Until I Find You

“Lawrence is a fink and a liar. You can’t be too pretty in this town,” Myra Ascheim said. “Or too successful.”

The issue of how successful, or not, Myra Ascheim had ever been was never made clear to Jack—or, to his knowledge, to anyone else. No one had either corroborated or repudiated the Hollywood legends attached to Myra, all of them stories about who she used to be. Was she once an agent whom I.C.M. wooed away from William Morris, or did C.A.A. woo her away from I.C.M.? Was she eventually fired from all three agencies, or did she go off on her own of her own volition? Did she once represent Julia Roberts? Was it Sharon Stone she was supposed to have “discovered,” or was that Demi Moore? And was Myra truly the first person to refer to Demi as Gimme Moore?

Jack later ran into Lawrence at the bar of Raffles L’Ermitage—not Jack’s favorite hotel in Beverly Hills, but a watering hole Lawrence loved. Lawrence told Jack that Demi Moore’s nickname of “Gimme” was his idea, not Myra’s. But Myra was right—Lawrence was a fink and a liar. And whether or not Myra Ascheim ever represented Julia Roberts, Myra had maintained her contacts with casting directors—almost all of whom liked her. Even if Myra no longer represented anyone, casting directors still returned her calls.

Bob Bookman, who was Emma’s agent at C.A.A. before he became Jack’s, told Jack a story about Myra’s identifying baseball cap. She wasn’t an Anaheim fan—she didn’t even like baseball. She liked the A on the hat, but she detested the halo. “It’s an A-list hat, but I’m no angel,” she liked to say.

According to Bob Bookman, Myra bought an Angels cap every year and removed the halo with a pair of fingernail clippers. “I saw her do it over lunch,” Bookman said. “Myra snipped off the halo while she was waiting for her Cobb salad.” The Cobb salad made the story ring true; aside from breakfast, a Cobb salad was all Jack ever saw Myra eat.

Alan Hergott—who became Jack’s entertainment lawyer—said that Myra always left the same message on his answering machine. “Call me back or I’ll sue your pants off.” That sounded like Myra.

“In this town, you get tired of hearing something you already know,” Alan told Jack. “You’re supposed to sound or at least look interested, but you know more about the story than the guy who’s telling you the story does. Myra’s different. She always knows something you don’t know. True or not—it doesn’t matter.”

In Hollywood, there were as many Myra Ascheim stories as there were stories about Milton Berle’s penis. And to think that Jack Burns met her because his schlong was small, or smallish—and only because he met her porn-producer sister, Milly, first! In fact, if it hadn’t been for Lawrence, Jack might never have met the Ascheim sisters, and he met Lawrence only because the fink wanted to bang Emma. (Knowing Emma, she probably had an instinct that steered her away from Lawrence—maybe his schlong was all wrong for her, or she knew that Lawrence would never relinquish the top position.)

“Actually, I’m no longer an agent,” Myra told Jack over their breakfast at Marmalade. They were sitting at a kind of picnic table—communal dining in Santa Monica. “My sister and I have created a talent-management company.” This information confused Jack, given his limited (albeit specific) knowledge of the other Ascheim. But he would make a point of never trying to grasp how the industry worked. From the beginning, Jack Burns realized that his job was getting a job. He already knew how to be an actor.

A man had spread a newspaper over one end of the picnic table; he sat on the bench beside Jack, muttering, as if he bore a lifelong grudge against the news. At the other end of the table, nearer to Myra than to Jack, was a family of four—a young, harried couple with two quarreling children.

Like Rottweiler, Myra Ascheim had plucked Bruno Litkins from Jack’s resume. “The gay heron,” as Jack had called Bruno, was the only marketable name among Jack’s earliest supporters. “I don’t suppose you are a transvestite—you just know how to look like one,” Myra said.

“I just know how to look like one,” Jack concurred.

“I’ll let you know, Jack, when I sense a surfeit of transsexual roles.”

The children at Myra’s end of the table were bothering her. A little boy, maybe six or seven, had ordered the oatmeal with sliced bananas; then he picked all the bananas out. He wanted some of his older sister’s bacon instead, but she wouldn’t give him any. “If you wanted bacon, you should have ordered it,” the children’s mother kept telling him.

“You can have my bananas,” the boy told his sister, but the bacon was not negotiable—not for bananas.

“Look—there’s a lesson here,” Myra said crossly to the little boy. “You want her bacon, but you’ve got nothing she wants. That’s not how you make a deal.”

In the movie business, Jack was learning, meeting people was an audition. You didn’t even have to know which part you were auditioning for; you just picked a part and played it, any part. Jack looked at the little girl who had the bacon. She was nine or ten; she had three strips of bacon. She was his audience of one, for the moment, but Jack was auditioning for Myra Ascheim, and Myra knew it.

In Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer plays the blond android—the last to die. He holds Harrison Ford’s life in his hands, but Rutger is dying; he’d rather have someone to talk to than die alone. “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” Rutger Hauer says. That was the moment Jack had in mind.

That was the tone of voice Jack adopted when he spoke to the girl about her bacon. “I have a younger brother,” Jack-as-Rutger-Hauer began. “He was always asking me for my stuff—he wanted my bacon, just like your brother wants yours. Maybe I should have given him the bacon, at least one strip.”

“Why?” the girl asked.

“I was in a motorcycle accident,” Jack said. When he touched his side, he winced; his sudden intake of breath made the little boy squish one of his banana slices. “The handlebars went in here—they went right through me.”

“Not while we’re eating,” Myra Ascheim said, but the children and Jack-as-Rutger-Hauer ignored her.

“I thought I was going to be okay—I lost only one kidney,” Jack explained. “We have two,” he told the little boy. “You have to have at least one.”

“What’s wrong with the one you’ve got?” the little girl asked.

Jack shrugged, then winced again; after the handlebars, apparently it hurt to shrug, too. (He was thinking of the way Rutger Hauer says, “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”) Jack said: “My one remaining kidney is failing.”

“ ‘Time to die,’ ” Myra Ascheim said, with a shrug. (Those are Rutger Hauer’s last words in Blade Runner. Myra obviously knew the movie, too.)

“Of course I could ask my brother for one of his kidneys,” Jack went on. “Only a brother’s body-part would work inside me—only a brother’s or a sister’s, and I don’t have a sister.”

“So ask your brother!” the girl said excitedly.

“I suppose I better ask him,” Jack agreed. “But you see the problem. I never gave him my bacon—not even one strip.”

“What’s a kidney?” the boy asked.

His sister carefully placed a strip of bacon beside his bananaless bowl of oatmeal. “Here—take this,” she told him. “You don’t need a kidney.”

“I’ll let you know, Jack, when I sense a surfeit of Rutger Hauer roles,” was all Myra Ascheim said, but Jack knew he’d nailed the audition.

The girl sat watching her brother eat the bacon; Jack could tell she was still thinking about the accident. “Can I see the scar, from the handlebars?” she asked.

“Not while we’re eating,” Myra said again.

Jack had been so focused on his audience of one, he’d not noticed when the man with the newspaper had left. In any performance, even a good one, somebody always walks out. But after breakfast, out on Montana, Myra was critical of Jack’s audition. “You lost the newspaper guy. He didn’t buy the handlebars, not for a minute.”

“The girl was my audience,” Jack said. “The girl and you.”

“The girl was an easy audience,” Myra told him. “You kind of lost me with the handlebars, too.”

“Oh.”

“Lose the ‘Oh’—it’s a meaningless exclamation, Jack.”