corresponding through e-mail and the occasional telephone call at work. She talked about her travails on the set of PlugIn, the futuristic sci-fi thriller in which she was costarring with a hot young actor who required not one, not two, but three full-time “sobriety managers” to keep him in line, and e-mailed me investment tips and articles about how I should set up a fund for the baby. I’d write her back, talking about work, mostly, and my friends… and my plans, such as they were. She didn’t ask many questions about the impending arrival – good manners, maybe, I thought.
“I have news,” she said. “Big. Huge. The hugest. Your screenplay,” she began breathlessly. I swallowed hard. Of all the things we’d talked about in the months since our meeting in New York, my screenplay hadn’t come up once. I’d assumed that Maxi had forgotten about it, hadn’t read it, or had read it and decided that it was so terrible it would be better for our friendship if she never spoke of it again.
“I loved it,” she said. “The character of Josie is such a perfect heroine. She’s smart, and stubborn, and funny, and sad and I would be honored to play her.”
“Sure,” I said, still not understanding what was happening. “Start eating.”
“I fell in love with the part,” Maxi continued, ignoring me, her words tumbling over each other, faster and faster. “And you know I’ve got this deal with this studio, Intermission… I showed the script to my agent. She showed it to them. They loved it, too… especially the idea of me as Josie. And so, with your permission… Intermission would like to buy your screenplay, for me to star in. Of course, you’d be involved the whole way through… I think that both of us should be able to sign off on any changes to the script, and, of course, on major casting decisions, not to mention who’s going to be the director…”
But I wasn’t listening. I lay back on the bed, my heart suddenly feeling fierce and strange and enormously excited. Making my movie, I thought to myself, a huge smile spreading over my face. Oh, my God, it’s finally happening, somebody’s going to make my movie! I’m a writer now, I’ve really made it, maybe I’ll be rich!
And that’s when I felt it. Like a wave cresting inside of me. Like I myself was in the ocean, being gently tumbled, over and over, by a wave. I dropped the phone and put both hands on my belly, and then came a gentle, almost inquisitive series of tap, tap, taps. Moving. My baby was moving.
“You’re here,” I whispered. “You’re really here?”
“Cannie?” said Maxi. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!” I said, and started laughing. “I’m perfect.”
PART FOUR. Suzie Lightning
FIFTEEN
I’d never had any luck with Hollywood. To me, the movie industry was lik e a guy you lusted after from across the high school cafeteria – so good-looking, so perfect, that you just knew he’d never notice you, and that if you asked him to sign your yearbook at graduation he’d stare at you blankly and grope for your name.
It was an unrequited love affair, but I’d never stopped trying. Every few months I’d importune agents with query letters asking if they were interested in my screenplay. I’d wind up with nothing to show for my troubles but a fistful of preprinted rejection postcards (“Dear aspiring writer,” they’d begin), or occasionally a semipersonal letter advising me that they were no longer handling unsolicited material, unknown writers, novice writers, unproduced writers, or whatever they were using as the derogatory term du jour.
Once, the year before I met Bruce, an agent did meet with me. The thing I remember most about our appointment was that during the entire ten minutes or so he granted me, he never once said my name, or removed his sunglasses.
“I read your screenplay,” he said, pushing it across the table toward me with his fingertips, as if it was too distasteful to risk full palm contact. “It was sweet.”
“Sweet’s not good?” I asked – the obvious conclusion one would draw from the expression on his face.
“Sweet is fine, for children’s books, or TGI Fridays on ABC. For movies, well… we’d prefer it if your heroine blew something up.” He tapped his pen across the title page. Star Struck, it read. Except he’d doodled little fangs coming out of the S’s, so they looked like snakes. “Also, I’ve got to tell you, there’s only one fat actress in Hollywood ”
“That’s not true!” I exploded, abandoning my strategy of smiling politely and keeping quiet, not sure what I was more offended by – his use of the term “fat actress,” or the notion that there was only one of them.
“One bankable fat actress,” he amended. “And really, the reason is, nobody wants to see movies about fat people. Movies are about escape!”
Well. “So… what do I do now?” I asked.
He shook his head, already pushing himself back from the table, already reaching for his cell phone and his valet parking stub. “I just can’t see getting involved with this project,” he had told me. “I’m sorry.” Another Los Angeles lie.
“We’re anthropologists,” I murmured to Nifkin, and to the baby, as we flew over what might have been Nebraska. I hadn’t brought any of my baby books with me, but I figured, if I couldn’t read, I could at least explain. “So just think of it as an adventure. And we’ll be home before you know it. Back in Philadelphia, where we’re appreciated.”
We – me, and Nifkin, and my belly, which had gotten to the point where I pretty much regarded it as a separate thing – were in first class. Actually, as best I could tell, we were first class. Maxi’d sent a limo to my apartment, which had whisked me the nine miles to the airport, where a block of four seats had been reserved in my name and nobody so much as batted an eyelash at the presence of a small and ter-rified rat terrier in a green plastic carrying case. We were currently airborne, at our cruising altitude of 30,000 feet, and I had my feet up on a pillow, a blanket spread over my legs, a chilled glass of Evian with a twist of lime in my hand, and a glossy assortment of fresh magazines fanned out on the seat beside me, beneath which Nifkin reposed.Cosmo, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Mirabella, Moxie. The brand-new April issue of Moxie.
I picked it up, hearing my heart start thumping, feeling the sick feeling in the pit of my belly, and the familiar cold sweat at the back of my neck.
I put it down. Why should I upset myself? I was happy, I was successful, I was flying to Hollywood first class to collect a bigger paycheck than he’d ever see in his life, not to mention the mandatory hob-nobbing with superstars.
I picked it up. Put it down. Picked it up again.
“Shit,” I muttered, to no one in particular, and flipped to “Good in Bed.”
“The Things She Left Behind,” I read.
“I don’t love her anymore,” the article began.
When I wake up in the morning, she isn’t the first thing that I think of – whether she’s here, and when I’ll see her, and when I can hold her again. I wake up and think about work, my new girlfriend, or, more likely, my family, and my mother, and how she’ll manage in the wake of my father’s recent death.
I can hear our song on the radio and not instantly punch up another station. I can see her byline and not feel like someone large and angry is stomping on top of my heart. I can go to the Tick Tock Diner, where we used to go for late-night omelets and fries, where we’d sit side by side in a booth
