King Maybe (10 page)

“Me? You crazy? I'm a country girl. If it doesn't come in a bottle, I don't do it.”

“I think he's in trouble,” I said.

“Honey,” Casey said, “way he's going at it, he's gonna kill himself. And as brown and leathery and mummified as he is, there's still a real person in there somewhere. It's a good thing this is a commercial transaction, 'cause I'd hate to get all maternal about him.”

“About who?” Jake croaked from the door. To me he said, “Isn't she
big
?”

Casey said, “Good thing you're not paying by the inch.”

“Please,” Jake said, “let's try to maintain the illusion you're here because you can see through all that tanned leather.”

“Uh-oh,” Casey said. She fanned her face as though it were hot. “Well, you know what they say about eavesdroppers.”

“Give me that coffee,” Jake said to me.

I did, reluctantly, and found a big chipped mug in the adjoining cabinet, which I filled for myself.

To Casey, Jake said, without looking at her, “For Chrissake, go get dressed. You may be a tramp, but that doesn't mean you gotta look like one.”

Casey eyed him for about ten seconds, chewing on her lower lip, and then she went to the sink and dropped her full cup into it, with a satisfying mini-explosion of coffee and little bits of china, while I silently admired the gesture. She brushed her palms together. “Should I call a cab, too, you old catcher's mitt?”

“Why not?” Whelan said. “Unless you've got some new tricks, something that wouldn't be a rerun. I wouldn't want to have to sit through it twice.”

“Really, Jake?” Casey said, and her voice was calm although her face was flaming. “You expect me to
remember
what we did? I forgot before I fell asleep.” She turned and left the room.

“You've lost your touch, Jake,” I said. “That's a nice young woman.”

“They're all nice young women, and who gives a fuck? And in case you think I was kidding about having you taken out, you better wake up.”

I went to the sink and dropped my mug into it, too. Thick as it was, it broke into several nicely shaped pieces, and coffee splashed over the edges of the sink and onto the filthy counter. “Tell you what,” I said. “Call me when you want to say you're sorry. And don't worry about getting a cab for Casey. I'll take her home.”

Jake growled, “You gonna pay her, too?”

“The way things look here,” I said, “I can afford it better than you can.”

Jake hauled off and threw the delicate cup at me. It spooled end over end across the big kitchen, trailing a spiral of coffee, hit a wooden cabinet about three feet to my right, bounced off, and dropped to the kitchen floor, miraculously intact. On my way out of the room, I detoured to step on it.

Jake called out, “Wait!”

I said, over my shoulder, “She watched all your mind-shriveling movies so she'd have something to talk to you about. Even that piece-of-shit Secret Service thing. Then she put up with you all night. She should charge you a few thousand over and above whatever you pay her for the cheerleading.”

“That was a
great
movie!” Jake yelled. “Get back in here!”

“Casey?” I called from the living room. “I'll take you home.”

“Just a sec,” she called from upstairs, her voice echoing down the stone stairway. “Looking for my earrings.”

“Junior,” Jake said.

“Fuck off, Jake.”

“Junior.”
His tone turned me around, and there he was, at the far end of the room. I really took him in for the first time. He'd been a fabulously handsome young man who had aged into an extremely well-kept older man. But all that residual glamour was scrubbed roughly away by the afternoon daylight coming through the windows. He looked like he'd spent ten years in a jar. The famous tan was patchy and had the supernatural saturation of early Technicolor makeup. The black hair showed half an inch of silver at the scalp, and the infamous bags beneath his eyes were packed so full of puffiness they'd tugged his lower lids down to reveal an unhealthy-looking line of moist pink tissue below the whites. He wore a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts that exposed knees like walnuts, and he weighed twenty pounds less than when I'd seen him last.

I said, “Jesus, Jake.”

“Junior,” he said, “I'm in trouble.” He took a step toward me, and I actually thought he was about to go down. “I'm in real trouble.”

11

Ambient Violet

“How do you
think
I found out it was fake?”

Jake, looking fairly relaxed for someone who was as wired as the phone company, was stretched out in his butter-colored leather armchair in front of the giant fireplace, in which Casey had built a very businesslike fire as a hedge against the house's air-conditioning. From time to time, she abandoned
Lawrence of Arabia
, which Jake had cued up for her in his screening room, to bring in more wood. In jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt with vertical yellow stripes, she looked even taller.

“You had it appraised,” I said. “At a guess, you needed the money.”

He gave me a look I could only describe as grave. “I had three appraised. I've never had to sell one before.”

“And I can see why, considering how you got them.”

“Oh, there's a market,” he said. He smiled, but it wasn't the kind of smile that improves a face. “If anyone should know that, Junior, it's you.”

“Were the others straight?”

“Straight enough to hang in the Louvre.”

“So why are you selling them? Where's all your
money
, Jake?”

“You don't wanna know. I'm getting fucked on streaming because who ever heard of it back when my contracts got drawn up? More streaming means less TV syndication, and all that means less residuals. Also, who am I kidding, the movies are getting old. Kids don't want to watch them. These days they want giant robots throwing planets at each other.”

“Come on,” I said. “If that's what they wanted back then, you'd have made them.”

“But with
heart
,” he said. “Remember the Tin Woodman in
The Wizard of Oz
? Had a clock instead of a heart? That's these movies, got a clock for a heart, and it's set at the exact time to let theaters squeeze in an extra showing every day. Good? Bad? Who cares anymore? What matters is,
Is it a franchise? A tentpole? Will the Chinese like it?
More than half the box office now, it comes from overseas.” He sat back, sniffed to clear his overworked nose, and crossed his bare ankles. He'd changed into a brown cashmere sweater, no shirt, beige linen slacks, and alligator loafers, no socks. It was so nineties it made my teeth itch.

“But still, you're Jake Whelan.”

“I was,” he said. “Now I'm the guy who
used to be
Jake Whelan. These days—Jake Whelan these days—you know who he is? He's Jeremy Granger, that's who he is.”

“What's he got on you?”

“My future,” Whelan said, showing lots of yellowy front teeth on the
f
in
future
. “Which is the only thing that matters to me now that Ellie is dead.” Ellie Newsome, an actress he'd made into an almost-topliner, had been Jake's third wife. He'd lost her—Hollywood's oldest story—to a movie star on a location shoot. The relationship with the movie star had fallen apart in about ninety minutes, but it took her marriage to Jake with it. Still, some habit of affection survived, because she and Jake remained a sort of ceremonial couple, getting their formal wear back from the dry cleaner's when they were invited to fill out the C-list at some event where they previously would have been the crown jewels, smiling like dethroned royalty while the flashbulbs went off for younger faces, slowing hopefully for red-carpet interviews with people who were already craning past them for someone fresh.

Ellie had died of cancer, very badly, about five months earlier.

“I was sorry to hear about Ellie, Jake. But I don't know how I can—”

He waved me off, a bit of the imperial Jake I'd first known coming to the surface. “That's on account of you keep talking. Here's the first thing: you
took
me, Junior. I trusted you, and you sold me crap.”

“Not on purpose,” I said. “I stole two of the pictures, and one of them was real. How the hell was I supposed to know the other one wasn't? How can anyone
tell
with Klee? They look like the geometry in a nightmare.”

“Junior,” Jake said. I was in the slightly less swell armchair to his right, and he leaned over and tapped my knee. He was a hard tapper. “I'm not gonna tell you my aesthetics are all outraged. I don't like the picture any more than you do, didn't like it when I bought it, but it filled a hole in my collection, and you know what?
It was supposed to be real.
You wanna serve me Miracle Whip? Fine, I'll choke it down. But don't you fucking tell me it's mayonnaise. Those pictures in my cellar, they
represent
something to me. They represent someone who's pushed himself or herself to the far edge of their talent, someone who was already burning as hot as he could but threw a little more coal on, maybe even burned part of himself away, but he got what he was reaching for. There weren't supposed to be any
fakes
down there.”

“I know,” I said. “I know, I know, I
know
. I'm embarrassed as hell. I'm
humiliated
. I can usually tell when something's duff. It was a personal lapse on my part.” I was rubbing my face with both hands. “And I know exactly how you feel about that, that burning thing, about people at their best.”

“And now,” he said, as though into silence, “I'm gonna have to sell one I really love.”

“Who's the artist? Not that I actually want to know.”

“Mary Cassatt.”

I said, “Ouch.”

“So you can probably see why I wanted to kill you.”

“I'm not exactly neutral on that issue, Jake—”

He said again,
“Mary Cassatt.”

“Okay, I
do
see why you wanted to kill me. But that doesn't mean I'm automatically going to do this job for you. And don't threaten me again. You're not exactly invulnerable yourself anymore.”

“So what do you want?” he said. “I mean, what do I have to do?”

I nodded toward the production room. “Have you paid her?”

“Fifteen hundred,” he said. “That's seven-fifty over.” He did something with the corners of his mouth that might have developed into either a grin or a snarl if he'd let it. “She asked did I want change.”

“How bad is your situation? Financially, I mean.”

“What's that got to do with you?” He gave me a good look at his eyeteeth.

“It's part of the picture,” I said. “I don't want to do what you want me to do, so I need to know why I'm going to do it.”

He rubbed his nose, possibly checking to see whether it was still there. “It's shit. I'm poorer than the Little Match Girl. I made less than half a million last year, and my expenses are three, four times that. Bank accounts are down to paper clips. I've borrowed as much as I can on this place. House payment alone is twenty-eight Gs at this point, so that's like a third of a mil every year right there. Lawyers are eating me alive, trying to solve this streaming thing. I'm still paying alimony to the first two Mrs. Whelans. I owe a couple mil to the IRS.”

“How much is the collection worth?”

He shook his head, and then he shook it again, more vigorously. “More than I need. But you gotta know, Junior, I
can't
. I can't sell them all. I might as well die. Just the Cassatt, it's like getting a leg cut off. Also, I sell a clump of them like that, I'll get busted sure as hell.”

“And what's Jeremy Granger got on you?”

“Okay,” he said. He drew a rectangular frame in the air with index fingers and then pointed at areas to identify items inside it as he talked. “The money, the house, the IRS, all that? That's my past and my present. Bad as it is, much as it keeps me awake at night, it's
gornisht
.” He erased the frame with an open hand. “What Jeremy's got is my future. My legacy.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“A movie. My
legacy
. The thing that will stand for Jake Whelan as long as people watch pictures in the dark. The thing that could make up for all the junk I put out while I was on top.” He paused for a moment, blinking into the fire like someone trying to work through some blank spaces in an idea. Then he said, “Back in a minute,” and got up. I watched him climb the stairs, moving more slowly than I remembered, off to fill his nose so he could face the moment. Fill himself up again with the jittery, snow-burn energy that passed for Jake Whelan these days.

I got up myself and wandered the long hallway to the projection room. I pushed the door open and looked in. Peter O'Toole, his eyes as cold and as blue as sapphires, drank in the desert like a man lusting for something he hated, or maybe it was the sight of Jake plodding up those stairs that made me see it that way.

Casey turned back to me. “How do the Brits
do
this?”

“Training?” I said. “An actual education? I don't know.”

“Well, it works. Have you seen this one?”

“Over and over. How you feeling?”

“I'm okay. I'm like a diamond, I don't chip or scratch. How's he?”

“Sad, old, and fucked up.”

“That's about right. Damn, he was handsome when he was young.”

“You supposed to be anywhere?”

She reached into her purse and brought out her phone. “Close to this.”

“That's all right, then.”

“I s'pose.” She turned back to the screen. “How long until the sheikh comes back?”

“Not long. They looked at him in the rushes and beefed up his part. We should be out of here in . . . I don't know, half an hour.”

“I'll be here,” she said. “With Lawrence. And the sheikh.”

“You know his
nickname?” Jake asked. He was a lot more energetic, and there was a little sift of snow on his upper lip. “King Maybe?”

“I've heard it. Don't know what it means.”

“It means what it says. He's the man who says maybe. Maybe we'll do this. Maybe I'll make your movie. Maybe I can get the stars you want. Maybe it'll put you back on top of the heap.”

“Does he deliver?”

“That's really
two
questions, and when you're a supplicant, which is what I am these days, you only ask one of them, and that's
can
he deliver? And the answer to that is yes. Yes, he can deliver, practically without lifting a finger. The second question is
will
he deliver? And the answer to that is practically never.”

“Okay, he can but he doesn't. So why would you do business with him? Why would anybody?”

He held up two fingers. “Two guys, Junior. There are probably only
two guys
on the entire planet who can greenlight a movie that costs a hundred fifty, two hundred mil without going through a committee of people whose only job is to say no, and Jeremy Granger is one of them. The other one is someone, if I was being nailed to a cross, he'd be looking for blunter nails. Used to be we had studio chiefs, moguls, and they were awful, a lot of them, but most of them, if you cut them deep enough, you'd find someone who liked movies. Now the studio chief is a spreadsheet and what says yes or no are P&Ls—sorry, profit-and-loss models. And the models have changed. People used to worry about which section of the market a movie would sell to, like slices out of a pizza: male—that was a big slice; female; teens, which was another big one; couples”—he tilted his hand side to side—“sort of
meh
. Now they move the pizza over to the side of the table and worry whether it'll sell to the Chinese. And you know what sells to the Chinese?”

“No idea.”

“Guys in tights with capes. Things going boom. Titles they already know.
Tyrannosaurus Terrificus 12. Hyperman 14
. No need to market, just put thirty seconds and the logo in prime time on CCTV—sorry, China Central Television—slap the preview on Weibo, and get out of the way. Not much dialogue, because it requires too much dubbing. Oh, and it's gotta flunk the Bechdel test.”

“The—”

“Comes from a comic strip,” he said. “Woman named Alison Bechdel made it up. To pass the test, there's gotta be like three points: there has to be at least two female characters in it, and there has to be a scene where they talk to each other, and when they talk, it can't be about the guys in the movie. So the movies that flunk that test, you can imagine how the great actresses fight over the female roles. These girls in these movies, the way they're written, they're all Cracker Jack prizes.”

“Talking about me?” Casey said from behind an armload of wood. “Sorry to bust in, but I figured you two would freeze to death if the little woman didn't keep the home fires burning. And the movie is really long,”

“I apologize, Casey,” Jake said.

“And I accept, Jake. That doesn't mean I'll be coming back, but thanks for the impulse.”

“What's happening in the movie?” I said.

“Ya caught me,” she said. “That's really why I left. He's getting his ass whipped by those Turks and sort of enjoying it. That, like, brings up some of my issues.” She took an andiron and distributed the wood she'd thrown on the coals. “Okay,” she said, “real reason? I got a call. No hurry, but I gotta get home and do stuff to my face in an hour or so.”

“No problem.”

“Nope,” she said, hanging the iron up on its stand. “Well, you boys just jaw a little more, and then we'll hit the road.” We both watched her go.

“Thirty years ago,” Jake said, shaking his head, “I'd have probably put her in a movie and married her.”

“Thirty years ago was probably fifteen years before she was born.”

“Jesus,” Jake said. He rubbed the side of his face as though he'd been slapped. “Really gets away from you, time does. Aaaahhh, you wouldn't know. What're you, thirty-four, thirty-five?”