Chapter 1 #2
Now that…that made Wich look more closely. She looked familiar, like one of those actresses who played lovely young bodies on Law and Order before aging into cynical defense attorneys and finally stern judges.
Her skin was nearly bare of makeup that might have hidden the creases and camouflaged the softness. Her hair, held back by what looked like a CHiPs clip, had a few streaks of silver.
She looked to be his age and beautiful in that worn, vulnerable way the Japanese appreciated in their stuff, if not always in their women.
Her clothes were impossible to read. A stiff-white t-shirt with the LAX sign and an airplane flying overhead, Dodgers joggers with fresh-out-of-the-package creases, and a pair of oversized Bruins flip flops.
"Here,” she said, sliding the drink toward him. “You're so interested. You be friendly.”
Wich had once worked in a writers' room with the legendary Karl Hemminger. (Best Screenplay: The Way Hearts Work). Hemminger had said something to him that had always stuck. "The world is filled with stories waiting to be heard. A writer’s job is to listen."
So Wich raised the free drink, smiling at the guy. He did not smile back, just slapped two bills on the bar and clambered from the barstool, grabbing his wheelie bag so quickly that it bumped upside down behind him along the tiles.
“Wrong kind of friend, I guess,” Wich said, taking a swig of the whisky sour.
She answered with a nod, settling an escaped strand of hair behind her ear, before returning to her book.
Suddenly, he was struck.
This was Sarah. Sarah, who had wrestled with the expectations of others all her life and was now freeing herself. Sarah who was sitting still and escaping at the same time.
Sarah.
“Helen, actually,” the woman said. “You said ‘Sarah.’ Wasn’t sure if you’d mistaken me for someone else.”
“Uh, sorry, no. Sarah’s just someone who’s been on my mind a lot recently.”
She frowned. “Oh,” she said, tentatively. “I hope she’s…okay?”
“Sarah? Yeah, she’s not real or anything. She’s a character. In a script.”
“Yours? Has it been picked up?”
And with that, it hit him how completely he’d blown up Wistful when he marched out of Seraphic. Now, talking about it felt like open heart surgery without anesthesia.
“No,” he said. He didn’t add that it never would be because while he might feel sorry for himself, he didn’t want to sound like it.
Helen nodded. “Have you written something that has been picked up? Anything I might have seen?”
He took another sip of the whisky sour. “Depends on how low your fandoms go. Basically, I’m a hack, kind of like Dr. Frankenstein. I get handed a bunch of dead body parts and told to stitch them together securely enough to lurch across the screen.”
Helen laughed. “I probably shouldn’t have laughed.”
“I would’ve if somebody else had said it."
She drew her finger absently along the gutter of her book. “Nobody comes to LA to be a hack. Everyone starts out…hopeful.”
Wich nodded, staring at the perfect circle of condensation that had formed around his glass.
“Wishful.”
“Okay. They start out wishful, then.”
“That was actually…it was the name of the only movie I really consider mine. The one I wrote when I first came to LA. It was called Wishful.”
He saw her repeat it silently. Wishful. “Wait, I think I saw that. I liked it. I really did.” She looked out the window. “About a guy from Delaware?"
“Maryland.”
“Maryland,” she repeated. "And it started in the Theme Building, right? Like it was a stand-in for big dreams. Big future. Something. Didn't it win an award?"
“Finalist,” he said.
She stripped the fruit from the orange slice teetering on the edge of her glass.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask,” she said, wiping her fingers on the cocktail napkin. “Can't promise I’ll answer.”
“What’s the story with the clothes?”
She looked down at her T-shirt and joggers as though she had forgotten what she’d been wearing. “No story. Like I said, I’m on vacation. Here,” she waved vaguely around, “I don’t have to dress for anyone else.”
“Or smile if you don’t feel like it.”
“Exactly.”
“Like Sarah."
“I’m not sure how I feel about being compared to one of your lurching monsters.”
“No, not her. Never Sarah. She’s my passion project. Wishful was about a young guy filled with great expectations. Wistful is about a woman who knows how treacherous expectations can be but holds on to hope anyway. Kind of a bookend to Wishful.”
“Hunh,” she said, but not meanly. “And? What happened?”
Wich shrugged and shook his head.
“Let me guess. Turns out guys can’t write women.”
“That’s what you would think. It’s what I was afraid of, but no. Turned out one very big actress liked it too much. Now the studio won’t make it without her.”
“Isn't it good to have a big actress interested in a passion project?”
“Not if she’s the single worst possible choice to play a part. Made me feel like nobody actually read the script.”
She frowned at herself in the mirror behind the bar, making him suddenly worry that she was in fact one of those actresses who had never made it past roles as a lovely young body by the trash bin covered in blood.
“Sorry,” he said, “I don’t know why I’m blathering like this. I’ve been off alcohol for a while now and shouldn’t have had that second drink.”
She nodded at the mirror seeming to acknowledge herself more than him, then pulled out a phone encased in pink and white diamantine that seemed so totally out of keeping with her Couture by Hudson News ensemble.
“Do you know where the departures board is?”
He pointed. “If you bend down a little, you can see it across the hall.”
“Ooof. Too far,” she said. “Don’t have my glasses.”
“What’s your plane?”
“Amsterdam. KLM…5734?”
He squinted toward the board. “Your flight doesn’t board for nine hours. I don’t know where you’re coming from, but I can suggest some places to visit in L.A. if you want—"
“I’m coming from Beverly Hills.”
“Nine hours early?”
She sucked the bright red cherry from its stem. “I like it here. It’s like regular life is on hold, each gate feels like a new opportunity and the people watching is great. Everybody is so preoccupied that they don’t notice.”
Wich looked at the bartender who’d gone back to wiping the glass and watching his game. “Pickings are a little slim here.”
“True.”
He drained the last of the whisky sour. “Do you…Do you want to go somewhere else?”
Two little lines formed between Helen’s brows. “Not really in the habit of picking up strangers in airports.”
“I don’t mean that,” Wich said. “I just thought… I don’t know what I thought.”
She slipped a crisp bill under her glass and signaled the bartender. Then she held out her hand. “Like I said, I’m Helen. Why don’t you tell me your name, then we won’t be strangers anymore.”
He smiled. Not the friendly-yet-reserved smile he’d practiced in the bathroom of his crappy first studio in Westlake, but the genuine one that pushed one cheek up too high and revealed his crooked right canine.
“Nice to meet you, Helen,” he said, taking her hand.
“My name’s Peter Wichowski. Like the Wachowskis but with an ‘I’? Everybody calls me Wich, though."
She gave his hand a single shake. “Wich,” she said, sliding her phone back into her stuffed canvas bag with the Hollywood sign emblazoned across it. “I think I can remember that.”
Wich waited until her back was turned before easing himself from the barstool. For some reason, he didn’t want her to see the way his knee always stiffened when he first put weight on it.
Most people walked through the terminal scanning signs, stopping at maps and looking at their phones but Helen moved through the crowds like water through a sieve, so it was only when she stopped at a balcony overlooking the main floor that he caught up with her.
"Who do you think they’re waiting for?” she said, nodding toward a gaggle of photographers on the other side of security.
Wich shrugged. Air Canada was in this terminal. "Probably someone coming back from Toronto."
“It’s NTS,” said a woman seated on a bench, tying her shoe. “I asked one of them when I came in.”
Helen looked out over the assembled paparazzi scanning the terminal, then sucked at her teeth. Tchk. “Sometimes I feel for that girl."
"You should feel for me.” The woman stood, reaching for the handle of her wheelie bag. “I’m the one sitting in the middle seat all the way to Miami.”
Helen chuckled, and the woman looked at her more closely.
“Did you used to be someone?” she asked, shaking out her pant leg.
“No, but I get that a lot.” Helen gave a tight wave to one of the photographers, who looked back quizzically. “I think I just have that kind of face.”
The photographer turned away, and the woman did, too, because even if Helen used to be someone, she wasn’t anymore.
“Why do you feel for her?” Wich asked, leaning on the railing beside her. “For NTS, I mean?”
She shrugged. “She doesn’t even have a name anymore.
Just a brand. And she can never be off brand.
Be a person. I can only imagine how tiring it is.
Constantly dealing with people’s assumptions.
Always being noticed.” A man bumped into her, his head low over his phone.
He glanced up briefly before returning to his screen with a barely audible ‘srry.’
“To me, that kind of life sounds like hell.”
But Wich had noticed her. He’d even broken out the old Like-the-Wachowskis-but-with-an-‘I’ line from the days of his early networking so that maybe she’d remember his name.
“NTS was the one who bigfooted Wistful. I don’t know what she’s doing here. Last I saw her, she was coming in the front of a restaurant while I ducked out the back so I wouldn’t have to talk to her.”
“Ooof,” Helen said. “You sure that was wise?"
“Wise? Probably not. Then again, my agent used to say I was the one client she could count on to throw razors into a tornado just to see what would happen.”
“But not anymore.”