Violet & Claire Read online

  Jealousy? Was I jealous? I didn’t know it then. Maybe if I had known it, things would have been different. All I knew was that I was feeling suddenly unsettled, as if something I needed in order to survive was about to be taken away.

  It was not a feeling I could handle. I decided that I would hold on to the one thing no one could take from me—my work.

  The next day, Richter called me into his office where he was pumping iron and talking on a cell phone. He didn’t get up but he wiped the sweat from his face and pointed over to his desk.

  “The envelope, please.”

  I went over to pick up a small packet marked with my name. Richter got off the phone, still chuckling at his joke.

  “One of these days I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re sitting there in that audience full of beautiful people, wearing the most devastating Alaia gown and you hear those very words followed by, ‘And the best screenplay goes to…Violet Samms.’”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “Why do you think I’ll win an Oscar?”

  Richter got up from his bench press, threw a towel around his neck and stood watching me. His tone was patient if slightly condescending. “I’ve been in this business long enough to recognize raw talent when I see it, Miss. I hope you have more faith in me than that.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Richter,” I said. I always tried to use his name. It seemed like a power-business type thing to do.

  “Aren’t you going to open your envelope, Violet?” (It seemed he was into power business too).

  I already guessed what was there by the weight and the sound. I was right: keys. He must have seen my anxiety although I tried to hide it. I really hoped Richter wasn’t trying to get me to sleep with him in order to keep my job.

  But he reassured me. “No worries. They are keys to the office. Any time you need to come after hours and work on your writing, feel free. I want to stimulate your budding creativity.”

  The words “stimulate” and “budding” still worried me, but I got the feeling Richter’s seduction wasn’t as literal as, well, shall we say, literary. It seemed like if he really wanted to sleep with me he wouldn’t have bothered with such an elaborate plan. And it might be a kick to work at the office some time alone at night; it might inspire an interesting story.

  I figured that by focusing on my work I’d be able to ignore Claire’s obsession with Brookman. I figured it would wane after a couple of days when she realized what kind of a guy he really was. But I was wrong.

  We were sitting at the Raunch Room one night watching the boys mosh around in the pit and Claire wasn’t drinking her soda or listening to the thrashing music but scribbling in a notebook. I asked her what she was doing and she said she was writing her assignment for Brookman. I told her we had a week.

  “I feel so inspired! I can’t stop thinking about that poem he read us. Isn’t he beautiful?” she drooled.

  “Who?” I said, lighting a cigarette. I mean, she could have been talking about someone else, a mosh-boy for example.

  When she squealed Brookman’s name I wished I hadn’t asked the obvious. “He’s all right if you like that type,” I said.

  I glanced over at the stage where just a short time ago Flint Cassidy had reeled and screamed like a boy-Violet in holey jeans. That type—that Brookman type—what a bore. I needed more excitement, I told myself.

  Yes, more excitement. Maybe my need for excitement, for something to really happen in my dull life, combined with the jealousy that I couldn’t acknowledge yet, was what made me vulnerable to the whim of my brutal muse—a sleek tan middle-aged fox in an Armani suit who had suggested, perhaps in response to my glum mood, that I use the office that night, see if a change of atmosphere might help my work. And I was up for a bit of a change, maybe a bit of adventure.

  They say be careful what you wish for.

  At first when I saw them in Richter’s office, I thought, this can’t be real. But what is it then? Am I taking after Judy? Am I insane? Or, is it real? Should I get the fuck out of here right now? But I didn’t; I stayed. Violet Samms—always eager for a good story. He had counted on that. And I listened. And took note. The way he wanted.

  Richter turned slowly toward the door and the petite blonde actress recovered merrily from her swoon. They looked at me. They laughed.

  “What the…” I started to say. I have seen and heard of some pretty sick things in my young life, but this was one of the most original.

  “Don’t be upset, Violet,” he said. “It’s for you. A gift for you.”

  Richter’s gift was a staging of an idea for a script: young Girl Friday, with wild ambition to write for the silver screen, stumbles across something in her agent-boss’s office one night. As he’s testing a hot babe for a scene in which she’s murdered, things take a turn. It’s no longer play acting, the murder is real. And all of the above is witnessed by Girl Friday, as was Boss-Guy’s intent—she can’t let anyone know—what will he do to her? But he’s a sicky in more ways than one—he wants to make sure she gets it all on paper, she has a story to write for him now. High concept. Blockbuster. And, most especially, very, very wicked.

  This was the story that opened the door to a different world. I’d always imagined that when that door opened it would lead to emerald citadels and lost utopian horizons, ghost towns swaggering with gun-toting cowboy idols and petticoat whores, swank palmy night clubs where six-foot-tall champagne bottles danced with bare-shouldered beauties, vistas made of paint, gauze and diamonds. But my story would not become a healing vision, a sublime dream, imprinted on the consciousness of an audience who longed to heal their damaged hearts in the darkness of a theater decorated like a palace or a shrine. My story would drip blood and make them writhe in their eight-dollar seats. I saw it everywhere I looked, imposed on the night like a drive-in screen glimpsed on a highway—a window through to another, bigger, even more violent universe.

  What had Richter done? By using what I’d seen, did that make me guilty of something, too? And what would it do to me? Playing in the dark. Would I become Vile again, secretly collecting razor blades in an asylum and hiding them under my tongue to carve screenplays on my body?

  All I knew was that I had to write till it was over. And so I wrote.

  Fade to black.

  Claire

  I haven’t written in my journal for an eternity. I just haven’t been depressed enough, or happy enough. I know that’s not the way a mature writer behaves, but I can’t help it. I either have to be deliriously upset or deliriously in love. Well, now I’m kind of both.

  The upset has to do with Violet. At first we raced through space, like shadows and light; her rants, my raves; her dark hair, my blond; black dresses, white. She a purple-black African-violet-dark butterfly and I a white moth. We were two wild ponies, Dawn and Midnight, the wind electrifying our manes and our hooves quaking the city; we were photo negatives of each other, together making the perfect image of a girl. Projecting our movie onto the sky.

  Violet is strong like muscle and sinew and sophisticated like silk velvet, liqueur. I do think she has lived a number of other lives in which she learned how to look at things differently. She sees angles and light, she hears tones in voices, she watches stories unfolding when I’m not even aware that a story is taking place. (For Violet a story is always taking place.)

  Violet believed that I had something too, some quality that no one had ever noticed in me before. And she defended me that day, with the sandwich. She didn’t even question it. I mean, the reason they were harassing me wasn’t just about the wings. It was the thing I said about faeries in class, how I said I think I’m a descendent of an ancient race who knew the secrets of nature and radiated light and were then forced underground and corrupted in the folklore into weak little flitty fantasy things. So I guess those kids had the right to bomb me for revealing something like that, but Violet didn’t think so.

  We were going to make our own movie. We were going to sh
ow the world itself the way we wanted it to be, and maybe then the world would turn into that place—a place where two girls rode a wild black Mustang through a night smeared with starlight, thick with butterflies.

  But then this weird thing happened, and I’m still not even sure what it was. Something about that new part of the script Violet started writing ever since she got the job at that big agency. And now she’s sold it for a fortune, but the change in her came before she sold it. It didn’t seem to just be about the money. She was sort of troubled by something. And it’s worse now. I can see it in her eyes like a little reel of film, playing over and over again. But I can’t get close enough to see the images on the screen. I don’t know what to do.

  On top of that there is Peter Brookman. When I saw his picture in the ad, it was like finding the first piece of the jigsaw puzzle that would fill up the empty place in me, the place that had been growing and growing, bigger and emptier, since I was three, since my dad left. I don’t remember my dad. But there is a sensation I have of someone tall standing in the shadows, of the smell of cigarettes and the texture of corduroy and a desire to be enveloped by the shadows and smoke and fabric, a desire to go with him when he left. I can’t see his face. And my mom destroyed all the pictures—decapitating him in them. I just know that he left and she got fatter and I got thinner, both of us with longing. That my heart closed. That I started feeling different, not human, part of the faeries, because real living girls were never this ice-cold and alone.

  But every time I’m around Peter Brookman it’s like another piece filling the emptiness. The finished puzzle is a tall poet with big hands and full lips and sad eyes that turn down at the corners, this man who carries a dog named Lord Byron around in his pocket and who asks me questions and reads the poetry that I write. Someday maybe the puzzle will be complete inside of me.

  But between these two emotions—this weirdness with Violet and this need for my poetry teacher—I’m spinning. I can’t seem to concentrate. It also has to do with making such a big move, I guess. L.A. is so different from the Midwest. Most people would just love the change—not being cold in the winter, so cold that your bones feel like rods of ice, ready to crack—and I do love the jacaranda trees, with their purple nipple-shaped blossoms and castanet-shaped pods, and the pink tassels hanging from the silk trees. It’s also much nicer to be in a real house instead of the trailer park. I don’t want to be ungrateful. If Aunt Meg hadn’t died and left us this place, we’d still be living in that trailer with the fake flowers in the window box and the flimsy little wall separating my bed from Mom’s. But I miss the fields full of puffy white Queen Anne’s lace and the high stalks of corn where I could hide, making wigs for my dolls out of shiny yellow corn silk and plucking off the raw kernels to feed the birds. I miss how those same fields lit up with green electric sparks at night—fireflies, which to me are almost as magical as seeing faeries. Trying to catch them to wear in my hair. Here you don’t see dream-eyed deer or rascal raccoons or the red baby foxes I found, boxing like puppies under the hill by the lake; here you see maybe just an occasional pigeon or squirrel. Everyone here is so beautiful and well-dressed and tan like TV ads and their cars are so new and lunar looking. They have mansions perched on stilts on the top of hills, in spite of the earthquakes, and huge gas-slurping cars even though they have to drive an hour to get anywhere, and they wear sunglasses all year long. Many of the flowers here are beautiful but also poisonous—oleander and belladonna. The air is poisonous, too, but deceptive, because at sunset it is rose and it shines, and at night it smells of jasmine. I want to go and hide in my abandoned barn that everyone said was haunted but where I felt safer than at school, writing poems by candlelight and hoping for ghosts, but it was always just cows or owls; or in the graveyard among the ancient headstones, making up stories about the dead. Like that little girl, Emily Mercy (1910–1919). I imagined her running with me through the cornfields, her long braids flying, her hands colder than marble. The kids at school thought I was weird, living in the trailer park with a mother who never spoke to anyone, spending all my time alone roaming the hills searching for signs of faerie homes. It’s not that I literally think I’m a faerie. It’s just that I feel so different from most people. And this idea of a race living underground in caverns, spending all their days dancing and playing the fiddle and eating flowers and reciting poetry and sharing their dreams, that to me sounds much more real than the way people live in this world, hating and fighting and wanting and hurting.

  I still think a lot about those boys with the shotguns. I still dream about it. Running through the leaves crackling and crunching under my feet, my fingers ready to drop off with cold. Falling on the ground with my face smashed into the dirt, praying that they won’t see me, that the earth will crack open and let me in.

  Here no one chases me with shotguns, but I’m afraid of them anyway. Except for Violet.

  That’s why I was so glad when she agreed to go to Joshua Tree with me. I’ve always wanted to see the desert. And it will be good for her, I think, and give me the chance to write and catch up on all the things I’m feeling.

  There is no way to describe the desert in regular language. I want to make up a new language for it. Peter Brookman says that is what poetry is to him—“a self-made language of the heart with which to describe the indescribable.”

  Did you know that the Joshua trees are not really trees at all but a kind of lily? Like the flower in the annunciation. The graceful creamy bell that the angel gave to Mary to announce the mystical conception, as if the secret of the birth was trumpeting up from inside the petals. I read that Joshua trees are a descendent of that flower.

  We drove out there in Violet’s car. It feels good to get away from the city. It felt as if we’d really escaped when we got to the life-sized dinosaurs at Cabazon. One’s expression reminded me of something Peter Brookman’s Lord Byron does with his teeth sometimes. In a way it was sad to think that the only dinosaurs left are tourist attractions marking the place where you can buy candy bars, but still I was glad they were there, casting their huge shadows onto the violet-colored mountains. Then we saw the windmills spinning manically all over the hills like fallen stars trying to get back home. The air tasted hot-dry-clean and my ears started to pop as we climbed into the higher altitudes.

  Violet turned off the highway and we bumped along over this dirt road, past more Joshua trees. The sun was setting and the sky was this glorious shade of pink, and forever. We found an empty campground and lay our sleeping bags out under the Joshua trees. I started to build a fire and Violet asked how I knew how to do that. I was glad she seemed a little interested in something, so I told her about playing in the woods and how sometimes it got so cold that the only way I could avoid going back to the trailer was to learn to build a campfire. We sat near ours, as close as we could get without burning up. In the firelight Violet looked beautiful, spooky and flickering; she still didn’t say much. We roasted marshmallows for dinner and licked the charred sugar goo off our fingers. Then we weren’t sure what else to do and the fire was dying, so we got into our sleeping bags.

  It was hard for me to sleep because the moon was so bright, but I could hear Violet’s breathing and I knew she was sleeping, which was good; I don’t know how much sleep she has been getting lately. I felt lonely, though, with her asleep, really empty. I wondered what Peter Brookman was doing and if he’d read my latest assignment, and if he were here if the space in me would feel filled up. I wish I wasn’t a girl who needed so much but a little free creature that slept in deserts and ran on clouds and lived on lilies.

  In the morning when I opened my eyes a desert bunny was watching me. I elbowed Violet to show her, but when she turned over, it ran away. Part of me wanted to follow it like Alice in Wonderland and see where it took me, but I was pretty hungry; so instead of looking for rabbit holes I made coffee and got out the bananas and bagels we’d brought.

  Violet got up and went to sit on a rock in the sun. I
brought her food, but she only wanted coffee. I told her I was worried; it seemed like she hadn’t been eating at all.

  She just shrugged and picked up her Variety—the one with the article about her in it, of course: “TEEN SCREENWRITER CUTS 6-FIGURE DEAL.” It was obvious she didn’t want to talk, so I chased this yellow butterfly that was flitting around.

  After a while I noticed Violet was watching me.

  I said, “I love it out here. Maybe we should move.”

  “There’s not much of a film community,” she said.

  I told her we could make our own movies. About faeries.

  This made her roll her eyes and I got mad. I went into my same old speech about how the faeries were serious, how a few of them had survived the holocaust and that some of us were descended from them. I told her that I thought Peter Brookman was.

  “I hope he’s not a faerie, for your sake!” Violet said.

  I thought it was a pretty stupid joke, but I could tell she was upset that I’d brought him up so I ignored it.

  That therapist they sent me to once said I need to forget about the faeries and realize that I am a real live girl, that I can’t live on ice and scraps; but I’m afraid if I become real, I’ll be like my mother—bloated and sad. I’d rather chew morsels and suck flowers and wear feathers. I never want to be like her. She used to be this fragile girl who believed my father had given her wings. I’d seen pictures of her from then and read the love poems she’d written to him. He was her professor at the university. He came into that small town with the cobblestone streets, like one of the beautiful men on the posters on her walls come to life, told her her essays were good, told her about what it was like outside of Ohio, beyond the cornfields, gave her books to read. She was a little freshman, a little country girl living in a trailer park, but she had heard the Beatles, she had read Kerouac. And she had met him—my father. A huge dark-shouldered silhouette against a sky swollen with summer rain. That’s what I imagined. A voice reading her words that made her heart explode like the sky when rain finally came. And she was lying in a field of Queen Anne’s lace and fireflies, she was staring at the constellations and listening to him quoting Walt Whitman. His love could fly her away anywhere, she believed. But then after only a few years he flew alone. She had to move out of the house and back to the trailer park. She was left thinking about California because it was warm and because he had spoken about the way you’d never be cold like in the Midwest. Your blood turns to honey, he said. Your blood turns to the blue Pacific. The rock stars and film stars live in the canyons in houses with gardens full of plants that have aphrodisiac properties. Big sparkling glass windows reverberate with drumbeats, while the city lights keep the beat below. Spotlights fan back and forth across the sky all night long. He was going to California, maybe, she thought. She’d go there, too, with me when she had enough money. Leave the trailer park. Then Meg died and left us the house. But by that time my mom had changed so completely he would never have recognized her, even if she’d been able to find him. She didn’t recognize herself.