girl in the hat

(photo by ally ally oxen free on flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/11339081@N07/)

Wayne slides one admiring hand across the Lilien’s antique maple liquor cabinet and swings the doors open: “Ta dah!”

“That’s a lot of booze.”

“Here’s a forty-year-old bottle. Want a taste?”

“No thanks.” Drew is still woozy from her lunch with Mae and sick with the thought of how she blathered on and on. Her head hurts and when she closes her eyes, visions of every cool girl she has ever known flit across her interior screen. Close-ups of blasé faces: the elevation of an eyebrow, the curl of a mouth, a sudden surfeit of white in the eye, deep sighs and monosyllables, all the minute clues Drew is always too busy leaning forward and acting clever and trying too hard to notice until later, when it’s too late.

Drew’s decline started when, pulling triumphantly away from the restaurant, she looked in her rearview mirror and saw the woman from the car behind get out and wave. She was an older woman, pretty, with curly black hair and dark sunglasses. She looked familiar, very familiar, and suddenly it clicked: It is her. It’s her! It’s my mother. Walking up to the driver’s side of my car. It’s her.

Drew could only grip the steering wheel and wait.

She had often wondered if her mother had run off to Hollywood. That’s what she had loved most after all, watching the old movies they’d show every afternoon on television. For years after her mother disappeared, Drew had stared at the little screen in the den hoping to find her mother in the commercial for laundry detergent or trying on shoes in the background of a sitcom, in the studio audience or as a game show contestant. Like the tingling of a ghost limb, her mother’s face is always there- the peripheral blur, the shadow in the background-and Drew is always finding her in store aisles and dressing rooms, staring until the waitress (or ticket seller or clerk) opens her mouth to speak and Drew registers the too-small nose or the olive tones in the skin and drops once again into the ordinariness of the moment.

So wouldn’t it be spectacularly perfect to run into her in Los Angeles? Hollywood-perfect.

Drew opened her car door and slid out to meet her. “Hi.”

The woman just grimaced. “Should we call the police or just exchange information?”

Drew’s laugh was verging on hysteric. “What do you mean?”

“You just backed into my car.”

“What?” Drew got out to look. It was true. She had backed the Lilien’s superfancy platinum-colored BMW right into the woman’s car, hard enough to put a dent in both expensive bumpers. “Oh my god, oh my god,” Drew intoned. But even then, even the truth right in front of her eyes didn’t stop her from saying, “This is not my car. I borrowed it. The Rabbit’s at home. I drive a green 1986 Volkswagen Rabbit?” How could she be so stupid, so dense. She had pulled out her Michigan’s driver’s license and handed it over as if it were a gift. “I’m sure I know you. Don’t you know me?”

The woman’s tight smile evaporated off her face. She leaned in close, close enough to reach out and poke Drew and said, “What do you want, my fucking autograph?” Then the woman actually did reach out and poke her, once, right in the middle of her sternum. “Cut the chit-chat and tell me how the fuck you are planning to pay for the damage.“

Drew blushes hard just thinking about it. She feels sick, too sick to tell Wayne, even.

“What’s wrong?” Wayne asks. He touches her brow. “They’re going to use Mae as Edna, aren’t they? I mean, they have to, right?”

“Well, yes. She said she got the part.”

“Then what’s up?”

Drew pinches her earlobe and mumbles, “I just hope they don’t change my script too much.”

“Your script? What are you talking about? I thought you sold it,” he chides. “Your naivete kills me, Drew. But don’t ever lose it, whatever you do. It’s one of the major ingredients of your charm.” He takes a sip from the bottle and smacks his lips. “Don’t tell me you’re going to play the wounded writer who can’t believe how they molested her pristine script.”

Usually his teasing helps, but not today. Drew snatches up the watering can and turns back to the cymbidium. “What are you writing these days? Still working on your Billy Wilder rip-off?”

“Oh come on, Drew. At least I have no pretensions of remaining faithful to a writer I’ve never even met, especially one who died a hundred years ago.“ As he speaks, Wayne sniffs and sips the contents of the bottles in the liquor cabinet.

“Wayne, even if you were the last person in the world, you couldn’t remain faithful to yourself. You’d find a way.”

He carries a bottle with him down the hall while he fingers objects, fondles upholstery, and opens doors. He’s looking for a distraction. It worries him when she gets like this. Over his shoulder he says, “There is nothing pure to remain faithful to. There is no such thing as an original thought.”

“Uh huh. Did you get that from Bartlett’s Book of Familiar Quotations?”

“What are we talking about, anyway? Are you going to tell me what happened or are we just going to quibble?”

“Do you have to touch everything? If you break it, you buy it.”

“Fine.” He pauses with his back to her. “This whisky is delicious. You should really try some.” He smacks his lips and swirls the liquor in the bottle. “Authenticity is expensive you know. How many people can afford to be authentic or faithful? How much do you still owe on your student loans, by the way?”

“Don’t ask.”

“You still owe me, too.”

“I know, I know. I’m sorry. I’ll try to pay up this month.” She’s clutching her forehead and dripping water on the floor. He opens the double doors at the end of the hallway to reveal the Lilien’s pristine four-poster. “Don’t sit on the bed, please. I don’t want to mess anything up.”

“You won’t.” Wayne dives onto the bed and rolls around on the fluffy comforter, groaning; he throws a leg over a pillow and pushes his face deep into the down. He looks like a perverted cherub making love to a cloud, thinks Drew, and she smiles despite herself. He turns his flushed cheeks to her: “Do you remember that scene with Ann Margaret on the white satin bed with the baked beans spewing out from the broken television?”

“Disgusting.”

“Now that was a great scene. I want to write a scene like that.”

“Would you like me to look in the cupboards for a can of beans?”

“Yes! Let’s look in the cupboards.” He jumps up and runs past her down the hall towards the kitchen. “And don’t try to pretend you don’t like me like this. You love a good show just like everyone else. That’s what they’re hiring Mae for, isn’t it? To juice up the story? Inject a little life?”

“Well…” Drew follows slowly with her watering can. “I actually think Mae is going to be great.”

“Great?”

“I know. But I really do. You’d have to meet her to understand. In person, she is just so… so…” Drew can’t say ‘observant’ because the word has superior connotations; ‘believable’ and ‘real’ insinuate an inherent falseness, and ‘sympathetic’ sounds slightly pathetic. Drew can’t find the words to explain that there’s something miraculous about the way Mae looks at her, that it feels like being seen for the first time; Drew feels herself dissolve and expand to accommodate something bigger and better. Instead she says, “I just think this is going to be a break-out role for her.“

“For you both, you mean.”

“Why do you say that?”

When she catches up with him, he’s inspecting the contents of the refrigerator. “Well, the better she is, the better it is for you. I know you didn’t get paid much for this script, but when she wins an Oscar you’ll be able to ask triple that amount for the next one.”

“You make me sound like a money-grubbing parasite or something. By now you should know that I don’t have one ambitious drop of blood in my body.”

“Then maybe it’s time to reconsider your goals. It’s not a crime to take care of yourself. If you don’t, who will?” He grins and holds up a tin of caviar. “You feed her, she feeds you, and I’ll eat the bits that fall to the floor.”

“I don’t want to be rich or famous. I just want my work to be recognized.”

“Good luck with that.”

Drew sighs.

Wayne asks, “What’s wrong with being rich and famous, anyway? Or moderately well-off and well-known enough to get hired again? What do you have against paying your bills and going to restaurants and buying a mattress that no one has slept on before?” He stands in front of her with his eyes framed in tortoiseshell. “I mean, this is a nice place you’ve got here. Don’t you enjoy it just a little bit?”

“Look. I’m really tired…”

“Fine.” He pulls his car keys from his pocket. “But get some sleep, would you? You look like hell.”

…

The yellow dress is hanging on the back of the closet door. Drew inspects the crumpled, deformed silk. Maybe if she steams it, Katherine Lilien won’t notice. She turns on the hot water in the tub.

She knows what Wayne means. When a person’s parents die or leave, one is left with a deep need to be taken care of, to belong in a house like this to a couple like the Liliens, to misbehave and be forgiven. If he had love like that, he would share it with her.

And she is ashamed to admit that there is something unexpectedly wonderful about the uniformity, dimension, comfort and effortlesness of the Lilien’s fancy home. Drew’s apartment has a stingy, shallow little bathtub and an endless shortage of hot water and no matter how she contorts her body, she can never attain full submersion. But she’s resigned to that fact. When she’s shivering in a puddle of lukewarm water, she’s performing for an imaginary audience who admires her endurance. She believes she will emerge from the bath a stronger, better person. Isn’t a rusty little tub more interesting than the gilded vessel you’ll certainly find featured in this month’s décor magazine? Doesn’t hardship make a more interesting story?

But the Lilien’s tub is a marble behemoth with elaborate golden taps. Three grown adults could share it quite nicely. When the steam begins to fill the room, Drew takes off her clothes. It would be a shame to waste the water.

Vulnerability trembles up her naked legs from the cold, hard marble floor. What if she slipped and the Liliens found her there, her skull crushed like an egg? She should go get the copy of Anna Karenina from her purse, but Katherine keeps a stash of trashy entertainment magazines by the tub. Drew leaves her clothes in a pile on the tile floor, grabs a few magazines, and slides in.

This is where pretty Katherine, size zero, lies with her head pressed back against this little blow-up plastic pillow. Drew flips until she finds the obligatory story on Mae. The magazine is several months old and came out just after Mae’s big action film. There’s a full-page shot of Mae in a candy-apple-red latex catsuit with her hair in two long girlish braids tied with big plastic red dice, presumably to keep it out of the way while she wrestles bad guys. The sidebar declares:

It’s so trashy and juicy and inane. She wonders how that red latex feels against the skin. When she positions her foot under the flow of water, the hot pressure climbs up her leg.

With her eyes closed, she rewinds day and starts over. This morning she should eat a healthy breakfast: protein, poached eggs, tea instead of coffee. She should keep the daisy behind her ear but wear her ordinary jeans and a t shirt. Mae would admire her for being herself and not caring what anyone thinks. She should bring her Ipod to the restaurant and when the waitress comes, she orders water instead of wine. Drew doesn’t prattle— she acts like a grown-up. She asks Mae about her childhood or her last boyfriend or what she’s read lately or whom she voted for. They’d talk about what a Buddhist day feels like and if the day ever feels Amish or Hindu or Muslim. Drew would be intelligent and witty, impervious, Teflon. She would talk less and listen more and promise to never, ever tell.

…

Comments/Questions:

As usual, all comments are welcome. I am posting this novel online because I really want feedback.

I’ll be out of town for the next two weeks- please excuse a brief lapse in attention!