The Movie (8 page)

‘I am fat,’ Megan said, horrified.

‘No you’re not. You might think about losing just a touch. But only if you wanted to,’ Stacey added hastily.

Both of them glanced involuntarily down at Megan’s soft thighs spreading out under the raffled hem, orange peel dimples just beginning to form across them.

‘Hov’s the script going?’ Stacey asked hastily, changing the subject. ‘Got an agent yet?’ , Megan laughed bitterly. ‘Of course. Mike Ovitz rang

yesterday. Which is why I’m still here, schlepping for standard-issue assholes.’ She broke off at the fight of Stacey’s hurt face. The younger girl wasn’t exactly Simone de Beauvoir, and she wounded easily. ‘Oh, Stace, I’m sorry,’ she sighed. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I guess it’s just getting to me today. I got rejections through from William Morris and Sam Kendrick this morning.’

‘Oh, Megan, I’m real sorry. That’s too bad.’

‘Ľeah,’ Megan said shortly. She glanced at her watch. Half-ten. Thank God. ‘At least I get offin fifteen minutes.’

‘You go on home. I’ll cover for you,’ Stacey offered, thinking how low Megan looked this evening, like a puppy with all the fight kicked out of it.

‘Would you? Oh God, thanks, Stacey. I’ll come in early tomorrow,’ Megan promised, rushing through the dirty double doors of the kitchen to get changed. She knew she shouldn’t have accepted, shouldn’t have taken advantage of Stacey’s soft heart. It only meant Stacey would be stuck with the jerks on table four instead of her. But God help me, she thought, tonight I just can’t make it through another minute. She felt so exhausted she could lie down

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here and just sleep through all the racket and shouting without any problem at all. At least, she told herself grimly as she struggled out of the horrible uniform and pulled on her loose jeans, I could if the floor were cleaner.

‘See you tomorrow, Megan. Quarter of nine. Sharp,’ Mr Jenkins, the supervisor, said pointedly to her, nodding at the clock on the wall. ‘You don’t keeping mucking about with your shift times like this. OK? Shifts are set for a reason.’

Megan mumbled something placatory, hating herself. ‘Want your Mr Crispy Special?’ Jenkins demanded, proffering her a small tub of fried chicken wings packaged with a tub of barbecue sauce and a microscopic corn on the

cob.

‘Not tonight.’ She was totally starving, but the humiliation had been too recent. Even her loose jeans had gotten snug around the waistband.

‘Sure?’ He was surprised.

She ignored the growling in her stomach. ‘Yeah. Thanks.’

On the long drive back to Venice, Megan checked herself out in the rearview mirror of her beat-up Flat It was practically a felony to drive a car this old in the city of gleaming Mercedes and personalized Polls-Ikoyces, but at least it was night. And there were some advantages to having lousy wheels. Like nobody would bother carjacking someone who so obviously had nothing worth stealing, and the drive-by shooters wouldn’t waste a bullet. Megan smiled to herself, with grim humour. She better find something to laugh about. Because her reflection wasn’t funny.

The weight was the first thing; OK, so she wasn’t fat fat, not obese, tkoseanne Arnold was fat fat. Oprah before the diet. No, Megan was just-what? Plump? Fleshy? Nearly a stone heavier, and she’d been no Kate Moss before she left San Francisco. Now it showed on her face, as well as her

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ever-thickening thighs. An unsightly bulge under the chin. A rounding of her features, enough to give her a moonfaced expression. And a stomach that was nudging at the waistband of her loose jeans. Megan knew that when she sat down in the bathtub a small roll of flesh would crease over her midriff. She’d started to use bubblebath regularly, and now she guessed it was so she wouldn’t have to look at what was happening to her. At those little dimpled cushions that were developing at the tops of her knees.

Tears started to ftlm across her tired eyes. Oh, God. She didn’t want to see this, didn’t want to take a good look at herself. What would R.ory say if he could see her like this? tory, her last boyfriend up in Frisco, the one that she’d dated for nearly a year and then dumped, three months ago now. There had been nothing wrong with lory, which is why they’d lasted so long. He’d been as comfortable to Megan as her favourite old jumper. But there had been nothing much tight with him either-he’d never been able to get passionate about anything except sex, he was happy with their little world exactly the way it was. Though M’egan had looked forward to going back to lory at nights, she’d never managed to get worked up about it. The thought oflory waiting for her had never given her that wet, sticky, pressing feeling in her pussy she got when she was fantasizing about Harrison Ford or Keanu leeves in the library. And lory on his own had only been able to give her quick little orgasms, not the more satisfying, deeper spasms she got when she shut her eyes and guiltily imagined it was Zach Mason she was fucking. So eventually she’d got round to chucking him, because she couldn’t shake the feeling that as long as she was with tory she’d be missing out on something. Something special, something different. Passion. Infatuation. Her heart speeding up, that faint sickness … the. stuff she saw in the movies, the stuff she read about. Sleepless in Seattle, Romeo and Juliet,. Scarlett O’Hara melting for Rhett Butler. God,

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listen to me, Megan thought, pressing her foot on the gass, picking up speed. Even thinking about it, it sounds ridiculous. When does it ever happen to anyone? How many Richard Geres are out there waiting for your average streetwalker? And dumping Kory, for that. What a joke. If he’d seen her like this, he wouldn’t have stayed with her for ten minutes. Even Dec would have been embarrassed by the total mess she was sliding into.

It wasn’t just the pudginess. The whole thing was a disaster. Poor diet and no exercise and lack of sleep had shot her skin to hell. Her face was grey-complexioned, pallid and dull. On top of that, she had breakouts, nasty little whiteheads peppering her forehead. The lank hair was probably making that worse. She washed it every morning, but cheap shampoo was no match for the spitting oil and rank steam of the Mr Chicken kitchen. And she noticed that the real beauty, the red zit on the end of her nose, had triumphed over the six layers of cover-up she’d plastered on it this morning, and was now throbbing dully and noticeably at her in the rearview mior

Well, Megan thought, if the car breaks down at least I’ll be able to light my way home. And then she was really crying, big, salty tears that spilled out of the corners of her eyes and tickled as they ran down her plump cheeks.

She slowed down, sniffing and reaching up with one hand to dash the water away. She didn’t want a car wreck. Wouldn’t that be the perfect end to the perfect day?

It had started off on the wrong foot this morning, not that there was anything new about that. Her alarm shrilling at eight, waking up with a headache, stumbling into the shower to wash it all away. That had been OK: the hot kiss of the water, the soft bubbles of her shower, her fingers slipping between her legs for a little relief, and a shockingly good orgasm five minutes later, leaning back against the thin plastic shower rack, warm rivulets of water flowing across her fingers, mingling with her own juices, letting

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her come, knowing that her ragged gasps wotfld be hidden from the others by the noise of the shower. Towelling off quickly, she’d almost felt good; relaxed and unstressed, like some soothing hand had temporarily untied all the knots in her muscles. But it hadn’t lasted.

‘What’s up?’ she greeted Jeanne and Tina, her roommates, who’d already had breakfast and were sitting at their small table in the cramped kitchenette, drinking instant coffee. The apartment was grimy and too small, the showerhead needed jiggling every other day and the paint was peeling in most of the rooms, but it was also incredibly cheap. And thus in demand. She’d been really lucky to have the other two pick her out of a long list the day she answered the flatshare ad; maybe it was because she was so ‘much plainer than all the other girls who’d applied, and

they hadn’t wanted any competition. Whatever, neither of them had gone out of their way to make her feel at home once she’d moved her single suitcase in. At least they weren’t overtly hostile. Perhaps that was what passed for friendship in this town. And they hadn’t objected when she’d tried to make the dump seem a little more like home: hanging a surrealist print over the stain in the hallway, putting her faded Afghan blanket down in the kitchen, and tacking her Dark Angel and Metallica posters up in her bedroom and the front room.

‘Hi,’ said Jeanne, a French girl with a chic brown bob

and impeccable skin., Jeanne sold insurance over the phone, downtown, and wanted to be an actress. Central Casting. sometimes called her in to do extra work, and she’d once had a speaking line in a dogfood commercial.

‘Post came for you,’ Tina added, not without sympathy.

Tina was dyed-blonde and silicone-breasted and checked coats at a not-so-exclusive nightclub. She always had more money than her salary would explain, and Megan never asked how she got it.

Megan had walked forward to the table, her .mouth

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suddenly cottony-dry. No mistaking it. Two fat velopes, addressed to her in her own handwriting, lt, about eighty pages fat. Her script, tLetumed to her again, rejected again. Dismayed, she looked at the franking on tlae top. Sam Kendrick. Oh no. And William Morris.

She sank into the vacant chair, feeling despair envelop her in its familiar thick fog.

‘It isn’t that bad,’ Jeanne said, offering some uncharacteristic sympathy. ‘No one gets accepted right off.’

‘You have to know someone,’ Tina confirmed. ‘Do you want some coffee? I’m gonna get some more.’

Megan didn’t want coffee or anything else unless it was laced with strychnine, but she also didn’t want to offend Tina. ‘Thanks.’ She ripped open the envelopes, saw those death-kisses, the stapled sheets marked RETURNED UNREAD, with a form letter saying that the agency was not accepting unsolicitsd scripts at this time.

‘That’s so you can’t sue them,’ Jeanne told her, wisely. Jeanne considered herself a veteran, a pro. She knew all about ‘the Business’.

‘I don’t understand,’ Meg-an said, faintly. At least in San Francisco her novel had been rejected. Here she couldn’t persuade one agency to so much as read her screenplay. ‘Unread’. ‘Unread’. ‘Unread’. They’d all said the same thing, and they’d all sent it back by return of post. Megan couldn’t afford to make huge numbers of copies, so she’d sent out two manuscripts, sending the same copies out again when they came back. Which they always did, like the world’s most accurate boomerangs. Megan had started with the small agents, where she fdlt she had the best chance, and worked her way up. Not that it mattered; she’d struck out all the way up the pond, from the minnows to the whales. And now William Morris and SKI had told her to get lost, she was about through her entire list, with only ICM and CAA remaining. Yeah, right! Like. either of them were gonna give her the time of day.

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‘It’s so you can’t sue them if they rip off your idea,’ Jeanne explained. ‘So if a studio makes a movie, and it’s kind of like your script, you can’t sue them and say they used your idea and ripped you offwithout paying for it.’

‘P,.eally?’ Megan asked. She felt so helpless. ‘But then

how does anybody ever get a script read?’

‘Beats me,’ Tina said shortly, putting a mug of coffee

down in front of her. Megan knew Tina looked down on her, compared with Jeanne. Not only did Jeanne have looks and style; at least she was” failing to be an actress. Megan was only failing to be a writer. How low could you get?

‘You have to know somebody. Tina’s right,’ Jeanne

said.

‘ ‘But I don’t know anybody.’ Not in showbusiness, and not in this whole fucking city, Megan thought. She picked up her copies of the script, ready to slot them into new envelopes for CAA and ICM. They felt like lead in her hand, heavy with the weight of foolish ambition and frustrated dreams.

“So what are you going to do?’ asked Jeanne.

Megan shrugged. ‘Right now I guess I’m going to work.’ And she’d gone back into her bedroom to pick up the Mr Chicken uniform, all ready for another fun-packed day in Tinseltown ….

She turned down Cari]lo, nearly home now. Pretty quiet out there tonight; only a few bodies huddled in doorways, the normal night-time groupings you didn’t look too hard at, kids selling skin or crack, more likely the latter. More money in it. The tears had stopped now; she was too tired to cry. She just wanted to get inside, get something in her stomach so she could sleep. There would be a little less time tomorrow morning, too, because she’d have to get in fifteen minutes earlier. Although there’d doubtless still be time to get back both copies of See the Lights, her. script,

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from CAA and ICM. And Megan wondered for a second what she’d do then. When she had literally run out of chances.

‘Hey, Megan,’ Tina yelled out as she walked through the door. ‘Come and have a beer.’

‘What’s this?’ she asked, hanging up her uniform on the back of her bedroom door and wandering into the kitchen. ‘Are we celebrating?’

‘We are.’ Jeanne had picked up two six-packs of Bud and some grass. The heady, bittersweet scent of marijuana smoke hung in the tiny room, and Megan was assaulted with a sudden rush of homesickness. ‘Want some 6fthis?’ Jeanne proffered an expertly rolled joint and Megan accepted it, taking a deep drag, right into her lungs. Maybe

a little dope would relax her.

‘Beer?:

‘Yeah. No,’ Megan said, thinking of the calories. Tm gonna try and lose some weight.’

‘Jeanne got a part,’ Tina told her smugly.

‘You did?’ Megan asked. ‘Truly?’

Jeanne nodded her sleek head proudly. ‘Second lead in an art ftlm by tkay Tyson. I’m getting twelve hundred dollars.’

Twelve hundred dollars! Megan was appalled to find herself swamped by a wave of envy and resentment. What had Jeanne ever done that was worth so much? Jea.nne was stupid, a bimbo with an accent. But she was slim, she was chic. Things Megan would never be. It was so unfair.