Still, after careful consideration of QuestraWorld’s submission, the studios deemed “To Kill a Unicorn” strikingly inept, contrived, and off-point — which under normal circumstances would have been enough to put it on a fast track to production. (The project remained a novelty item whose only generated heat emanated from the oddball producers’ curious, heavy-handed innuendo that its creator was none other than the murderer-protagonist himself.) An article in Vanity Fair wound up being optioned by a pair of former Fox executives with close ties to Tiff Loewenstein. Eventually, CBS and Showtime got into the action, but ultimately the bizarre story of the look-alike killer and his Tinsel Town sojourn slouched toward Babylon, never to be born.
• • •
“THANK YOU SO much for having me read. I loved the script so much.”
“No, it was my pleasure.”
“I so didn’t think I’d be reading for you.”
“I’m known to sit in on auditions,” he said, sardonically. “You were terrific. Sharon raved about you.”
“She is so great — she’s gotten me, like, every part I’ve ever had. And I know you’re sick of hearing it, but I loved When Harry Met Sally so much!”
“I never get sick of hearing nice things.”
They had bumped into each other in the hall, after the read, when Becca was leaving the powder room. He looked like he was angling to get away. But maybe not.
“Thanks again, Mr. Reiner!” she said, pouring it on.
As he walked off, he added, “And by the way, you were very funny in Spike’s movie.”
She thought: A “very funny” from Rob Reiner is pretty fucking great. He’d lost about fifty pounds and told Jay Leno that it was because he wanted to be around for his kids. Becca thought that was so sweet. The audience had even applauded.
He ogled her from afar, with a kind of quizzical charm. “You know, you look much more like Drew in the movie than you do in real life. If we can call this real life.”
She laughed. “So much of the Drew thing is how I wear my hair?” she said, with an old-style Valley Girl (Southern belle) upturn. “And it’s partially attitude. I mean, I gotta be in that Drew mood—know what I’m sayin?”
She felt feisty and carefree, talented and desired.
She felt like Ashley Judd.
“Thanks for coming in,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.”
She almost never read with directors — the casting person put her on tape and that was the end of it. Usually, you had to get called back maybe three times before something like that would happen. She told Annie that when she came in the room and saw Rob Reiner sitting there she almost lost it. He was so down-home and had her do the scene a bunch of different ways. It wasn’t a huge role, but there were two scenes with Ed Norton and one with Dustin Hoffman, who played Ed’s dad. Dixie was gonna die when she told her. Dustin Hoffman was her mother’s all-time hall of fame fave, and Becca thought that was funny because Dixie always seemed to go for the Jews. In the movies, anyway.
Labor Day
LISANNE AND PHILIP were in Rustic Canyon, watching the remains of the Jerry Lewis telethon.
Philip was sniffling. He said that around four in the morning he’d called the on-screen number during a five-minute pledge rush to gather funds to send kids to a special MDA camp. It cost $540 a kid, he said. Lisanne thought he’d been moved by the poignancy of it, but then he confessed. Philip said he got connected to a young volunteer and told her he wanted to buy twenty pledges. That was almost ten grand, and the girl got excited. He said he would give her his credit card. He unhurriedly doled out the numbers, while saying he was also doing a certain something to himself and she told him she didn’t know what he meant (she really didn’t) and then he said that he thought she did know what he meant and he warned her not to hang up because if she did that would mean twenty disabled children wouldn’t be going to camp. The girl whimpered but stayed on the line — she was so young that she didn’t know any better. What excited him most was that he could actually see the girl crying in the back phone-bank row as she took down the bogus info. He said that, to the home viewer, nothing appeared out of line because half of the people on the telethon were always crying anyway.
• • •
“THAT’S THE THING about Jerry that always bugged me,” said Robbie.
(Lisanne left the house in Rustic as soon as Philip finished his little story; the telethon was on at the Sarsgaard’s, too.)
“He’s mean,” said Robbie. “I mean, I love ‘im and everything — and he’s the world’s biggest softie. But Mr. Lewis can be meaner than hell! Right, Max?”
“That is correct,” said the old woman from her La-Z-Boy.
Lisanne recalled the first time she saw her, in Albany, standing in the dusky kitchen. At the motel, Robbie had lied, and said he was sharing his home with his paternal grandmother. She remembered thinking, Something fishy there. Maxine Rebak was in her late sixties, and the alliance was comical to Lisanne at first but then poignant — everybody loves somebody sometime. Looking back, she wondered why he drove them over to see Max in the first place. Maybe it was some kind of ambivalent last gasp defiance toward his wife-to-be. But whatever ambivalence he might have had was now gone. They had the soft, comfy edges of any long-married couple.
Robbie met Maxine on a singles Web site. A Christian Scientist, she had registered her age as ten years younger. He advertised himself as a retired ambulance driver who became further disabled during WTC cleanup efforts, the truth being that on 9/13 he actually did start into Manhattan but was sidelined when a piston blew. That kind of bravado was pure Robbie. He was more a dreamer than a deceiver, and Lisanne loved him because he didn’t have a malevolent bone in his body. (Doesn’t have a bone at all, her dad would have wryly said.) He was a passive, sweet-hearted man. Maxine was a widow with a little bit of money. Shortly after they introduced themselves at a coffee shop rendezvous in Syracuse, she sold her house and moved in. She’d grown ill over the last few months; the road trip to L.A. took it out of her. They were married in Vegas, on the day they visited the Hoover Dam, “a thing of profound beauty” that Maxine had always dreamed of and wished to see before her death. But Siddhama superseded any morbid notions — she loved the idea of her husband being a sudden father, and seeing him with the boy gave her renewed life.
Lisanne had been in the hospital only a few days when Reggie tracked Robbie down. Reggie and the Muskinghams met Robbie and Maxine for dinner, and that was when Philip offered to lease them a duplex in the Fairfax area. The nannies’ living quarters were on the second story (that way, Max wouldn’t have to negotiate stairs), and they worked in revolving shifts so that the Sarsgaards were never without help. Between hospitalizations, Lisanne visited Siddhama whenever she wished, and while no one broached the topic of the baby returning to Rustic Canyon to live, she knew she wasn’t ready. But she was no longer afraid of her child. The aberrant ideation of his Panchen-like abduction receded, as flotsam upon floodwaters, and she reveled in their communion, staring deeply into his eyes with unneurotic affection. It was in this fashion that she willed Siddhama into being, assembled him with her love, and that he grew more real with each passing moment. She could not fathom this luscious, magical creature not being in her life.