B008J4PNHE EBOK (3 page)

His father’s shrug seemed to imply that the request was over the top, but he was willing to cooperate for civility’s sake. He shifted down the railing a few feet.

“Okay, then,” said Sam. “I’ll grant you that it’s heavy. The story is heavy. So what?”

“So nothing!” Booth’s chuckle boomed across the open air. On film, he had utilized this same sonorous chuckle on many occasions, often when playing the role of an insane person. “It is a very grave work of art. There is nothing wrong with that.”

“Terrific. We agree. Thanks.” It was easier to submit. The sun was warm on Sam’s face. He breathed the good scents of dirt and leaves and thought about the drive to come, the privacy of his car, his future, not seeing having to see this man.

“You are perfectly welcome. But you see, this is a story about college students, and you have endowed it with the gravity of the Manhattan Project. And that is what I mean when I say that it could be construed as a bit
portentous
.” Booth gave the railing of the deck a sharp knock for emphasis and beamed out at the treetops as if he had conquered them. “Think about letting some light into the thing. You can do that, can’t you, think about it?”

Sam nodded. He wasn’t changing a fucking thing.

“Good! That is all I wished to say. However it turns out, I am terribly proud of you.” Booth spread his arms wide. “You are, and always have been, and always will be, an incomparable delight to me, and—I am sure I don’t need to add—to your mother. She could not have loved you more. I could not love you more.”

Sam touched his father on the shoulder and slipped inside the house and upstairs to the attic.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Other people found Booth charming. Women generally agreed that he was witty and adorable. Men instinctively took him as an authority. Tom Ritts, as forthright and sterling a character as Sam knew, let Booth sponge off him incessantly. Allie, Sam’s mother, had continued to coddle him after their divorce. It could make Sam feel wild if he thought too much about it, as if the whole world were an airtight tank filling with water, but no one else would admit that they were getting wet, let alone help him find some way to escape.

His mother had given up everything for Booth: college, music, her business. Tough, resourceful, a withering teaser, Allie had never been one to suffer nonsense—except when it came to Booth, from whom she had been capable of suffering nearly any amount. Tom at least had the excuse of having grown up with Booth. Allie had essentially raised the man’s child on her own and absorbed his absences and adultery for nearly twenty years before divorcing him. Then, after everything, she continued to invite Booth to holiday dinners, where he was allowed to sit in his old chair, and talk his bullshit, and eat way more than his share, and act altogether as though he had never been cast from their home.

Sam could recall a particular Christmas Eve in the early nineties. Booth’s arrival had been imminent. His mother had been in the kitchen, cooking for her ex-husband.

“I’m disappointed in you, Mom,” Sam blurted. He had been thirteen, a craterous zit aching and glistening in the center of his chin.

Allie looked up from the trellis of piecrust that she was attempting to puzzle out. She frowned, blew her bangs out of her eyes. His mother had been one of those middle-aged women whose faces remained smooth while her brown hair spilled white. “Not too disappointed to help set the table, I hope.”

“Why?” Sam asked. “Why does he have to come?”

“Because I love him, kiddo,” said Allie. “Because he’s your father.” She smiled and shrugged, her expression full of sympathy and love for Sam, before adding, “And because it’s my damn house.”

His ears had grown hot. “Mom.” What was he supposed to say to that?

His mother had tipped her head from side to side, the same way she
did when she was contemplating a restaurant menu. “Just set the table.” Without waiting for a response, she returned her attention to the crust. “Oh,” she added, “you know, I was flipping through
TV Guide. Hard Mommies
is on sixty-four tonight. Have you seen that one? That’s the one where Booth plays the mumbly mobster.”

 ■ ■ ■ 

After Allie’s death, Tom offered his attic to absorb the few possessions that weren’t liquidated with the house. This was why Sam had come south from Quentinville—the location of Russell College and of his apartment—to Hasbrouck the previous night, to rummage the contents of the attic. He was looking for things to sell.

The attic was a long pine-smelling hallway with canted ceilings and triangular windows on either end. Sam kept to the center of the room so he wouldn’t bang his head on the ceiling and sat on the floor, dragging the boxes over to sift one at a time.

There were Sam’s baseball cards, his comic books, and a footlocker of red plastic figurines called Nukies that he had collected feverishly for a couple of years in his early adolescence. These one-inch statues were intended—with their humps and bulging eyeballs and claws and dripping flesh—to portray the mutant peoples of the post-apocalyptic world. Sam spared a moment’s tender thought to the child who had amassed the little horrors and spent so many solemn, satisfying hours arranging them on surfaces. Then the cards, the comics, and the figurines went into a forty-gallon garbage bag, the Sell Bag.

When their tops were popped, a clutch of cardboard tubes divulged well-preserved posters of
New Roman Empire, Devil of the Acropolis, Buffalo Roam,
and a few other Booth Dolan classics. The posters went into the Sell Bag, although if he didn’t get a fair price, Sam planned to create a Burn Bag.

Last was a shoe box containing pieces of costume jewelry that he could not recall ever seeing his mother wear. He ran a few of the necklaces through his fingers and felt bewildered and unhappy. As often as she had frustrated him, Sam missed his mother to such a painful degree, and on such a basic level—wishing for her at that moment the way he remembered wishing for home one summer when he went away to camp, ecclesiastically—that it made him ashamed and scared. The feeling was so powerful that some interior sluice usually prevented
him from thinking about her at all. But the unfamiliar jewelry had him blinking at tears. The beads of one necklace felt hollow between his fingertips, but as hard as he squeezed them, they didn’t pop. Sam let out a breath, put the jewelry into the Sell Bag, and wiped at his face with the neck of his shirt.

Wadded in the corner of the shoe box was a faded black cloth. Sam pulled it out. The cloth was lacy, scalloped at the edges; it was a pair of panties, twelve years old, he knew.

 ■ ■ ■ 

Booth had offered to help load the car, but when Sam came downstairs, he discovered his father on the couch in Tom’s living room. The television must have snared him on the second pass. On the screen, an alien and some children were flying through the sky on their bicycles against the backdrop of the moon.

Sam watched from the doorway.
E.T.
was among his least favorite movies. He thought it was sentimental and disingenuous. In
E.T.
the kids saved the day. His own childhood of divorce had unquestionably had its moments, but what he remembered most was feeling bewildered and ineffectual. Also, E.T. was magic, and magic annoyed Sam. Magic was puppets, lighting, computer animation, and latex.

“You still want to help me carry my stuff out?” he asked, not knowing why he bothered.

“I’ll be right there,” said Booth, leaning against the arm of the couch, head propped on fist, making no move. He was sitting in exactly the same position when his son stopped by on his way out the door.

“I’m leaving,” said Sam.

The older man clicked off the television and, with a grunt of effort, shifted around to look at his son over the arm of the couch. “Already?”

“Yeah.” It was about a two-hour drive north to Quentinville.

“Very well, then. Two last pieces of advice. One: have fun! It’s supposed to be fun! That is why they call it
entertainment
!”

“Ah,” said Sam, “I’d always wondered.” The man’s philistinism was ceaseless. Like Tom’s mansion, it spread ever outward.

Booth flourished the television controller. “And two: get your coverage!”

“Coverage” was the most basic principle of filmmaking, whereby you made sure to “cover,” say, the angles of a two-person conversation at a
restaurant table. There was a master shot that showed both people, a medium shot of the one on the left, a medium shot of the one on the right, a close-up of the left, and a close-up of the right. Perhaps you also snapped a cutaway or two, the bell ringing above the door as someone enters, maybe, or a geezer on a nearby stool sipping coffee. That was it: you were covered.

Coverage was the director’s first responsibility. Coverage was the essence of responsibility. To be reminded of such a thing by Booth Dolan—well, now there was a faultless irony.

Who did the man think he was?

Sam strode into the room, tore the pair of panties from his pocket, and threw it at Booth’s face.

The article of clothing missed Booth’s face and landed on his shoulder, like a very small net. His father recoiled, snatched the panties off, and studied them with a perplexed grimace. It was bullshit, though. He knew. They both knew exactly to whom the panties belonged, and the singular, unpardonable place that they held in their shared history. Sam waited for the lie, waited for it like waves in the dark, the interval between crashes.

“Jesus Christ, Samuel.” Booth blinked at him. “Why did you just throw a pair of underpants at me? What is wrong? I’m sorry I got caught up in the film and didn’t help load the car.”

“Never mind,” said Sam, thinking, miserably, He’s actually not such a bad actor when he wants to be. “I need to go.”

Booth held the panties, crumpled in his hand. “What do you mean, ‘never mind’? You don’t throw underwear at people without cause. Look, don’t hurry off. Relax. Why don’t you stay and watch a movie with me?” His grimace opened into an anxious yellow smile. “There’s always something good on cable.”

“I can’t,” said Sam. “Goodbye, Booth.”

He left his father’s hand hanging in the air, left the room, left the house, climbed in his car, put it in reverse, backed out into the street, and got going.

2.

When it came to making the film, Sam began with two key advantages.

The first of these was that
Who We Are
could be made relatively cheaply. The script included no special effects, no costly Hollywood-style spectacles, no stunts, no explosions. Many other elements of a typical production were irrelevant: set design was unnecessary—the college was exactly what they needed it to be; the actors could provide their own wardrobes; and the conceit of the film was such that lighting continuity was not particularly important—all that mattered was that the “day” of the movie gradually fade into “night.”

It wasn’t as though Sam didn’t care how the movie looked; he didn’t want it to look bad, but he didn’t want it to look too good, either, and he certainly didn’t want it to appear planned or affected or, God help him, fucking “covered.” If they couldn’t flag a given shot—block the excess light—a little resultant flare on the lens wasn’t going to end the world, and it might actually add to the audience’s sense of realism. Light did sometimes shine too brightly, after all.

Sam’s professor and adviser, Professor Julian Stuart, had greased the wheels of the college’s bureaucracy and, in exchange for a relative pittance, arranged for twenty days of full access to the major locations. On top of that, much of the necessary equipment was already available to borrow from the film department. Julian had also proved instrumental in helping Sam assemble a cast and crew. To earn an independent study credit, a small group of juniors and seniors had eagerly signed on at no cost except board.

None of which was to say that the movie could be made for free.

The “relative pittance” that Russell required to allow them to tramp freely about the college grounds was enough to purchase a new car. Because the film department’s equipment had been manhandled by thousands of trust-fund fuckwits, there were still a number of pieces that he had to rent, including the camera and several lenses. The 16mm stock that Sam had decided to use was cheap by Hollywood standards, but not by any other standards. Developing fees, video transfer fees, and storage fees were significant and unavoidable. The cast and crew, meanwhile, did have to be fed, and though the summer rates for Russell’s
dorm rooms were not exorbitant, the cost of a whole hall of them added up.

Sam had also consented to the necessity of hiring one true ringer, a middle-aged makeup artist named Monica Noble who had experience in the theater. When he posted an ad for the position on Craigslist, she initially answered just to mock him for the amount of money he was offering, but ended up signing on because she was attracted by the challenge. It was the makeup artist who had to make the actors’ physical transformations—hairstyle changes, beards, scars, etc.—convincing. If she pulled it off, Monica Noble would have quite a calling card for herself. Nonetheless, she had promised Sam, “If you don’t hand me eight thousand dollars in new twenties and tens the moment I step off that bus from Philadelphia, I am stepping right back on.”

And those were just the things he had to have. Should he strike a financing geyser, high atop Sam’s wish list was the rental of the carnival rides and attractions—Ferris wheel, teacups, duck shooting galleries, etc.—that the college brought in every year for the actual Spring Festival. While he was prepared to make the film without them, their inclusion would add a degree of verisimilitude that couldn’t be created otherwise.

No matter how you cut it, rides or no rides, the movie needed at least thirty-five thousand dollars (and preferably three times that amount), every penny of which he needed to raise in under a year.

Which led to the matter of his second great advantage: Sam had determined to absolve himself in advance of any and all crimes, moral or otherwise, committed in the service of the film, from the first dollar raised to the locking of the final print. Whatever bullying, manipulation, or duplicity was required, he was duty-bound and preforgiven to do what was best for
Who We Are
. When it was over, he could strive to make whatever amends were possible.