"How awful for you," he said. She could hear him tap his fingers. He had made himself the make-believe author of a make-believe book of essays called One Man's Opinion, and when he was bored or inspired, he quoted from it. "I was once in a rock band called Bad Perm," he said instead.
"Get out." She laughed.
His voice went hushed and worried. "What are you doing there?" he asked again.
her room was a corner room where a piano was allowed. It was L-shaped, like a life veering off suddenly to become something else, ft had a couch and two maple dressers and was never as neat as she might have wanted. She always had the do not disturb sign on when the maids came by, and so things got a little out of hand. Wispy motes of dust and hair the size of small heads bumped around in the corners. Smudge began to darken the moldings and cloud the mirrors. The bathroom faucet dripped, and, too tired to phone anyone, she tied a string around the end of it, guiding the drip quietly into the drain, so it wouldn't bother her anymore. Her only plant, facing east in the window, hung over the popcorn popper and dried to a brown crunch. On the ledge, a jack-o'-lantern she had carved for Halloween had rotted, melted, froze, and now looked like a collapsed basketball — one she might have been saving for sentimental reasons, one from the big game! The man who brought her room service each morning — two poached eggs and a pot of coffee — reported her to the assistant manager, and she received a written warning slid under the door.
On Fridays, she visited her parents in Elmhurst. It was still hard for her father to look her in the eyes. He was seventy now. Ten years ago, he had gone to the first movie she had ever been in, saw her remove her clothes and dive into a pool. The movie was rated PG, but he never went to another one. Her mother went to all of them and searched later for encouraging things to say. Even something small. She refused to lie. "I liked the way you said the line about leaving home, your eyes wide and your hands fussing with your dress buttons," she wrote. "That red dress was so becoming. You should wear bright colors!"
"My father takes naps a lot when I visit," she said to Tommy.
"Naps?"
"I embarrass him. He thinks I'm a whore hippie. A hippie whore."
"That's ridiculous. As I say in One Man's Opinion, you're the most sexually conservative person I know."
"Yeah, well."
Her mother always greeted her warmly, puddle-eyed. These days, she was reading thin paperback books by a man named Robert Valleys, a man who said that after observing all the suffering in the world — war, starvation, greed — he had discovered the cure: hugs.
Hugs, hugs, hugs, hugs, hugs.
Her mother believed him. She squeezed so long and hard that Sidra, like an infant or a lover, became lost in the feel and smell of her — her sweet, dry skin, the gray peach fuzz on her neck. "I'm so glad you left that den of iniquity," her mother said softly.
But Sidra still got calls from the den. At night, sometimes, the director phoned from a phone booth, desiring to be forgiven as well as to direct. "I think of all the things you might be thinking, and I say, 'Oh, Christ.' I mean, do you think the things I sometimes think you do?"
"Of course," said Sidra. "Of course I think those things."
"Of course! Of course is a term that has no place in this conversation!"
When Tommy phoned, she often felt a pleasure so sudden and flooding, it startled her.
"God, I'm so glad it's you!"
"You have no right to abandon American filmmaking this way!" he would say affectionately, and she would laugh loudly, for minutes without stopping. She was starting to have two speeds: Coma and Hysteria. Two meals: breakfast and popcorn. Two friends: Charlotte Peveril and Tommy. She could hear the clink of his bourbon glass. "You are too gifted a person to be living in a state that borders on North Dakota."
"Iowa."
"Holy bejesus, it's worse than I thought. I'll bet they say that there. I'll bet they say 'Bejesus.'"
"I live downtown. They don't say that here."
"Are you anywhere near Champaign-Urbana?"
"No."
"I went there once. I thought from its name that it would be a different kind of place. I kept saying to myself, 'Champagne, urbah na, champagne, urbah na! Champagne! Urbana!'" He sighed. "It was just this thing in the middle of a field. I went to a Chinese restaurant there and ordered my entire dinner with extra MSG."
"I'm in Chicago. It's not so bad."
"Not so bad. There are no movie people there. Sidra, what about your acting talent?"
"I have no acting talent."
"Hello?"
"You heard me."
"I'm not sure. For a minute there, I thought maybe you had that dizziness thing again, that inner-ear imbalance."
"Talent. I don't have talent. I have willingness. What talent?" As a kid, she had always told the raunchiest jokes. As an adult, she could rip open a bone and speak out of it. Simple, clear. There was never anything to stop her. Why was there never anything to stop her? "I can stretch out the neck of a sweater to point at a freckle on my shoulder. Anyone who didn't get enough attention in nursery school can do that. Talent is something else."
"Excuse me, okay? I'm only a screenwriter. But someone's got you thinking you went from serious actress to aging bimbo. That's ridiculous. You just have to weather things a little out here. Besides. I think willing yourself to do a thing is brave, and the very essence of talent."
Sidra looked at her hands, already chapped and honeycombed with bad weather, bad soap, bad life. She needed to listen to the crickets tape. "But I don't will myself," she said. "I'm just already willing."
she began to go to blues bars at night. Sometimes she called Charlotte Peveril, her one friend left from high school.
"Siddy, how are you?" In Chicago, Sidra was thought of as a hillbilly name. But in L.A., people had thought it was beautiful and assumed she'd made it up.
"I'm fine. Let's go get drunk and listen to music."
Sometimes she just went by herself.
"Don't I know you from the movies?" a man might ask at one of the breaks, smiling, leering in a twinkly way.
"Maybe," she'd say, and he would look suddenly panicked and back away.
One night, a handsome man in a poncho, a bad poncho — though was there such a thing as a good poncho? asked Charlotte — sat down next to her with an extra glass of beer. "You look like you should be in the movies," he said. Sidra nodded wearily. "But I don't go to the movies. So if you were in the movies, I would never have gotten to set my eyes on you."
She turned her gaze from his poncho to her sherry, then back. Perhaps he had spent some time in Mexico or Peru. "What do you do?"
"I'm an auto mechanic." He looked at her carefully. "My name's Walter. Walt." He pushed the second beer her way. "The drinks here are okay as long as you don't ask them to mix anything. Just don't ask them to mix anything!"
She picked it up and took a sip. There was something about him she liked: something earthy beneath the act. In L.A., beneath the act you got nougat or Styrofoam. Or glass. Sidra's mouth was lined with sherry. Walt's lips shone with beer. "What's the last movie you saw?" she asked him.
"The last movie I saw. Let's see." He was thinking, but she could tell he wasn't good at it. She watched with curiosity the folded-in mouth, the tilted head: at last, a guy who didn't go to the movies. His eyes rolled back like the casters on a clerk's chair, searching. "You know what I saw?"