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“So what did you see in this guy?” Shane asks. “Originally?”
Claire glances up. What did she see? It’s too corny to say—but she saw all the clichéd shit: Stars. Flashes of light. Babies. A future. She saw all of this the very first night, as they banged through her apartment door, flinging clothes and chewing each other’s lips and reaching and prodding and cupping—and then he lifted her off the ground and all of her college fumblings became as insignificant as bumping into someone on a stairwell. She felt exactly like she’d never been fully alive before the moment Daryl first touched her. And it wasn’t just sex; he was inside her. She’d never really thought about that phrase until that night, when in the middle of it she looked up and saw herself . . . every bit of herself . . . in his eyes.
Claire shakes the memory off. How could she possibly say any of that, especially here? And so she simply says, “Abs. I saw abs.” And it’s odd; she feels worse for dismissing Daryl as a set of stomach muscles than she does for being in this hotel room with a boy she just met.
Shane nods again at the cell phone in her hands. “So . . . what are you going to tell him?”
“No idea.”
“Tell him we’re falling in love; that’ll end it.”
“Yeah?” She looks up. “Are we?”
He smiles as he snaps the buttons on his faux Western shirt. “Maybe. We could be. How will we know if we don’t spend the day together.”
“Impulsive much?”
“Key to my quirky appeal.”
Goddamn it; she thinks that might be the case—his appeal. She recalls Shane saying that he married the harsh, truth-telling waitress after dating for only a few months. She’s not surprised—who even uses the words falling in love fourteen hours after meeting someone? There is something undeniably . . . optimistic about him. And for a moment, she wonders if she ever had such a quality. “Can I ask you something?” Claire says. “Why the Do
“Oh, no,” he says. “You’re just looking for a laugh again.”
“I told you, I’m sorry about that. It’s just that for three years Michael has rejected every idea I bring in as being too dark, too expensive, too period . . . not commercial enough. Then you come in yesterday with—no offense—the darkest, least commercial, most expensive period film I’ve ever heard about, and he loves it. It’s just so . . . unlikely. I just wondered where it came from.”
Shane shrugs and reaches for one of his socks on the floor. “I have three older sisters. All of my early memories are of them. I loved them; I was their toy, like a doll they dressed up. When I was six or so, my oldest sister, Olivia, developed an eating disorder. Just about destroyed our family.
“It was awful. Olivia was thirteen, and she’d go in the bathroom and throw up. She’d spend her lunch money on diet pills, squirrel food away in her clothes. At first my parents yelled at her, but that did no good. She didn’t care. It was like she wanted to waste away. You could see the bones in her arms. Her hair falling out.
“My parents tried everything. Therapists and psychologists, inpatient treatment. My ex thinks that’s when they really started becoming so overprotective—I don’t know. What I remember is lying in bed one night and hearing my mom weep and my father trying to comfort her, Mom just saying over and over, ‘My baby is starving to death.’ ” Shane still has the sock in his hand, but he doesn’t put it on. He just stares at it.
“What happened?” Claire asks quietly.
“Hmm?” He looks up. “Oh, she’s fine now. The treatment clicked or something, I guess. Olivia just . . . got over it. She’s still got some food hang-ups—she’s the sister who never brings food for Thanksgiving, always makes a centerpiece instead. Little pumpkins. Cornucopias. And don’t even mention the word brownie around her. But she came out okay. Married this jackass, but they’re happy enough. Have two kids. The fu
“But I never got over it. When I was seven or eight, I’d lie awake at night, praying that if God would make Olivia better, I’d go to church, become a minister . . . something. And so when it didn’t happen right away—you know how kids are—I blamed myself, co
He stares off, rubs the inside of his arm. “By high school, Olivia was fine, and I was over my religious phase. But after that, I was always fascinated by stories of starvation and deprivation. I read everything I could find, did my school reports on the siege of Leningrad and the Potato Famine . . . I especially liked stories of ca
Shane looks down and sees the sock in his hands. “I guess I identified with poor William Eddy, who escaped himself, but who could do nothing while his family starved in that awful camp.” He absentmindedly puts the sock on. “So when I read in Michael Deane’s book how pitching a movie is all about believing in yourself, pitching yourself—it was like a vision: I knew exactly the story I needed to pitch.”
A vision?Believing in yourself? Claire looks down, wondering if this Just-Do-It-Dude confidence is what Michael was actually responding to yesterday. And what had attracted her last night. Hell, maybe they can make Do
Claire glances back down at her BlackBerry and sees an e-mail from Michael’s producing partner, Da
C—Rbrt says your setting up pitch for Unvsl Mnday on Do
She looks up at Shane, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching her. She looks back down at Da
“Ah, shit,” she says.
“Another text from your boyfriend?”
Would they really do this? She recalls Da
“What?” Shane stands and she looks over at him, his big doe eyes and those bushy sideburns framing his face. “Are you okay?”
Claire considers not telling him, letting him have his weekend of triumph. She could just put on blinders and finish out the weekend, help Michael with his doomed pitch and his missing actress, then on Monday accept the cult museum job . . . start stocking up on cat food. But Shane is staring at her with those moon-eyes, and she realizes that she likes him and that if she’s ever going to break away it has to be now.
“Shane, Michael has no intention of making your movie.”
“What?” He laughs a little. “What are you talking about?”
She sits on the bed next to him and explains the whole thing, as she sees it now, starting with the deal Michael made with the studio—how, at the low point of his career, the studio took on some of Michael’s debt in exchange for the rights to some of his old films. “There were two other parts to the deal,” she says. “Michael got an office on the lot. And the studio got a first-look deal, meaning that Michael had to show them all of his ideas and he could only go to other studios if they passed. Well, the first-look was a joke. For five years the studio rejected every script Michael brought in. And when he took those scripts and treatments and books out to other studios—if you already know that Universal has rejected an idea, why would you ever want it?