Chapter 7
Hollywood Hits is easy enough to get to, if you hop in the back of Zach’s sister’s car.
The high school girls seem unfazed, happy to spend the afternoon shoplifting temporary tattoos from Wet Seal and eating sticky orange chicken from the food court.
There’s nothing particularly appealing about Casey Papadopoulos and her friend Daria, but their overwrought mixtape and deep analysis of senior boys is a small price to pay for the destination.
“Don’t you guys want to go to the beach?” Casey asks, eyeing them in the rearview.
“Apparently not,” says Sebastian.
“I don’t get it,” says Zach. “Why are we going to a movie when we can just watch TV?”
“Film is art, television is furniture,” Viola says. She heard that somewhere.
“What does that even mean?” Sebastian asks.
Obviously, he wouldn’t understand. He still watches cartoons.
She shouldn’t have to explain: films are vehicles for humanity.
They elevate understanding, take you to unimaginable places.
They are recorded and packaged and available to rent forever and ever from Blockbuster; the recording confers its own importance.
Television is cardboard. It is cheap microwave dinners. It is designed to disappear.
She chooses the simpler argument: “The actors are better.”
“It’s that one with Orson Grey, right?” Casey asks. “That like, oldy-timey one?”
“Lola, you are obsessed,” Sebastian says.
“Shut up.”
“What’s it called again?” Daria asks.
“Malentendu.” Orson plays an aspiring novelist whose poor command of the language and proclivity for mishaps lands him in the custody of a beautiful prison warden, played by Juliette Binoche.
She will watch this film as closely as she has watched all of his films, as closely as she has followed his narrowly avoided marriages and (happy!) breakups.
Their imaginary relationship has blossomed in the margins of her life.
The waiting room of the dentist’s office, for instance, where she flips through trash magazines, imagining her face next to his.
Her name scribbled one hundred times in the pages of a notebook, Viola Grey (gray-violet, a whole spectrum of color and light emerging from the possibility).
In the same notebook, she has written forty pages of a fictional saga in which she is sometimes his wife and sometimes the wife of the misunderstood Bond villain he plays on screen.
As it turns out, Doctor Meltdown is actually very tender, and receptive to her feminine updates to his volcanic lair.
It is childish, but she picks at her crush like Sebastian picks at the skin next to his fingernails.
“Sounds lame,” Zach says.
“Well, it’s not.”
“He was in that show with your mom, right?” In the rearview mirror, Casey’s eyes are bright.
“How do you know that?” Sebastian asks.
“Well, our mom used to watch it. Like, all the time.”
“Don’t be awkward, Casey,” Zach warns.
“What! It’s true. She’s obsessed, like, you guys are like these celebrity children.”
“She was only on it a few times, I think,” Viola says.
“Not the way my mom talks about it.”
“Really?” Sebastian is watching the back of Casey’s head with intensity, and Viola can see an idea lodging into his mind, can see it is going to become a problem. Her problem, probably. “We’ve never seen it. I didn’t think it was that big.”
The thought of her mother’s acting fills Viola with dread: other people experiencing her, owning a piece of her that Viola will never know—better not to think about it.
Casey is just exaggerating to be nice. Most people do.
When it comes to dead people, everyone is always smarter or kinder or more successful than they were in real life.
Besides, if she had been really famous, they would have gone out to Los Angeles, lived glamorous lives.
They would have known Orson, really. But, being sensible, her mother must have realized it was impossible to make it out there.
She stayed home and took them on field trips and learned how to hit a tennis ball.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some die before they get the chance.
“No, it was like, a big deal. Like, back then. I mean, I’m really sorry, like for your loss and everything. It’s like, really sad. That she passed.”
“… Music the great communi-ca-tah, use two sticks to make it in the nay-cha…”
Zach is reaching to turn up the Chili Peppers, committed to changing the conversation through chaos. But it’s not enough to lift the fog that has descended, the strangeness of their mother’s name in someone else’s mouth, in someone else’s living room.
Sebastian is looking at his knees. Viola can feel the racing of his mind.
At the ticket counter, tingling, she hands over $8.
50 in exchange for two hours and twenty minutes with the love of her life.
Hurry into screen seven, scramble for seats in the back row!
As the lights dim there is nothing else to think about, not the couple sucking on each other’s face or Zach Papadopoulos’s thick scent or the empty candy wrappers on the floor or whether your grandmother has noticed your absence.
The title card falls and the romance begins.
Paris, the thirties. Viola is absorbed by the direct address, the searching look in Orson’s eyes that only ever seems to call out to her.
The warden is slipping Orson pages of the newspaper to read.
She is also, as it turns out, a romantic, and understands that man cannot live on bread (or in this case, beef stroganoff) alone.
Viola can no longer tell if the look of wry gratitude that Orson is giving the warden is the same as the look he gave her on the night of the funeral.
As she looks around at all the faces basking in the great projected light of him, she feels an almost-jealousy, a rupture of the illusion that he is hers alone.
I’m the only one who actually knows him, she thinks, a memory of dashboard heat blasting onto her hands.
Even as a child, he saw her clearly—someone to be taken seriously.
No: despite his miraculous rise to fame, despite all the world thinking they own him, he has always been her secret friend.
Orson scrawls a poem on the back of the newspaper. Maybe I should learn French, she thinks. Maybe I should cut my hair short like Juliette Binoche.
“Honh Honh Honh.” Zach is applying a bad French accent to Orson’s moving mouth. “You very pretty lady, let me show you ma baguette.”
“Shut it!”
In the light of a full moon, the warden opens the cell to Orson’s room and removes her trousers.
As she watches, Viola awakens to Orson as a man with cheekbones like cut gems, a man who looks good with his shirt off.
Though the air conditioner is aggressive, a pleasant warmth enters her body.
Around them, parents who had underestimated the PG-13 rating are instructing their children to avert their eyes. Sebastian looks uncomfortable.
“Ooh! Make me a nice French bébé with a leetle mustache!” Zach whispers. Sebastian snorts so loudly that a man in front of them turns around and glares.
“I will kill you,” she whispers.
In blessed silence, Juliette opens the window to a new morning.
Viola imagines herself living in this beautiful way, autumn sunshine hitting the terrace of her European apartment, a book at a thirty-degree angle to the table, a tiny coffee in an exquisite ceramic mug.
A pastry. A man, sitting across from her, unspeaking but glowing in mutual presence, each of them thinking profound, essential thoughts. Clean. Perfect.
“Dad, was Mom, like, a celebrity?”
The question is a nonquestion, unanswerable.
Al’s son is helping himself to seconds, tearing up bread into small pieces and mopping up barbecue juice.
He’d been talking about high school, how different it was going to be, how they should start by impressing their teachers with the summer reading.
Everything counts, he’d been saying, but he hadn’t counted on this.
“Well, there are gradations of celebrities.”
“Okay, but like, would people call her that?”
“Some people, maybe. But it would be an overstatement.” To him, she was Susan.
And now she is no one. Seven years have made her a figment to them, a voiceless, smiling woman in family photographs.
He has simplified her into a person who existed solely for them.
What is he afraid of? The door to another reality, the invitation to imbalance.
“Can we watch her show anywhere?”
“You know, Seb, it was really just a few episodes. I’m not sure there are copies. Soaps, they never had that sort of thing.”
No, he can’t admit to it; not to the tapes, not to any of it. He used to worry that they would hate her for all the time she denied them. But now he worries that they might hate him instead.
“How’s Grandma?” he asks.
“Oh,” says Viola. “She’s good.”