She Is Me Page 2

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.

  “Then, I’m in the gym,” he said, paying no attention, “and I’m reading, and . . . here it is!” He smacked the magazine. “Concept. Clarity. Class.” He smiled at her, his boxer jowls lifting. “You’ve got the common touch.”

  I certainly do not, Elizabeth wanted to cry out, offended.

  “In spite of yourself,” he added.

  “Oh. Thank you,” she said.

  Larry Volfmann leaned back, his hands behind his head. He spun around, 360 degrees, in his leather chair.

  “You on?” he said.

  “Well, but, I don’t really have any experience . . .”

  Shut up, asshole, she told herself. Way to talk yourself out of a shower of fucking riches.

  “No. But you’ve got . . .” He thought for a moment. “Seychel,” he said. “You know what that means?”

  She nodded. But he continued anyway.

  “Common sense. I mean, that’s the translation. Good, common sense.”

  “Yeah. That’s good,” Elizabeth said. “Yeah. I like that.”

  “Seychel,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Elizabeth said. She realized she liked him, even though he had read her paper on Flaubert in Tikkun and wanted to pay her a lot of money to write a screenplay for an updated Madame Bovary, to turn poor Madame Bovary into a “project.” She liked him even though he was buying Emma Bovary as if she were a new sweater, cashmere, but still; and buying her, Elizabeth, as if she were . . . what?

  Oh, come on, now. You mean you like him because he’s buying you. Don’t be a prig about selling out, you prig.

  “It’s oddly comforting to be a commodity,” she said.

  “Back at you,” he said.

  Greta remembered when Elizabeth was a baby, her beloved first child. When she woke up in the morning, her first thought had always been of little Elizabeth. To call it the first thought was not quite accurate, though. It was the continuation of last night’s thought, which was a continuation of that day’s thought, which was simply a continuation of the thought of the day before. Elizabeth had filled Greta’s consciousness. She was a beautiful baby with intense, dark eyes and, even then, a worried scowl that could burst into a smile so unexpected and bright it caused complete strangers to laugh out loud. Elizabeth’s eyes were still big and dark and round. She stilled scowled, too often for a grown woman. But she smiled, too, and when her big, wide smile appeared, it still broke through like a glorious surprise. Elizabeth’s whole face lifted into an expression of such benign, open joy that those around her knew the world was good and fair and our reward would come in this life; we would not have to wait for the next. Witnessing the transformation from pensive baby moodiness to generous baby joy had felt like a gift. It had always been Elizabeth’s unconscious, secret power. It still was. When she’d left the house earlier to go to this mysterious meeting of hers, she had turned her head just before the front door closed and the smile had been revealed and the people, or Greta, who was the only one present, had rejoiced.

  Greta had existed in the baby’s beauty, in her moods, in her needs. Now, she realized, she existed in Lotte in the same way. Her mother’s comfort, her spirits and moods, her demands, and her sad, vulnerable needs had been transformed into the air she breathed, a steamy atmosphere as real as the mist that poured from Lotte’s humidifier, which Greta was careful to clean every day.

  Lotte’s voice had wormed its way into Greta’s head. Lotte’s pain was as clear to Greta as if she felt it herself. The disappointment Lotte felt with each failed treatment, each unsuccessful doctor’s appointment, weighed heavily on Greta’s chest. Lotte’s joy, the intermittent, glorious moments when she struggled up from her illness and courageously enjoyed a new pair of shoes, a huge, garish sunflower, or a cookie—this was Greta’s joy.

  “It’s like having a two-year-old,” she said to her husband. But how could Tony know what she meant?

  “You have to separate yourself from her a little bit,” he suggested.

  Greta looked at him, disturbed. Separate?

  “Why is that a goal, I wonder?” she said. “I know it is. I know it’s what we’re always supposed to be doing, all our lives. The therapists so rule. But why?”

  “Self-preservation?”

  Preservation? Should she zip herself up in a plastic Ziploc bag and preserve herself in the vegetable bin in the refrigerator? Even though she wasn’t the one whose face was rotting?

  “Don’t you think ‘self-preservation’ is just a nice contemporary phrase for selfishness?” she said.

  “No,” Tony said. “I don’t. People need boundaries.”

  She hated the way he said “boundaries.” It sounded as though it should be written with a capital B. Tony often seemed to capitalize his nouns.

  “People need Boundaries,” he said again.

  Perhaps People do, she thought. Tony would know. He was an authority on People. He looked authoritative, too, standing there, his rather large head with its pleasantly crow-footed blue eyes and firm, reassuring, smiling lips.

  “Fuck people,” she said.

  Elizabeth walked out of Larry Volfmann’s office still gripping her bottle of water, now empty, now warm. Most people thought Elizabeth willful, but she often felt her will was not entirely her own. She was a person who appeared arrogant and unmovable not because she made up her mind and then stuck to it but because she found it so difficult to make up her mind to anything at all. Elizabeth waited, and waited, and waited, hoping for that elusive bit of evidence that would finally and utterly convince her.

  Sometimes there was no alternative before her, and then she would rush down a path as if pulled by gravity. It made people think she was ambitious and energetic. But I’m passive, don’t you see? That’s why I studied so hard in school—too lazy not to. And now this. I’ll do this because Larry Volfmann told me to.

  “Elizabeth?”

  Elizabeth realized she was still standing in the waiting room with her empty plastic water bottle. A young man stood in front of her, short, preternaturally tanned, his thinning blond hair gelled into alarming spikes.

  “I’m glad I caught you,” he said.

  Elizabeth was not glad, somehow, although she did feel caught.

  “I’m Elliot.” He took her by the elbow and led her to another office. “Elliot King.”

  “Look,” said Elliot King. “I’m sorry.”

  He sat at his desk and put his feet up, motioning her to a chair.

  “I’m just a businessman,” he said.

  Elizabeth sat and looked past the soles of his Adidas at the businessman who was sorry. His brows were knit. He put a pencil to his lips.

  “I have to warn you about Larry,” he said.

  “You do?”

  “I love him dearly,” he said.

  Elizabeth nodded.

  “He’s the boss,” he said.

  She nodded again.

  “The studio head.”

  “Right.”

  “I love him dearly.” Elliot stared at her. “But I’m just a businessman.” He threw the pencil onto the table, where it skipped like a stone. “Elizabeth Bernard,” he continued, “your head is spinning, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Heady stuff, movies,” he said. “Like champagne, right? You want to be in the business, right? Because it is a business. A business you want to be in. But who doesn’t? Every kid wants to be in the entertainment industry. But let me tell you something.” He leaned back so far that Elizabeth could see into his nostrils. “As a businessman. As the man who picks up the pieces.” He snapped his head forward and stared at Elizabeth with obvious hostility. “Madame Bovary?” he said. “Who are we kidding?”

  Elizabeth did not know what to say. Was this planned? A loyalty test? She shrugged, hoping that did not commit her either way.

  “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, the man is sincere, don’t get me wrong. I love him dearly.”

  Elliot’s phone rang. He pic
ked up the receiver, motioning for her to wait. He nodded, grunted once or twice. “The murders are boring, I told you that,” he said.

  Elizabeth tried to look intelligent and interested and comfortable, but she was hot with embarrassment.

  “I love you dearly, you fuck. Just give me a cooler murder, maestro.”

  He hung up.

  “Business,” he said apologetically.

  Elizabeth shifted. She was having trouble focusing on Elliot. She had not eaten and she was feeling faint and far away. She felt her belly was sticking out and wished she had not worn this shirt. She wondered if she would ever find her way home.

  “I know this industry,” he said. “I know the marketplace. I know your patron, too, Professor. I love him dearly, but the man is like a dog with a bone when he gets these ‘literary’ ideas, gnawing and slobbering all over them and then, what? Drops them in the dirt. Look, I’m just a businessman, but, whim or no whim, Larry Volfmann is a businessman, too, and movies are a business, and bad business is bad business. And Madame Bovary . . . who I love dearly, by the way . . .”

  He held his palms out.

  “You get my point?”

  Elizabeth said, “I’m a little confused, actually.”

  “Need I say more?”

  Greta was on her knees weeding when Elizabeth got home. Her daughter did not look sunny anymore. Greta stood up. “How was Mr. Wolfman?”

  “Volfmann.”

  “Wolfman, Volfmann . . . Did you hit traffic?”

  She put her hand on Elizabeth’s cheek, leaving a smudge of dark, rich dirt, and wondered if this tall grown woman dressed in black who drove a car and plucked her eyebrows could really be her daughter, her little whining Elizabeth, her baby.

  “Mom . . .”

  Yes, she decided as Elizabeth wrinkled her face in an unattractive, hostile way. She could.

  “Mom, I got a job. Then this asshole told me not to take it —”

  “Volfmann?”

  “No. The other one. Elliot King?”

  “Oh! His mother is my client!”

  “So that settled it —”

  “His mother wanted a waterfall, totally wrong for the space, but I must admit the pergola really does look great —”

  “So, I need an agent,” Elizabeth said. “I’m supposed to write a screenplay.” Then she smiled.

  Greta was suddenly elated, and wondered, not for the first time, that the moods of her children were such powerful masters, causing her own moods to do their bidding so readily. She felt herself about to clap her hands in a show of excitement as she had done when Elizabeth was a child, but caught herself and pulled back before any damage was done. Elizabeth did not like being “infantilized,” as she put it.

  “I’m so proud of you, darling,” Greta said, instead.

  “God, you don’t seem very excited,” Elizabeth said, and headed for the kitchen, pouting.

  Greta followed. Her son, Josh, now off in Alaska on a geological dig, had always been less talkative than Elizabeth, but his feelings were easier to read. Josh had been a cheerful boy, boisterous as a child, usually outside running or digging holes like a dog. Sometimes, he would come to his mother and say in a plaintive voice, with no explanation, “It’s ridiculous.” That’s how she knew he was unhappy. It was a simple, direct communication, and she could then go about solving the problem. But Elizabeth had never been direct. Greta sometimes thought of her daughter as a ski slope in the Olympics, the ones full of moguls and poles with shimmering orange flags.

  “Anyway,” Elizabeth said, sitting at the table, “I’m suddenly a screenwriter. Can you believe it? I’ve been anointed. I’ve been plucked from the toilers of the academic field to write a movie. Every undergraduate’s dream. It’s bizarre. The guy is serious though and I kind of liked him, even if I’m just a whim . . .”

  Greta watched the clouds gather over Elizabeth’s mood.

  “. . . which I suppose I have to admit I am.”

  And Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. Then she sighed. Then she put her head down on the table. Then she picked her head up and looked at the ceiling.

  “Elizabeth . . .”

  “Oh, you don’t understand.”

  Greta looked at her daughter’s neck, the curve of it as Elizabeth gazed miserably at the ceiling, her whole posture a relic, perfectly preserved, of long ago, before every spelling test, every paper or exam. Elizabeth had been an absurdly earnest and conscientious student. My poor baby, Greta thought, and, she couldn’t help it, she smiled.

  Elizabeth caught the smile from the corner of her eye and her scowl focused on Greta.

  “It’s not that big a deal, Mom, okay?”

  “Don’t be such an ass,” Greta said.

  “He said it was his pet project,” Elizabeth said. “People abandon pets. He’ll send his limo to dump me and Madame Bovary by the side of the road. Or have his assistant drown us in a burlap bag. Then he’ll buy himself some goldfish.” She stood up and opened the refrigerator.

  “Just enjoy the moment, darling,” Greta said.

  Elizabeth gave her a savage look. “Lots of brilliant people come to Hollywood and fail.” She took an apple from the fridge and riffled through a newspaper that lay on the counter. The phone rang beside Elizabeth’s elbow, but she seemed not to notice. “Like, say, Bertolt Brecht,” she said.

  “Goldfish,” Greta said. “God, that reminds me. I have to get koi for that Ripley woman’s fish pond.” She reached past Elizabeth, picked up the phone, and heard her mother’s voice, irate, no “hello.”

  “I can’t get this screwy machine to work,” Lotte said.

  “Brilliant people,” Elizabeth was saying, ducking under the curling telephone cord, throwing herself down on a kitchen chair and biting her nails. “And I’m not brilliant . . .”

  “Goddamnit, everything is so complicated, they used to give you a switch. One switch. It went up, it went down . . .”

  “Mama,” Greta said into the phone, “what machine?”

  “It went on, it went off . . .”

  “The TV? The dishwasher?”

  “. . . or coming to Hollywood,” Elizabeth said.

  “Fine,” Greta said, turning to Elizabeth. “Fail from New York! Who cares? . . . What machine?” she said again into the phone.

  “Don’t use that tone of voice with me,” Lotte said. “I may be old, but I’m still your mother . . .”

  “You’re so supportive,” Elizabeth said, pacing up and down the kitchen.

  “Stop regressing!” Greta yelled at Elizabeth’s back. “And don’t you start with me,” she added, into the phone.

  Lotte began to cry. It was a terrible sound, high and unearthly and somehow unclean and unnatural, too, the howl of the wind on a moonless night, a bird of prey plummeting to its death, a wolf caught, squeezed without mercy by its bloodthirsty throat. Greta had heard it all her life, and she had never gotten used to it. It frightened and enraged her. It turned her stomach with terror and murderous rage. She dreaded that weeping, as exaggerated as Lucy Ricardo’s, as loud as thunder, as eery as lightning.

  “Mother, please, don’t . . .”

  “All the machines, the buttons . . .” Lotte was wailing. “My own flesh and blood . . . It’s inhuman, Hitler should have had to push so many buttons . . .”

  “What machine?” Greta said again, very calmly, very slowly, as she watched Elizabeth sit down again. Your mother is very old, she told herself. Very very old. Pretend she is a child. Just like your child, your highly competent, adult, big horse of a child sitting at the kitchen table biting her fingernails and spitting them on the floor. “Stop that!” she said to Elizabeth. No, no. Patient. Be patient with your child, as if she were a child. Be patient with your mother, as if she were a child. “Which machine is bothering you, Mama?”

  “What?” Lotte said, the crying over, her voice back to normal. “For God’s sake, darling. I’ve got it. I’m not senile.”

  Elizabeth went with her mother that afternoo
n to pick up Lotte for another doctor’s appointment. In the face of death, she thought as they waited with Lotte in the examining room, what difference did it make if you wrote a screenplay? If a tenure was on track or not? If your three-year-old slept in your bed and you really didn’t mind?

  “Ultimately everything is meaningless,” Elizabeth said.

  “Don’t be maudlin,” her mother said.

  “What?” said Lotte. “What did she say?”

  “Nothing,” said Elizabeth.

  “Nothing,” said Greta.

  Lotte sat on the examining table. Elizabeth was leaning against the door. She felt it push against her and she stood back to let the doctor in. This was the third doctor they’d tried since she’d been in L.A.

  “Well! Mrs. Franke!” said the doctor, yet another broad, tanned, unsmiling specialist with his headlight strapped to his forehead and a pair of reading glasses balanced on his nose.

  Her grandmother looked white and bony beneath the blue paper gown. It crinkled noisily as she held out her arms, then surrendered to the metallic burst of Lotte’s bracelets. “You’re handsome,” she said, shaking her finger at him, “for a butcher!”

  The doctor smiled a thin smile. He began to examine the red spot by her left nostril.

  “Does this hurt?”

  “Hitler should have my pain.”

  He poked some more.

  “The gangster,” she said.

  “Never even had a pimple,” she added.

  “Who? Hitler?”

  “That dirty son of a bitch,” she said.

  “Me,” she said finally when the doctor made no further response. “Me. I never had a pimple in my life. Not one. Look at this skin.”

  “That’s what I’m doing, Mrs. Franke.”

  “Call me Lotte,” Lotte said.

  “Loosen up, Doc,” Lotte said.

  “Cheer up, what are you, Dr. Karoglian?” she said.

  “Kevorkian,” Elizabeth said.

  The doctor, who had studiously been ignoring everything but his patient’s tumor, turned to Greta and said, “Your mother is a pistol.”