Lipstick Jungle

“You owe me,” she said.

“I owe you already,” he said. “If you get Tony there.”

She had to tell him about Shane. He was nearly at the door, when she blurted out, “By the way, Shane’s back.”

He stopped for a moment and turned, and without missing a beat said, “Oh good. Well, it’s good for you, anyway. Makes things easier. Bring him too.”

Damn, she thought, picking up her headset. Why had he been so nonchalant? She suddenly realized that she wanted him to be a little bit bummed.

The whole time he was sitting there, she’d been thinking about sex, secretly comparing her feelings for Selden to Shane. Unfortunately, at that moment, Selden was winning. But it was practically no-contest: Ever since Shane had come back, she hadn’t found him sexually attractive at all. This hadn’t prevented her from giving him a blow job just before she left for Romania, however, which was the reason she hadn’t had time to pack.

“This kind of sucks, Wendy,” Shane said earlier in the afternoon, following her into the bedroom. “I’m back for one week and you decide to take off?”

“What do you want me to do, Angel? Tell them to stop a one-hundred-twenty-five-million-dollar production so I can get my marriage back on track?”

“Yes, I do,” Shane said. “If you want our marriage to work, you have to be present.”

Why was he torturing her? “Angel,” she said patiently. “You know what Ragged Pilgrims means. To us. To all of us.”

“To you, Wendy,” he said. And added meanly, “It’s always about money, isn’t it?”

That was a low blow, Wendy thought. Why was it that when men were concerned about making money, they were admirable, while women in the same position were considered suspect? And when it came to money—her hard-earned money—Shane certainly didn’t seem to have a problem spending it. Or simply taking it.

This was a topic too big and too ugly to get into at the moment, so she kept her mouth shut. As Dr. Vincent would say, “Belittling, Bitching, and Bellyaching only make your marriage Bad.”

She had sighed, pulling the valise out from underneath a pile of shoes in the closet. “I have to provide. Remember what Dr. Vincent said? I’m only trying to do my part. Providing for the family.”

Shane was too clever for her. “Dr. Vincent says there’s a line between providing and escaping.”

A terrible thought crossed her mind. Dr. Vincent was right. She did want to escape. From Shane, her nagging Mousewife. She wondered when Dr. Vincent would get to that part of the program.

But suddenly she felt guilty. She mustn’t think about Shane that way, ever. He was only trying to do his best and what was best for the family. So she’d turned around and begun giving him a blow job. She was on her knees anyway, so what the hell.

“We were supposed to see Shirlee tonight. She isn’t going to be happy,” he said afterward. He left the room and returned a couple of minutes later. “It’s okay after all. Shirlee said we can reschedule a phone session with her tomorrow. So what time is good for you . . . ?”

From Romania?

Poooooo. Pooooo, went the hum of the engines.

She opened her eyes and ripped off her sleeping mask. She was all keyed up now. She looked at her watch. Seven p.m. New York time. One a.m. in Paris, and two a.m. in Romania. The pill hadn’t worked, and now she’d never get to sleep.

She sat up, pressing the button to raise the bed into a sitting position. She reached into her valise and took out two scripts. One was the screenplay for Ragged Pilgrims, filled with her notes, and the second one was the shooting script with the scenes rearranged by day. Together, these documents were her bible. Then she took out her computer, turned it on, and inserted a disk.

The disk contained the dailies from the last two weeks. Ragged Pilgrims was shot on film, and every two days a special courier from the production department would fly from Romania to New York to deliver the film to the processing center in Queens. He would then drive the film to the Splatch-Verner building where she would screen it. After that, the film was digitally copied onto a disk, so she could go back and study it more thoroughly on her computer.

She put the shooting script on her lap and began watching the dailies, comparing her notes to what she was seeing on her computer screen.

She gritted her teeth in frustration, causing a sharp pain in her jaw just below her ear. That was all she needed right now—a TMJ flare-up. She’d had it on and off for years, and it always happened when she was overwhelmingly stressed. She pressed down hard on her jaw, trying to loosen the muscles. There was nothing she could do other than live with the pain.

She peered at the screen again. She was right, she thought, so far the dailies were a disaster. She’d been in this business for nearly twenty-five years, and she had absolute confidence in her opinions. The problem wasn’t that the actors weren’t saying the correct lines, it was the way they were saying them and the tone of the scenes that was all wrong. This was the impossible part of moviemaking, the art of it, in a sense: getting your vision and what was in your head onto the screen. But that distance was a chasm, filled with hundreds of people—all of whom had their own ideas.

Like Bob Wayburn, the director. She grimaced. She and Bob were literally not on the same page when it came to Ragged Pilgrims, and he knew it. This was the reason Bob had refused to take her calls for the past two weeks. It was outrageous but not unusual, and in some circumstances she would have let it go. If, for instance, Bob was right—if he was teasing a nuance out of the script that she hadn’t envisioned herself—or if there was enough material in the dailies to fix the movie in editing. She always made visits to the locations and sets of every movie Parador produced, and if the circumstances were slightly different, she would have been able to put off the trip to Romania for a few more days, until after the weekend, after Magda picked out her pony. But Ragged Pilgrims wasn’t the average movie. It was the kind of film that came along once every five to ten years, a movie with heart and intelligence and fascinating characters. It was, in short, what people in the industry referred to as “worthy.”

She read through a few lines of the script, not that she necessarily needed to. She knew every line of dialogue, every stage direction, by heart. She’d been working on the project for five years, having bought the rights to the book, Ragged Pilgrims, when it was in manuscript form six months before it even became an actual book. No one, not even the publisher, had any idea that the book would go on to become an international best seller, remaining at the top of the New York Times’s best-seller list for over a year. But she had known. Sure, anyone in the business could figure out that they should option a book once it became a best seller. But knowing what was going to be a hit before it happened took a special kind of talent. She could still remember the experience of reading the first paragraph of Ragged Pilgrims, climbing into bed with the manuscript, exhausted but pushing herself to do another half-hour of work. It was after eleven, and Shane was next to her, watching TV. She’d had a lousy day. She was in a different job then—a producer at Global Pictures with her own production company—and Global had just hired a new president. The word was that he only wanted to do young, male-driven movies, and that Wendy was going to be one of the first to go. She remembered turning to Shane in despair. “I don’t know that it’s worth it, anymore,” she’d said. “No one seems to want to make the kinds of pictures I would even want to see.”

“Oh Wendy,” Shane sighed, not taking his eyes off the TV screen. “You’re always so dramatic. Just get over it.”

She’d given him a dirty look and started reading.