Until I Find You

She called Jack frequently, often to reschedule their rendezvous. Usually the postponement had something to do with her husband or one of her children, but the last time the family dog had been to blame. The unfortunate animal had eaten something it shouldn’t have; the complications were so severe that the vet had promised to make a house call.

Emma said that Jack should learn to read between the lines—clearly the housewife was also sleeping with the vet. Emma loved listening to all the reasons the Benedict Canyon woman found not to sleep with Jack, or at least to postpone the illicit act. But Emma had been writing; she’d not answered the phone that night. She and Jack listened to the answering machine together after Jack came home.

Both Lawrence and Rottweiler said they had called Myra Ascheim and told her she should meet Jack; they’d given her his phone number. The third message was from Myra. Her voice was alarmingly like her sister’s. Jack first thought it was Mildred, calling to further abuse his small schlong.

“There’s two people, both assholes, who say I should meet you,” Myra Ascheim’s message began. “So where the fuck are you, Jack Burns?”

That was the message—not very elegant, and she didn’t even leave her name. Jack knew it was Myra only because he’d met Milly and recognized the sisterly voice. (It was a voice with more Brooklyn in it than L.A.)

Emma must have noticed the despondency in Jack’s expression when he replayed the three messages, again and again. That some word from the insane housewife in Benedict Canyon was not among the messages appeared to pain him. Only Emma knew Jack well enough to guess that, although he was relieved to let the relationship slip away, he missed the woman’s madness.

Emma Oastler’s first novel was called The Slush-Pile Reader, which was almost entirely based on Emma’s job—not that “slush-pile reader” was her job’s official title. (With an uncustomary dignity, as if her job were a pinnacle of the profession, the studio called Emma a “first” reader—a part of the process also called “screenplay development.”)

Emma read not only unsolicited manuscripts; she read the scripts submitted by agents who were less than name brands, and the occasional script by a marquee screenwriter whose agent had recently jerked the studio around. Very few screenplays were eventually produced—and most of those had more important first readers than Emma, but Emma would eventually read those scripts, too.

What bothered Emma about her job was not how many screenplays she had to read, or even how badly written most of them were. Emma’s principal gripe was with the studio execs—they read her notes but not the screenplays. Emma discovered that for the majority of scripts she read, she was the only reader. This inclined her to be overgenerous in her notes, even in the case of bad screenplays; she didn’t want to be the sole reason a film wasn’t produced, even though Emma’s foremost complaint about many of the movies she saw was that they should never have been made in the first place.

“But why would a studio hire a script reader, especially for the slush pile, if the studio execs wanted to read a bunch of bad screenplays?” Jack asked her. It seemed perfectly natural to him that, in most cases, a first reader meant an only reader.

Not to Emma; she was both indignant and unreasonable about it. “The execs should still read them, even if they’re bad,” she insisted.

“But they hired you, Emma, so they wouldn’t have to read all the junk!”

“Someone wrote that junk, baby cakes. It took hours and hours.”

Emma surely exaggerated what she called wasting her time as a film major. What was the point of learning to appreciate good films? Emma argued. The way the movie industry worked had nothing to do with film as an art form. Jack thought that Emma’s motive for revenge was misguided; it was the machinations of the movie industry that had wasted her time, not her having been a film major.

Emma insisted that the studio execs were responsible for making many terrible movies that should never have been made; therefore, to make some small measure of atonement for their crimes, they should read their fair share of bad screenplays.

Jack argued that Emma should have been more upset about what happened in that rare case of an unknown screenwriter who wrote a script the studio execs actually read and liked. On only two occasions had Emma loved an unsolicited screenplay; both times, she’d managed to persuade the execs to read it. In each case, they promptly bought the rights and offered the screenwriter a fee to write a second draft; they rejected the second draft, paid off the screenwriter, and hired an established writer to reconstruct the story in all the usual, conventional ways. Whatever quality had been good enough to catch Emma’s attention (in the original script) was lost, but the studio now owned and continued to develop what they called “the property.”

This didn’t upset Emma at all. “It’s the writer’s fault—the writer caved to the money. That’s what the damn writers do. You want to maintain control of your screenplay, you take no money up front—you don’t even let the fuckers buy you lunch, honey pie.”

“But what if the writer needs the money?” Jack asked. “The writer probably needs lunch!”

“Then the writer should get a day job,” Emma said.

Arguing with Emma drove Jack crazy. It also worried him about Emma’s novel—that the writing would descend to a level of autobiographical complaining; that it would be an unimagined story, without an iota of invention, full of rantings and accusatory anecdotes he’d heard before. That the main character of The Slush-Pile Reader was a young Canadian woman—a newcomer to L.A. who’d gone to school “back East” and had Emma’s job—did not, Jack thought, bode well. But it turned out that Emma had invented a character who seemed most unlike herself; she’d actually imagined a story, one that was far more interesting than her own. And, sentence by sentence, she wrote well—she’d taken the necessary pains to revise herself.

Furthermore, Emma had envisioned a heroic character—one capable of touchingly unselfish gestures—notwithstanding that Emma was generally too cynical to be heroic herself. The main character of The Slush-Pile Reader, the eponymous reader, is not a cynic. On the contrary, Michele Maher (of all names!) is a pure-hearted optimist with an indestructibly sunny disposition. Michele Maher—that is, Emma’s character—is such a good girl that her purity survives her most degrading experiences, and she has a few.

Unlike Emma, Michele is a preternaturally thin young woman who has to force herself to eat. She haunts gyms and health-food stores, gagging on protein powder and popping all the dietary supplements that bodybuilders use, but she never manages to put on a pound. Despite all her weightlifting, she looks like a wire. Michele Maher has the body and metabolism of a twelve-year-old boy.

Also unlike Emma, Michele is conscience-stricken by the bad scripts she reads. The worst, most self-deluded screenwriters break her heart. Michele wants to help them be better writers; to that futile end, she writes them encouraging letters on the studio letterhead. These letters are very different in content and tone from the notes Michele submits to the studio execs; in those notes, she is critical in the extreme. In short, Michele does her job well: she tells her bosses all the reasons why they shouldn’t waste their time reading this crap.

But to the rock-bottom writers themselves, Michele Maher is an angel of hope; she always finds something positive to say about their most abhorrent excrescences. In the first chapter of The Slush-Pile Reader, Michele writes a warm, enthusiastic letter to a heavily tattooed bodybuilder and porn star named Miguel Santiago. His porn name is Jimmy.

In his pathetic screenplay, which is the story of his life, Santiago describes himself as a porn star who hates his work. The only way Santiago can have sex on command is to imagine he is a young James Stewart falling in love with Margaret Sullavan in The Shopworn Angel, or submitting to the sentimental bliss of domestic life with Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life. Santiago manages to stay the course through such epics as Bored Housewives 4 and Keep It Up, Inc., by imagining he is the one and only Jimmy Stewart in these black-and-white soap-opera masterpieces.

There’s no story: we see Miguel Santiago lifting weights and getting tattooed, we see him memorizing lines from The Shopworn Angel and It’s a Wonderful Life, and of course we see him performing as the other Jimmy. In her notes to the studio execs, Michele Maher states that such a film is “not makable”—easily a third of it would be a porn movie! But in her letter