Chapter 12 Be More Like Meryl Streep
Be More Like Meryl Streep
Hi Mr. Branksome,
I don’t know if you’re actually going to get this email, but I thought I’d give it a shot.
It was nice to meet you over the phone the other night.
I want to surprise my mom by coming home for Thanksgiving—she thinks I have to stay at school.
I was wondering if you could help me with the logistics.
Like, does she have plans? Will she be home on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving Day?
Normally I’d ask my dad this, but of course that isn’t going to work now that I’m in my Child of Divorce era.
I mean, I guess he could find out, or her friend Tiffany could, but I thought you might be the most logical person to ask since you’re on-site. And you guys seem tight.
Anyway, I got this email address off your website, and for all I know it goes to “your people” and not you, but if you get this and you’re willing to be my informant, can you let me know?
Thanks,
Esme Johnston
Dear Esme,
I accept this mission, and I will get back to you with intel as soon as I can.
Sincerely,
Jack
Jack didn’t particularly want to play secret agent on Esme’s behalf, but he didn’t see that he had a choice.
He was, after all, emailing her while sprawled out next to her mother’s pool waiting for crows to visit him.
He also didn’t want to come off as a person who was “tight” with Blair Kellermoon, but he didn’t have any control over how others perceived him.
He closed the computer and his eyes. He’d just rest for a moment. He’d been making good on his vow to work at night, and he was feeling, for the first time since he’d gotten here, like he might actually pull off this book.
And yes, he thought maybe if he closed his eyes, acted like he wasn’t paying attention, the crows would come. If Morticia and Edward were anything to go by, he was good at attracting animals with his indifference.
The catch here, though, was that he wasn’t indifferent. For some damn reason, he was preoccupied with these crows.
Well, not “for some damn reason.” He was preoccupied with them because there had been a big black bird in that vision, that flash, he’d had when Blair invited him to LA.
He’d been leaving food out every day and watching the crows eat it from inside.
Every time he tried to do so from outside, they held themselves aloof.
They would only eat when he retreated. He had done some research and had replaced the granola with healthier-for-crows and cheaper-for-humans unsalted peanuts, because apparently he had become the kind of person who cared about the health of a bunch of wild birds he was trying to make friends with.
His LA-ification was coming along nicely.
Today he’d thought he’d try his luck waiting for them outside—but prone. Stretched out on a lounge chair. With his eyes closed. Because he was trying to make a bunch of wild crows believe he didn’t care about them.
It worked.
Oh my God, it worked. He heard them first, and for a long moment he stayed perfectly still, kept his eyes closed.
But he was alive inside, his blood beating a path through his veins, a bubble of something he very much feared was joy—though why would he fear joy?
He resolved to examine the question later—rising through his chest.
When he finally dared open his eyes, the birds went still.
He couldn’t say they were looking at him, exactly, but they were aware of his presence, his attention.
After a few moments in which he feared they would be able to hear, and be spooked by, his heart thudding in his chest, they resumed eating, and in less than a minute they were off, rising into the sky, a flurry of black cawing.
It was perhaps the greatest thing that had ever happened to him.
The next day when he went outside to fill the bowl, he found the metal tab from a pop can inside it. He wouldn’t have thought anything of it, would have assumed it was random litter, had Blair not told him that crows sometimes brought trinkets. He took it and filled the bowl with peanuts.
The next day, there was an earring in the bowl. It was ugly costume jewelry, a dangly tarnished silver drop hanging from a dirty pink stone, and he was utterly, unbecomingly thrilled. He picked it up and poured some peanuts in the bowl.
“What are you doing?”
Shit. “You’re home early.”
She said nothing, probably because his observation was obvious enough she had decided not to dignify it with a reply.
“To answer your question, I’m feeding the crows.” He paused. “I hope that’s OK.”
She dropped her towel. She was wearing a black one-piece bathing suit that made her legs look unreasonably long, given her short stature. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, what?”
“Why wouldn’t it be OK that you’re feeding the crows?”
“Well, eventually I’ll have to leave, and you’ll inherit a crow army.”
She shrugged. “You never know, a crow army might end up coming in handy.”
She dived into the pool without another word and started her laps, and honestly, he wished she would stop doing that.
But, of course, it was her house. Her pool.
She swam for twenty minutes. He tried to keep writing, to turn her laps into background noise. It wasn’t that she was making a racket. All he could hear was the sluicing of flesh through water and small splashes when she made her neat turns, somersaulting and pushing off the pool wall.
He tried not to watch her, either. There was nothing remarkable about what she was doing, or wearing. Her bathing suit was exactly the kind a woman doing laps for exercise would wear. He blurred his eyes on purpose, though he wasn’t sure why. She became an inky blot moving through the water.
He was startled when she suddenly broke the pattern, like a single bird deviating from its migratory V. She surfaced near him and held on to the pool’s edge, water cascading from her head and the golden hair on her arms glistening in the sun.
He watched her mouth moving but didn’t hear any sound coming out, which was funny because her almost-silent laps had, mere moments ago, been a waterfall in his ears.
“Sorry, what?” he asked, entertaining the notion that perhaps he was experiencing some sort of adverse neurological event. Why else would he be feeding birds and watching people talk without hearing any sound?
“Do you want to go do something out in the world?”
He looked at her for a moment—too long a moment, apparently, because she rescinded the invitation. “Forget it.”
“No, no, I’m just trying to tell myself I need to work.”
“I need to work, too.”
“Yet you’re home from work early,” he said, once again stating the obvious. But it was the second time that had happened recently.
“It was a rough day. I asked my boss if I could take the rest of the day off.” Her bright hazel eyes twinkled, and she shoved off the side of the pool and onto her back. Floating, she said no more.
He wanted to inquire about this rough day, but then he asked himself why. Why did he care? “Where do you want to go?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She spoke to the sky. “I just thought it would be good to get out of my own head.” She flipped and paddled to the edge of the pool farthest from him, hoisting herself out. Water rained down from her body. “But I don’t need you for that.”
He thought of Esme accusing Blair of avoiding her friends, of never going out.
“Have you ever been to the Watts Towers?” he blurted at her back as she headed for the main house.
She turned. “I haven’t.” She paused. “Do you want to go?”
“I’ve read about them.”
“Is that a yes?”
“I just…” He couldn’t believe he was about to tell her this.
He never talked about his works in progress.
“There’s a character in my book who’s teaching herself to crochet.
She’s not making a blanket or anything; she’s just compelled to keep crocheting.
It got me thinking about what motivates people to create things like that when there’s no one asking for it, no audience.
Where it’s just self-propelled. Art for art’s sake. ”
“Or it’s a compulsion,” she said, hitting on exactly the question he was asking.
“Right.”
“Let’s do it.”
“Is it too far to drive?” He wasn’t sure why he was asking. Was he trying to backpedal?
“Oh, who cares? What else are we going to do? Not write books and not make movies? Let’s go look at some fucking art.”
He was a bit startled by her vehemence, by the uncharacteristic profanity—when Blair “swore,” she said something like tarnation or my stars.
Perhaps startled wasn’t a strong enough word. Perhaps he was stunned, which would explain why he found himself, half an hour later, in Blair Kellermoon’s pink car, cruising down the freeway on the way to look at some fucking art.
They arrived at a small museum dedicated to a series of towers built from the 1920s to the 1950s by an Italian immigrant who, to hear it told, was single-minded in his dedication to his creation.
There were seventeen interconnected towers of varying sizes, the tallest of which, they were informed, was ninety-nine and a half feet.
They were made of mesh-wrapped concrete, though you didn’t look at them and think “concrete,” given that they were inlaid with glass and tile and studded with found objects.
He saw lots of shiny bits: parts of bed frames, mirror shards, seashells, bottles.
It reminded him of crows, and the kinds of baubles they delivered to the humans who inspired their devotion.
It was hard to know how to make sense of it. “The curious thing,” he said as he and Blair made their second circuit of the grounds, “is he was a construction worker and mason, right? And this was what he wanted to do in his free time? I guess it was a compulsion.”
“Do you think it was an actual, clinical compulsion?” she asked. “Or are you just using that word colloquially, the way people do?”