“Jake and I hang out a lot,” Greg agreed. “In fact, I would have to say he is probably my best friend.”
“No kidding?” she asked. “How is he doing these days? Is married life agreeing with him?”
“He’s very happy,” Greg said. “And Laura is a dear. They make a good couple.”
“That’s good to hear,” Mindy said quietly. “I’m pleased for him. I didn’t treat Jake all that well when he and I were together and ... well ... afterwards either.”
“No?” Greg asked, surprised to hear her admit this.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know if he’s told you the tales, but I used him terribly back when we first met. I had the utmost affection for him, and I really did enjoy being with him—especially, you know, in the bedroom—but I used him all the same and I feel bad about that.”
“Do you?”
She nodded. “Our relationship haunts me to this day,” she said softly. “I don’t really have any excuse for what I did except that I was young and ambitious, and I didn’t have much of a conscience when it came to getting what I wanted. I needed Jake to help me break out of the Slow Lane persona I’d been saddled with, and my plan worked just like I wanted it to, but Jake ended up with the short end of the stick. I regret that deeply.”
“Interesting,” Greg said, and then, because he had a healthy shot of alcohol on an empty stomach coursing around his brain, he asked: “And what about the other time you hooked up with him? When you were married to Scott Adams Winslow?”
Mindy’s expression looked startled for a moment and then recovered. “He told you about that, did he?”
Greg nodded. “He felt the need to warn me about you.”
She chuckled a little. “I guess that’s fair,” she said. “Yeah, I used him again when it was time to divorce Scotty. That was a particularly low point in my life, I will admit, and I was particularly cruel to everyone involved. I’m not proud of those days at all.”
“But you’ve changed?” Greg asked.
“I’m older and wiser now,” she said. “I like to think I’ve moved beyond such things.”
“You like to think?” Greg asked. “That’s a little open to interpretation, isn’t it?”
“I suppose,” she said after thinking it over for a moment. “I don’t really have much cause to use people on that level these days anyway. I’m already rich. I’m already an established A-list actress. I even had an Oscar nomination for my last film, so I can now be billed as ‘the Oscar nominated actress’. I’ve got everything I need now. There’s no need to be ruthless anymore even if I didn’t regret the past.”
“An interesting way of looking at it,” Greg said.
“Jake wrote a song about how much of a bitch I was,” Mindy said softly. “I hear it played on the radio constantly.”
Greg nodded. “Nothing’s Different Now,” he said. It was from Jake’s first solo album, written during his exile in New Zealand, shortly after the second relationship with Mindy had come to an end.
“You know,” Mindy said, “when I first heard that song and realized he was singing about me, I was fucking infuriated with him. I actually called my lawyer to see if I could sue him for defamation or something like that. It turns out I can’t, since he never really says he’s talking about me and since a reasonable person would not know he’s talking about me and ... well...”
Greg smiled. He knew a thing or two about defamation lawsuits. “And, you’d have to prove that all those things he suggested about you were not true,” he said.
“Yeah ... right,” Mindy said sourly. “Anyway, as I heard the song more and more, I had a little bit of an epiphany. If someone feels the need to write and record a song about how big of a bitch you are ... well ... maybe you are, in fact, a bitch.”
“Maybe,” Greg allowed.
“And maybe if you are a big enough bitch that someone is inspired to commit it to musical prose ... well ... that’s nothing to be proud of and maybe you should stop and examine some of your life choices and attitudes.”
“And you did that?” he asked.
“I did that,” she said. “And I found I didn’t like who I was.”
“So ... you’re saying that things are different now?”
“Things are different now,” she assured him. “I’m the new and improved Mindy Snow model, ready to settle down and start enjoying the fruits of all my bitchy labor. And I’m really looking forward to working with you, Greg.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Why?”
He nodded. “I was told you turned down this project initially. But once they named me as the lead, you suddenly changed your mind and campaigned to be given the part of Lyndsay. I can’t help but conclude the two events are related. So, why me?”
She looked up his face, her chocolate brown eyes radiating warmth and sincerity. “Because I think you’re one of the best actors working today,” she said. “I’ve wanted to work with you for some time and, once I heard you were in the roll of Haverty, I knew my chance had come.”
“Well ... I’m flattered, of course,” he said, “but my career took quite a hit when I starred in The Northern Jungle.”
“That was a terrible film,” Mindy agreed. “But that has nothing to do with you. Your acting in it was still first-rate. You’re a respected professional among those of us on the inside and I’ve always wanted to work with you. After seeing you in So Others May Live, I knew you still had it after the Jungle fiasco. That just strengthened my resolve to do a project with you.”
“That sounds reasonable enough,” Greg said, and it did, but what had Jake told him? Mindy doesn’t so much as fart without having an ulterior motive. “Jake warned me, however, that sometimes things are not quite as they seem with you.”
She nodded slowly. “Again, I stung Jake pretty badly, not just once but twice, and I can understand how he would feel that way. But I’m not the same person Jake knew. I assure you, Greg, my interest in you is purely professional. You’re a great actor and I’m a great actress and Us and Them is a great script with a great producer and a great director, even if he is a pain in the ass micromanager. I think we have a strong potential for carrying away an Oscar or two from this film.”
“You really think so?” he asked. So far, he had never even been nominated for one.
“I really think so,” she said. “That’s why I jumped on this project when I heard that you were going to be the lead. Between you and I, we’re a cinch for nomination and if we walk away without at least one of us carrying home a statuette, I’d be surprised.”
Greg pondered her words for a few moments and then nodded. What she said made perfect sense and sounded very logical. And even if it hadn’t, what possible other motive could Mindy have? She couldn’t be trying to steal him away from Celia, could she? For what purpose? They hardly knew each other. And Mindy likely made more money than Greg these days anyway.
And so, his suspicions satisfied for the moment, he invited her to share his dinner table with him. She accepted. And, even though it was a bit uncouth, they both decided to go with the cheeseburger plate to help get them into character.
Chapter 9: Setting the Stage
Chicago, Illinois
May 21, 1995
The primary staging location for the cast and crew of Us and Them was the Chicago Police Department’s 4th District station on East 103rd Street in the heart of the southside, the same station that Greg had deployed out of during his ride-a-long period of preproduction. It was a simple single-story brick building that had been constructed in the early 1950s and had long since become outdated for the size and the call volume of the district it covered. In the back parking lot of the station, a parking lot that was already too small by far, the movie studio trailers had been parked. There were six of them in all, powered by a generator truck that sat in the middle of the formation and constantly spewed out diesel exhaust into the air. Several times a day the catering trucks and the limousines would invade as well. The cops who worked out of the station—they tended to be the younger members of the force, as District 4 was a rookie assignment for patrol officers and a first supervisory position for newly promoted sergeants and lieutenants—were greatly inconvenienced by all of this, particularly when it came to parking, but they remained good natured and polite about it. After all, they were making a movie out of their station, a movie starring Greg Oldfellow and Mindy Snow. How freaking cool was that?