Chapter 2 Everyone Holds the Cards to Their Downfall #2
Jack and June stand by a wagon, watching her as if she’s fallen from the sky until Jack realizes what happened and scans the street as well.
Jack, famous not just for his acting but also his heavy right hook, is thirty-four years old, with a bio that waxes poetic about his rustic start on a ranch, a past that left him rough around the edges.
That man came into the world swinging at the doctor, Magda Lockwood, the studio’s favorite tabloid reporter, has written more than once.
Regardless, men still want to end their days on the barstool beside him, and women still want to start their nights in his bed.
Even now, Frankie notices the option girl getting closer, gaze fixed on him as he takes off his hat and runs his hand through the flop of his dark-blond hair.
Beside him, June pretends not to notice.
A couple for three years now, they increase ticket sales simply by holding hands in public.
It’s their movie, Desert Son, that’s about to premiere.
A Western that fell behind schedule when the director discovered that June was afraid of horses.
What’s next, Nico asked, an island romance so we can find out she’s scared of water and coconuts?
For some reason, Jack’s carrying a fishing pole. Frankie squints at it. “There’s no fishing in this movie. Is there?”
“I’ll tell you what there’s not,” he says loudly. “There’s no marlin in a river.” The property master, standing beside a wagon, shakes his head. “Even baby marlin,” Jack continues, eyeing the man, “which, believe it or not, are still marlin.”
June’s production assistant hands her a glass of water, but from the slow sip and the new-fawn wobble in June’s step, Frankie knows it’s not water.
To Hollywood, Prohibition only means hidden doors and hidden flasks, covert fun and tunnels that provide party guests with routes out in case of a raid.
June winces as she takes another sip, and Frankie decides she’ll mention this to Nico.
June, though only twenty-six, is more famous than royalty and tends to leave pandemonium in her wake, the result of an inexplicable insecurity and a mood that too often swerves from bright optimism to dark despondency.
There is a wilted flower at her core, Nico’s said.
“Marlin are saltwater,” Jack explains to Frankie. “Saltwater fish are different than freshwater.”
Another sip, another wince, and June says, “We know all about marlin now. It’s been a captivating half an hour.”
Frankie catches the option girl shifting over a few feet—so she’s directly in Jack’s line of vision—as she lifts her dress to adjust her stocking. With every second, Frankie’s resolve to talk to Nico is slipping. “I’ve never fished.”
When she looks back up, Jack’s eyes are wide. “You’ve never fished?”
“From Montana,” she hears the option girl say to her friend, about Jack. “And he plays tennis and boxes.”
“I stole a fish at the Fulton Fish Market,” Frankie says.
“That’s not fishing.”
She shrugs. “I went home with a fish.” He laughs. But she won’t let him distract her, so gets back on her bike. “Sorry, have to see Nico.”
“There a problem?”
Suddenly June’s all attention as well. There’s a twitch in her eyelid. Watch her eyes, Nico’s said. You wouldn’t think an actress would have a tic, but it’s how you know she’s not acting.
“No problem, I just wanted to talk to him,” Frankie says, but then she remembers that he wanted to talk to her. “Or maybe there is a problem? I don’t know.”
“Would you please take this?” June says, unclasping a barrette from her own hair and handing it to Frankie. “I swear, Frankie, it’s as if your hair is at war with itself.”
While all around her are perfectly sculpted finger waves, Frankie doesn’t have the time or patience.
Despite her lack of extensive grooming, she’s still heard people say she’s beautiful, a claim that catches her off guard.
She’s actually quite beautiful, she heard recently, a statement that rose at the end with bewilderment, as if maybe Frankie had done her best to hide this fact.
But a bit feral, I’d say. That was the part Frankie loved.
Now, without any idea of what she’s doing, she fastens the barrette and tries not to look at Jack, who she knows will start laughing.
“Mr. Sawyer,” a man says, approaching. “I’m with Acqua di Parma. You might know our fragrance, Colonia. If you have a minute, Mr. Marconi was saying—”
“Sorry, all I endorse is a bar of soap.”
“Sure, sure. But I do come bearing gifts. My wife tells me you’ve got one hell of a sweet tooth.”
The man holds out a box of chocolates, and Frankie pauses, always confused by this world in which rich people are handed so much for free. Jack, however, doesn’t care that it’s free—only that it’s chocolate—and Frankie uses the moment to escape, rehearsing her speech.
Nico, it’s time.
She parks her bike in front of their office building, which is two stories, the first level dressed up with fake storefronts. Across the street is a town square with a quaint center park and water fountain, the kind of life most of the people here have filmed but not lived.
Inside, Nico’s secretary, Betty, spots her and holds up her hand like a traffic cop. Glasses and short hair. She smells like expensive perfume, like the crushed petals of a thousand French roses. She nods toward Nico’s office, and whispers, “The powers that be.”
Frankie falls silent, listening. The powers that be is Nico’s term for the top brass at the studio, men who could decide on a whim to fire everyone in their line of vision, men who could destroy an actor’s career in such a variety of ways that Betty once joked they had a card catalog of options: A for audition—put a significant chip into an actor’s confidence by holding auditions for the role they were set to star in; B for budget—allocate such a low budget that the entire film looks cheap and tanks overnight; C for character—force the actor to play a character that audiences are meant to hate.
Page seven! Page seven, he kills the family dog!
one of their former stars screamed when he read a rewrite on the film he was doing, a rewrite ordered the day after someone spotted the actor talking with a competing studio.
“Are they,” Frankie whispers about the top executives, “in there?”
Betty makes a face. “I don’t think they’ve ever gone to someone else’s office. No, they’re on the phone.”
Quietly, so she might catch part of the conversation, Frankie moves to the side of the room with the parrots.
Romeo and Juliet: two red-crowned Amazons, lime green with red foreheads, an irony in their names since they’re forever forced together.
On one side of the office bullpen is what started off as a massive birdhouse in the same style moderne as the new Chrysler Building in New York City, complete with steel spire, sunburst motifs, and geometric patterns.
But despite how much money the head of the studio paid for the birds from an exotic animal dealer in Mexico, he quickly decided they were too loud, and since then producer after producer has schlepped the parrots around until, at last, they landed with Nico.
Nico, who enlisted the help of the studio’s metalworkers to open up one side of the cage and build what he calls the addition—a giant floor-to-ceiling enclosure stocked with tropical plants and a wall that the studio artists shaped and painted to look like lava rock, complete with ferns that require biweekly misting.
Betty, not a fan of the noise, must’ve decided to let the birds sleep for as long as possible, and so Frankie draws up the curtain that covers them.
It kills Frankie that they’re inside like this, but no one could release them without incurring the studio head’s wrath.
This is better than being in the wild, Nico has said.
Here, their only predator is Betty, and if I’m a betting man, I got the birds to win that one.
“You eat?” Betty asks. “This working-on-a-Sunday bit has thrown off my schedule.”
Frankie nods, though she forgot to eat lunch, too consumed with all she needs to say to Nico. “A sandwich the size of my arm.”
“I can never tell when you’re lying.” A laugh. “Nico’s trained you well.”
Frankie smiles. “Or maybe I trained him.”
Betty tilts her head as if considering. “I might actually believe that.”
Though she shouldn’t take it as a compliment, Frankie does.
“Did I tell you I saw one of them outside the window?” Betty asks.
It takes Frankie a second to realize she’s talking about the parrots. Frankie looks at Juliet, a bit fainter with her colors, who edges back and forth on her perch. “One got out?”
“Oh no, I mean there was a third. It was outside the window. Juliet, or maybe it was Romeo, I don’t know who’s who, and I don’t care, but one of them was going crazy. Drove me crazy.”
These birds are not native to the United States.
They don’t live here, and so what Betty saw—if indeed the same species—must have been an anomaly, an escapee perhaps, and now Frankie’s picturing a lone, solitary bird.
What would it do upon finding two of its friends behind the glass?
Would it want to join them and no longer be alone?
Or would it prize its freedom, no matter the expense?
Frankie doesn’t know who she feels worse for—their birds that are caged or the one who lives by itself, its calls unanswered.
“I hear Nico took you to see a house,” Betty says. “Is it just for the studio to have? Because we’ve got the bungalows if someone’s coming to town. I can arrange to have one cleaned. Is someone coming to town?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Did you like it?”
“It was tiny. In Edendale.” The Edendale district, home to the original studios, Mack Sennett, Keystone, and Disney. All hills and steep streets and wooded secrecy. Frankie’s favorite part of town. Where she lives now is just on its edge, in a fourplex.