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.”“I see.”She remembered her sorrow and anger disguised as boredom, at the end, just before she left.She remembered watching him, blurry and faceless through the misted, dimpled toilet glass of the shower door, sawing his buttocks apart with a new brick of green soap, and she remembered feeling at that instant that she was allowed to do anything she wanted with anyone on earth so she wouldn’t have to feel one more second of that.So she’d been wrong.“How were you wrong?”“I want him.I want him to be a strong support.I can’t walk around like this.He’d show me how to fake it better, how to pretend to forget now and then.”“You want to go back?” asked the therapist in Rachel’s head, whom she hadn’t gone to see in weeks.“No.Just to go on.I’m done.”She lay in bed, Carlton’s dream and the therapist’s voice fading.She reached for the phone and dialed Aidan’s cell from memory.14THE END OF A SHOOT.The cubical studio was empty but for him and Maile, cross-legged on the floor, Bach Cello Suites on the speakers, and shiny orange Chinese food in white, tin-handled boxes on cherry-red Chinese-zodiac place mats, greasy from the spots on the floor where the daily beauty’s red hair had been combed out thirty-eight times, conditioned strands plopping dollops of the Product onto the black wood, sounds partially masked by the Rolling Stones played loud over the speakers to give the client and agency people the pleasant sensation of a day not only out of the office but shot free of corporate life entirely (thus encouraging future business with Julian Donahue).“Can I say, today you seemed like a real director?” Maile said.Julian laughed.“I am a real director.”“I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, I meant a film director.No offense.”“None taken.‘Real,’ unlike my entire existence and your salary.”“Oh, my God, this is not coming out how I meant.I meant to say that you’re better than this.Than ads, I guess I mean.”“You think you’d like Hollywood people better than ad people?”“I know, everyone’s selling something.But movie people are at least also trying to make something, right? I sound naive to you, don’t I?”“A little.”“Well, that reflects badly on you, then, doesn’t it?” she said, with sauce.There was an answer to Maile’s kiss-up compliment disguised as smart-ass challenge, her flirtatious treatment of her boss as an underachieving child lacking only an inspiring woman.The answer, though, was not likely to impress a temporarily semi-infatuated production assistant.He’d been embarrassed, years earlier, in front of film-school friends who’d done well enough in Hollywood, that his “talent” or “vision” hadn’t been strong enough to resist the offer of his first television commercial, and then, even more, when his talent was too weak to overcome the inertia of continued offers.He couldn’t even claim he’d failed to make a great film, as he had never tried.He remembered wanting to make one.He wished he still did, but he didn’t.He wished he were an artist, a great artist, but sometimes he also wished he was an astronaut.He even wished he could tell Maile he had a vision for a film that he was unable to make, for fear of failure, a subject of some regret… but that would have been a bone-deep lie.The childish belief that he would someday direct great films had been replaced by a prickly adult wonder that such a goal had ever boasted its moral superiority, and he tried, jokingly, to explain this to the lovely girl sharing Heaven’s Pig and Enraged Life Crab with him.Why, he pressed her, was it better to direct a film? His work, stories told with haiku efficiency, provoked real emotion, too, but then they also produced—the ultimate tangible proof of invisible emotion—action, thousands of times over: purchases, votes, donations, changes in fashion.What Hitchcock film had such empirical evidence of its auteur’s prowess? Some people were scared to shower for a day or two? “If the true measure of an artist’s greatness is his influence, then I’m a genius.”“I don’t think you mean that,” said Maile.She watched him as she slowly laid a water chestnut in her mouth and delicately crunched it with her lips apart.“You might think you mean it, but you don’t.” That matronizing sentiment—one Rachel used to flash from time to time—combined with the slow insertion of food into red mouth, was a hardwired tactic of the human female.They would offer themselves sexually at the same moment they insisted they understood their potential mate better than he understood himself.The praying mantis just bites her male’s head off, and only after the fun; the human insists upon dissolving her mate’s personality before the pleasure.Maile would improve him.She promised.And if he agreed to the procedure, he could have her, for a while, until the day when, aghast, she would realize she’d been swindled despite her best efforts, and he would stand before her, erect and unimproved.“Let’s say you had all the money in the world,” Maile pushed.“What sort of film would you make?”He asked her—as she plainly wanted him to—what her favorite films were and looked duly impressed when she cataloged dead maestros from cinema’s storied past.The whole game was one he’d played too many times, too long ago.Maile stood on the far side of a rushing river, in another country, waving her arms frantically, but the rapids drowned her voice, and Julian smiled and nodded.Later, Maile would render their conversation as:MARIEYou think I’m naive.That doesn’t reflect very well on you, now does it?HUGH moves to kiss her, but she closes the cab door and smiles at him through the window.HUGHWell.It seems it’s time I became a better man.MARIE(slyly) So it would seem.(to the cabbie) Onward, Mr.Singh, onward.The evening is young.He had the studio for another nine hours, though there was no reason to stay.But the disarray at the end of a day’s shoot still attracted him, after years, one of life’s butterfly moments that left him pleasantly near-satisfied, a much better feeling than the dull, guilty bloat of fully satisfied.“I’ll close up, Maile.Thank you for everything today.”She didn’t hear, or pretended not to
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