blood, something about hearts being cut out:
On the sacrificial stone.
From the wound
Beads of blood flow
Like black tears.
Bogdan probably meant to evoke an Aztec ceremony. Ted fast-forwarded through the pages:
Fear is with him,
He is less than a man, a worm,
A sinner cast out.
Holy twaddle. Laments on the corruption of the world and the torments of a soul in hell. Someone had warned Ted that Miro Bogdan was a religious freak.
He spotted Bogdan standing a little distance from the display table, an anorexic looking fellow, twentysomething, in skinny jeans and a suit jacket over a Tshirt. Not exactly prepossessing, Ted thought: weedy figure, close-set eyes, black hair tied back in a ponytail varnished to wig-like smoothness. Bogdan was standing with his back to the wall, nursing a pale drink and looking peevish, like a fractious child. From time to time his agent tried to coax him out of the corner, but the artist wasn’t eager to mix.
Ted walked up to him and introduced himself. Bogdan looked at his outstretched hand, unsmiling. For a moment Ted thought he was being rebuffed, but it was just delayed reaction, some sort of mannerism. Bogdan lifted his arm as if powered by a sluggish engine and touched Ted’s fingertips.
The fellow was awkward. It would take professional skill to get him talking, but that was Ted’s forte. There was a time once when the critics said he was too bland, too mild-mannered. At first he balked at their criticism. He had struggled to find his own voice, and it happened to be amiable. He held out. But after a while the critics got to him. He began to doubt himself. He was a nice man, sure, but in show business that was a curse. Ted reworked his performance. He added color to his delivery, got more tenacious, put his questions more forcefully. His docility was rewarded. “Hillman develops a flair for quotable sound bites. He discovers pockets of impishness,” Variety said. Impishness? Those guys doled out praise like nuggets of gold. They sat in front of their laptops, thinking, okay, let’s reward this fellow, Hillman, for compliance with the rules governing talk shows, but let’s not be too generous. Unadulterated praise is against our code of ethics. After a year of faint praise, they finally came out with an ego-stroking phrase or two: “Hillman’s blend of benevolence and steadfast pursuit is a winning combination, his ticket to success as an interviewer.” For Ted, in the meantime, that blend of benevolence and steadfast pursuit had become a tiresome routine. And in Bogdan’s case, it didn’t work. Ted had to kickstart the conversation:
“I read the preface to your book: you were born in Pasadena. How did you end up in Bulgaria?”
Bogdan shuffled his feet. “My father was Bulgarian. He decided to go back to the old country.”
In other words: didn’t make it and bailed out. “Homesick?” Ted asked politely.
“No. He hated the West. He detested consumerism.”
Ted raised his eyebrows. Really? Detested consumerism more than tyranny? “That was in the days of the iron curtain, right?” he asked. “Your father didn’t find the Bulgarian regime repressive?”
“The system was flawed of course, but my father believed in the idea behind it. He was a committed socialist.”
“You attended the American School in Sofia?” Ted said without missing a beat. Enough circling of the wagons. There was a glaring inconsistency here: Bogdan Senior hated the West and sent his son to a prep school for children of Western diplomats?
“My father wanted me to have the benefit of an English curriculum,” Bogdan said. He was on the defensive, but holding steady. “He didn’t encourage me to socialize with the ex-pat community.” Bogdan had a habit of pausing between sentences, clamping his mouth shut as if he wanted to keep himself from saying more.
Ted was afraid to turn him off altogether. He switched tack and moved on to neutral ground.
“I understand you have decided to stay in the States,” he said.
“I’m not sure it’s the right decision. I may go back to Bulgaria.” He looked at Ted moodily. A long pause threatened to end the interview.
Ted tried to revive the flagging conversation, but there wasn’t much common ground. “Have you read Naomi Baum’s East West Connection?” he asked. The bestseller was set in Bulgaria.
A flicker of interest showed in Bogdan’s dark eyes. “I’ve read it,” he said.
“It’s a good story, isn’t it? Pure Hollywood, of course. Car chases, graphic violence, torrid sex, torture scenes, cliff-hanger suspense – someone is bound to make a movie of it. It’s a sure box office hit.” Ted saw the disconnect in Miro’s eyes and stopped. “But to get back to the Bulgarian setting – is Baum’s description accurate in your opinion?”
“Accurate? I don’t know. She is alienated by the Communist East, I can see that. And I am alienated by the moral bankruptcy of the West. Coming here was like entering another world.”
“‘Entering another world’ would make a great title for a show. I should have you on Hillman’s Circle.” Ted paused to let the offer sink in, but Bogdan’s eyes remained blank. Hillman’s Circle left no discernable impression on him.
Ted didn’t press the point. He was afraid of an outright no.
Bogdan seemed lost in thought. He stared at a point above Ted’s head. “You know Naomi Baum?” he said after a pause. His voice was cagey.
“I’ve never met her in person.” Ted said. “She doesn’t do the party circuit.”
“I met her, once, in Kozloduy, when I was a child. She visited my father. They knew each other from Pasadena. I tried to contact her when I came here. I wrote, I emailed, but all I got was a form letter signed by her secretary.”
Jackpot. The boy had strung together five sentences.
“If you are interested in meeting Naomi Baum, let me try to put you in touch,” Ted said. “Let’s set up a show with you and Naomi Baum.”
“I’m not interested. I have nothing to say to a television audience.”
“You could do an installation for us,” Ted said amiably. “Read one of your poems.”
Miro hesitated. “Let’s see whether you can get Naomi Baum.”
That was his condition. He wouldn’t come unless Naomi Baum agreed to be on the show. Odd. Why was Bogdan interested in her?
“Family history,” he said.
A voice from the past. Someone who had known his father. Known in the biblical sense?
Ted had his own reasons for wanting to meet Naomi Baum. He had already been playing with the idea of doing a show on her. There was a piece of unfinished business connected with her name. Years ago, he sent Baum a story, asking for an assessment. He thought of himself as a budding writer, but there was more to it. He wanted to meet Naomi Baum in person. He had a crush on her. Well, not on her exactly, but on the sultry heroine of her book, which he somehow identified with the picture of the author on the back cover, the woman with the sexy smile, flaming red hair and arched eyebrows like Anne Bancroft. It was the kind of picture he could get off on. Ted had visions of being seduced by Naomi Baum, Graduate style. The imagined details gave him wet dreams. Naomi did write back, but only to shoot his story down and destroy it with a barrage of cynicism. Alright, it was a jejune piece of writing with a contrived plot and a forced ending. But couldn’t she have let him down gently?
It was one of those pungent, shameful episodes that linger and crystallize into a moment fixed in time: the movement of his fingers opening the letter, the pounding impatience, the rushed reading, the deadly phrases. “The story showed no literary imagination,” she said. It was full of cliché. The characters were twodimensional, never lifted off the page. The pain of reading her words took his breath away. She was rejecting him, crossing him off her list of possible lovers. He was a man full of cliché, common, dull, a character that did not come alive. Reason kicked in later. The breathing normalized, and he remembered he had asked for criticism not love. Naomi Baum’s words were meant for his story. She said what he knew already. His talents lay elsewhere, in journalism rather than belles lettres.
Ted should have laid the episode to rest long ago, but in his imagination Naomi was still an alluring figure, a fetish, the orgiastic fulfillment of his carnal dreams. Perhaps it was risky to arrange for a meeting after all these years. Imagination is delicate web – drop reality into it, and you tear the fabric. End of dream. But that wasn’t the right metaphor. Ted wasn’t dreaming. He was perfectly rational. He had no trouble keeping night time fantasy from prime time reality. Unlike his ex-wife, who couldn’t distinguish between backstage and real life. Or how else do you explain the fact that Ashley fell for a stunt man, Jack “The Robot” Matthews, who made a living flinging out of burning cars and driving over cliffs? She bought into the fantasy. Ashley drifted into stunt-man Jack’s arms, afloat on a cloud of imagination. Probably thought the excitement of exploding firebombs would carry over into the bedroom. But Ashley was an airhead. Give the happy couple half a year, and they will be at each others’ throats.
Even on the rebound from Ashley, Ted was a realist. He knew what to expect from a meeting with Naomi Baum. She was forty-five. As a sex symbol she was out of date, but as a catalyst, she was still relevant. He needed that personal encounter, he told himself, to cap the episode of the rejection letter.
He had kept up with Baum’s novels. The photo on the jacket of her books never changed. It was the same one Ted had fallen in love with, showing a thirty-year old redhead wearing funky black-framed glasses and big jewelry. Baum herself hadn’t been seen in public for more than a decade, but her retired life added to the mystique and enhanced her celebrity status. She still turned out new novels at regular intervals, every three years or so, but she refused to go on reading tours or give interviews. She didn’t need to. Her novels sold well without publicity stunts. East West Connection was number one on the bestseller list. Had been number one for three weeks. Apart from the morose ending, it was an excellent read, with bits that resonated. There was instant recognition when Ted read about the protagonist’s failed marriage. He saw the words on the page and knew: they described his relationship with Ashley. Either Naomi Baum had extraordinary insight, or his life was following a recognized pattern and had become a literary commonplace:
There was no one reason, Nicolas thought. There were many reasons why his marriage was a failure, and he was uncertain which of them carried most weight. He accused himself of an unreasonable desire for perfection, or at any rate nostalgia for a more perfect time, a time when being with Paulina was exhilarating, vibrating with joy, when he had a large vista of their future together. Then came a time when he saw the flaws in their relationship but still believed in the possibility of correcting them, when the years were spreading before him like a blue sky full of hope and potential. It could be worked out. It needed only a little fine tuning. But discontent began drifting across his line of vision, a cloud turning the sunny morning into an overcast afternoon. The disagreements became sharper, the arguments more numerous. They piled up in a disorderly heap, unresolved, choking conversation. He gave up arguing with Paulina, but the silence descending on them was worse. Their time together turned limp with boredom. Happiness became a congealed record of voices and laughter, passion a memory frozen in time. I am changing, he thought. She is changing. We can no longer see one another. We are spinning out of sight, into separate worlds. She hankers for the personal. She takes a prurient interest in the anecdotal, the neighbor’s dog run over by a car, someone’s purse stolen on the bus, a lover’s quarrel overheard on the staircase. She begrudges me the time to talk about issues. “You and your politics. You and your philosophy. You and your projects. How you go on and on about them. What about me?” Paulina’s neediness was terrible. She needed to confide in him every facet of her feelings, relate to him every idle detail of her life. One must fill up the time. She rooted around in trivia, she wallowed in emotion. Don’t you love it? Don’t you hate it? She bounced between enthusiasm and loathing and settled on hating it all. She carried on with the ease of a professional mourner, about the unseasonable weather, the job routine, the boorish colleagues, the system, herself. “But you don’t want to hear about me, what I’m going through.” To forget how depressing life was, Paulina went shopping. The shelves in the stores of Kozloduy were half empty, but she liked to go on scavenger hunts, surround herself with a comforting jumble of worthless, useless stuff. Wax flowers, doilies, mirrors, imitation silver trinkets.
It was a description of Ted’s marriage. On Rodeo Drive, the shelves were not bare, and Ashley had taste. Her scavenger hunts had an haute couture motif, but the rest of the story was the same: the need for the world to turn around her, the preoccupation with trivia, the eagerness to fill up time, the impatience with issues that interested him. At first they argued, but after a few years the arguments died down, the large vista of his life with Ashley contracted, clouded over, turning a sunny morning into an overcast afternoon. Their time together became limp with boredom. Ashley became a habit. He could no longer see her. If, one evening, they had put another woman in his living room by mistake, he would not have noticed it. Ted suspected that boredom was at the root of their breakup, but he was ashamed to admit it. What did that say about him? That he was a shallow person, looking for a quick fix, a shot of pleasure? But here was a literary character conceived by the omniscient Naomi Baum, validating his experience, writing the lyrics to the soap opera of his life. Ted had felt the same nauseous boredom as the hero of Baum’s novel. He had given up arguing with Ashley, debating the same points over and over again. There was no one reason for the break-up. There were many, vague reasons. It was not easy to fault Ashley. She was good-looking in a blonde and feckless way, the serenity of her smile undisturbed by the vagaries of life. She had a dove-eyed look that said “It’s not my fault, really.” She was socially adept, available in bed when needed, but their marriage had sunk to the “nice” level. The perfect smile Ashley smiled in the toothpaste commercial, the creaseless baby feet she turned to the camera for a soap ad, the puppet-like strutting on the catwalk, that wasn’t acting, that was Ashley to the core. After she gave up her modeling career, she inhabited his life doll-like, soft, sinuous, boneless, stood beside him at gallery openings and charity balls, useless and pretty. There was no enthusiasm left in their marriage, no highjinks, no bedroom acrobatics. Passion was frozen in memory, yes. The shallow flow of marital life became unbearable. Ted wanted to escape the picture perfect nicety, return to the wilderness of abandon, but his affairs, the occasional nights of sexual caprice made reentry into the dull routine even more difficult. What if he had married a different woman – the flame-haired Naomi Baum, for example, whose glossy photo promised passion? Would it have lasted? No, he told himself. Passion wasn’t meant to last.
4
Liz had hoped to escape Naomi this morning, but the wonky talks were becoming routine. Before she was allowed to take the dogs for a run, she had to take care of Naomi-pet, sip tea with her in the study and listen to her Freudian ramblings. At best, the sessions offered Liz an opportunity to study Naomi’s gestures. The lesson might come in handy if she ever played a diva. Naomi was the prototype, but there were few calls for that role.
Naomi was in a pensive mood, sitting very upright, legs crossed decorously at the ankles. A black silk shawl was wrapped tightly around her shoulders. She was playing with the fringes, grazing them with her slender fingers. “I was watching the Academy Awards,” she said, “the young women prancing down the red carpet. Tell me, Liz, why do I find them attractive? They are lusciously vulgar, full of trailer-trash come-on. What is it that attracts me about them? What does it mean?”
Liz took a stab in the dark. “You want to be thin like them,” she said. Naomi had a hang-up about weight. She was desperate for gamine slenderness.
“Well, obviously. I don’t need you to tell me that, Liz. But I’m also fascinated by their taut skin, tanned cleavage, abundant locks, plump lips. Does that mean I am sexually attracted to them? Or am I merely envious because my own skin has begun to sag and my hair comes out when I brush it?”
“I can’t answer that, Naomi. It’s a personal question. You have to figure it out yourself.”
Naomi sighed. “I thought you knew those things, Liz. Doesn’t acting require an understanding of the emotional content of a scene? Can’t you sense what I am feeling?”
Erin appeared at the door of the study. The terriers snuck in behind the secretary. Their black and mahogany coats were glossy in the morning light. They padded up to Naomi warily, ears erect, slender legs elegantly taut. She reached out to them with a languid gesture. Buffy resisted, but Lane came and sniffed at her hand. She withdrew it.
Naomi had bought the dogs two years ago when they were cute puppies. She wanted undemanding company. In return, she was willing to provide a life of luxury for Buffy and Lane. She fed them holistic food and put up a fancy doghouse, a mini Swiss chalet with indoor-outdoor carpeting, crowded with plush toys, squeaking rubber balls, and rawhide bones. But she quickly tired of the dog as man’s best friend idyll.
“Go find Liz,” she said, waving her hand. Lane turned her sleek body and lay down at Liz’ feet. Buffy ambled over as well and furtively licked her shoes, leaving a shiny wet spot on the soft uppers.
“Sorry to bother you,” Erin said to Naomi. “I’ve had another call from Ted Hillman’s office asking you to appear on his talk show. His assistant has been pestering me, and now Hillman himself –”
“Tell him: I don’t do public appearances.”
Naomi had not been seen in public since her heart attack thirteen years ago. She refused to leave the house after the doctor told her to avoid undue excitement. She saw no one now except Liz, Erin, and the dogs. The heart attack was the result of taking fen-phens to lose weight, but Naomi insisted it was a constitutional weakness. She is playing the card for all it’s worth, Liz thought. It’s her ticket to ride: to brood, to sulk if she felt like it, to issue orders lying back languidly on the sofa, a privileged invalid.
Erin’s large, watery eyes were as blank as Orphan Annie’s. “I’ve told him you don’t do public appearances,” she said, “but he is – what can I say? – he is politely insistent. He is fascinated with your writing, he says. He’s read every single one of your books, admires your style, loves the way you unfold a story. He’s been a fan of yours for ages, he says. I didn’t want to be rude to him. I said I’d bring the invitation to your attention.” She contorted her body into a pretzel-shaped “sorry.”
“Well, now that you have brought it to my attention, call him back and tell him ‘no.’”
“I will,” Erin said, but made no move to go. “He faxed me a list of the guests,” she said. “I thought you’d like to see the line-up.” She handed Naomi a sheet of paper. Liz could tell: Hillman had gotten under Erin’s skin. She was on his side. Not altogether surprising: Hillman’s Circle had a large fan base. Women adored the tall, lanky host with the amiable smile and unflawed forehead. Hillman caught their fancy with his mellow voice and his shock of sandy hair parted on one side. He looked as urbane as an Englishman in the colonies.
Naomi glanced at the paper and ran her index finger down the list. She stopped at the third name and froze. Her hand crept up to her throat, slid, and came to rest over her heart. She patted her chest nervously. “On second thought,” she said to Erin, “don’t call Hillman yet.” She looked shell-shocked.
“I’ll leave it with you then,” Erin said. Buffy lifted up her muzzle and rose. She sensed that the audience was over. Lane stretched and yawned, showing her teeth and throat. She looked back at Liz with black, shiny eyes. “I’ll take you for a walk in a minute,” Liz told them softly. She didn’t want to get up and go without an official nod from Naomi.
The dogs followed Erin to the door. She stopped and did a little bee-dance, turning around in expectation of another order, but Naomi let her go without. She was in a trance, still looking at the list.
“Miro Bogdan, poet, photographer, installation artist,” she said, reading the third name on the list.
Liz had never heard of Bogdan.
“Is he someone you know?” she said. It was always difficult to break into a prolonged silence. It took a special kind of shallow breathing to keep the first word from hitting the air too abruptly.
Naomi came out of the Bogdan-induced trance and removed her finger from the mesmerizing line. Her face remained pale. “Miro Bogdan is my son,” she said.
East West Connection had an implausible ending: the heroine returns to America pregnant and gives up her child for adoption. There were two possibilities: either the novel was more memoir than fiction, or Naomi was suffering from false memory syndrome.
“Your son?” Liz said.
Naomi looked as fragile as porcelain. “I haven’t seen Miro in years. I went to Bulgaria when he was four years old. I wanted to persuade his father – well, I don’t know what I expected from that visit. Reconciliation with Simon was out of the question. Some arrangement, I suppose.”
“You have a scene like that in East West Connection,” Liz said. It was a gentle reminder, in case Naomi had difficulties distinguishing fact from fiction.
A dry, hot wind raised dust from the sidewalk. Bits of paper and plastic were flapping and swirling around the doorways. The road was leading to a cluster of apartment buildings, an encampment of monumental grayness. The buildings were identical except for the numbers and letters above the entrance. Nora pulled out a piece of paper and checked the address: Block B, Building 11.
A cloying smell of refuse, of rotting cabbage leaves and rancid fat filled the air of the narrow hallway. Nora climbed the stairs.
On the third floor, where Nicolas lived, the pane in the hall window was broken. Shards of glass littered the sash and the floor.
She rang the bell.
Nicolas opened the door. He was unchanged: handsomely masculine, a narrow face with inquisitive eyes. His dark wavy hair was mussed as if he had just run his fingers through it.
“Come in,” he said.
“Is that scene drawn from life?”
“All fiction is autobiographical, Liz. Do I need to tell you that?”
No, she didn’t. Nora, the heroine of East West Connection, was eerily familiar. She was Naomi’s doppelganger. “I take it, ‘Nora’ is you and ‘Nicolas’ is your ex-husband Simon,” she said.
Naomi winced. “Don’t be simplistic.”
“And the love affair –”
“Liz, please. Nicolas is a character in a novel. I hate it when people speculate about the extent of truth in fiction.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Naomi had her guard up. The confessional heat had cooled. She sat very upright, with her knees pressed together, ankles touching, looking straight ahead. But perhaps it wasn’t Liz’ speculation that upset Naomi. Perhaps it was the idea of seeing her son.
“I can’t pass up the chance of meeting Miro,” she said. “I have to talk to him, but I’ll go crazy if I do.” Her hand was at her chest, to calm the palpitations. The weak heart was a wonderful prop for Naomi’s act. It gave tragic depth to the fluid movement of her hands and the mobile expression of her face. “I can’t even go out on the terrace without suffering an anxiety attack,” she said. “When I think of the camera, the lights, the people I’d have to meet if I accepted Hillman’s invitation –” She bent forward and grabbed Liz’ arm. “I can’t do it, Liz. I can’t. – Why don’t you go instead of me?”
“Don’t be absurd, Naomi. Hillman wants you, not your dog walker. Hillman’s Circle is a celebrity show, nothing else, whatever his pretensions to culture.”
“I mean, go as me.”
“Impersonate you? You can’t be serious.” But Liz felt a thrill of excitement. It was a great offer. Too bad it wasn’t kosher. She swallowed her excitement and cleared her throat, but the idea stuck in her craw like a fishbone.
“You are an actress,” Naomi said. “Consider it a professional challenge. I’ll pay you a fee.”
It was the best role Liz had been offered in years, but was it worth the risk? “What if they check up on me?” she said. She was going through the motion of doubt, but her heart was beating thickly, caught by the outlandishness of the hoax, the delicious idea of being discovered, a B-movie actress in a choice part, giving the performance of her life.
“Don’t be silly,” Naomi said. “Who would check up? No one gives a hoot about an author appearing on a talk show.”
Naomi was wrong. The Hillman Circle had a large audience. And Liz risked being recognized as Liz Morgan. She was an obscure actress, a midnight hawker of costume jewelry and vitamin pills, but even the Shopping Channel had its late night following. The question was, did any of these insomniacs watch The Hillman Circle? The risk was there, but the offer was tempting.
“Liz, you’ve got to do it,” Naomi was saying. She could change her eyes from crystalline to soft and her voice from flinty to wheedling in a second. “I’ll make it worth your while,” she said. “I’ll put you on salary.”
“A long-term contract?”
Naomi laughed. “A life-time contract,” she said. “The dogs’ lifetime.” There was a hysterical edge to her voice, a desperate dryness in her throat. “I’ve been thinking of setting aside money for Buffy and Lane. I’ll put it in my will. Why shouldn’t I leave money to the dogs, so the poor things can have some fun? I feel so guilty about them. They must be bored to death with me. You could take them on holidays, Liz. Fly them to New York. Stay at the Plaza and take them for a run in Central Park. Or go abroad: The moors of Scotland. The Tuscan hills.”
“I knew you weren’t being serious.”
“I swear I am,” she said. Her laughing mouth had frozen to a grimace.
“You are not. You’ll outlive the dogs.”
“I shouldn’t have mentioned the will. Take the dogs abroad after the show. To recover from the rigors of impersonating me and to lessen the chances of anyone recognizing you in the street.” She pulled her lips into a painful smile. “Come on, Liz. Say yes. Think of it as taking over from me for a couple of days.”
Liz lowered her eyes to conceal from Naomi’s x-ray eyes that she was holding out with difficulty. Playing Naomi was a dream. Getting a steady job out of it was a bonus. “We’d have to let Erin in on it,” she said.
“She’ll keep her mouth shut.”
She would. Erin served Naomi unconditionally.
“How did your son end up in Bulgaria?” Liz asked.
Naomi smiled victoriously. She knew what the question meant. “So you’ll do it? You’ll go on the Hillman show for me?”
“I need background information,” Liz said. “You’ll have to fill me in.”
“Simon got custody when we divorced and took Miro back to Bulgaria.”
“Have you kept in touch?”
“Miro doesn’t even know I am his mother. That was part of the bargain I made with Simon.”
“What bargain?” Liz asked. She was entitled to exact answers. She had been promoted from dog walker to impersonator. But Naomi never volunteered more information than necessary. It was a technique of hers. She stopped after the first revelation, choked back the words and waited for a follow-up question. And if you didn’t ask, you never found out.
Naomi hesitated. “Simon divorced me over an affair. He caught me in the act. He was ultra-conservative about sex.” Her hand came up to her forehead, brushing against it – removing the cobweb of a thought? “I went to see him in Bulgaria, and we came to an agreement: I would make no further attempts to contact Miro, and he would keep silent about the reason for our breakup. I was afraid he would demonize me in the eyes of the child, you know.”
“And he kept to the bargain – you think.”
“He told Miro I was dead. Committed suicide. He insisted on that macabre touch. It was close enough to the truth: I did try to kill myself.”
Liz thought of the suicide scene in East West Connection.
She opened the door of the gas stove, trusting in its mercy, its power to take away the pain. She put her head inside, bedded her cheek down willingly. The rustle of the gas streaming into the oven was like the even breathing of a sleeper, as calming as prayer. It reminded her of Sundays long ago, when she was a child. It reminded her of pews and incense. The church in Kozloduy had been closed down, the door padlocked. The regime frowned on religion. In her mind she saw the deserted nave, mould creeping up the walls, painting them with leprous patches. The fresco of the Last Judgment above the main altar was peeling. Only God’s face was left intact, and his raised arm. He was looking down on her with large almond-shaped eyes, promising – hell fire, paradise? She could not tell. Her fear dwindled to a faint nausea in the pit of her stomach and dissolved into nothingness. She closed her eyes and felt the insinuating onset of eternity.
“And you never saw Miro again after that visit to Bulgaria?” Liz asked.
“No. I tried to get in touch with Simon when Miro’s book came out. I thought after all those years he might be ready to call a truce. I wrote to his office and was told he had died, of throat cancer. He was a chain smoker, you know. I wasn’t sure whether to feel relief at the news, or not. I had visions of a deathbed confession. I pictured him saying to Miro: I’ve allowed you to believe that your mother is dead. The truth is: I could not get myself to talk about her or even think about her. She has done unspeakable things.”
“Unspeakable things?”
“I’m using Simon’s voice. He was a prig.”
That was all Naomi was willing to say. The confessional fire had burned itself out. She compressed her lips. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. No one on the show will ask you about the reasons for the divorce. And if they do, tell them it’s none of their business. No comment!”
“But what exactly do you want me to say to Miro?”
“Act like someone who cares, in a maternal way, but don’t go into any details or revelations.”
“Alright, no revelations.”
“He is under the impression that his mother has committed suicide. I don’t know whether there is any point in resurrecting her. Perhaps I should leave him an orphan. I haven’t made up my mind yet. I’m not sure what to do about him. So, play it by ear, Liz. Improvise.”
5
Ted checked the message on his cell and congratulated himself. The show was coming together. The miracle had happened: Naomi Baum was agreeable. Miro Bogdan had fallen in line. Norwood Taylor was a possible third, and he needed the publicity for his new book on Rwanda. The tabloids were down on him. His agent was pleading for respectable sound bites. Guesting on Hillman’s show was the needed antidote to pictures snapped at 4 a.m., showing his client disheveled and puking in the parking lot of a strip club.
Ted took the idea to production and hit a snag. Gary Brown, who held the purse strings, nixed the concept.
“Miro Bogdan? Naomi Baum? Norwood Taylor? You’re shitting me, Ted.” He refused to green-light a show based on art and books. It wasn’t likely to spike the ratings or improve the quarterly budget figures.
Gary had one of the coveted corner offices on the eighteenth floor, overlooking the lot. If you craned your neck, you could see the Hollywood sign in the distance. An interior decorator had given the office the once-over with burnished walls and original movie posters, but Gary had superimposed his cheap-laughs concept. There was a life-size plastic doll with anatomically correct orifices leaning against the wall. It was the ultimate conversation piece, according to Gary.
“Cerebral doesn’t sell,” he said in his booming voice. “Do I have to tell you that, Teddy-boy?”
No, Ted knew the creed: cerebral was just wrong. But you could get away with sincere. Or earnest. “Every show has to be sold to the public,” he said earnestly. “You have to convince them that what you are doing is worth watching and knowing.”
“So sell me on it. Who is this Bulgarian whiz-kid?”
“Miro Bogdan? He is the up and coming man in Europe. He does installations –”
Gary waved a dismissive hand. “In Europe. Has anyone here heard of Wonder Boy?”
“He did an installation a couple of weeks ago. It made a big splash. You heard of ENTRY/EXIT?”
Gary shook his head. He was toying with his cell phone, punching in numbers.
“A collector snapped it up, paid a price in the six-figure range for it.”
Gary stopped fiddling with his cell. “Six figures? Like what? A hundred? Five hundred?”
“Enough to buy a property in Nevada. Bogdan is thinking of staying in America. He has found the land of plenty.”
“He speak-a the English?”
“His English is perfect. He went to a private English-language school in Sofia.”
“Is he interesting? Funny? Outrageous? Can he hold an audience?”
Ted evaded the question. “I talked him into doing an installation for the show,” he said. “It’ll make for great visuals.” And give Ted something to fall back on, in case Bogdan refused to open his mouth on the show.
Gary was swiveling back and forth in his chair. “All very well,” he said, “but culture is a niche market. I don’t see how you can pull it off and deliver the numbers.”
Gary’s taste was crass. If things were left up to him, they’d be making shows about singing condoms and gay sumo wrestlers. “I have to be able to believe in what I am doing, Gary,” Ted said. He was desperate, ready to believe in his own lies.
Gary shifted his meaty frame. “I don’t know why you are so hung up on that show,” he grumbled, “unless you have suddenly decided to take the high road.” He pointed an accusing finger at Ted. “You know, I suspect you of perverse leanings like that.”
“Since when is it perverse to go after celebrities?” Ted shot back. “Bogdan’s installation drew a record crowd. Baum’s books have been made into movies and grossed millions. Norwood Taylor isn’t cerebral.” Taylor was notorious for his graphic battle descriptions. Deathbed heroism, blown off limbs, muddy field hospitals were his specialty. “He is a blood and gore man,” Ted said. “What’s your problem, Gary?”
“I don’t know,” Gary said. He still wasn’t sold on the show. He stopped swiveling and faced Ted. “You want a recluse? Why don’t you go for Salinger?” he said.
“He’s ancient. Ninety-something.”
“So what? Everybody knows Catcher in the Rye. Even I’ve read it, and I don’t read a hellova lot. I remember the scene about fucking the family dinner. Anything like that in Baum’s book?”
“A couple of lesbian scenes,” Ted said. That’s all he could offer Gary: a couple of tame lesbian scenes. “And that was Portnoy’s Complaint, by the way,” he said.
“What was?”
“The liver-fucking incident. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth.”
“Roth. Whatever.” Gary didn’t like to be caught out. He wanted to be all-knowing, all-powerful. The God of Production. “Listen to me, Ted. Forget about fiction writers. Stick to Hollywood celebs. Who is bedding who. Their kinky fantasies. That kind of thing.” He shuffled papers on his desk. He was getting tired of the discussion. “You know, Ted,” he said, “you are getting too laid back for your own good.”
Gary was from the East Coast. He liked to play up the contrast between New York hustling and Californian ease.
Ted didn’t answer. Gary was right of course. The proposed show had no earning potential, but Naomi Baum had accepted the invitation to be on the show. He was going to meet her, finally. Ted kept his eyes firmly on Gary and said nothing. He knew: silence would unnerve him.
Gary held out for thirty seconds, and threw up his hands. “Okay,” he said, “I see you’ve got your heart set on books and stuff.” He lapsed into beagle eyed resignation. “But the title has got to go.”
“You mean ‘Entering Another World?’”
“Yeah. That’s shit, Ted. Well, maybe it sounds good in Bulgarian. Did you know, the Spanish title for Gone with the Wind is Lo que el viento se llevó, ‘That which the wind took away with itself?’ Can you believe it?”
“We’ve got an alternative title, Gary: ‘Culture Shock.’”
“Alright,” Gary said without enthusiasm, “we’ll let it ride. I guess we can spin it into an educational DVD if need be, package it under cultural diversity or some-
thing and sell it to public broadcasting.”
“Something like that,” Ted said vaguely. “Don’t worry. We’ll place it.”
“Well, if the show doesn’t go where we need it to be, I’ll flame you, Teddy-boy. You hear me? I give you fair warning.”
*
“Rebecca Rifkin is fishing for an invitation,” Peggy said. “I think you should have her on the show.” Ted usually deferred to the judgment of his assistant. She had a perfect ear for nuances. No cell phone innuendo escaped Peggy, no suppressed sigh, no swallowed misgivings. She caught every electronic whisper. She understood what was left unsaid. But Rifkin?
“The social historian?” Ted said. “No way.”
They were sitting in the conversation pit, a sunken hexagon in the corner of his office, furnished with Plexiglas chairs, glass table with chromium legs, and a gray leather couch, cool to the touch. Ted loved the look of industrial design. For a while it had been all the rage, but the trendspotters were already predicting the end. Time to redecorate, Ted thought reluctantly. He still liked the clean lines, but he didn’t want the office to look dated. You had to watch that sort of thing. If you measured prestige by square footage, his office was no match for Gary Brown’s, but at least it had panache. Flair made up for size. Or maybe not. Perhaps it wasn’t the office that counted. Some people gauged a man’s clout by his personal assistant. Gary Brown’s front girl was suitably impressive, an ultra-chic whippet wearing little tailored suits with narrow skirts to show off her A-1 legs. Ted had to admit: Peggy didn’t measure up in that department. She was unfashionably zaftig. She could flash a sexy smile, but she didn’t pass muster walking across the floor. Peggy was short and tragically broad-hipped. Her upper body was petite. Below the waist she was as sturdy as a Palomino pony. You wanted to hide her rump behind a large, solid desk.
I really should replace Peggy, Ted thought, but she was super efficient and had a winning personality, which made you forget her proportions and forgive her habit of standing a little too close and breathing Altoid in your face. Peggy was smart and likeable. And she was one of the few people who could handle Gary. When she put her pudgy fingers on his arm, he listened. Maybe Gary had a secret hankering for fertile hips.
But Ted was firm on Rebecca Rifkin. “We don’t want her,” he said to Peggy. “We have a full complement of guests for ‘Culture Shock.’ Besides, Rifkin doesn’t have the right profile. She may be well known in academic circles, but she means bugger-all to the general viewer.”
“I wouldn’t say that Rifkin lacks profile,” Peggy said. “Her books sell. She has a cult following. You should run this by Gary. I bet he wants her on the show. She offered to read from her forthcoming book, Holocaust Memories – an account of a visit to Auschwitz.”
“No. Been there, done that.”
“She says she and Naomi Baum were fellow students at UCLA back in the late 1970s. Apparently they knew each other ‘intimately’ – that’s the word Rifkin used. There might be something there, you know.”
Peggy had a sixth sense when it came to creating the right dynamics for a show, but this time she was wrong, Ted was convinced of it. “She’s bluffing,” he said. “Intimate knowledge sounds better than ‘we used to have coffee in the campus cafeteria.’ And it’s hell to work with academics. They are in love with abstract words.”
But Rifkin didn’t give up. She kept bombarding Peggy with emails and phone calls, making it clear that hers wasn’t a campus cafeteria story. She had some sort of peeve and wanted to air it. Ted wavered. When Norwood Taylor, the old sot, canceled, Ted made up his mind. Rifkin was on. Perhaps she could supply the needed fireworks.
He went back to Gary Brown.
“You remember Rebecca Rifkin, don’t you?” he said.
“She the dyke who organized a Pride Parade on campus a few years ago?” Gary said.
“– which the administration shut down, and there was a ruckus. That’s the one.”
Gary’s fleshy hands came together in a gesture of thanksgiving. “Okay, get her,” he said and gave Ted the thumbs-up sign. Overt lesbianism filled the bill. The sex quotient was up. Gary was almost reconciled to the idea of having a show on books and art.
It was Peggy who came up with the idea of staging “Culture Shock” at the Villa del Mar. The brochure described it as “an enchanted place, a magical blend of art and nature, offering serenity and blithe repose.”
“It’s out at Malibu,” Peggy said. “A private estate with the amenities of a resort: beach, swimming pool, gym, sauna, excellent film library. They rent out the place for executive retreats and that sort of thing. I blocked two days, pending your approval. I thought we’d schedule everyone’s arrival for the evening before the taping. That will give Miro Bogdan time to set up his installation, and you can have a talk-down over dinner. If it turns into an all-nighter, good. A little sex on the side never harmed anyone. The thrill will carry over into the show.”
Peggy thought of everything.