Stuart Kaminsky - Show Business is Murder

“Probably not.”

“I said to myself, ‘If that little prick ever calls again, I’ll hang up in his face, I don’t care who he is.’ ”

“Well, I deserved that,” Arthur said.

She stopped turning. “Then you called. I was lying in bed listening to my machine, and when you said your name, I started crying.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you don’t understand. I was crying because in that instant I thought, ‘He’s calling to give you the part after all,’ and I was so goddamned grateful. And I hated myself for feeling that way. I hated you for making me feel that way. I wanted to kill myself. I didn’t even hear the rest of your message until later, when I played it back. I almost didn’t hear it at all. I almost pulled the tape out and threw it in the garbage.”

“Good thing you didn’t.”

Lisa paused. “I still don’t understand why you did this for me.”

“You mean, what’s in it for me? No, that’s a fair question.” Arthur took a file from the stack on his desk and from the file retrieved a photo of Corey Dunn. “He’s going to do Goin’ West, ninety-nine percent certain. Why? Because I sent you over to Bill Fitch and he liked you.”

“But you sent me over without knowing if I was any good. You sent me over blind.”

“So? What did I have to lose? Dunn wasn’t doing the picture. Fitch wasn’t returning my calls. So you go over there and bomb. Dunn’s still not doing the picture and Fitch still isn’t taking my calls. What could I have lost?”

“You told him I was good. You could have lost your credibility.”

“Don’t make me into a white knight,” Arthur said, thinking to himself, credibility? What credibility? “I took a shot and it paid off. If it hadn’t, I’d have tried something else.”

“You could have taken a different shot. The fact is, first you were a real asshole to me, and then later the same day you helped me out when you didn’t have to.”

Arthur shrugged. “I felt I owed you a good turn.”

“You’re a tough guy to figure,” Lisa said.

“It’s part of my charm.”

“Why me?” Lisa said. “No offense, but I’m sure you’re an asshole to lots of women.”

Arthur thought about it. Why? Because she looked like she needed help more than those other girls. Or maybe like she deserved it more than they did. Or maybe it was just that she was the first woman he’d seen that day who wasn’t young enough to be his daughter. “I don’t know,” Arthur said. “It was a feeling I had about you. And I had seen you in Telling Lies . I knew you were good.”

“I only had two lines in Telling Lies, ” Lisa said.

Only one of which I’ve heard, Arthur said to himself, seeing as how I only caught the second half of the movie last night on HBO. “They were good lines,” he said. “A person knows talent when he sees it.”

“You’re such a liar.”

“Yes,” Arthur said, “I am. Want some lunch?”

She faced him dead on, arms crossed over her chest. “Let’s get one thing straight, okay? This feeling you had about me? No, listen to me. I don’t care what you did for me or why you did it, I’m not going to sleep with you.”

“What did I say?” Arthur said. “I said, ‘Want some lunch?’ I did not say, ‘Want to sleep with me?’ Lisa, I’m a married man, and though my wife wouldn’t believe it if I slapped my hand on a pile of Bibles and sang it soprano, I haven’t had sex with another woman since a few weeks before November 5, 1976, which is the day she and I got married. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

“Because that was the only thing I could figure,” Lisa said, going on as if he hadn’t said anything. “That you’d thought about me some more and decided you wanted to get me into bed. The only other thing I could figure was that you felt sorry for me, which would be even worse.”

Arthur took his coat off the hook on the back of the door and slung it over his arm. Why had he done it? Why had he taken her picture home and called Fitch and put himself on the line for her? He wasn’t sure. Lots of reasons. No reason. Oh, hell, what could he tell this woman that would make her understand?

“Totally honest?” he said, and she nodded. “Maybe I did feel a little sorry for you. Jesus, who wouldn’t? And maybe I wanted to get you into bed, too, just for a minute. I don’t any more, believe me.”

“Which?”

“What?”

“Feel sorry for me or want to get me into bed? Which don’t you any more?”

“Either,” Arthur said. “Listen, you say you felt like you wanted to kill yourself when I called. I don’t know if you meant that or not. But I could have said the same thing that very morning, and I would have meant it, every word of it. I was standing at that window-” he pointed “-and I was this close, this close, to opening it and saying sayonara to the whole goddamn shooting match.

“Why? You’re asking yourself why. Here’s a man, corner office on the thirtieth floor, casting for major Hollywood blockbusters, has beautiful women in his office at all hours showing him their tits, bigshot agents call him all day long begging him to let their stars be in his pictures, why would a man who’s got all this want to do a double gainer from his office window?” He ran his hand through his hair. His fingers itched for a cigarette.

“That’s what you’re asking yourself. Well. All I can say is, the agents aren’t calling, the stars aren’t begging, the thirtieth floor stinks as much as the third in this lousy city, my business is all on the West Coast, my wife’s sure I’m shtupping every girl who walks in here, and the girls-yourself excluded, God bless you-all look like they got inflated with the same bicycle pump. I walk out of here at five o’clock, I don’t want to see another pair of breasts as long as I live.

“Then you walk in here, deserving better than me, deserving better than this whole lousy business, and I treat you the same as the rest of them. And you let me do it to you.” Arthur shook his head. “I had to call you back. That, or come back here, open the window, and get it over with once and for all.”

The descent into LAX had left her with a headache, and though normally she could cure her headaches by promptly applying chocolate, the Snickers bar she’d bought from a vending machine by the escalator was doing no good. It wasn’t hunger that had given her the headache this time, it was reading on the plane. It always did. But she had scenes to do in twelve hours-no, less, ten and a half-and, my God, this dialogue was not the sort to stick in your head on first reading.

Why couldn’t it have been Pale Moon ? She’d really loved that script, not because it would make such a good movie, but because the part she’d have had was just a great part. Melanie Lyons had lots of screen time and a great arc-from docile wife to heroic rescuer of her family to drained and bitter widow after her plans went all to hell. She’d have gotten to play opposite Michael Keaton, who may not have had much of a career lately but had always struck Lisa as a generous actor, judging by his films. But now it was Michelle Glassberg playing the wife (Michelle Glassberg? What was she, fifteen? ) and Lisa was struggling to learn page after page of pseudo-scientific gibberish.

Why did they even bother with dialogue? No one would come to the theater curious about the combination of tachyons and muons and pi-mesons it took to make a man invisible, they just wanted to see the results. They might as well hang a sign around her neck labeled “exposition” and let her keep her mouth shut. She’d get to carry a syringe, wear a lab coat over surgical greens, restrain the hero on a gurney, and explain breathlessly to Jon Farrell what had gone wrong. She couldn’t imagine a more generic part. Even the character’s name was generic: Carol Brown. Doctor Carol Brown, but so what? You want to talk invisible, you don’t need to mess with tachyons and muons, just name someone Carol Brown, stick her in a lab coat, give her a clipboard and a stethoscope, put her in a hospital hallway, and you’ve just made an invisible woman right there.