Jonathan Dee - A Thousand Pardons

He brushed his hands through his hair, mostly as a way of getting his elbows out of the palms of his two escorts, who were already visibly worried.

“Everybody’s here tonight! You must have lots of friends here for your big night!”

“I don’t really have a lot of industry friends, actually,” Hamilton said ruminatively, as if they were having a serious conversation at the tops of their voices, “because if you have a lot of friends in the industry, then you wind up spending a lot of evenings like this one.”

“Tell me about this movie,” the woman with the microphone said through her dozens of teeth. “Was it—”

“Maria,” Hamilton said. “Is it Maria? Not that you look like you would be named Maria, just I suddenly feel like we’ve met before.”

“Wow!” said the woman who might plausibly have been Maria. “So there’s already Oscar buzz about this movie. What was it like making it?”

“What is your job?” Hamilton asked her, in the friendliest possible tone. “What do you do?”

The woman’s openmouthed smile gave way to uncertain laughter. The microphone dropped an inch or two.

“No, I’m sorry, right, the movie, the movie,” Hamilton said. “Well, look around you, I mean this evening says it all, right? The movie was just like every other movie I have ever made, an exploration of the self and its boundaries, a pathetic, profligate waste of money, an orgy, a journey, a total clusterfuck.”

“A what?” said Maria.

“Clusterfuck!” Hamilton repeated into the microphone, at which point the two handlers put their forearms into the small of his back and got his momentum going toward the theater door again.

“What a tool,” Sara said. “Seriously, with the I’m-too-good-for-this routine. If you don’t like being looked at, don’t spend your whole life in front of cameras.” Helen saw she was texting again.

“It’s hard to be scrutinized all the time,” Helen said softly. “And watch your language, please. Some actors find it hard just to be themselves. I don’t think this is reflective of who he really is.”

“How do you know who he really is?” Sara said. “And do not tell that story again. Can we go get some decent seats, please?”

The theater was already nearly full, though hardly anyone was seated. The lights were still all the way up. The aisles were crowded with people on their phones; Helen saw one woman who was clearly only pretending to talk to someone, then discreetly turning the phone every few seconds to take a picture. She looked around to see who was worth this small subterfuge, but in the front few rows of seats it was hard to recognize anyone, precisely because everyone had that look to them, that look of being someone whom you ought to recognize. “Keep going, keep going,” Sara said to her bewildered mother. “I do not want to get stuck on the side.” Helen pushed gently past five or six standing men, toward what looked like unclaimed space in the interior of one of the center rows. It was impossible to tell which seats were taken and which were not, because no one was willing to compromise his or her view of everyone else by sitting down.

“Can I help you?” a female voice asked incredulously. Helen looked down and saw a beautiful, dark-eyed, pint-size young woman with a headset and a tiny skirt, staring at Helen and her daughter as if they had just broken into her home. Her right arm was thoroughly, colorfully tattooed from the shoulder down to the forearm, at which point the design dwindled gracefully, like an unfinished chapel ceiling. Her red hair was stylishly, boyishly short, the sort of haircut models in fashion magazines sometimes fooled you into thinking you and your imperfect face could get away with. This woman got away with it completely, and it contributed to her air of almost biological disdain. Her question was of course rhetorical; as Helen was still smiling at her, prefatory to explaining how she could indeed help them, the tiny woman said, “This is the VIP seating and I am going to go ahead and guess you don’t belong here.”

“Probably not,” Helen said affably. “Can you tell me where we do belong?”

“Staten Island?” the woman said. “I don’t know. A word of advice, though. Next time you want to try crashing, don’t bring a kid. That’s just shameless.”

Helen’s smile dropped. “Listen,” she said, feeling herself blush, “there’s no call to get personal. I have just as much right to be here as you do. But if you can just tell me where it’s okay for us to sit, we will go sit there.”

“How is it my problem where you belong?” From the suddenly wild look in the woman’s eyes, Helen could tell that someone very important was somewhere behind her. “All I can do for you is tell you where you don’t belong. Do I not have enough to deal with? Do you even know how these events work? What, did you win your tickets in a contest or some shit?”

“Mom,” Sara said urgently and put her hand on her mother’s arm.

“You need to stop blocking this row immediately,” the woman said.

“How can I even get out? You are blocking my only way out of this row.”

“You need to clear this row or I will call security.” She put her fingers to her tiny headset.

Helen’s shoulders sagged.

“Mom!” Sara said.

“Excuse me,” another voice said behind Helen, “they’re with me.” She turned, and there was Hamilton Barth, big as life, in a very elegant-looking dark suede jacket and jeans and cowboy boots. Their proximity to him did not seem quite real. He gave off a sharp smell. He flashed his weathered smile. “Are these my seats? Because these two are with me.”

No sound came from the woman with the headset. Helen was looking right into Hamilton’s face, and smiling expectantly, and he was smiling back at her, but in a reflexive way that made it clear to her he had no idea at all who she was. Not that he should have been expected to recognize her — someone he kissed at a party thirty years ago. Still, she was let down by the realization that as far as he was concerned he was just doing something impishly chivalrous for two unglamorous strangers.

“What’s your name, dear?” he said to her.

“Helen,” she said both pointedly and nervously.

He looked over her head to the young woman with the headset, whose expression was stony, as if determined to face disaster bravely. “Helen and her daughter are my guests. These are our seats, correct?”

The young woman nodded. It wasn’t a lie; his saying it made it true.

“And your name?”

She swallowed. You could see her thinking that Hamilton Barth asking for her name was either the best or the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She wasn’t some ordinary flack: she had bought into the ruthless values of her flackdom so completely that, just as she had not questioned Helen’s inferiority to her, she stood before this famous person as she would have before a judge. “Bettina,” she said clearly.

“Thank you for your help, Bettina,” Hamilton said and sat down. He gestured grandly to Helen and dumbstruck Sara, and they sat as well, so that Helen was between the other two. She felt as if she had crossed into some new dimension. She could have made their forearms touch if she wanted to: he was handsome and rumpled and musky and tan and faun-like, but he seemed to radiate some ethereal quality above and apart from all that. From the corner of her eye she could see people surreptitiously shooting pictures of him, pictures in which she would reside forever and invisibly.

“I hope that’s all right with you,” Hamilton said. “I just can’t stand watching these little martinet bitches treating people like that. A little bit of power, you know?”

“I do know. Thank you.”