Phylliss raised an eyebrow at the loitering Eric, then sarcastically gave him his walking papers. “Well…we’d love it if you could stay but—”
Eric adored Phylliss, and was used to her public paddlings. He smiled shyly, bowed his head then left.
“Thank you, Eric!” Phylliss called out musically.
“Cute,” said Obie.
“Here’s the cassette,” said Phylliss, setting Teorema by Obie’s purse. “Latest draft’s in there too — the Grosseck draft.”
“Efficient little fuck,” said Obie, looking Donny’s way.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “But she is full-service.”
They gossiped about people who were dying. Phylliss mentioned a friend, a screenwriter with AIDS who recently took a turn for the worse. Suddenly, he was getting ghoulish e-maiclass="underline" prayers and solicitations from a network of God freaks he called the Internuts.
Donny, the good agent, dutifully brought them back to Phylliss’s project. Obie said she’d recently screened Salò, and Phylliss was surprised to hear the filmmaker fascinated her enough that she’d once considered optioning a biography, Pasolini Requiem, with the intent to produce. Naturally, the idea of playing a young woman who becomes the sexual obsession of a suburban family appealed to her immensely; Obie’s instincts were always to shock. Though Phylliss knew Big Star was bold (most often for the wrong reasons), she cagily emphasized the commercial elements along with the avant-garde.
“It’s like a darker version of Boudu Sauvé des Eaux—the Renoir film.”
“Down and Out in Beverly Hills.”
“Yes!”
“Then it’s a comedy?”
Phylliss scrunched her mouth up, a translator pondering nuances of an ideogram. “It is funny—unbelievably so. But I don’t think I’d call it a comedy.”
Donny laughed. “It’s definitely not a comedy.”
“Do you have a director?”
“We’re close.”
“Jane Campion would be so great.”
“I love Jane,” Phylliss said, “but I don’t think she’s available.”
“Well, I love what this is about. And your stuff is always so great—I love your shit. And I’m so fucking sick of the studios. I need to do this.”
“It’s not a very long shoot,” said Phylliss. “And it’s all in L.A.”
“I wish it was in Miami — or New Orleans.”
“If that’s really an issue—”
“Naw. I don’t wanna fuck you up.”
“She just bought an amazing house in Palm Beach,” offered the agent.
“The two cities are so similar,” said Phylliss.
“Fuck it, I’ll do it in L.A. I’ll be cool.”
They toasted each other. They were having their Get Shorty “done-deal” moment — a sort of druggy group hysteria that Phylliss knew usually led nowhere. No matter. Strokes from Oberon Mall were better than a pass from Sandra Bullock. More fun, anyway.
“By the way, we are changing the title.”
“Teorema would be kind of a tough sell.”
“Too artsy.”
“Thirty Days in the Hole?” Donny shouted.
“The Man Who Came at Dinner.” Phyllis was choking.
“No! No! The Man Who Came on Dinner.”
Airborne again with her flotilla of Chanels, up, up and away, sucked from Bel Air over park and Palisades, Topanga and Pepperdine and Point Dume, ocean and asphalt and greensward, then the buses of Hearst Castle, faraway confetti of tourists filling Serena with the kind of mournful nostalgia roused by the drone of prop planes or secret garden wishing wells. She felt a fathomless burning. She sat atop a maypole, like the novelty eraser on a child’s pencil, remembering the Great Intruder. That’s what she was on, then — a metastatic tour of the Americas, a Cook’s cancer carousel of the Western world. Impaled thus, riven by pain and douched by morphine, she kept her stabbing vigil on the highest sail, nightwatch on the old crone’s nest. She’d be first to sight Raccoon Cove, the gelatinous waves of its mossy harbor flecked with sodden offerings: crumbcakes, sheepskin shag and tiny buoys of meperidine ampullae.
There was Sy, waving from the dock. They first met at Beth-El, the Wilshire Boulevard temple where Donny went to Sunday School. Her marriage was on the rocks. Sitting at those services, Donny’s little hand in hers, she fixated on the tall gray cantor while Bernie fidgeted, dreaming of Vegas or studios or whatever it was Bernie Ribkin dreamed, sitting with sore and stinky cock, unwashed from last night’s whore-fuck. To Serena, the burnished wood of the pews always smelled like coconuts and musk — as she imagined the skin of the cantor — and for her, this odorously illicit concatenation made her pulse pound. Rejoice: she watched the deadpan cantor silently clear his throat, neck shifting mysteriously, Sy Krohn, the inscrutable religious pro, and the Ribkin family stood along with all the others when his songs began, prayerbooks open for talmudic anthem, this soignée, beaten-down housewife who could actually smell the cantor’s balmy breath, redolent of Listerine and borscht, matzo brei and brisket, beer and kugel; she built an aromatic bridge to him, tendons of ambrosia, sandalwood and heliotrope, jasmine and rose — high altar of attar. He lifted the span with the tension of his voice and held her aloft while Bernie vanished to the men’s room or sidewalk with a sixty-dollar cigar. They journeyed together, cantor and mistress, a powdery pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, Gaza and Alexandria, Palmyra and Damascus. Skirting the Empty Quarter — Rub al Khali. To Athens they went — along the way, eloping from the caravansary and camping in a grove of tamarisks, near a spring-fed pool. Sy roasted a young goat over thuriferous firewood and served tea thick as molasses. He tore into her Arabic tail, slicing it open, licking her spit. Come morning, she awakened in his arms beneath a cloudy anvil of monsoon.
The congregation sat again, jarring her reverie. As the rabbi spoke, Sy faded to the wings to begin his trademark mucosal rumblings. Once she was his, Serena resolved to do a makeover. A few adjustments, that’s all. Get him to stop putting grease in his hair, that’s why he had the dandruff. Then, in the middle of these absurdities, Donny looked into her eyes, freed by the absence of his father, a strange beseeching look, the abstract, abject entreaties of a small boy’s nameless misery. The seven-year-old could not give his heartbreak a voice — the cantor would have to speak for them all. The congregation would rise again as Serena fell back on her fantasia: East of Aden, there they were amid merchants and drovers, wending through souks with the imperturbable charm of post-coital complicity: stalls of cinnamon, cardamom, turmeric and thyme, ivory, indigo, coffee and galls. He gave her myrrh for menstrual cramps, and ground red coral for the abrasions from their lovemaking, resin from the dragon’s blood tree. The cantor wore blue loincloth, scabbard and jambiyya. Gone were the grease and the talis, the flaky skin. Under hallucinatory skies of eagles and crested hoopoes, through fields of wheat and fire-red aloes, rock-laden baboon-screeched wastelands and stands of lemon trees they went, Sy and Serena, until reaching the vulcanean cliffs of Hisn al Ghurab.
Bernie rejoined them, sliding onto the bench (that reeked of the mucus of her love), soft and honey-smooth as a bowling lane. It had been hell for almost four years; he hadn’t touched her in three — why didn’t he leave? Because of the child, he said. But we’re killing the child! Their rancor was sloppy and public. Why hadn’t she forced him out? Because of the child…