Fran's voice held a sharpness that he'd never even heard in the can. “She says you can wear that same suit again, but you need a better tie.” Really letting her disdain rule her face, but throwing her whole body into it. Hips thrusting, her chin right in his face. She seemed to have more muscles in her top lip than anybody he'd ever met before. No matter how much a guy hated you, he couldn't let you know about it as well as a woman could. “She picked one out for you. She thinks burgundy is your color.”
You did what you could to hide what you were thinking, but sometimes it still slipped out. “Shit.”
“So, Miss Super Titties has got herself a new pet to play with. If you're lucky, maybe she'll pick you out a nice diamond-studded collar. I guess the stink of prison on you must remind her of her husband.”
“Maybe she just likes my eyes.”
“Yeah? But not enough so she lets you ride in back with her though, eh?”
Dane killed a few hours driving his patterns around Brooklyn, down Rockaway Parkway and around the circle to a broad cobblestone pier sticking into Jamaica Bay. The cold wind came off the water and made him think of Maria Monticelli when they were teenagers, and how he'd come down here with a couple of six-packs and pine for her. She'd talk about how she wanted to act on the New York stage and eventually make it to Hollywood. He'd listen and imagine her on the screen, that face sixty feet high and looming over him, a smile so much larger than himself he could waft away on her lips.
Your thoughts could break off one of your own ribs and jam it into your heart. He went home, changed into his suit, but didn't bother with a tie.
Dane took the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan again, but drove a little faster than usual, like he might actually be on a date. If he thought about it too much, the slow surging anxiety would start tightening his belly, so he let it go.
This time he pulled up in front of her building and parked in front. The doorman mashed his lips but must've sensed the score. Maybe because Dane wasn't wearing a tie. He walked up and the little fireplug of a guy squared his shoulders and said, “Miss Bishop will be right down.” He held his hand up in front of Dane's chest.
Someone else who thought you could stop the world by putting your palm up.
Dane got back in the limo, lit a cigarette, and turned on the radio. A blue spark leaped from his fingers and a sudden squawk of voices started berating him. It snapped him up in his seat because he thought, for a second there, that he could hear his father and JoJo Tormino among them. Upset but not angry. He could feel their frustration. Static rose up and drowned the agitated muttering, then regular music faded in. He switched the radio off and finished his cigarette.
Glory Bishop stepped out the front door and now she looked more like she did in Under Heaven's Canopy. Beautiful and with the sensual aura turned all the way up. Twenty-five feet away and he still felt the pressure of it. Whoo baby.
The doorman held the rear door open for her and she slid in with the supple movement she'd shown on the dance pole. It put a hitch in his breath but he said nothing. He gave her one look over his shoulder and she knew what was on his mind.
“Look,” she said as they pulled away. “We're going together, this is just so the media doesn't blitz us too early on. You get to be the ‘mystery man' when they do their write-ups tonight.”
“Couldn't I be a mystery man in the backseat with some other mook driving?”
“This is more mysterious. Besides, I thought you liked to drive?”
“I do when I'm not getting paid for it.”
“That doesn't make any sense whatsoever.”
He went, “Uyh,” and tried to play it off. Not take it so seriously, but he had a bug up his ass about it. “Listen, if they see me driving the limo, all they have to do is call Olympic and get my name.”
“They're not that smart,” Glory told him. “But they'll follow us around and take plenty of photos, so try not to look too unhappy or punch anybody out, all right?”
“I'll do my best, but you're asking me to go against my grain.”
“I get the feeling that going against the grain is going with your grain.”
“That makes no sense whatsoever,” he said, and let out a chuckle. He felt a nice flush of victory at the rimshot.
“And don't be mad if I'm unresponsive,” she said. “We'll talk when we get inside the theater.”
“I thought that's when we watch the movie.”
“Nobody's really going to watch it. We've all heard it's a piece of shit.”
“Even the lesbian scenes?”
It got her laughing, and the three-hour ride out to the Hamptons went by fast. She talked about how she went from modeling in her teens to bit parts in bad horror films where guys wearing rubber suits with tentacles chased her around sorority houses wearing only her nightie or a towel. She'd had her throat cut in three flicks and been stabbed in three others. She thought screenwriters were mostly mama's boys with a few screws loose who only got their rocks off by chopping women to pieces on paper.
She met the husband during auditions for a movie he produced but didn't direct. She thought he was a real artist, showing up on set like that to keep an eye on everything. A control freak but not heavy-handed about it. “I was the worst kind of stupid,” she said. “Because I thought I'd been through more than everybody else.”
Dane thought, yeah, that was kind of stupid. No matter how slick you thought you were, there was always somebody else on the corner who had you figured out.
The husband still had no name, even while she told his story. Glory leaned forward, funneling her words right into Dane's ear. How they'd dated for a few weeks but it was nothing too serious. He did some coke but not a lot, and she never guessed he was involved with distributing the product. Then he asked her to move in and it still didn't seem very serious. He'd already started preproduction on Under Heaven's Canopy when-
Dane cut in. “Listen, I want to ask you-”
“What the title means, right? It drives everybody crazy. There's all these weird theories running around on the Internet, geeks who find all kinds of bizarre symbolism and make these freaky connections to the Bible.”
He nodded. “I watched it twice the other night and it still makes no sense to me.”
“The original title was The Mouth of Hell. Think about that one for a minute, see if it makes any more sense to you.”
He remembered that the caves deep in the mountains where the terrorists hid the missiles were called that. “Okay, see, now that's a cool action title. And it ties in with the story.”
“Sure.”
“But why heaven? And where's the canopy?”
“Everything is dependent on test screenings,” she explained. “They show the movie to a couple hundred people and have them fill out forms on what they don't like about the film. It allows them to feel powerful. You turn two hundred fans into film critics and they start tearing the whole movie to shreds. So a bunch of them said they didn't like the title.”
“Why not?”
“They said it didn't resonate enough. That's one of the boxes they could check. If the title resonated with them.”
“And Under Heaven's Canopy resonates?”
“They thought it sounded more like a date movie. And the producers were already hung up on the hell part, you know? It was in their heads. They couldn't clear their minds of it, so they just turned it around, turned the hell into heaven. If the viewers in the screenings didn't like hell, then they've just got to love heaven, right?”
“These producers, they make a lot of money?”
“Christ, yes.”