Ben popped a Nexium, which would help the reflux, but not the emotions beneath it. What was weighing him down? It wasn’t Selene, Ben decided. She was just another secret.
He found a diner tucked into a side street near the courthouse, but his appetite was gone. He drank black coffee and read USA Today, going over and over the weather info for California. Where, in fact, it was raining and there were mud slides, but he still would rather be there. Only four more weeks of shooting, and then he could go home. He didn’t belong here, and neither did Flip, much as he pretended to love it. If they got the pickup for a second season, Ben was going to actively lobby for Los Angeles or Vancouver. They could reproduce Baltimore on a soundstage. Hell, based on what he had seen, they could make a better one.
Chapter 4
He stopped at the mock-retro diner on Eastern Avenue, the one he had come to think of as his base camp, a term he had picked up from one of the call sheets he had actually seen. They were on the soundstage later today, with the second unit on the water, which would make it difficult to get to her. But then, except for that one brief encounter, it had proven impossible to get to her, and he was beginning to suspect this was no mere coincidence. They were keeping her from him. If he could just get her alone, he was sure she would be understanding, even sympathetic. But he needed her alone.
Perhaps he should hire a pro, someone detached, but that was exactly the reason he didn’t want a pro. A pro had nothing on line but his fee. Besides, the pros used so far had done nothing but collect their fat checks. They hadn’t even bothered to apologize for their failures, their incompetence.
The diner, with its aluminum siding and leatherette booths, reminded him of Diner, although he knew this one was shiny new, a fake on many levels, its booths harboring video games instead of miniature jukeboxes. The real diner from Diner had been moved downtown after the movie wrapped, and staffed with juvenile delinquents as part of a training program. Funny to think how desolate East Baltimore and the waterfront had been then, how easy it was to create the illusion that a diner sat on a lonely little forkful of land in the middle of the old industrial base. That had been his first visit to a movie set, more than twenty-five years ago. No – wait, his memory was playing tricks on him. It was only after seeing Diner in the theater that he realized that a movie had been made here, in Baltimore. He had been almost sick over it. What were the odds that Hollywood would ever return? But Levinson had come back, several times over, and Phil Tumulty had followed with his version of Baltimore. Although he thought Tumulty the better filmmaker, he felt closer to Levinson’s world. He remembered the day that they closed Howard Street to film the collision outside the old Anderson Cadillac – that was Levinson’s Tin Men – and the balloon festival in Patterson Park, staged expressly for Pit Beef, the first in Tumulty’s trilogy about growing up in Highlandtown.
He reached into his briefcase and, after taking care to make sure there was nothing on the tabletop, opened his scrapbook. There were photographs and articles about every production that had ever come to Baltimore – not just Levinson’s and Tumulty’s films, but And Justice for All and Homicide and The Wire and Ladder 49 and Red Dragon and The Replacements and Step Up and, almost every year, like the groundhog, another John Waters film. He visited Waters’s sets because he felt he had a duty to completeness, to see them all, but he didn’t really care for the movies because they so seldom had real stars. What had Gloria Swanson said? She stayed big, the movies got small. He didn’t get Waters, his insistence on making things look the way they actually were. Who needed movies for that?
He flipped through the pages, stopping at the one instance when a newspaper photographer had caught the both of them, standing on the edge of everything. Their own mothers probably couldn’t pick them out of the shot, but he knew they had been there, so he could identify the backs of their heads, then thick with hair. There they were down in Fells Point, the night the big fire scene in Avalon was filmed. That had been fascinating. And Levinson’s people had been nice. When it came down to it, he might have preferred Tumulty’s movies, but his people – Tumulty made very bad choices in his people, and now he had foisted those choices onto his son. Tumulty had forgotten where he came from, living out there… wherever. Tahoe? Santa Fe? Some suspect place, neither here nor Hollywood.
His breakfast arrived – how did they do it so fast? He was almost skeptical at the speed with which diner food arrived. Given the time, past eleven, he had opted for a grilled cheese and french fries with gravy. Had he put gravy on his french fries before he saw Diner, or had the movie persuaded him that this was what people in Baltimore did? He could no longer remember. It wasn’t that he had any trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality. He was as sane as the next guy, and had the tests to prove it, as the old joke went. They had made him talk to a psychiatrist as part of the exit interview, but that had been to cover their own asses. He had been in HRD; he knew the drill. He propped the local section of the Beacon-Light against the old-fashioned sugar dispenser, and read the latest litany of complaints about Mann of Steel. You reap what you sow, you reap what you sow. He wondered if Mandy Stewart could be of any use to him, but decided that she had been too open in her hostility. She probably couldn’t get any closer to Tumulty Jr. and his minions than he could at this point. The steelworkers, too, were of little use. Besides, he didn’t know any steelworkers.
His cell phone rang, and he debated not answering. The french fries were at that divine, fleeting moment of perfect hotness. But ignoring Marie was never a good idea, under any circumstances, and she had been especially needy the past few months.
“Where are you?” she said.
“Having an early lunch.”
“Why aren’t you at work?”
“ Holiday.”
“What holiday?”
“Columbus Day.” The lies were coming so easily now. The mark of an artist, he decided.
“Isn’t that the Monday that falls the same week as the twelfth?”
“Used to be,” he said agreeably. “But they had to start switching it around because people complained about the Italians getting their own holiday. So the federal holiday was last week, but the state-city holiday is today.”
“What does that have to do with the date? And why would they have more Columbus Days if people are angry about the one?” He could imagine her face – forehead creased, mouth turned down – panicking a little at this information, more proof that the world outside the house was going on without her. For some reason, she seemed to think that the world should have halted when she stopped participating in it.
Then again, he was lying to her. He should factor that in. But it was out of consideration. Everything he did, he did for her.
“No, there’s only one, and it’s today.”
“Oh…” Her voice trailed off.
“Marie?”
“Hmmmmm?”
“Why did you call?”
“Can’t remember. I wanted you to bring me something from the grocery store… a magazine? Candy? Hey – if there’s no work today, why did you put on your suit and everything, leave the house at the normal time?”