BURIAL GROUND
Twelve Tales of Terror
by
Mark Wheaton
Smashwords Edition
* * * * *
Published on Smashwords by:
Southbound Films
Burial Ground
Twelve Tales of Terror
First Edition
Copyright 2010 by Mark Wheaton
Stuttering Hunter was originally produced as a one-man play for radio December 29, 1995 on 91.7 KVRX-FM, Austin Radio. All of the roles were performed by Philip Gonzales.
Gare du Nord was originally published online at http://www.PopcornFiction.com in October, 2009
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
* * * * *
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Posthumous Mind; or, Please Don’t Touch Me
* * * * *
Quid rides? Mutato nomine de te fabula narrator.
– Horace
* * * * *
It’s an odd thing being married to a newly famous actress when that circumstance begins to take on all the milestones of permanence. And no, I’m referring to the marriage. If I know anything about Hollywood relationships it’s that they don’t last about a hundred percent of the time, particularly when they involve those big, recognizable names and Jennifer is just really, really talented, that one in a million that could make it.
Of course, I’ve known this for years and was just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up, but it’s still a crap shoot as it’s never just about talent. In her favor, however, is that she’s very pretty, but not hot, a condition that audiences notoriously disallow to evolve over time.
At the end of the day, though, Jennifer’s just nice to people in a way I’ve never found natural in my own interactions, particularly with Hollywood folks (I’m a director, I’ve won just enough awards to get people to finance now three movies, but said films’ cumulative domestic box office is under $15 million, which may impact a fourth). Directors, producers, execs, actors - they always say, “It’s about who you work with.” Well, people want to work with Jennifer because she’s fun to be around. She has a nice way about her, a self-deprecating humor, the ability to stay calm and even sunny under just about any condition and she makes you want to protect her even though she can handle herself on her own.
The moment she was cast in Mission Control, a one-hour network drama about the space program centered in and around the astronaut-training facilities at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, I knew from the part she landed that if the show went, actually made it past pilot and got on the air, I’d suddenly find myself sharing her with a lot more people than I was accustomed. She had gone in to the casting session to read for the role of “Ashley,” the seductive communications officer who initially catches the eye of the male lead, pilot “Robert,” but was subsequently asked to read for “Catherine,” the rougher-around-the-edges career Air Force pilot-turned-NASA-mission-commander who, in the pilot, is completely at odds with Robert. I’m sure Jennifer laughed when they suggested it as it couldn’t be further from whom she was or the parts she was more typically brought in to audition for, but I’m just as sure that it was that laugh that got her the part. The genuine incredulity of, “What? Me? Oh, I could never…”
You see, she didn’t realize that the director of the pilot, the producers, the studio, the showrunner and the network were all looking for exactly this hint of vulnerability because of where they were hoping to take Catherine over the season as they planned for her to be the one the country would fall in love with in order to segue the character – surprise! – into a more significant love interest for Robert.
This was ten months ago.
The show has just aired its fifth episode and Jennifer has already been on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, US Weekly, People, In Touch (solo on TV Guide)and is becoming routinely featured on various pervy sites online that regularly post up an array of paparazzi snaps, preferring ones that show her in stretch pants coming out of a gym, in revealing dresses or walking to and from set in short-shorts to combat the Houston humidity.
Her co-star, Elizabeth Akins, who ended up landing the role of Ashley, was who the tabloids initially believed would be the receiver of all of this heat and the young actress did her best to draw it by spending all of her off-time on a beach somewhere in an ever-skimpier bikini, or so it at least seemed. But the Hollywood press was onto the producers’ scheme to make Mission Commander Catherine the female heart of the show after the first two episodes and they immediately began digging into Jennifer’s private life and publishing almost any photo they could find of her, even if this meant ones from my own premieres in years past. The network provided her with a publicist, a very nice, middle-aged man named Gary Gibbons who had been down this road many times before and after the initial wave, Jennifer and I both began to deal with it, albeit from different coasts. I think it was easier on her because she was still on location in Houston for a few more weeks whereas I was back in our Beachwood Canyon house, the vaunted Hollywood sign a mere stone’s throw away, being barraged daily by links and clippings sent by well-meaning friends and acquaintances that allowed me to see just how people were saying about her.
It turned out that the masses were in agreement. The men wanted to fuck her and the women wanted her as a best friend.
“This is really good news.”
That was Eileen Ankor, the packaging guru at my current agency who had been my strongest advocate there for years even when my directing reps had seemingly thrown up their hands in a “what more can we do?” gesture after I turned down the umpteenth studio directing gig or episodic television pilot. It was Eileen, originally from South Carolina, but who had grown up more or less in Europe due to both parents being academics, who still put a lot of weight behind European arthouse theater owners who would approach her at Cannes, at the London screenings, at MIFED (Mouvement International des Femmes Democrates – just kidding, Mercato Internazionale del Film e del Documentario), at the Berlin and Venice Film Festivals, brush aside her mention of whatever current project she was looking to finance and inevitably ask, “When will we see the next Tom Donne movie?” in their language of choice.
Eileen would come back to Los Angeles, trumpet this within the drab halls of her agency, to managers of actors who had intimated that they were looking for that more “artistic, character-driven piece,” to domestic financiers who made similar claims, but was routinely met with indifference.
My movies hadn’t made money.
I’d had three chances.
People couldn’t eat good reviews and award nominations.
If I’d just accept one mainstream job, one meant-to-be-stylish heist movie featuring armored cars that brought on a music supervisor long before they even locked script, I could easily land financing for my next two films, maybe even three. But, I’d dug in my heels. It wasn’t me against them, it was me against what I’d seen happen to countless of my favorite independent filmmakers, ones that had made me want to go to film school in the first place. They’d had some hit that became the darling of the indie circuit, they’d won an award or three and then they’d immediately taken a comic book adaptation or blousy star vehicle and disappeared into the machine.
There was a song I liked as a teenager that suggested if you saw something you didn’t like, don’t you end up doing it, too.
But here Eileen was, on the phone, telling me that our problems were solved.
“I have not foreign, but domestic money looking to put hard cash into whatever Jennifer’s first film is when MC goes on hiatus this summer,” she declared.
I sighed. “Every time an episode airs, her agent gets another three or four scripts each with bigger offers than we could make. While yes, most of this first wave is projects that have been kicking around for awhile, but it means she’s being noticed. Two more weeks, heck, after they air the ‘rescue’ episode, who knows what’s going to come in the door?”
“Tom, some facts: this is a company town built on nepotism,” Eileen said, pretending that she didn’t like putting on a little bluster. “Fact: your wife, right now, is the hottest name in show business. Fact: you have been trying to get The Lonely Sky financed for two years now. Two looong years. Fact: you have actors who aren’t going to stick around, equity commitments that will start looking for other movies…”
The truth was I wrote The Lonely Sky for Jennifer. The character of Meredith Kirkman was basically her. It’s not a requirement that you be in love when you write a love song, but the truth is, it helps. The Lonely Sky was good, just complicated, but it was a reflection of my feelings of falling in love with my wife. It was who I saw her to be.
But Jennifer had established a hard and fast rule since the beginning of our relationship that our careers would not overlap. When we met, she had been a struggling actress who had shot a couple of guest spots on television, a couple of larger roles in never-seen, zero-budget indies, but even then, she knew that if we were together, she didn’t want to have it look like she hadn’t earned her place at the table. There were parts for her in both of the movies I’d shot since we got together, but we, she, had decided that it wouldn’t look reflect well on either one of us, so we just decided never to go there. Our work lives were completely separate from our shared personal life at home.
“The problem is, I don’t even know if I see her in the part,” I lied. “You’ve read it. You really think she’s Meredith?”
“No, in fact,” Eileen surprised me by saying. “But that’s only because I don’t know her acting like you do. There’s no way in the world, nowhere in your mighty talent, that you think you could make her fit the part?”
I had eventually begged off the phone saying that I would talk to Jennifer about it, but I didn’t actually have any real thought to do so. She’d be back on Sunday and we had a short, no-work-talk vacation to Santa Barbara planned for the following week. Santa Barbara was our first out-of-town trip together, back when I was living off the money I made shooting commercials for Pizza Hut and Wal-Mart, soul-crushing exercises in product lighting that made me wish I’d chosen any other career path.
But it was starting to look up.
My first film, The Little Things was already in the can and was being shown to distributors leading up to what would become my coming out party the following year at Sundance. With the thought in my head that I would soon be reaping the rewards of many moons of close-to-the-vest living, I figured using an online trip-planner that promised half-price hotel rooms wouldn’t do too much damage to one of my four credit cards I revolved my debt around on at the time. What was a couple hundred more dollars? I’d be with the girl of my dreams and better yet, I’d be getting laid.
I’d met Jennifer on the set of a buddy’s movie, a real low-budget “drama” that the handful of critics who actually reviewed it in its eventual limited release dismissed as a “teen version of Crash.” Jennifer didn’t have a speaking part, but had been trying to change that in order to get a couple of SAG vouchers, not realizing that my friend’s quasi-legal shoot wasn’t exactly up to union spec. That there was something different about her was evident even then. She wanted something, but was absolutely unwilling to be a bitch about it, which immediately made me think she’d never go anywhere in Hollywood. A sucker for the underdog, I went up to her, affected my least-sleazy persona and explained that I was a commercial director. And though I didn’t have anything for her, a friend of mine was to be shooting a cat food commercial the next day and I knew they were still casting around for a “fresh face” to play Friend of Young Female Cat Owner #1 even at this late date.
“All you have to do is nod as she tells you how great her cat is doing on this new food,” I explained. “I’ve seen the boards. You’ll probably end up being in only two seconds of film, but it’s a national spot and the pay is solid.”
Once she realized that I was serious, she thanked me profusely (but didn’t go over-the-top) and I promised to call my friend in concert with her faxing over a headshot. When I did a few minutes later, I discovered that they had cast the role of the friend, but had lost the lead with all the speaking lines to a modeling shoot. I quickly recommended Jennifer for that part, too, and he said he’d check her out. They actually went so far as to shoot a quick test with her that night, but then decided that she was not believable as a cat owner (“too pretty – she’d have real friends”). I was bummed when I got the news, but when Jennifer called to thank me again, I suggested we have coffee and one thing led to another.
That was five years ago. In the intervening years, we moved in together (six months in), got engaged (one and a half years in), moved into a bigger place after my adaptation of a short story by a noted author (Movie #2) ended up winning a bunch of awards and making some money, which was good as I had deferred my salary on that one to own a piece of the movie (a long conversation with Jennifer on that one – two and a half years in). We got married (three years in) and our two-year anniversary was two weeks back.
To celebrate, I flew in to Texas for the weekend and we went to Galveston for two nights. By the time we got there, though, she was too tired for anything but sleep, so we took it easy. Monday morning, one of the production coordinators had me driven to Hobby Airport and I was back in LA by lunch time.
“I’m sorry we didn’t have more of an anniversary,” she said when she had called that night. “I’ll make it up to you when we’re in Santa Barbara. It’s just crazy here. Crazy.”
It was weird being on the other end of this same conversation we’d had when I was off shooting Movie #3, an ambitious, present day adaptation of Jack London’s The Abysmal Brute that went over with audiences like a lead balloon except at the Venice Film Festival where my lead actor won the top prize for his portrayal of the titular con artist-slash-boxer. It had shot in both Regina and Winnipeg and was the longest Jennifer and I had been apart, leading to several late night, oft-interrupted calls where we bemoaned how show business was keeping us apart.
A note: There is nothing to do in Winnipeg. One evening, I suggested to one of the production drivers after a meal that we should “go for ice cream.” Everyone agreed, so we piled into the vans with the driver telling us he knew where we could get some and, one hour later, we pulled into the only ice cream stand in what seemed like all of Manitoba. If you are thinking of going there for an extended stay, particularly with a cast and crew that needs to let off some steam every so often, don’t.
“It’s okay, Jennifer,” I had replied. “I know what it’s like, trust me. Just have fun and know that I’m here keeping the home fires burning.”
“Thanks, Tom. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
The truth, however, was that I was going a little out of my mind.
With a few days left to go before Jennifer’s return, I found myself desperate to leave the house. I grabbed my keys, my wallet, and my iPhone and headed for the door, ostensibly to go to the grocery store down on Franklin to tank up on 12-packs of Diet Dr. Pepper (cherry flavor, of course), but then got the idea to go to a movie instead. I’d been going to the movies a lot lately, double-features, arthouse shit, documentaries, etc., so in a short time, this had become a viable, time-killing option. Figuring it would serve me just as well on this day, I grabbed the galleys of a book, something my agent had sent over to consider adapting, and headed out the front door.
My mind was already on deciding what movie to see when I careened right through a large spider web that had been erected directly in front of the door, lines reaching from one of the porch columns all the way up into a nearby tree, probably seven feet in length though the actual web was about the size of a large hand mirror.
“Fuck!” I screamed, trying to sweep the web away from, at least, my face, giving in to that preternatural fear that somewhere an angry spider has landed on your person and was making its way to your eyes or mouth or ears to exact revenge for the destruction of its home in the form of a bite. But as I extracted myself from the net, I felt nothing on my skin and decided that the angry arachnid must be somewhere up in the porch’s rafters or tree above me, now mentally calculating the hours it would take to rebuild its trap, perhaps in a place less populated by clumsy human traffic.
I was just about the only one at the movies as happens a lot. I went early, bought a hot dog, Peanut M&Ms and a water, and then settled into my seat a full twenty minutes before the movie was to begin. Part of the reason for the absence of people comes from the fact that I always pay a little extra and go to this one theater on Sunset with reserved seating that, additionally, didn’t show commercials before the feature. This meant that you had a better sense of when the movie would actually begin in relation to what was printed in the L.A. Weekly. Three trailers, then opening credits.
I flipped through the galleys of my agent-sent book and quickly ascertained that it was a crime story about a fellow who gets out of prison and sets out to find his long-lost daughter in Pensacola. Fairly trite, I was done with it by page thirty and when I went to put it down, I got a fright as a half-crushed spider revealed itself as being squashed between the stapled-on cover letter and the exposed title page. Somehow, it must have fallen there when I went through its web and been smashed in my wild flailings. I tried to brush it away, but its still-goopy innards had somehow glued itself to the title page. Figuring it would be easier to remove once it dried, I simply placed it on the seat next to me and forgot all about it.
The movie was exactly what I needed: a very, silly thriller where the opening scene gave away the ending to anyone paying attention. It was made by a writer-director I had met a couple of times and really liked the films of, in theory, but even I couldn’t pretend to my own satisfaction that he hadn’t left exposed plot holes the size of a city block throughout his movie. Still, it was breezy, had some fun action scenes, embraced juicy B-movie conventions here and there, so who was I to complain?
When the credits rolled and the lights eased up, I went to retrieve the galleys of the book only to find my thumb magnetically drawn exactly to the spot of the forgotten spider where it ground into the mostly-dried corpse. I cursed, wiped my thumb off on the back of the theater seat beside me and headed for the parking lot.
“They’re changing the legislation again,” my accountant was saying on the phone, a call that had come in the moment I opened the door. “You have to collapse the profit-sharing trust into your SEP or you’ll have to pay a lawyer about $700 to update it for you.”
This wasn’t something I wanted to deal with. I hated that I even knew what he was talking about. It had to do with the corporation I had to form at one point in order to benefit from the same kind of tax breaks someone would who was actually gainfully employed. As a filmmaker, I was “self”-employed and had to pay taxes accordingly, but with this corporation, dubbed Tom-Tom Films (a suggestion of Jennifer’s which I occasionally regretted when signing legal paperwork), I was able to match funds that I put away for retirement, write off medical expenses and pay myself a variable annual salary depending on how much I’d put against the corporation throughout the year in order to pay the least possible in personal income tax. What was great about the corporation was that, as I worked from home, a quarter of the mortgage was a write-off due to it being used as a place of business. If I bought a piece of artwork or furniture for my home office, that too qualified as a business expense. I worked in film and adapted books, so buying DVDs, books and going to the movies, was also a write-off. So was cable television, though I’d heard if you got audited, the IRS wouldn’t really let that fly.
“Okay, I’ll call Michael at the bank and make an appointment to go in,” I stalled, knowing it would be weeks before I did even though I had plenty of time on my hands. “Anything else?”
“Well, Helena and I have really been enjoying Mission Control,” he continued. “Jennifer’s amazing in it, isn’t she?”
“Oh, yeah. Totally.”
“You’re going to need to incorporate her independently of you, you know,” he added as he got off the phone.
I hadn’t thought of that. Up until now, I had tried to avoid the knowledge that her suddenly bringing in a whole lot more money than she ever had before would lead to changes in the dynamic of our relationship. On financial matters, she’d generally followed my lead. I’d decide if we could afford this restaurant or that, the amount of money we spent at Costco, the cars we bought, what was acceptable to spend on redoing the house after we moved in and so on.
And it seemed like Jennifer was more than happy to let me handle that side of things.
She’d grown up upper-middle-class and had never wanted for anything, which also meant that she had gone through life enjoying a feeling of being provided for. I sometimes thought that was what we were doing together as I was the more established one when we met and, if we eventually broke up, it would be because she had reached an even more permanent situation. Either she’d become wealthy herself (which I hadn’t really envisioned if I can be honest) or she’d meet that guy who seemed to offer that permanence and security. She’d leave me for him, get burned by what inevitably turned out to be a flash in the pan, get dumped humbler and wiser, then hook into somebody older who was looking for that same permanence while she still had her looks. I kind of figured it would be an agent, possibly with a couple of kids, maybe twice divorced.
I hated myself for having these thoughts, but I thought of myself as a realist.
I got off the phone with my accountant and went to the bathroom to rid myself of the bottle of water I’d picked up at the theater. As I whizzed into the bowl, I happened to look out the window that was directly over the toilet. I had an odd relationship to that window as it looked out over the canyon. Though the nearest house in the sightline was several hundred feet away and the window itself was at chest level, I couldn’t get away from the paranoid feeling that if someone was industrious enough and at the right angle, they could watch me pee. Because of this, I seldom turned the light on all the way in the bathroom to avoid illuminating myself further, figuring the glare would take care of the rest and I could urinate in peace.
But as I was gazing through the glass this day, I noticed something in the foreground. Hanging directly in front of me about two feet away, but still almost invisible, was a large spider working to spin a cotton candy-ish web across the upper right-hand corner of the window.
I know that people have different definitions of a “very large spider.” Some look at a daddy long legs and say that, in fact, it’s not that big because only its legs are long; the body and thereby any kind of pincer or mandible it could use on your flesh small to the point of being inconsequential. To them, a large spider is one with legs in proportion to its body, say, one of the dazzling, yellow, white and black outdoor garden spiders whose abdomen-head-thorax combo could be over an inch long and half an inch wide. This was undeniably a large spider. A creature with heft and one that you assumed could possess any number of poisonous varietals waiting to be summoned from its bulbous torso.
In the case of the spider in my bathroom window, this would be of the small-body, long-leg variety, perhaps a daddy long legs (or whatever the more technical term, of which I assumed there was one), though its body seemed a little larger than other daddy long legs I’d seen. Frankly, I didn’t know what it was, but what I did know was that I wasn’t going to kill it as might be the reaction of someone else.
Let me explain. When Jennifer and I first moved into the canyon, we’d had a rat in the attic and at least a couple outside that ate from our orange tree. I called an exterminator who said of the outdoor rats that, “it was the canyon!” He offered to trap the one in the house and seal the vents and cracks as best he could, but that there’d always be rats outside.
I felt that way about the spiders in the house and, thereby, had cultivated a live-and-let-live approach. Jennifer, of course, would freak out when one scurried across the wall of the living room, but rather than reach for the newspaper, I dutifully retrieved a glass from the kitchen cabinet along with a sturdy piece of that day’s mail (high-end real estate postcards worked the best) to capture it, then escort it out the front door. It wasn’t as if I was radically anti-death or a Buddhist or something (though I’d read once that Allen Ginsburg, a Buddhist, was still terrified of bugs and spiders, so he’d just bring around someone else to come kill offending bugs), I just believed that they were here first and who was I to decide what should live or die?
I gave the spider another glance as I finished up, but then went back to my day.
“My day,” or at least what was left of it, consisted of playing around on the internet, masturbating, thinking about getting back into the novel I’d always meant to write and was 10,000 words into on my laptop (the one that would save me from my inability to become a Soderbergh or an Egoyan or a Jarmusch by doing something I presumed they couldn’t), but I instead ended up on an intense, multi-hour Google-stalk of an ex-girlfriend from college who was now a real estate agent in Ohio with a weird-looking husband and no kids. I considered dropping her a line through Facebook, but eventually gave up on the computer and went to see if there was anything on the Tivo.
Around ten o’clock, midnight Houston time, Jennifer called, just as I was finishing an episode of The Black Sheep Squadron.
“I think I’m being wrapped early,” she reported. “I could be home this weekend!”
“That’s great. When do you think you’ll know?”
“Tomorrow. But there’s a catch. They want me to do a photo shoot over the weekend, so I’d still technically be at work as it’s a full spread. It’s for a long lead magazine as they’re hoping the timing hypes the season finale.”
Spread. Long lead magazine. Hype used as a verb. I was getting a very different person coming home that I’d seen off only a few months before.
“Cool, I’ll start cleaning up. Throw away the pizza boxes, vacuum, invest in air fresheners.”
“Ha-ha. I’m sure the place is fine.”
It was. When Jennifer was gone, the place stayed immaculate as I used a much smaller percentage of the space and the housekeeper did the rest.
“We’ll have to go out to dinner or something to celebrate…”
“Yeah, totally….” I could hear the hesitation in her voice.
“What is it?”
“Well, if we’re going off to Santa Barbara, I’ve only got two nights in town and at least one of those has to be with my team.”
Meaning: agent/manager/attorney/publicist.
“Breakfast then.”
“I’ve got hair and makeup first thing….” But she cut herself off not wanting to leave me with nothing.
“We’ll just make sure to live it up in Santa Barbara,” I said reassuringly so she knew there were no hard feelings. “We’ll get away from it all. Drink some wine. Think about nothing.”
“Oh, and I’ll be wanting sex,” she said matter-of-factly.
“No problem there.”
We got off the phone and I went to brush my teeth before going to bed. The spider was still there in the window, but curled up in the corner like a half-folded umbrella with all its spokes exposed. I stared at it for a second waiting for it to move, but it didn’t. I flicked the light switch on and off to see if it reacted to the light, but it didn’t respond then, either. I half-wondered if it was dead and then went to bed.
It turned out that she was going to be wrapped early, so Jennifer arrived home late on Friday, but was an utter wreck from a combination of intense sleep deprivation and a certain runner’s euphoria at having completed the first season of shooting. On top of that, she was still riding the high of the go-go-go of the set and couldn’t stop talking about it for a second. A semi-famous director from the eighties who had directed a couple of her favorite movies had come on to direct the season finale (she hadn’t known that was who he was until I told her, of course) and she had spent the week gushing over him until, on the last day, he’d had his wife Fed Ex him an old movie poster of her favorite-favorite that he’d then signed to her. I actually thought that was a nice gesture. The guy had done four or five big flicks back in the day, had fallen out of favor in the nineties after a couple of commercial flops, but had then begun a second career directing one-hour episodic television. He was probably genuinely flattered by Jennifer’s unabashed enthusiasm and it probably made his week, if not year. I also imagine that this immediately turned in to a desire to fuck her, too, and I wonder if she would’ve been tempted had he made the offer.
“And then we wrapped! There was going to be big a party tonight, but I had to go to the airport, so everybody came to my trailer early as I was packing and gave me a piece of cake and it was really, really nice. We all got these little ‘mission patches’ for the first half-season that were designed by one of the artists NASA uses to do the real thing. I don’t know where I put mine, but isn’t that cool?”
“That’s great. But you didn’t have to miss the party.”
“There wasn’t a red eye and I’ve got to be in Santa Clarita in the morning for the photo shoot. Hair…”
“…and makeup,” I said. “Got it. I’ll drive you.”
“Oh, no – they’re sending a car.”
She could tell that I was feeling left out, so she tried to ask questions about what was going on with my various projects, how our neighbors and friends in LA were doing, but obviously could care less. Every question inevitably led back to something about her show.
That weekend flew by. She did the photo shoot, changed her hair and makeup and was whisked to an array of sound stages to be interviewed by reporters for Entertainment Tonight, Extra and a couple of shows I hadn’t heard of to promote upcoming episodes of Mission Control. When all that was over, she went straight to dinner with her reps. She got home late and had been drinking, which wasn’t great as the photo shoot had been out in the sun. By the time she got home, she was partially dehydrated and functionally collapsed the moment she was in the door. I carried her straight to bed.
The next morning, the Sunday, was a second photo shoot, this one by a photographer I was a fan of who had, alongside Richard Avedon, shot just about every picture that appeared in Interview magazine for a stretch of years in the eighties. The shoot was to happen in and around our house, so as the man looked for angles, I tried recommending him this spot or that, lensman to lensman, but he was all business. I decided he must be a junkie.
“I’m not getting anything here,” the photographer said after awhile, but then escorted Jennifer to the door. He told her that he knew someone down our street who had a “magnificent” camera-ready house and after she agreed to the switch, he texted them. Five minutes later, the shoot had traveled up five houses to an address that I had often passed, wondering who lived there. Now I knew, it was the widow of a television star from the seventies who had famously smoked himself to death. The place looked exactly as it must have when the ambulance carried him away, same magazines, same furniture, same everything, as if the widow had created a corpse-less mausoleum for herself to haunt. That said, I had to agree with the photographer, though, as any picture taken in such a space would be unbelievable.
“What show is she on again?” the widow, who had cozied up to me after I lit her cigarette, whispered as we watched Jennifer pose on the balcony.
“It’s called Mission Control and is about the astronauts.”
“Oh, David played an astronaut in his younger days. A B-picture where he got shipwrecked on a distant planet. I don’t remember now, but they play it on TV now and again. Is it like that?”
When Monday morning rolled around, it was finally time to head to Santa Barbara, but only after Jennifer had rolled a bunch of phone calls, sent a plethora of texts and replied to a stack of e-mails. We were taking my laptop and there was a phone charger in the car, so it would be impossible to think we’d be cut off, but the thinking was that we could have a peaceful drive up the coast if she got all of this out of the way first.
“Oh, my God!” I heard her cry from the bathroom as she went ‘one last time.’
“What?” I called, hurrying over.
“There’s a spider! And it’s cornering a fly!”
She quickly opened the door even though she hadn’t pulled her pants all the way up yet. I looked in the window and saw what she was talking about. Some small flying insect, not as large as a fly, but not quite one of the Asian moths that occasionally polluted our kitchen cabinets, had found its way to the window and seemed to be trying to get out, the nearby web having gone unnoticed as had the now very alert spider in the corner. The flying insect bounced up and down as it tested this part of the glass or that, perhaps believing it would simply push through if it tried hard enough, but then the spider made its move.
I’d seen a spider attack something in a nature special at some, but there was something hauntingly voyeuristic about watching it go down in your own house. You could feel the anticipation in the way the spider was coiled, its legs at just the proper angle to thrust itself forward when the would-be victim got too close.
And then it happened. The fly bounced up, seemed to get caught in the web, but was already on its way out when the needle-thin legs of the spider reached out and grabbed it. It was a quick, fluid motion, one described in sharks as a “pneumatic response,” but the fly seemed unfazed. The spider struck a couple of more times, but still, the fly was buzzing to the point where I thought to myself, how inefficient is this spider? It seemed to be batting the fly around as if it didn’t really want it.
But then, the game became perfectly obvious as the fly, now alarmed, did the spider’s job for it and after the repeated thrashings, got tangled up in the fuzzy web as it blindly tried to escape. Left to its own devices, the fly could’ve probably gotten free as it never really got tangled to the point of no return, but the spider’s instincts finally told it that this was the right moment and it went in close, grabbing the fly with four of its limbs and spinning it into what looked like fresh web as it wrapped it ever tighter. Naturally, I thought it would begin devouring the thing immediately, but once it was wrapped up, it simply stepped back a little as if to inspect its handiwork. After a second, it moved a little ways away as if seeing what a different angle might illuminate.
“That is seriously disturbing,” Jennifer finally said. “Will you just kill it?”
“Why?” I asked, surprised. “How can you watch it do something so animal, so human even, and then want it to die?”
“Because it’s gross,” Jennifer replied, sounding all of fourteen.
“Look, it’s been there all week,” I said, hoping this sounded like a compromise. “A spider’s life cycle is pretty short. It’ll be dead by the time we get back.”
Jennifer seemed to accept this and off we went.
We were supposed to be gone all week, Monday to Saturday, but we ended up racing back on Wednesday as an opening came up for Jennifer to appear on Ellen the following day and it was too big an opportunity.
“If it was anything else, ‘who cares,’ you know?” Jennifer had said, though it was obvious her mind had been made up the moment Gary had called. “But it’s Ellen. I mean, come on. Think how many people will be watching and who will then tune into the show. We could use the number.”
The number. In other words, I’m not enthusiastically embracing this for selfish reasons, I’m being a team player and you should recognize that and be a team player, too.
Frankly, I was happy to go.
This had been my first real exposure to what Jennifer had probably gone through, to some degree, in Houston. In Los Angeles, particularly in and around Hollywood, a celebrity sighting isn’t that big a deal. Sure, it’s embarrassing at the gym when you nod at, say, Nicole Kidman (in town to pick up an award and just trying to grab a pre-red carpet workout) because you recognize them and, before your brain reminds you that you don’t actually know them, you’ve already given the smile-and-nod. Worse, perhaps thinking you’re her dog walker’s boyfriend or manager’s assistant, they politely smile-and-nod back, fulfilling what they feel is an obligation, one of a thousand on any given day, and make you feel like a sap.
Jennifer was recognized in the lobby of the hotel/resort. She was recognized in the elevator. She was recognized in the hallway walking to our room. She was recognized when we picked up our car later from the valet station. She was recognized when we decided to walk to the beach instead of drive. She was recognized and begged to have her picture taken with on Stearns Wharf. She was recognized by every waitress at every restaurant and every giddy sales clerk in every boutique along State Street and even by a maître ‘d who’d actually sat us many times before (never recognized us then!) at the seafood restaurant we liked on Harbor Way. Over and over, I was the good-natured guy who held the camera and hit “the silver button” or “the little red button” while Jennifer played, and quite well, I should add, the “Oh, it’s not that big a deal!” role with her adoring public.
When my grandfather died, we buried him in the small Texas town he grew up in and then set out to find the actual farm on which he was born. I was with my aunt and cousin and we stopped at a butcher shop/restaurant along the way at a crossroads he’d probably blitzed by hundreds of times as a teen in his re-built Buick. Out of a misplaced sense of nostalgia, I purchased one of the souvenir t-shirts they sold there. On the front, it said: “Follow me to….” On the back, it had a drawing of a pig and the address and phone number of the butcher shop. I wore it a total of one time as that entire day was spent having every person I walked by stare at my front and then, waiting until I passed, stare at my back.
That’s what this was like. Everyone, and I mean everyone, was gawking at Jennifer as if she had a sucking head wound.
So, on Wednesday morning when we explained the situation of our imminent departure to the hotel, they thought it was the best reason ever to have to duck out early (fans of Ellen, they) and, in fact, refused to charge us for even the time we’d already stayed. I wish I could say that I accepted this with as much gratitude as Jennifer, but it just bothered me so I stood there silently as she thanked them and thanked them. After we got on the road back to LA, I managed to not be a dick about for all of two minutes, but the look on my face was just begging Jennifer to ask what was wrong. When she did, I complained about how obvious it was that they were hoping, in turn, that Jennifer would mention their hotel on the air or in a subsequent interview for the free publicity. Jennifer didn’t seem bothered by this at all, equating it to the clothes a couple of boutiques had lent her publicist for the photo shoots and then hadn’t expected in return.
“It’s just weird,” I finally decided.
“Well, it might be like this for awhile,” Jennifer replied with a sigh.
I couldn’t tell if she meant the shower of gifts or was reacting in an accepting way towards my newly dour attitude.
As soon as we got home, the first thing Jennifer checked was the bathroom and discovered that instead of dying in our absence, the spider had only gotten larger. Its body had originally been a sort of black dot, like a rat turd, but it was now elongated with a more easily defined abdomen and thorax as its segmentation was revealed. Its head, thereby, now looked much smaller and as I couldn’t make out any “mandibles,” it almost seemed to be taking on the appearance of a mosquito more than a spider.
More interesting than the body though were the changes to the legs. Before, they’d seemed a solid color, perhaps brown or black or gray. But now, these were also segmented, the joints remaining dark, but then the legs themselves going yellow or almost translucent, coming to a fine, hair-like tip at the end.
It was like looking at a completely different creature, an evolutionary leap between the early, less intricate version and now the Arachnid 2.0, an obviously more efficient creature, perhaps capable of more complex thought.
Jennifer’s reaction was predictable: “You said it would be dead.”
“Well, in my defense, I thought we’d be gone longer.”
I had meant it as an innocent remark, but Jennifer took it as a shot and rightly so, given how I’d been in the car.
Knowing this could go on and on, I decided to make things right and, as Jennifer returned e-mails and calls, I went to the grocery store, picked up enough of Jennifer’s favorite foods to make a feast and then went back up to the house.
When I walked in the door, I heard Jennifer laughing in the kitchen and discovered she wasn’t alone. Leaning against the island was the actor who played Mission Control’s male lead, pilot Robert, Alex Pinter, who had become Jennifer’s character of Catherine’s love interest by the end of the first season. Everything was smooth sailing for the couple until we learned in the season finale that he’d bedded Ashley, which Jennifer’s character just couldn’t abide, leaving the audience on the hook for the hiatus as to whether they would patch things up (I’m not a betting man, but…).
“Hi, Tom, I’m Alex, we met on set,” said Alex, sticking out his hand. “I was just telling Jennifer that it’s really weird being in the house of ‘Tom Donne.’ I’m a fan!”
After an introduction like that, Alex ended up being invited to stay for dinner and turned out to be a pretty likeable guy. I had kind of figured him for gay as he didn’t seem to be trying to hit on my wife, but then he let slip that he was in recovery, which accounted for the ever-present smile and why I’d never have to worry about Jennifer going for him. I knew that in her eyes, he was already broken and that was that. It was strange to know this about one’s wife, but it made me feel better. It also helped that she was speaking openly about who she was going to try and fix him up with now that they were back in Los Angeles.
“What about Lizzy?” Jennifer had offered.
“She’s an actress,” Alex complained. “And I’m done dating actresses. Even worse, she’s a co-star and that’s just asking to get fired or written off the show when the producers have to take sides post-break-up.”
Ah, the voice of experience. As they talked, I was starting to remember something about Alex that was hiding way back in my memory banks. What was the series he was on before this one? Wasn’t there a public flame-out? Didn’t he punch somebody? Wasn’t it a female producer?
At one point, Alex excused himself and Jennifer immediately looked at me to offer an explanation.
“He was in the neighborhood when he called. I think he was lonely, so I invited him over.”
“No problem,” I said, meaning it. “I hadn’t really met him before, so I’m glad to do so now.”
“You think he’s a jackass, don’t you?” she asked, lowering her voice.
“No more than any other actor,” I grinned.
She rolled her eyes, but played along. “What about me?”
“You’re that exception. Every other actor is trying to use the constant applause to fill some gap in their emotional well-being. For you, it’s about finding nuance and meaning in the human details of a story. You then use your spectacular imagination and breadth of knowledge to embody a character that is then the most accessible and most able to relate what your interpretation of those details are to other people.”
It was a lot of bullshit words, but it brought tears to Jennifer’s eyes and, for a moment, she saw past my “prickly exterior” and realized why we’d been a match.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” I replied, realizing that I wasn’t lying. I reminded her of having seen a video of her onstage in a high school production of Our Town and how I thought that I learned more about Thornton Wilder, New England, the 1930s and the changing American spirit from her interpretation of Emily than I’d gotten from reading the play or countless critical assessments of it when I was in school. This, she liked and was just leaning over to kiss me when we heard Alex call from the other room.
“Did you guys know you have this huge spider in your bathroom window?”
Jennifer smiled at me and then turned to the hall. “Yeah, it’s Tom’s pet. He won’t let me kill it.”
“It’s huge!” Alex cried as I heard him turn on the water to wash his hands.
“Yeah, it was supposed to be dead by the time we got back from Santa Barbara, but it just got bigger.”
Alex came back in the room, wiping his hands off on his jeans. “That’s crazy man,” he said, looking at me. “Don’t most people who live in the canyons get dogs?”
“He’s allergic,” Jennifer said, without skipping a beat.
Jennifer and I had some of the best sex we’d had in years that night. The truth was, she enjoyed getting fucked, just didn’t need it on a regular basis. But this night was different. She’d made a host of winking and suggestive comments as we cleaned up after dinner, this following an abrupt exit by Alex who had gotten a call from his publicist to show up at some ultra-exclusive event that night being sponsored by a brand of vodka. I refrained from pointing out the irony of that being an odd choice for someone in recovery until he had left, but did so as soon as the front door was closed.
“Shhh! He might hear you!” Jennifer had hissed, but was laughing, too.
As I stared up at my naked wife, her eyes closed as she grinded into me, the lazy movements of her hair only serving to amplify an already erotic visual, my mind traveled back to the photo shoot from the previous weekend when she was wearing all the designer clothes and had her hair and makeup done. I imagined a couple of the more “revealing” shots, nothing too crazy, just some leg and midriff, and then visualized some of the tensely romantic moments between her and Alex on the show. I thought of the first time she had kissed him, episode three (a move both characters immediately decided was a mistake), then thought of the images online of her going to and from the Houston gym in her form-fitting black tights, the gym where the production had gotten the cast memberships as it was directly across from their long-term housing duplexes. I visualized the EW cover with her pouty lips and the neckline of her astronaut’s tunic that could be best described as plunging, albeit as modestly as possible.
I then did what all of those online masturbators couldn’t do and reached up and grabbed her breasts, drawing her down to me and kissing her on the lips that none of those would-be stalkers would ever touch either.
It occurred to me about halfway through that the reason the sex was so great was because I was hopelessly caught up in a celebrity sex fantasy revolving around a television star and just so happened to be having sex with that same person. I wondered if this had ever happened to Orson Welles. Did he come home from the premieres of Cover Girl or Gilda or Tonight and Every Night and imagine he was having sex with the character he’d just seen his wife play on screen, the fantasy to every man in the country, or was he just humping his wife on a Tuesday night for the umpteenth time?
“Oh, my God, that was great,” Jennifer said as she lolled on the bed. “Why don’t we do that more often?”
I grinned in response, then rose and headed for the bathroom to grab a shower.
“Are you coming?” I asked.
“Already did, couldn’t you tell? Now luxuriating.”
I grunted, flipped the light on in the bathroom and couldn’t help myself from glancing back at her petite frame, now partially illuminated by the light.
As I turned, I caught sight of a movement and saw that the spider was scurrying back into the upper corner of the window.
“Sorry,” I said reflexively.
“What?” asked Jennifer from the other room.
“Nothing,” I replied. “The light scared the spider.”
“So you apologized?”
“Yep.”
“You’re such a dork.”
I was in no position to argue this fact, turned on the shower and hosed off.
When I climbed out of the stall a few minutes later, the spider was still tucked up in its corner, but then I saw what I had interrupted. During our lovemaking in the other room, some kind of tiny, tiny insect had gotten caught in the spider’s web and my friend had been making a meal out of it.
“Don’t mind me,” I said, though the spider didn’t move a muscle.
I glanced into the bedroom and saw that, though still naked, Jennifer had put on her sleep mask and was now fast asleep. I moved closer to the spider until it was only a few inches from my face. I kept thinking that, in the movie, this would be the exact moment where it would give the audience a shock by having the spider leap out and attack my face, but this didn’t happen. Instead, I just stared at it for a few more seconds, flipped off the light and went to join my wife in bed.
“Oh, shit!” Jennifer exclaimed the next morning as she got ready to head to the CBS studios where they taped the Ellen show.
“What?” I said, coming in from the living room where I’d been checking my e-mail (nothing of interest).
“I got bitten.”
I looked down at Jennifer’s ankle and, sure enough, there appeared to be a small insect bite on her leg. It was raised and red, but you couldn’t mistake it for a pimple.
“It’s a spider bite,” she declared. “Your spider.”
“You’re kidding, right? You think that spider walked all the way from the bathroom, climbed into the bed and bit you? Then climbed out and went back to the bathroom? We have spiders all over the house.”
“So that answers my first question – you are going to be a jerk about this.”
“Who’s being a jerk? You’re fine. It’s a little bite. It would suck if it was on your face or something, but it’s not. No one’ll see it on the show.”
“So you’re not going to kill it?”
“Why would I kill it?”
“Because it bit me,” she said, getting angry.
I figured she was mad about something else, perhaps stressed about the interview, and rolled my eyes. She responded by rolling hers and the conversation came to a halt.
We breakfasted on fruit I’d brought up the night before from the grocery, but Jennifer stayed fairly quiet the rest of the morning. She didn’t seem to be pouting, but it was hard to say. It took a few more minutes before I was able to place the look as it wasn’t one I’d seen for a little while: her “plotting” look.