Memphis Movie (7 page)

Sandy was in the kitchen making coffee.

“Hey, Bunky,” she said, softly. “Coffee and cake? They've got some pretty nice chocolate cake in here.”

“Yes, thanks,” Eric said, shaking the cobwebs away. “How long did I sleep?”

“Dunno, don't know what time you came in.”

“Oh, yeah. Oh. Wait. The pages—they're wonderful. Just the right touch for Hope's character. You've really nailed it.”

“Thanks, Bunky, My Little Cabbage. Come get some cake.”

Eric struggled out of the recliner. His bones hurt. After he rose he picked up the pages to take them to the kitchen table. Something fell out from between the pages.

Eric groaned as he bent to pick it up. It was a photograph.

“What's this?”

Sandy looked up from her cake.

“Ricky Lime brought that by. Look at it.”

Eric went back and put his reading glasses on. The photograph was of a city street, a shot down one sidewalk, street with moderate traffic on the right side. There was a sign in the foreground. Central Barbecue.

“So?” Eric said, settling down. He picked up his coffee. “Thanks, Sweet,” he said.

“There's a ghost in the picture.”

“What, this blur?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So Lime isn't the best still photographer. I'll get him replaced. I don't know where he came from anyway.”

“No, no, look closer. The—ghost—”

“Is—oh, no—is wearing a white cape.”

“Yep.”

“A white, spangled cape and jumpsuit.”

“Yep, that's the puppy.”

“It's blurry.”

“Well. He's been dead for so long.”

10.

The Film Commission sent a limousine to pick up Eric and Sandy. The limousine driver handed Eric a note. It read:
DAN YUMONT STILL NOT FOUND
.

Eric sighed.

The driver smiled as if he were driving a hearse.

He handed Eric a second note.

Eric studied the messenger. He had that lean and hungry look, the one most often associated, in Eric's experience, with someone who wants to break into films.

“Thanks,” Eric said, investing the simple word with as much endgame as he could muster.

The second note was from Eden Forbes. Why didn't he just call Eric's cell?

It read:
DIDN
'
T WANT TO CALL CELL IN CASE SANDY ANSWERED. I WANT YOU TO ADD MEMPHIS WRITER TO SCRIPT. NEED MORE LOCAL FLAVOR OF WHICH SANDY HAS NIL
.

Oh, this was gonna go over well. Eric looked at his paramour. He smiled a tight smile.

“Who's that one from?” Sandy asked. She was dressed in a gown so low-cut that a fingernail-paring-size slice of aureole was visible on either side.

“No one,” Eric said.

“Hm,” Sandy said. “Is no one female?”

“Now, there's a question.”

“Hm,” Sandy hmmed. She had already lost interest in the query.

“Why this note passing like we're in school?” Eric mused out loud. Had he mused it out loud? He thought so, though Sandy moved not.

“Everything all right?” the limousine driver asked.

Eric studied his eyes in the mirror. Even his eyes were lean and hungry.

“Yes, thanks,” Eric said into the mirror.

“My name's Hassle Cooley,” the driver said into the mirror.

“Hassle. Cooley.”

“Right.”

“Ok. Thanks, Hassle.”

“No hassle,” Hassle Cooley said.

“Ha. That's funny,” Eric said.

Sandy rolled her heavily made-up eyes.

“I make movies, too,” Hassle Cooley said.

“Ah,” Eric said.

“Maybe later I can tell you about a couple of projects I have in mind.”

“Sure.”

“Really?”

“Yes, why not?” Eric said.

“You won't be sorry,” Hassle Cooley said.

Eric was always sorry.

11.

The party to celebrate the launch of
Memphis Movie
was held in a downtown restaurant called the Arcade. The restaurant sat on South Main, across from the Amtrak Station with its gorgeous and frightening architecture. The building adjacent to the station loomed high above the street, gothic and unkempt, its dirty stone like a hanging garden of soot and age.

The Arcade itself, though unpromising from the outside, inside was a bit of a Memphis time machine: quaint and funky, alive with Memphis mojo and serving up the best hummus in the city. Its walls were obscured by a plethora of photographs of Memphis greats: Elvis, Rufus Thomas, B.B. King, Big Star, and a new addition, a lovely dun-tinged photo of the recently deceased Arthur Lee. The restaurant was closed for the movie party and the two shotgun rooms of the place were packed so tight it was impossible to move. In each booth sat at least six people, animated to the point of public disgrace, creating, overall, a din akin to the roar in the Roman Colosseum during a bloodletting.

Eric and Sandy were greeted by loud shouts and incoherent toasts as they entered. At the doorway stood someone from Linn Sitler's office, a lovely young woman named Mimsy Borogoves. She offered Eric a soft, thin hand, which he took the way a retriever takes a shot dove into its mouth, gently, with only a
deeply buried desire to crush it. Was it Eric's imagination, or did the young beauty hold his hand a little too long, a dangerous half-minute longer than she had held Sandy's?

They had reserved a place at the head of a long table for Sandy and Eric. When they were seated plates of appetizers were placed before them. Sandy immediately began to eat. Her appetite recently was something to behold.

Eric eschewed the food and looked up and down the main table. Here were the chief ingredients for
Memphis Movie
. The actors; the cinematographer, Rica Sash, whom Eric had never worked with but was excited to get the chance, Rica having just the previous year shot the new Roman Polanski film, for which he had received an Oscar nomination; Ricky Lime, looking worried and smug simultaneously; much of the crew; and in the chair marked for Eden Forbes sat a round little man with eyes like a tax accountant's. Eric made a mental note to avoid him.

Eric ad-libbed a little speech. It was a short conglom of fervent words. Five minutes after he sat down he couldn't remember what he'd said. Had he said anything worthwhile? Anything new? Did it matter?

Sandy was asked if she wanted to add anything, after being introduced as “Eric's wife and writing partner.” She waved a half-eaten chicken wing in the air, signaling that she would rather not speak. A small phobia of Sandy's, the getting up in front of crowds. Eric hated it too, but it never frightened him. He had about him a bit of the ham.

Later, in the crush of the crowd, Ricky Lime pressed up against Eric and breathed heavily into his ear.

“Did you see the picture I sent over?”

Eric nodded.

“What do you think?” Ricky fairly shouted.

“Can we talk later? It's hot as hell in here.”

“I have more. Nearly 50 percent of the shots have some kind of—of anomalous image in them.”

Eric nodded. He wasn't sure if he was agreeing to anything. He just wanted to get out of there.

“Some younger, some older,” Ricky was saying now. Had Eric missed part of it? “When can we get together? I also think I'm being followed.”

Eric nodded one last time. As soon as he could he would have Lime fired and replaced with—anybody.

Eric greeted most of the cast at least briefly. Kimberly Winks seemed to spend most of the evening in tight conversation with Ike Bana. Eric could only imagine what delicious ambition was being generated between them. At least he was spared Kim for the night. Many of the actors were expressing overly ardent worry about Dan Yumont. Eric was all calm reassurance. He felt, actually, something less than calm about it. A small qualm, would be how he would put it.

At the end of the evening, he pulled Hope Davis outside. They stood on the sidewalk under the neon and Eric felt a bit less harried outside in the relative quiet.

“So, how do you like Memphis?” Eric was suddenly a high school nerd looking for a date.

“What I've seen is charming.” Hope Davis spoke in her Hope Davis voice. Eric's heart fell through his body like a cake dropped from a second-story window.

“It can be. Charming, that is.”

“Yes, you grew up here, right?”

“I did. If I grew up.”

Hope Davis laughed a warm and polite laugh and placed her hand on Eric's bicep.

“Now I think I'm ready to crash for the night,” Hope Davis said.

“Is your room nice? Did they do right by you?”

“Oh, yes. The Peabody. The view of the river is quite—quite hypnotizing.”

“Sleep well,” Eric said.

Sleep well. Shit.

Where was Sandy? Did it matter whether he waited for her or not? How far had they gone down
that
road?

Eric could see the maniac limo driver across the street grinning like an ambitious Moonie.

Just as he was about to start for the car a hand arrested him by grabbing the back of his shirt. It was a disconcerting, though oddly sensuous feeling.

Eric turned and was staring into the exquisite face of Mimsy Borogoves. She had pale skin with a natural rose blush to her cheeks and eyes the color of luminous fish scales. Her hair was a soft brown nest.

“You don't remember me,” she said.

“I—I don't.”

“When you came back in . . . uh, 2000, to give a workshop at the U of M.”

“I—”

“There's no reason you should remember me. You must have talked to hundreds of people that night. You said something that night, a joke that flopped, that I have remembered ever since. Some hotshot young actor challenged you concerning Memphis's theater history, something about you not supporting local actors enough. And—do you remember this?—the young Turk made a reference to the Memphis State production of
Hair
, how groundbreaking it was and—”

“I don't—”

“The punch line, anyway, was, ‘You, sir, are no Keith Kennedy.'”

“Ah.”

“I think I was the only one who laughed.”

“A joke too insider to make a ripple.”

“It still makes me laugh.”

“Ah—afterward—at that professor's house—”

“Yes.”

“You were—well, you were a child.”

“I was 19.”

“Yes, but—”

“I know. Late bloomer.”

“Well.”

“Yes, I just—I wanted to say, that talk that night, it sorta changed my life. I dropped literature as my major and went full-steam into film. I graduated last spring.”

“Well—aren't you the big girl now?”

There was a pause—and then they both laughed at the ridiculous phrasing.

“You've really turned into a beautiful woman.”

“The swan from the duckling.”

“Not exactly that—”

“It's ok. I'm enjoying blowing off all the guys who didn't look at me just five years ago.”

“Ha! I imagine that is a distinct pleasure.”

“It is.”

“And now you—you work for Linn?”

“Linn? Oh—”

“How's that going?”

“Oh, it's wonderful. I get to do so many—creative things. And I get to meet you again.”

There was a modicum of warmth to that last phrase. Sexual?

“I am happy for that as well,” Eric said. Just in case he faked a flirtatious geniality.

“I got Kimberly Winks put on the picture,” Mimsy added.

12.

Eric rode back to the house alone in the limo. Alone except for Hassle Cooley, whose anxious eyes appeared to Eric like T.J. Eckleburg's peering down in judgment over the valley of ashes.

The filmmaker-driver outlined one of his many movie proposals. He said he had “scads of ideas, ideas raining down like falling angels.” Eric squirmed at the metaphor.

“Here's one, and I'm just grabbing one off the top of the pile, so to speak, right?” He was holding Eric's eye in the mirror. Eric answered quickly, if only to prevent them from plowing into an oncoming car.

“A sequel to
The Fly
, ok? Except rather than the transformation making the poor mad scientist into something superhuman, and evil, like the Jeff Goldblum version, the fly DNA only makes him pissy and annoying. Get it? He, like, he shows up at dinner time without asking. Or makes phone calls at inopportune times. Or tries to talk to you when you're like two or three pages from the end of a book. See? Little annoyances. Like he hangs around wherever food is. And he talks in this sort of incessant drone. He kinda hums. He's just annoying but he doesn't realize he is.”