My Hollywood (22 page)

Claire
THE PILOT SHOOT

“He’ll be fine,” Paul said. What I thought of now as his refrain.

Malcolm Lucas, a musician I admired, was conducting my symphony, but I didn’t want to go. Had I always been so scared? I still wanted to work every day, but just at home.

“I guess you almost could do that now, with Paul making money.” Lil sighed. “But you know, it’s part of it. I think you have to go.”

“Will doesn’t have that many friends.”

On a Sunday afternoon in February, Jeff sat flossing on our living room floor. He’d never directed for television before; we thought he might give Paul’s pilot a little buzz. I offered coffee. All that was left of my crush was a faint bitterness.

“You know, you have to go.” Jeff looked up at Paul. “I mean, she has to, doesn’t she?”

“I
think she should. I’ve told her.”

“Isn’t it a no-brainer?”

“Well, the show’ll go on. But it’d be good to go.”

They conducted this conversation about me as I stood there.

“Claire, when I have a movie, they send me to ten cities on what they call a tastemaker’s tour. I talk to twenty or thirty people; it’s not about box office, but they get critics and radio hosts and just people who they think’ll talk. If you don’t show up, it gives the whole thing an orphaned feeling. You wouldn’t let William go out on his own.”

“But I would be leaving him on his own.”

“I beg your pardon,” Paul said. “He’d be with his father.”

“And Lola,” I said.

“Okay, and Lola.” Jeff’s voice gentled. “He’s close to Lola. Ten years from now, he’ll want you to have gone.”

I shrugged. “So I’ll go.”

“Good. Scared me there. You have something, you know.” Jeff tapped my forehead, the way a nun had once rapped the front of my flat uniformed chest to say where my soul was. “You have to give it.”

We’d had a whole affair he never knew about. Was it so different from any love, a state legendarily uneven?

Paul and I had Tuck and Head-on-Shoulder. He said, “Head on shoulder,” patting; I fitted my head there and we could rest. I recognized his exhaustion. He understood when I found the noise of kids too much.

He didn’t expect me to be more than I was.

Jeff would. Was there such a thing as too easy to please?

I flew alone; it was a little exhilarating to read the whole paper.
The New York Times
had changed since the last time I’d read it through. Now it was all about food.

At the rehearsal, ten o’clock Wednesday morning, Malcolm Lucas asked if I had notes. I stepped up to where he was. I wanted this part to sound like a country piano teacher humming to himself, with his hands in the pockets of an old sweater walking down a lane of trees. Dreaming up his little phrase. Rather liking it.

“It should be precise, but sort of lyrical underneath,” I said.

He shrugged. I couldn’t really communicate. A problem with music. The reason teachers play a piece first for their students. I tried to talk to the players.

“Off the string,” I told the violins, and the sound came up bright. There was a passage where most of the strings had to turn their pages at the same time. I asked if they could practice doing that as quietly as possible, so as not to mess up the hush. Lucas looked at me as if I were crazy.

“Let’s try it again,” he said, and my heart flattened.

Malcolm Lucas didn’t care for my piece. I had very much wanted him to like it.

There are different ways you can make a note, and he was getting all the sounds wrong. But maybe it was my piece.

My
Diary of a Country Piano Teacher
.

My year in C-sharp minor.

Lil’s laughter reminded me of bells.

We sat in the hotel bar, two middle-aged women who no longer lived in New York, each wearing makeup inexpertly applied.

Since her third child, Lil had stopped trying to work. She sounded happier, though. She and her husband went for a long weekend, without the girls, to the Caribbean, and on the plane down, she’d asked him how many episodes he was expecting. “
I
want a number
, I told him. I thought if I had a number, then, after that was done, I’d be in the clear.”

“What was his number?”

“Six. When we landed, they gave us this coconut drink, and I think there was something in it, because we took care of the quota the first night, and then after that, I started to feel, I don’t know, a little desire. A trickle.”

Here we were, friends for twenty years, discussing married sex again. It felt harder to talk about their tender episodes than it had been to complain.

“We have cocktail hour every night now,” Lil said.

That dissolved us in mirth.

Listening to her call home to say goodnights, I had a sense of the rigmarole it must have taken for her to leave. I called home too. Paul had seen Will this morning; Lola had picked him up from school, given him his dinner, and put him to bed.

“When I worry about Will,” I said in the dark, “that he’s not making friends, I don’t know what to do but give him time. Time feels like all I have.”

“I think that’s right,” she said.

For the fourth night in a row, I couldn’t sleep. My fingers kept going. My second movement. Vinteuil’s renunciation.

While we dressed in a zigzagging flurry, there was a knock. Flowers, I supposed. But Paul stood there. We’d decided he wouldn’t, but he’d come anyway.

Arrange your mouth, I thought, he’s meaning to give you something.

I had on the silver dress he’d bought me for Christmas. I turned around, held my hair up, and he zipped.

The three of us sat together in the round-backed burgundy seats. Paul smiled and Lil seemed to soften—he was handsome, I reminded myself.

When the violas started, it was thrilling to hear. I winced when the bassoon came in muddy. The cello surprised me.

The first movement eddied. Paul picked up my hand. He had a solemn look. He was always kind.

Brass floored in, strong and building, yet subdued under the force of something larger.

But in the second movement, a pause stumbled. I heard agitation, rustling. Those pages turning.

By intermission, there was a sense of weekday exhaustion. When we returned to our places, three seats in the row in front of us stayed empty. The woodwinds sounded chalky. It sounded as if they were working too hard; I wondered if I could have written their part more idiomatically. A high-pitched noise started in my ear, a shrill headache. I’d read about composers constantly hearing high As or A-flats. Dvorak had that.

I wanted it to be over, but then I’d have to stand up and talk to people. Lucas finally bowed, a quick nod, and motioned to me. After, we walked into the gilded hall, where hundreds of people moved in that giddy way of parties, black-and-white evening clothes, glasses tinkling, little bites of food. My ears hurt. People shook my hand.

My old pals came. Harv had put on a tie. The group I used to work with, who asked for a score. We huddled together. A guy I went to conservatory with walked in late because he was playing
Phantom of the Opera
.

After midnight, I whispered to Paul, “Can we go?”

“Just a minute,” Paul said. “Be right back.”

The crowd seemed to drift away and it was quieter.

I understood that pain had to do with the absence of sound. Someone had gone outside, downstairs into the wind, bought a newspaper, snapped it open in the cold, and read my future. He must have returned and whispered to someone who whispered to someone else next to him, who whispered … The texture of this silence held a crunch as if the air were frozen.

Paul returned, hard shoed, his footsteps audible. “I’ve got it.” He tapped the rolled newspaper against his open palm. “But it’s not good. Do you want to see?”

A matter of extreme difficulty to detect tangible musical themes in the second movement of loosely constructed, amorphous, atavisitic modalities
.

Arid and gray music, devoid of grace, charm or smile
.

I saw Lil across the room, which had emptied, laughing at something a man was saying, holding a champagne flute.
Flute
, I thought, stuck on the word.

I read the paper again, dumb. A large public failure, and I was only at the beginning. I’d failed not just myself but Little Will, I thought, who was right now alone in Los Angeles, disliked by the boys he wanted to play with.

Paul corralled Lil and managed us into a cab.

“Let’s go home,” I whispered. “Tonight if we can.”

Paul looked worried, two lines above his nose.

“The worst of it,” I said, back in the hotel room, jabbing things into my open suitcase, “are the moms in Will’s class. They all subscribe to the
Times.”

Paul talked on the phone, trying to change our flight. Jeff had sent a huge bouquet; it stood on the desk in the dark.

“But just to write a symphony and have it performed is a huge accomplishment,” Lil said.

“They won’t see it that way.
Trying
doesn’t register. Almost the opposite. They consider it a vanity. If I’d made something they admired, they’d forgive me. And maybe make playdates with Will.”

“Really? Is that true?” Lil looked to Paul.

He sighed. “They’d make playdates with Will if Will stopped hitting their kids.”

“Aleph Sargent’s kid’s a bully but they all make playdates with him.”

“And she’s the biggest female box-office star in America,” Paul said. “Why do you think
we
hear about everything he does wrong? They gossip about him plenty. They just want to say Aleph Sargent came to their house.”

“But Will’s not a bully,” Lil said.

I sighed. “A little bit he is.”

Paul huddled over the phone, scribbling numbers.

“They think I should spend all day with my kid. Like they do. And if all that time working ended up with this—if I couldn’t do better, they’ll think it serves me right. Yesterday, he pushed a girl off the swing.”

“Really? How do you know?” Lil hadn’t completely hidden her alarm.

“The school called Lola. She told me.”

Paul had been wrong. Willie wasn’t fine.

We packed the bouquet from Helen and Jeff into the back of Lil’s station wagon.

It was raining when we arrived in LA and we rode home in an old taxi, jazz coming sketchily from the front seat. The driver smoked, his hand poised near his open window, and the rain smelled good.

Sunday morning, I woke in our bed, the room buffeted, trees outside blowing. I forgot where I’d been, until I was out the hall halfway to Will. Even when it slammed me, full body, it felt like a menace I could maybe outrun. The ocean in the distance looked dark and choppy; in overalls, Will clung to my knees, nothing wrong.

Paul pulled on sweats, and we ambled around our town. Sunday. Bits of leaves and eucalyptus riled the air, and I couldn’t see. We did what we usually did together: bought coffee for me, an ice blended for Paul, Jamba Juice for Will, and roamed in and out of shops. The worst had happened, but we were still here.

I carried Will on my shoulders. Maybe I could do this. His shoes tapped my chest.

Paul nudged me into an antiques store, but for once I didn’t want anything. No, I kept saying: No to the Miriam Haskell necklace, a handled glow on its old pearls. No to the wrought-iron porch furniture. I felt clear, a bow from an arrow. I would not dither anymore. The wind picked up invisible debris from the streets and barreled it in the air. I would work work work.

In one store, with shoulder-shaped chairs and a concrete floor, Paul plucked an evening dress from a rack. Chiffon, with an Indian-print jacket. Not on sale. When I came back from taking Will to the bathroom, he stood at the small desk, putting the receipt in his wallet.

How strange to walk in sweats, carrying this weightless treasure. For what? I’d failed and he bought me a dress. I was unhinged.
See
, he meant,
we’re still standing
. He wanted to protect the person who protected his child, whose hand hovered before the dash. We ate an early supper and watched a movie. I’d be all right, I thought, if we could all be home and the wind didn’t die. But, of course, tomorrow was Monday.

Paul took Will to school and the bravest of my old friends called.

“Fuck them!” Harv screamed. “What the fuck is an atavistic modality?”

“A bad performance can fool even a halfway decent critic.” Said by someone who’d once received a rave from the same guy for his percussion concerto.

Others put in calls the way they would after a divorce. “You okay?” Lil asked.

“A little wobbly.”

“Yes,” I said to the next one. “I guess I’ll learn from it.”

“Well, you will,” he said. “Like it or not, you will.”

Harv sent me an e-mail:

The reviewer in the
Allgmeine musikalische Zeitung
complained of “clumsy, harsh modulations” in Beethoven’s early sets of variations and they found in his Violin Sonata, op. 12 “a forced attempt at strange modulations, and aversion to the conventional key relationships, a piling up of difficulty upon difficulty.”

“How did your piece go in New York?” Lola asked.

“Not too well. They didn’t like it.”

“No? What do they know. Maybe other cities will like it.”

She brought me lunch to my workroom on a tray.

The house stayed quiet. On slopes of the day, I’d feel a collapse and think, Maybe I can’t do this anymore. But music was all I could ever do. I looked down the stairs, at the still living room, the empty chairs. I lay on the floor, listening to Wagner. Lola came in with a cool towel.

I still had so many streets to cross with William to deliver him to the other side.

Now I dreaded what I’d liked before, the drop-off. Lola picked him up from school that first week, and I met them in the park after to take Will for a walk. Before supper, I went out with shears and cut flowers for our table, arranging twigs and flowers that would last only a day. I’d studied Lucy. Maybe this was what I could do now.