"Oh."
Larry said, "I know it was an accident. I'm not suggesting it wasn't but ... Rune, you're a sweet kid...."
"You're firing me, aren't you?"
They didn't even bother to nod.
"You better pick up whatever you got 'ere and 'ead out now."
"We wish you the best of luck," Bob said.
He didn't mean it, Rune could tell, but it was nice of him to at least make the effort.
Didn't mean she was no good.
Rune walked along the Hudson, staring at the olive-drab shadows stretching outward into the rippled texture of the water. Seagulls stood on one leg and hunched against the cool morning breeze.
After all, didn't Einstein get kicked out of school for failing math? Didn't Churchill fail government?
They went on to show everybody.
The difference was, though, that they had a second chance.
So that was it: no distributor. And no money for editing, voice-overs, titles, sound track ...
Rune had thirty hours of unedited tape whose value would go to zero in about six months--the time when the world would stop caring about Shelly Lowe's death.
She went home to her houseboat and stacked up all the tape cassettes on her shelf, tossed the script on top of them and walked into the kitchen.
She spent the afternoon sipping herbal tea as she sat on the deck, browsing through some of her books. One that she settled on, for some reason, was her old copy of Dante's Inferno.
Wondering why that volume--not the one about purgatory or the one about paradise--was the best-seller.
Wondering about the levels of hell people descend to.
Mostly she meant Tommy as she thought this. But there were others, too.
Danny Traub, who, even if he donated money to a good cause, was a son of a bitch who liked to hurt women.
Michael Schmidt, who thought he was God and destroyed a fine actress's chance for no good reason.
Arthur Tucker, who stole Shelly's play after she'd died.
Rune wondered why descent seems the natural tendency, why it's so much harder to go upward, the way Shelly was trying to do. Like there's some huge gravity of darkness.
She liked that, gravity of darkness, and she wrote it down in her notebook, thinking she wished she had a script to use the phrase in.
If she hadn't died would Shelly ever have climbed out of the Underworld like Eurydice?
Rune dozed and woke at sunset, the orange disk squeezing into the earth over the Jersey flatlands, rippling in the angle of the dense atmosphere. She stretched and took a shower, and ate a cheese sandwich for dinner.
Afterward, she walked to a pay phone and called Sam Healy.
"I got fired." She told him the story.
"Oh, no. I'm sorry."
"My one regret is that we didn't ship it to the networks," she joked. "Can you imagine? Lusty Cousins on an ad during prime time? Boy, would that've been wholly audacious."