“Pretty bad,” I said.
I told her everything that had happened to me so far. I told her how I felt.
“Why is it like this?” I asked her.
“Because they’re scared.”
“Why are they scared? What are they scared of?”
“Because you’re only as good as the last hits you can attach your name to.”
“Huh?”
“If you say yes to something, the studio may make a film, and it will cost twenty or thirty million dollars, and if it’s a failure, you will have your name attached to it and will lose status. If you say no, you don’t risk losing status.”
“Really?”
“Kind of.”
“How do you know so much about all this? You’re a musician, you’re not in films.”
She laughed wearily: “I live out here. Everybody who lives out here knows this stuff. Have you tried asking people about their screenplays?”
“No.”
“Try it sometime. Ask anyone. The guy in the gas station. Anyone. They’ve all got them.” Then someone said something to her, and she said something back, and she said, “Look, I’ve got to go,” and she put down the phone.
I couldn’t find the heater, if the room had a heater, and I was freezing in my little chalet room, like the one Belushi died in, same uninspired framed print on the wall, I had no doubt, same chilly dampness in the air.
I ran a hot bath to warm myself up, but I was even chillier when I got out.
White goldfish sliding to and fro in the water, dodging and darting through the lily pads. One of the goldfish had a crimson mark on its back that might, conceivably, have been perfectly lip-shaped: the miraculous stigmata of an almost-forgotten goddess. The gray early-morning sky was reflected in the pool.
I stared at it gloomily.
“You okay?”
I turned. Pious Dundas was standing next to me.
“You’re up early.”
“I slept badly. Too cold.”
“You should have called the front desk. They’d’ve sent you down a heater and extra blankets.”
“It never occurred to me.”
His breathing sounded awkward, labored.
“You okay?”
“Heck no. I’m old. You get to my age, boy, you won’t be okay either. But I’ll be here when you’ve gone. How’s work going?”
“I don’t know. I’ve stopped working on the treatment, and I’m stuck on ‘The Artist’s Dream’—this story I’m doing about Victorian stage magic. It’s set in an English seaside resort in the rain. With the magician performing magic on the stage, which somehow changes the audience. It touches their hearts.”
He nodded, slowly. “‘The Artist’s Dream’…” he said. “So. You see yourself as the artist or the magician?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’m either of them.”