Don't Make a Scene Read online

  “I'm not talking about money. All sorts of people come back to visit.”

  “If I went back, they'd take my passport and refuse to let me leave. Why don't you move on with your life? Why have you not remarried?”

  “Remarried? I never divorced.”

  “And why is that?”

  “You have no right to talk to me this way.”

  “I'm speaking to you honestly. Face reality, María. I'm not going back.”

  She let out a scream that seared through his head, shredding any hope that he might get away with a pleasant chat on this Sunday. There was a tumult. She was passing the phone to someone else. He felt a wave of relief.

  “She's crying again,” his mother said.

  In spite of all his attempts to deal with each family member individually, it was a collective conversation. Privacy was an Anglo concept.

  “That's her problem.” He wondered why on earth he had thought it would be more pleasant to talk to his mother.

  “Your father will not be there, in Varadero,” she said, and she might have been talking about Valhalla. Varadero was restricted to foreigners. It was illegal for Cubans to be there without special dispensation, which Pucho was able to acquire on occasion. “He'll make sure that there's no passport issue.”

  “And why should I accept a gift from that swine?”

  His mother's voice broke into clattering sobs.

  “Mother. I refuse to talk to you if you cry. Mother. This is ridiculous.”

  Another tumult. His sister came on the phone. “So Vlade, how are you? You've made two women cry in less than three minutes.”

  “Nadia, what's new?”

  “Vladimir, the passport won't be a problem.”

  He felt another surge of irritation.

  “There are new rules,” Nadia continued. “You submit your passport, they investigate you, and they habilitate it with a permanent stamp. So you can come back whenever you want. You don't need to get an Entry Permit.”

  “You're not listening to me. I'm not coming! Not now, not later. Not ever. Never.”

  “Well, you're very negative.”

  “I'll be glad to see you when you get here. So when are you coming?”

  Nadia was a doctor married to a doctor. Doctors weren't allowed to leave the country (taking all their expensive education with them), not even for a vacation. Not alone and especially not with family members. Perhaps Pucho could work around that one, too, but hadn't.

  “Shall we have two members of the family corrupted by greed?”

  “Cojones!”

  “Dad says you're a coward,” she said.

  “Tell Pucho to go fuck himself.”

  “Tell him yourself.”

  Vladimir hung up the phone.

  It had been five years since he'd last spoken to his father, but of course he could feel him there in the room, like a malodorous animal. Listening to the conversation, coaching them all, telling them what to say. The only good part about calling Cuba was that they couldn't call back. Too difficult, too expensive. Even for Pucho.

  He went into the kitchen and looked in his empty refrigerator. He wished he hadn't sent Ellen away. On the other hand, he didn't really want to talk to Ellen, and had almost called her Janet just that morning. All the women in his quasi-bachelor life put together weighed less than María. Literally and physically—his taste in American women ran to light and thin, and not a Latina among them. He supposed María had gotten heavier. Who knew, and who cared?

  He walked out into the summer night, heading to the closest movie theater. He bought a ticket to a film he'd never heard of that had already started. It was a kung fu movie with explosions, car chases and lots of shooting. It hit the spots, as they said around here. Whatever else you could say about America, entertainment wasn't against the law. As he walked back home through the heat-stricken streets of SoHo, he made a mental note to ask Ellen about her parents’ friends who were going to Cuba. They could take Band-Aids, aspirin and Tampax, which his mother could use herself, or sell or trade.

  SEPTEMBER

  LIKE A BAD JOKE, the Bedford Street Cinema had just begun a new series: “Apartments We Covet.” Diane had planned this nearly a year earlier, believing that fall in New York, with its mass return from the watering holes and its back-to-school feeling, was just the right time for a real estate theme.

  She had scheduled A Perfect Murder (Andrew Davis, 1998) for the cold, marble-paved sumptuosity of Michael Douglas's corporate-raider pad in Carnegie Hill, in a double feature with Green Card (Peter Weir, 1990), which centered on Andie MacDowell's West Side bohemian oasis, as an antidote. She chose Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986) for the Old World charm of Mia Farrow's apartment on Central Park West, and Unfaithful (Adrian Lyne, 2002) for Olivier Martinez's book-and-curiosity-filled SoHo loft. Was it a coincidence that infidelity was an integral part of most movies featuring enviable real estate? Indiscreet would play again, for Ingrid Bergman's vibrant London flat with sunken living room. The squads of brightly framed pictures around the fireplace and the vivid throw pillows on the couches seemed to say, Yes, she's single, but that doesn't mean she's sad. Not Bergman's best movie by a long shot. But surely an apartment to covet.

  The actual real estate Diane had seen since receiving the eviction notice ranged from the squalid to the sordid. The prices were obscene.

  “What on earth is going on here?” she asked in a grimy, chopped-up one-bedroom with less than five hundred square feet in a seedy building on a bad block with a scary elevator and a littered hallway. The rent was $3,100 a month.

  The broker wore a red blazer and a permanent smile. “Where have you been?”

  “In a rent-controlled cloud, apparently. This is awful. How much would it cost to find someplace that I'd want to live in?”

  The broker's expression changed into a look of conspiracy. “Come with me,” she said, and steered Diane west on Tenth Street, asking impertinent questions about her personal life and finances until they reached an old, lovely, well-maintained brownstone with thriving plants in front. The apartment was quiet, freshly painted, and had high ceilings, elegant moldings and built-in bookcases. It had one bedroom, one bathroom, one living room, a large, renovated kitchen and a garden in the back. The asking price was $6,000 a month.

  This number hit Diane like a body blow. “What?”

  “It came on the market this morning,” the broker said, looking at her watch. “By tonight, it'll be gone. Get out your checkbook or forget about it. Are we done here?”

  Diane's summer had passed in frustration; for much of it she'd found herself awaiting permission to enter places in which, it turned out, she didn't want to spend ten minutes. She didn't want much. She was looking for the minimalist glamour of Jean Gabin's Parisian pied-à-terre in Touchez pas au grisbi (Jacques Becker, 1953), which was outfitted with everything a gangster bachelor on the lam might need, including an impossibly chic late-night snack for two, with place mats, napkins, champagne flutes, table water crackers and a tin of pâté. Simple was hard to find.

  “WHY DO YOU NEED twenty minutes between screenings?” Jack Lip-sky put his bare feet up on the desk. These monthly meetings always seemed to stick on the issue of turnover. “We have ten minutes between shows at the two-dollar theater in West Simsbury. Nobody complains it's not clean.”

  “For a two-dollar admission, your audience should clean for you,” Diane said.

  The phone rang: it was Dorothy Vail: She had just spoken to her agent. “He gives me modeling opportunities for adult diapers and assisted living homes for the ‘vibrantly mature’! Diane, I am at the end of my rope!”

  “Oh dear, Dorothy,” Diane said pointedly, taking the phone to her office.

  Lipsky gave her a disgusted look. The Board of Directors had been a natural consequence of getting the nonprofit designation. The idea of putting anything to a vote went against Jack Lipsky's nature, and in recent years Diane had come to regret changing his mind, as management of Boar
d personalities took up at least half of her time. Management of Miss Dorothy Vail often represented the lion's share of that.

  On Diane's first day of work, Lipsky had followed her around the office like a puppy, bumping into her. Lipsky retained, at fifty-three, the smirking look of a teenage boy thinking about something dirty when he talked to you. At one point, in the projection room, he appeared to be smelling her. Then he took a phone call.

  “You said we'd have it yesterday, and it's today already. Why should I do business with you, you lying bastard?”

  He slammed the phone down and hiked up his pants. “Where were we?” he asked, undoing his belt and buckling it at a tighter notch.

  Diane had wanted the job so badly she'd ignored the whiff of instability he'd given off during the interview. His desk abutted hers.

  She would have to look at him and listen to him all day. He didn't wear shoes in the office. Her predecessor had lasted only a month and a half. It was just a matter of time before she was the recipient of this abuse.

  The phone on Diane's desk rang. Lipsky gestured that she should pick it up. It was clear from the first word that the caller had been stewing in anger for at least ten years.

  “Hello. This is Ronnie Lipsky,” the caller announced. “I want to tell you, I know all about you and your hair, Diane Kurasik. You stay away from my husband.”

  Diane blinked. “Mrs. Lipsky, I assure you: wild horses couldn't drag me anywhere near your husband.”

  Lipsky knocked over her coffee in the process of grabbing the phone out of her hand. “How dare you call here? No, you shut up.”

  He was sweating. Diane blotted up the coffee.

  “Bitch!” He slammed the phone down. “She hung up on me.”

  “What could she possibly know about me or my hair?”

  “I think I may have mentioned you,” he said with a needy look.

  Unemployment couldn't be worse than this. Still, this boor had said that he'd be out of town most of the time and that she would run the show. The Bedford Street Cinema was a unique opportunity, perhaps worth the nonsense.

  Her phone rang again. “Look, Mrs. Lipsky,” she said, smiling sweetly at Lipsky and channeling the spirit of Carole Lombard. “I agreed to run your husband's shitty little theater, but fucking him was not part of the deal. I have no intention of getting involved with him, and if he comes anywhere near me, I'll call you so fast his head will spin. Are we clear?”

  There was silence on the other end, as well as six feet away, where Diane's new boss lurked uncertainly. “Give me your phone number, Ronnie,” she added, and wrote it down on the front page of her date book. “Okay, have a nice day, then.”

  Lipsky burst into a wheezy laugh. “You'll do fine here,” he said, and spent the rest of the day with his bare feet on his desk, repeating the line to everyone who called.

  She had done fine there, mainly because Lipsky spent most of his time in northern Connecticut attending first to the messy drama of his bitter marriage and then to the messy drama of his bitter divorce.

  Lipsky also owned a small chain of seedy second-run cinemas that kept him in places like West Simsbury and Yelping Hill; “high-tone” cinema went against his better judgment. Diane had somehow convinced him that Bedford Street was a prestigious asset. He was soon mesmerized by the newspaper and magazine articles when they launched the new repertory format. He began to enjoy the gloss of Culture the Bedford Street Cinema gave his empire, even if he never watched the old, obscure and/or foreign films they featured.

  Dorothy was still talking.

  Diane could never be a therapist, she decided: she had no patience for this.

  “Dorothy, I have a deadline at the printer,” she said finally.

  “I forgot to tell you why I called!” Dorothy screamed. “I've been thinking about how you said you spend at least thirty percent of your time on the bathrooms. And I have an idea for you: an attendant! You don't remember, you weren't old enough, but every restaurant, club and theater used to have ladies’ room and men's room attendants.”

  “Would anyone want that job?”

  “They have services now. The attendant would stay in the bathroom, replace soap and towels, and tell you when you needed to call the plumber.”

  “Perhaps the plumber could take the job, cutting out the middle man.”

  She went back into Lipsky's office, which she had moved into an enclosed space behind the projection room, out of her way. “I have to call the plumber. Dorothy just suggested we get a bathroom attendant.”

  “Maybe you'd like the job,” Lipsky said.

  As she did every month when her routine and tranquillity were disturbed by the omnipresence of Lipsky, Diane reminded herself of Frank Capra, who had noted that he had more independence as an employee on a contract at a studio than he ever did in a subsequent era as an independent director.

  Demolition was six weeks away. Diane felt like a character Jack Lemmon might have played: cranky, harassed, powerless.

  “So come home,” said her mother each time she mentioned it. “Your room awaits you. We haven't changed a thing.”

  Diane squeezed her eyes shut. Single, almost forty, and living with her parents in New Jersey? She slipped into the theater to watch Something's Gotta Give (Nancy Meyers, 2003), a middle-aged fantasy of real estate pornography, in which two very different men in all-cotton sportswear court a professionally successful woman at the end of middle age. But mainly it was an East Hampton beach house to covet, a beach house so large, and in such a desirable location, that its cost was incalculable. Did movies satisfy yearnings, or merely fan the flames?

  OF ALL THE marginal things Daniel Dubrovnik did in this life, such as teaching classic cinema to college students who slept through films as well as lectures, and writing “think pieces” for magazines that no one read, screenwriting had to be the most absurd. Even though Daniel had received an Academy Award nomination in the late sixties (for Dodge, an antiwar comedy), his name was familiar to most because of Ira Dubrovnik, his father, also a screenwriter, who had invoked the Fifth Amendment during the McCarthy era and fled to Europe, supporting his family during the blacklist period as a dishwasher and a clown.

  It was a clear blue day in late September, and Daniel decided to walk downtown to his meeting at the Bedford Street Cinema. Aretha Franklin—Queen of Soul: The Atlantic Recordings streamed out of his headphones. He wondered why “Ain't No Way” had gone triple platinum, while “Never Let Me Go”—featuring the same personnel and arrangements, recorded on the same day, presumably in the same mood—barely made a dent. He passed through the cleaned-up yet still sleazy neon commercial hell of Times Square. Critically and commercially, he had done okay. Others had done much better. Others had certainly done worse.

  Earlier that week, Daniel had sat in a sleek red-leather reception room in Hollywood, waiting to make a pitch at ten a.m. Three people arrived after him and were ushered in right away. The only thing on the coffee table was a copy of Vanity Fair, which he refused to read on principle. He felt unclean when he picked up Vanity Fair. And yet he'd ridiculed a colleague at Columbia for making an obscure reference recently, and hated himself for succumbing to the know-nothing doctrine.

  Daniel made his pitch at twelve-fifteen p.m. while the boy executive looked at his watch and his assistant poked her head in repeatedly to schedule appointments. Daniel's agent called the next day: the son of a bitch wanted to buy the option for chicken feed and have someone else write the script. In the last decade, Daniel had had no trouble getting in to see a few top people like this, who optioned his treatments and scripts preemptively, almost as if making a small contribution to a liberal cause. By these people, many lesser vehicles were produced and promoted relentlessly; by these people, many lesser vehicles were produced and sent straight to video. Why Daniel's movies remained on paper in a file cabinet was one of those mysteries never explained or even questioned, like why Cain's offering to God was lesser than Abel's in the first place.

>   The Board of Directors of the Bedford Street Cinema met twice a year on a Tuesday morning at a long table set up on the stage in front of the screen. Daniel arrived early, but not early enough: Dorothy Vail, queen of MGM's B movies in the fifties, had taken the head of the table. Lipsky, that foul beast, had parked his fat ass at the other end. News of the potential expansion and the largesse of the former Goldwyn Girl went over the Board meeting like a love bomb, and Dorothy Vail flashed triumphant smiles.

  “Congratulations, Miss Vail,” said Jan Mattias, Chairman of the Board, ass-kissing political animal and absurdly youthful producer of sweeping, big-budget historical epics featuring pulsating contemporary soundtracks. “What a coup!”

  “Anyone know what's in there?” asked Don Gleason, a struggling documentary filmmaker who made his living composing meandering New Age sounds for yoga videos. He still owed Daniel twenty dollars from three years ago.

  “I heard that it's a carriage house that was converted into a garage sometime in the thirties,” said Rebecca Temple, a Midwestern film preservationist with a Deanna Durbin overbite. “We may have landmark issues with the building, or at least the façade.” Rebecca had been brusque to him at the last Board meeting when he suggested lunch afterwards. She was no great shakes, and not a true intellectual, either: she'd thought “Jason and the Argonauts” was a Saturday-morning cartoon. He regretted the overture.

  “There may be ghosts inside,” said Dario Travisini, a stooped, elderly Italian neorealist film director with a gray, papery complexion. Daniel had included one of Travisini's movies in his illustrated history, Narrative in Cinema, which was still in use as a college textbook. Daniel used it in his own course, “The Screenplay: Innovators and Iconoclasts,” at Columbia. Diane Kurasik had suggested that they sell the book at the popcorn stand.

  Diane should lecture to his class—why hadn't he thought of this before?

  “We've had lots of leaks on the side that abuts that building,” said Diane. Such a smart, attractive woman wasting her time with plumbing and managing the egos of Jan Mattias, Dorothy Vail and Lipsky that cretinous mound of bad taste.