Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

“Not that I care,” she said happily, “but how far did you have to come down in terms of price?”

“The buyer has offered the full listing price—”

“Are you kidding ?”

“—in exchange for a few considerations regarding the closing. Chief among these is that he would like his identity to remain anonymous. He won’t be present at the closing itself, and he has given me his proxy to sign all affidavits, et cetera, on his behalf.”

“What about financing? Won’t all this secrecy be a problem there?”

“He will pay cash.”

“Oh my God,” Helen said. Into their lives, already stabler than they were used to, was about to drop $315,000 in cash. “What is this guy, like some kind of celebrity or something?”

“Yes, actually,” Bonifacio said coolly. “He is something of a celebrity, and for that reason would like everything done as quickly and as secretively and uncontentiously as possible. A fast closing. Is that acceptable to you?”

Helen allowed that it was. The day before the premiere, she took the afternoon off from work to ride the train back up to her old hometown and sit in Bonifacio’s threadbare office and sign a stack of documents, and their last tie to their old life was cut. She was surprised not to feel any more ambivalence or nostalgia than she did. Mostly she just felt an unfamiliar pride. From the shipwreck of her marriage, with no resources at all, she had made a new existence for herself and her daughter, and that existence, at the present moment, would have to be counted a roaring success.

Movie theaters had basically followed the model of airplanes — what once had a now all but unimaginable aura of luxury had become as depressingly cost-efficient as possible — but the Ziegfeld had been left sufficiently alone that it could be pressed into service on nights when a little old-Hollywood glamor was on order. Helen had been instructed to arrive no later than five-thirty even though the movie didn’t start until eight. She understood why. Sara did too, she was sure, though that didn’t stop the poor girl — who looked amazing, Helen thought, amazing and pitiably self-conscious at the same time — from denouncing the whole operation as a perfectly refined symptom of everything fake for which she somehow held her mother responsible. They got out of a yellow cab at the end of the block (as far as the traffic cop posted there would let it go) and walked to the head of the pristine red carpet, where the spotlights were turned off and dozens of photographers, who had to get there early to secure their positions, fiddled irritably with their equipment. Helen wasn’t sure whether to savor the moment and walk leisurely with her head up, smiling, or to speed into the theater as discreetly as possible. Sara walked almost directly behind her about halfway through the bored gauntlet, and then, incredibly, she stopped dead and answered her phone.

“Sweetheart,” Helen said reproachfully, but Sara held up a hand to silence her. She was reading a text; whomever it was from, it put a welcome smile on her face, and she flipped the phone around in her hand and began snapping pictures of the paparazzi. “Smile!” she called out, and one or two of them did, though most simply looked annoyed with her for daring to clog up the charged public space with her ordinariness. Sara’s phone beeped at her again as she was holding it aloft for another photo; she brought it down, read what was on the screen, laughed, and started texting back.

“Sara!” Helen said and put a hand on her shoulder. Sara shook it off. “Who are you texting?” she said, leaning next to her daughter’s face to try to look at the screen; she got a whiff of something sweet and medicinal. “Fine,” Sara said, closing her phone, and marched toward the theater doors, her mother trailing behind.

They were hustled into a very plain-looking reception room full of catering tables, where they spent an hour stuffing themselves with finger food while glancing at a closed-circuit video monitor fed by a stationary camera trained on the same carpet they had just crossed. First came a trickle of anonymous corporate invitees just like them, overdressed people who walked off the bottom of the screen and then appeared a few seconds later in the doorway of the reception room, trying to look nowhere and for a familiar face at the same time. Helen was sorry to see that no one else had brought a young son or daughter. Then came a second round of people, who apparently were well known if you were part of the movie industry, judging by the little, indiscreet grunts of recognition Helen heard moving through the crowd.

“Who’s that guy?” Sara said.

“Not a clue,” said Helen.

Sara shrugged. “They’re going to wait until the last of the genetically inferior walks the red carpet,” she said, “and then they’re going to seal the doors and turn on the gas.”

Her mother was turning to ask her to keep her voice down when a more serious ripple went through the room, and Helen felt her shoulders squeezed as others abruptly tried to work their way toward the door separating them from the lobby. She turned to the screen and saw a face she recognized, though she had no memory of the name, and then a beautiful young woman who was either Amy Ryan or Amy Adams. She didn’t dare ask anyone — certainly not Sara; when she got into a certain mood, anything you said to her was a provocation — which Amy it was.

“Pretty sure,” Sara said, “that I am the only Asian person here.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” Helen said, trying to conceal her surprise; that was exactly the sort of thing she’d always taken comfort in Sara not noticing. She kept her eyes on the screen. Though the camera angle excluded the arc lights themselves, you could tell they were on from the glow that now framed the faces on the video feed; and every time they heard the lobby doors open, the sound of a kind of dull human panic reached them from outside until the doors swung shut again. They weren’t really on the inside, Helen thought, where they could see what was going on, but they weren’t on the outside either; she didn’t know where they were. And then there was a collective octave change as the crowd saw Hamilton Barth step out of the carousel of limousines.

The other guests had already begun to exit the reception room, to find good seats and to get a good, clear, casual look at the famous in the flesh before the lights went down; so Helen, with everyone suddenly drawing away from her, could hear for the first time that there was now an audio feed on the monitor as well. Two well-dressed men, just good-looking enough to be unobtrusive, stood on either side of Hamilton with their hands on his two elbows.

“He’s bombed,” murmured Sara, startling her mother, who hadn’t realized she was right there. “Nice. He’s so hammered he needs two guys to hold him up.”

But Hamilton, handsome and curious and wincing a bit from the noise, clearly wasn’t bombed, and they weren’t holding him up — their touch was too light for that. While pretending to look elsewhere, the two men — who might have been co-workers of Helen’s at Malloy for all she knew; where else would you drum up people to perform such a task? — were trying their best to shepherd Hamilton into the theater as quickly as possible, to keep his feet moving before some beautiful woman in a gown holding a microphone could step into his path and arrest his attention, which was of course exactly what happened next.

“Hamilton!” the woman shouted at him. He stopped dead and drew back a little at the sight of her. “Hamilton Barth! What a night! How excited are you to be here?”

“How excited am I?” Hamilton said, shouting over the screams of those behind the ropes — shouting, it seemed, over the strobe of flashbulbs. He was grinning, a little gamely and a little condescendingly, and crow’s feet ramified handsomely around his eyes like pond ice someone has stepped on a little too soon. “We’re all overexcited, right! Did your mother used to tell you sometimes that you were getting overexcited? Mine did! What’s your name?”