Molly Bit Read online

  A hawk flew by at eye level. Down in the park, a squirrel posed for a tourist’s photograph.

  “I received an email yesterday,” Diane said.

  “Weird phrase.”

  “I’m supposed to give a deposition.”

  The trial of Roger Michael Vincent hadn’t been a trial at all. It was juryless—his guilty plea worked out in a deal with the district attorney. The state of California had wanted the case dealt with as quickly as possible. The industry too. Molly’s murder was something Hollywood didn’t want to think about too deeply. Everyone needed her death to be simple, explicable, a chance thing in the world, like a car accident or a drug overdose. They’d put Vincent in a maximum-security prison, but there were rumors of transfer. The psych evals were troubling, the internet said. He didn’t speak.

  His mother was a different story. She wanted the attention. She’d filed a lawsuit against the estate seeking compensation for mental anguish. She claimed the excessive media coverage of Molly’s murder by her son had resulted in depression. Depression by celebrity, her lawyers were calling it.

  “It’s inhuman,” Diane said. “He stabbed her. He broke into her home.”

  She knew the terrifying details. She had learned of the murder as she stood in line at the Student Union. News broke in across the flatscreens. “Sweetheart,” an Aramark worker had said. “Sweetheart, hello—your coffee.”

  “It’ll never happen.”

  “But still,” Diane said. “What kind of a person?”

  “All sorts,” Abigail said, nodding at the park. “Everybody down there is messed up.”

  They could go downtown, Abigail knew, and see mugs, T-shirts, posters with Molly’s face on them. There was a wax replica of Molly at Madame Tussauds. Fanned out on collapsible tables in Chinatown were bootleg DVDs of her early stuff, Starcatcher and Funhouse. There was a mural of Molly inside a Greenpoint warehouse where they’d shot a major scene in The Last Century. To get a look, you had to pay the owner twenty bucks.

  “Can I confess something?” Abigail asked. “Can I be honest? Otherwise, I’m going to walk around with this thing, and it will feed on my silence and eat me alive.”

  “Sure,” Diane said.

  “I don’t want to go to dinner.”

  “Me either,” Diane said. “Nobody wants to go to these things. Anyone who says any different is lying.”

  “So do we have to?” Abigail asked. “Do we have to go?”

  “Of course, we do,” Diane said. “Yes. We have to go. Has it been that long?”

  “I haven’t been to one of these dinners since the ’90s.”

  “So you burned some bridges. Who hasn’t?”

  “Bridges?” Abigail asked. “Whole villages will be smoldering in there.”

  “Oh, please,” Diane said. “Just follow my lead. All you have to do is eat, talk, and shake hands. I’m bringing antibacterial.”

  They had time and so cut across the park to the West Side. How it worked was, the film (Trust, in this case) was screened for the regular people; while that was going on, the important people ate dinner; after dinner was finished, the important people went across the street to the theater for the Q&A with the regular people; then the important people plus the regular people who’d paid for the extra ticket recrossed the street to the restaurant for the reception. Certain people, like Diane, could be both important and regular. Abigail was positive she was neither.

  It was a long table in a special backroom of the restaurant with fifty or so guests. The movie stars were at the other end. As usual, most of them looked weird in person, sort of out of proportion, like they’d been sucked through a vacuum tube or run through a trash compactor.

  Two production partners Abigail knew from the internet, from TheWrap.com and the news blasts she got from Variety, approached. She knew each man’s name, what movies they’d made, and their current deals. She had heard, and even spread, gossip about them. About her, they knew absolutely nothing.

  “When are we doing lunch?” the blonde one asked Diane.

  “When am I gonna see you?” the other one asked, staring at his phone. “What’s this I hear about you producing? I love that. What’s the project? Whose is it? What is it?”

  In the restaurant, Diane explained Abigail’s screenplay to the money men. Words like grief, hope, and public assistance program obliterated their attention. They drifted over in their own minds toward other, more reliable projects, where stars were attached and the formulas were sound. This was one end of the whole bullshit deal: the great guffawing boardroom side of huge tits and ass. Of high-wire explosions. Of dreams are the crushed bones beneath our feet. It was terrible. Box office. But the other end was maybe worse. Abigail had a friend, an always broke experimental filmmaker who’d shown at the Whitney once three decades ago, and who, upon her Facebooking the news that her movie could possibly exist, had promptly direct-messaged her that she was a Hollywood whore. The truth was, she’d have that arthouse fundamentalist know, she wasn’t serving his god, or any, or the cash cow in the sky these two bros worshipped at either. She was serving people, human beings, if they were still around, and weren’t all hooked on heroin or streaming Netflix. But to get to the people, you needed distribution. You needed an infrastructure beyond enough folding chairs, a projector, and a wall. Diane would take the movie only so far. After that, Abigail would need more money. The one guy, the not-blond one, occasionally got all philanthropic and took movies like hers on. Abigail’s instinct would always be to burn her life to the ground: to say, “You don’t like it? Fuck off.” But she couldn’t do that anymore. It wasn’t about her. It was about the women in the theater she would never know.

  When Diane was finished describing the movie, she made introductions. The men shook Abigail’s hand. It could have been her own paranoia at work, the feeling that she didn’t belong there, or anywhere, but she felt treated with a certain amount of skepticism, as if she were the pure product of someone else’s imagination, rather than her own.

  “Great,” the one said.

  “Looking forward to it,” went the other.

  Then they were gone.

  She ordered the vegetable lasagna. Salads arrived. She took a bite of a pale radish freckled appropriately in gorgonzola. Leonard Roth walked in.

  The last time she had spoken to him was during a therapy session in which he’d been a red throw pillow. In that setting even, her hate had been too much. After two minutes, she’d whipped him across the room into a Maxwell House tin of chewed-on pencils that rocketed off her therapist’s desk into the wall. In the dining room, he came at her quick. She had only enough time to fast-forward through their history a half dozen reps before he was above her.

  “Abigail,” he said.

  “Leonard.”

  “Diane.”

  “Hi, Leonard.”

  “I’m sitting down between you two,” he told them. Using his pointer finger, he made a come-here motion, minus the eye contact. A waiter brought a chair.

  “Look at this,” Leonard said, nodding at a movie star. “That doesn’t make any sense. Molly hated his guts. Am I wrong? Am I remembering?”

  “You’re right,” Diane said. “She hated him.”

  “I knew it,” Leonard said. “I thought so.” He turned to Abigail. “I hear you’re not doing drugs anymore.”

  She saw his age on him. As with everyone, it started around the eyes. Some men aged well, it suited them, but not Leonard. He looked tired, sad, and fat. She remembered him from before. When they were something close to almost friends, Abigail had liked Leonard’s sister far more. Emily was a quasi-monster too, petty and vindictive, but she’d handled Leonard like the little brother he was. In meetings she’d had with the two of them, Abigail could feel Leonard’s attention chasing Emily around the room. He would hope for a touch, a word, a confirmation. Maybe in private he’d managed to capture one or the other, but never that Abigail saw. Still, when he’d ruined her, and Abigail had called Emily to beg
her way back in, the coldness in Emily’s voice (“How is this my problem?”) had put an end to everything.

  “Just crack,” Abigail said. “I only smoke crack now.”

  “Crack?”

  “It’s prescription,” she said. “So it’s cool.”

  “Where are you?” he asked. “Where are you living?”

  “Upstate.”

  “But where?”

  She was surprised to find all of her molecules were intact, that the conversation hadn’t disassembled her body. She took a second bite of radish. She said the name of the town.

  “I have a house near there.”

  “I know,” she said. “Your helicopter flies over.”

  “It is loud,” he said. “I’ll give you that. Don’t you go crazy up there? I make it three days—then I have to get back.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t. It’s where I live.”

  In Abigail’s daydreams, hallucinations, homicidal fantasies, whatever one might call them, she would always be screaming at him by this point, destroying him with a monologue so exact it had accounted for all possible rebuttals, alternate versions of the truth, and misinformed realities. She was a consummate rehearser of scenarios. Long car rides. Hot showers. Dead eyes out the window drinking coffee. Coursing through her was a pure streak of vengeance like a fault line. She was ready for him. That prescription-for-crack retort had been stored up for years. She’d used it on other people, but it was Leonard’s. She was prepared for anything. Then he screwed her over again.

  “I miss her,” he said. “I keep remembering the weirdest shit. I’ll be walking down the street, or talking to someone on the phone—bang.”

  “Like what?” Diane asked.

  “Like I went to see her in Virginia once,” he said. “Years ago. I’d forgotten all about it. She’d found this woman who’d been in the CIA, called this woman up, told her about Tribes, how it was Cold War and all of that, and got invited down. It was in the middle of nowhere. This woman was ancient. She knew Hoover. Molly lived in a shack. That old biddy walked her through the whole thing, trained her like it was 1959. She ran like eight miles every morning. Read declassified manuals. Target practice.”

  “I remember that,” Diane said. “She was there for six weeks.”

  Diane’s wife, Susan, came into the room. Abigail saw her before Diane or Leonard did. Susan gave her a smile, pretty and crooked, and then she touched Diane’s shoulder.

  “What’s this?” Leonard asked. “Reinforcements?”

  “Finish your story,” Diane said. She grabbed Susan’s hand and held onto it.

  “What story?”

  “You went to see her. She was living in a shack.”

  “She was living in a shack,” Roth said. “For six weeks. I watched her skin a deer. That’s the story.”

  If you were tired, you slept. If you were hungry, you ate. If you were cold, you bought a sweater, or made a scarf, or something. To these three mantras, Abigail had long ago added a fourth. It went like this: if you wanted to get the hell out of there, you got the hell out of there.

  She stood up and gave Susan a hug.

  “Take my seat,” she said. “I need a little air.”

  The restaurant was packed now. She had to navigate her way through the crowd. She went around four cranky-faced girls in bright-colored dresses and a man whose cheekbones had the sharp angularity of a Siamese cat. The producers from before stood at the bar. The philanthropist tipped his drink at her. Abigail went to say hello, started with her hand, but then the men resumed their conversation, and she at once regretted and hated the part of herself that, even after all these years, had the habit of shrinking.

  Outside, it was almost night. New York was the color of rum. It took her three elaborate minutes of going from one traffic island to another in order to cross the street. Every car ripping by was operated by a stressed-out maniac. Once she was on the correct side of Broadway, she walked a half block north, and went up the stairs to the Walter Reade. Her old student, Kimball, was working the ticket booth.

  “Bonjour,” he said, for some stupid reason he least of all understood. “I put a sign on your seat.”

  She grabbed a program off the info desk. The cover was a black-and-white publicity still. Molly’s hand was up against her cheek. A vein in her wrist stood out. The photographer had asked her to do sad and knowing, and she’d done it. It was like a premonition, Abigail thought, but it was also cheap because of that. She pulled open the heavy door, and slipped into Trust.

  It was the scene in the movie where Molly playing Abigail leaves the funeral reception. The wife knows all about her. Feeling young, stupid, and used, she catches the train back into the city. The camera watches her looking out the window for a while. She cries a little. She gets it together. She heads to the bathroom, goes inside, and loses it again. When she gets back to her apartment, her dead lover’s teenage son is waiting for her out on the stoop. He’s seventeen years old.

  MOLLY

  Do you drink coffee yet?

  SON

  Sometimes.

  MOLLY

  Do you know who I am? Do you know my name?

  SON

  You’re her.

  MOLLY

  Who’s that?

  SON

  The other woman.

  MOLLY

  Gross.

  The two of them go upstairs to her apartment. She makes coffee. He wants to hear the story of how she met his father.

  MOLLY

  Where does anybody meet anybody?

  SON

  I don’t know.

  MOLLY

  In a bar. We met in a bar. I was there with some friends. He said hello. It was like something you can’t help. I thought he was sweet, and sexy, and kind of a jerk. I tore a napkin apart the whole time we were talking. I loved him right away. It took maybe thirty seconds.

  The son continues to visit her. They get to know each other. The seasons change. It’s fall. It’s winter. It’s spring. They talk about the father. They make him into someone they can know. One day the son leans in for a kiss, and she smacks him hard across the face.

  Claiming it was preparation, she’d taken Molly to Robert’s house once. They’d sat in the rental car across the street until the wife came outside and chased their wildly reversing car out of the cul-de-sac. They were young, and sometimes cruel, and they laughed about it, but on the way back into the city, Abigail had told Molly that she felt guilty. Maybe it was wrong to make the movie.

  “Only if you do it poorly,” Molly had said. “Only if it isn’t human.”

  Abigail had seen Trust a hundred times. She couldn’t take it again. She sat there for another ten minutes and then went back outside, where Kimball was arguing with a man twice his age through the window of the ticket booth.

  “I’m sorry,” Kimball said. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “I’m on the list,” the man said. He wore an oversized red and black cardigan to hide his stomach. His face was adorned with an unwise hipster porn ’stache. “I know I’m on the list. Last name: Os. First name: Eric. Eric Os.”

  “You aren’t here,” Kimball said. He waved good-bye to Abigail as she walked toward the exit. “I can’t see you. How many times do I have to say it?”

  There was a memorial at the corner of Sixty-Fifth and Broadway. A dozen poster board photographs of Molly were propped up or set flat on the ground. Lit tealights and larger, lopsided candles were down between them. It was hard to identify the flowers through their cellophane arrangements. The teddy bears, as usual, looked brutalized, as if they’d been rescued from a garbage dump. For how many thousands of years had this been going on? A person is murdered or dies unexpectedly, a person who had been revered as a god, and in the aftermath of that death—the fire, the objects, the tribute. Honor after the fact was no more than a gesture toward superstition, or (if Abigail was feeling generous) an instinct for the afterlife, so that somehow the most cynical New Yorker, the most
“Oh, yeah? Show me. Prove it,” was down on her knee, communing with the dead.

  Like any decent, less-than-well-adjusted person, Abigail ran on guilt and shame, and the suspicion that something terrible was about to happen. Retroactively, the blame for any actual tragedies belonged to her, along with an almost limitless anger at how unfair this dynamic was—as if she herself hadn’t created it. In this way, in a way that made no sense unless viewed through the warped prism of human nature, Molly’s death was Abigail’s fault. She hated Molly for making her feel this way (for being murdered to begin with), and this too resulted in guilt and shame. To top it all off, she understood these feelings were ridiculous as well as perfectly natural, but she couldn’t stop having them. Abigail asked herself: had her feelings and thoughts always been one and the same, or were they only now achieving a maddening unity and clarity thanks to therapy and middle age? Probably. But never mind. And never mind drinking. Not drinking was super easy now. It was thinking itself that continued to present a thinking problem.

  “This looks like a sacrifice,” she said to a redheaded woman setting a box of chocolates on the ground. “I don’t like this one little Molly Bit.”

  She was in the middle of New York City. The cars and the people and the textures of the buildings were always morphing into one great sonic and physical energy. She looked at the candles and flowers and teddy bears.

  “Oh, professor!” said a man’s voice behind her.

  She turned around. It was goddamn Leonard Roth. She saw him, and Diane, and Susan, and fifteen midlevel executives. Behind them were the movie stars, each beautiful and desperate, each ready and willing, waiting in a line.