“I loved A Few Good Men.”
“Thank you. Which is what the Aronofsky script lacked. Because that script you were going to do was essentially a courtroom drama— without a courtroom. And that’s something the audience demands, the kind of classic catharsis a courtroom setting provides. Otherwise, it’s Gladiator without the Colosseum. Of course, there’s a romance too, but we haven’t cast your ‘lady’ yet.”
Dark Horse
BECCA GOT THE CALL while she was at Whole Foods.
The Rob Reiner film was back on track — with Kit Lightfoot in the Ed Norton part. Her agent said that casting the recovering actor was a brilliant stroke (“No pun intended”) and amazing coup. He told Becca the director was anxious for her to read with his new leading man. Rob liked her original audition so much that he had phoned personally.
She was ecstatic. But the moment she hung up, Becca knew she was doomed. Her agent didn’t even get it. She examined the impasse from every angle — the problem being, it was only a matter of time before someone connected to the movie snapped to the fact that Becca Mondrain used to sleep with the daddy-killer whose buddy had whacked Kit Lightfoot in the head. It was an insane predicament, a tragically ridiculous checkmate, and the more she thought about it the more surprised she was that the Reiner camp had been caught unawares. What should she do? The oblivious agent would probably just say she was paranoid, but she knew that wasn’t the case. Even Annie agreed.
She was about to call Sharon Belzmerz for advice when it came to her: she would go in and audition for the sheer incredible experience of it — she owed herself that much — and if fate decreed he hire her, she’d bite the bullet, and come clean. Look, Mr. Reiner, there’s something that I think you don’t know but that you probably should because it’s kind of a big deal. And maybe you know already but I don’t think so. See, I used to pretty seriously date Herke Lamar Goodson, the guy who was on trial in Virginia last year? We went out for a few months before he was arrested for a… for homicide. He was the one who killed his dad? Everyone — including me! — was totally shocked when that happened. I had no idea he had anything like that in his past or was even capable of such a thing. Anyway, it turned out — as you probably or might already even know — that he also happened to be friends with the crazy person who did that awful thing to Kit. The man who hit him in the head with the bottle? When I found all of this out, it became totally one of the worst periods of my life. Because I’m from Waynesboro, Virginia, and we just don’t live life in the so-called fast lane there. Mr. Reiner, I cried my eyes out on the phone to my mama every night. And I know I probably should have made my agency “tell all” before I came in to audition — I didn’t conceal any of it from him, but to tell the truth I don’t even think he — my agent — was thinking straight — but I was just so amazingly honored to even be asked or considered by you for your film and that you remembered me and were gracious enough to totally ask me back was just almost too much! It’s almost like I didn’t want to let you down or disappoint you. Aside from “Rusty”—that’s what Herke Goodson called himself — he lied to me and everyone else about so many things, even his name — aside from the crazy coincidence of me auditioning with Kit, and my ex-boyfriend knowing the man who struck him on top of the head, I just wanted you to know, wanted to be sure that you understood that I so totally did not know at the time that Rusty, or Herke, had this terrible double life! It was beyond the worst thing that ever happened to me, worse than when my closest friend was hit by a car on prom night! And I am so sorry if I caused you any hassle or wasted your time but you have been so nice to me and I wanted to say all this because I thought that if things went any further it would potentially be embarrassing for all parties down the line, notwithstanding the studio. From a public relations standpoint. And I would never want to embarrass you or Kit. I know that you know that. And I just wanted to thank you for giving me the opportunity — it is something I will never forget. And that I would love to work with you one day in any capacity and just feel that my best chance of doing that is to open up to you in the way that I have today. So thank you, Mr. Reiner, thank you, thank you, thank you for even listening and hearing me out!
• • •
THEY SAT face to face.
A camera taped them as they read.
Kit seemed shy, but maybe she was just projecting. It was difficult for her to be in the moment. She knew Mr. Reiner was looking for chemistry more than anything else; she was a long shot but didn’t care, because as far as Becca was concerned, she’d already won. If I have to pack my bags and go home tomorrow, she thought, by God’s grace it would be all right. Here she was, all the way from Waynesboro, Virginia, where she’d slaved in a store just like the one Jennifer Aniston did in The Good Girl. She thought of how hard it had been for others before her — especially Drew, who, at thirteen, spent a year in lockdown. Her own mother had put her there yet she still had JAID tattooed on her back, with angels. Every night from the hospital, Drew looked up at the moon and cried her heart out to her dead Grandpa John.
Here she was, after all the hard, hard times. She’d finagled her way onto a classy cable show and even been some kind of cult figure on the Web, and now she was in a room with Rob Reiner and Kit Lightfoot, cohorts and fellow artist-travelers…
No regrets!
• • •
OUTSIDE THE Coffee Bean, two teenage girls breezed by. One of them made a little gasp, then excitedly turned to her friend. A familiar reflex foretold the actress had again been mistaken for Drew.
But the whispering girl said, “That’s Becca Mondrain.”
Graduation
LISANNE SIGNED UP for a Fearless Fliers clinic at LAX. The woman said there would be around twenty-five in the group. Enrollment in classes for “aviophobics” had diminished in the months following 9/11 but over time had rebounded to previous levels. In fact, the woman said sunnily, because of the war in Iraq people were confronting their fears with newfound confidence.
The three-weekend course began with an informal overview. The counselor, a retired airline pilot, said the most important thing the group would learn was that their phobia emanated not from the fear of death but from the fear of losing control. They couldn’t really grasp the distinction, but he reassured them they had come to the right place. Everyone seemed to exhale at once when he quoted a statistical study from MIT that said if you took a commercial flight every day for the next 29,000 years, the odds were you’d be involved in just one crash.
The enrollees formed a circle and introduced themselves. They gave their names and occupations before delivering what Lisanne imagined to be AA-style confessionals of how each had found his or her way to Fearless Fliers. One woman, a pediatrician, said that years ago on a stormy night in Minnesota she’d boarded with a syringe of Demerol and given herself a shot in the ass, only to awaken hours later to find they were still on the runway. (Lisanne thought that was someone who probably should be in AA.) Everyone had their own special niche, like the generic panic freaks, for whom fear of flying was a midsize subsidiary of a much larger corporation — or the seasoned claustrophobes, who equated entering a plane with being sealed into a coffin. Lisanne enjoyed the eccentrics the most: the ones who thought that the plane would run out of gas or that God might snatch whichever aircraft happened past Him at whatever arbitrary moment in time. (God was superpremenstrual.) Some in the circle worried about pilots having psychotic breaks or passengers having psychotic breaks or air traffic controllers having psychotic breaks or terrorist passengers simply being themselves. One or two self-proclaimed divas admitted to having been escorted from flights due to pretakeoff “arias”—groans, moans, and high-pitched wails that erupted from seemingly bottomless depths as runways were taxied toward. A man in his sixties was possessed by wind shear and “sudden rollover,” a phrase he invoked and muttered, both prayer and imprecation, with near-comic insistency. (The common denominator of horror being turbulence, hands down.) A sardonic librarian said that whenever she booked a flight, she couldn’t help imagining an AP wire photo of some Middle American farmer’s field strewn with the debris of metal and body parts, being picked over by an FAA crash team. Torsos in tree branches and whatnot. Everyone laughed when the same woman — Lisanne thought she was funny enough to do stand-up — said she’d even attended multiple showings of a theater piece at UCLA that was basically actors re-creating dialogue from black box transcripts of fatal air crashes. Lisanne could relate, though it’d been a while since she’d lulled herself to sleep with the dog-eared paperback. She didn’t share that with the group. Still, when it came her turn, Lisanne found herself saying aloud what she’d never told anyone, let alone strangers — that because of her phobia, she took a train to her father’s deathbed, and missed his passing. Her story opened a floodgate; astonishingly, she wasn’t the only one. The classmates became emboldened. Together, they stared into the face of cowardice and did not like what they saw.