The Biograph Girl Read online

  I looked down to see he had unfastened his pants. I said nothing, made no movement. I continued to puff my cigarette calmly, feeling his hand creep under my dress, around the curve of my thigh, between my legs. He moved closer to me, dropping his face to my neck. I felt the slithery warmth of his tongue.

  That was when I lowered the lit cigarette into his ear.

  He screamed. I unlatched the door, jumped down out of the car, and ran into the sandy scrub, somehow maintaining the presence of mind to keep clutching my purse. He pursued me. Crazily, in broad daylight, he pursued me. His pride had been wounded, and I would pay. It was the same old story. Charles, Bolton—how many others? I don’t think I expected to get away. But I ran. Even then, in the moment, I took some degree of satisfaction in the fact that I didn’t stay there, that I ran—through the sand, losing my shoes, tearing my dress, cutting myself against the sharp bare fingers of bushes. Yet somehow I managed to hang on to my purse, still gripped close to my heart, as if it had become a part of me.

  The man finally caught me by my waist, toppling me over face first into the sand. I felt warm blood in my nose.

  “You fucking ugly bitch,” he growled over me and tore my panties down. He clamped his hand, reeking of tobacco, over my mouth. I struggled and kicked, but he was younger, stronger, more desperate than I was. I felt his hot fingers enter me, opening me up.

  No, I told myself. No longer. This cannot happen to me now in this life.

  Not anymore.

  Somehow I managed to work my hand under him and grip his scrotum in my palm. I twisted it with all my strength. He screamed like a cat whose tail has been caught by the rocker, like a dog run down in the road. He stood, then fell backward and curled into a fetal ball.

  I found my feet and stood over him, looking down.

  “You bitch!” he cursed. “You fucking biiiiitch!”

  My eyes must have been wild. I bore down on him, one of the ancient Furies unleashed.

  “Did you think you could just do this to me?” I seethed at him, bending now over his writhing form, my face not more than a foot away from his. “That I would let you?”

  My voice sounded shrill, hard, alien to my ears. It was the voice of an old woman, some harpy, some witch—my mother’s voice even. I was shouting, using the discovered breath of my new life, the lungs I had fought so hard to win. “You pathetic little man! I say no! Do you hear me? I say no!”

  I must have terrified him with my sudden ferocity. He cowered, crawling away from me in the sand. When he was about two yards off, he finally stood, struggling to hitch up his pants. I remember such little details about him revealed by that powerful morning sun: the way his cowlick stood up in back, the diagonal yellow-and-red pattern of his tie, the pearl clasp that held it to his shirt. The way he turned and ran back to his car, terrified of the crazy woman he’d picked up along the road.

  I found my shoes. And his gold pocket watch, too, shimmering in the sand. I picked it up, examined it, confirmed that it was still ticking, and dropped it into my purse. My knees were scraped, my nose was bleeding, and I had started to smell, since it had been more than a day since I had bathed. But as I put on my shoes, I could barely suppress a giggle.

  So I’ll walk to San Francisco if I have to.

  At least now, I knew where I was going.

  The Present

  Unlike his brother, Benjamin Cartwright Sheehan doesn’t care that he’s losing his hair. All right, so he does care—cares a lot—but he’s damned if he’s going to turn it into some big tragedy the way Richard has, some drama of epic proportions. No Minoxidil for him, no hair-thickening gels. Ben just lets it grow long and ties it back in a short ponytail.

  “Why don’t you just buzz it all off?” Richard’s boyfriend Rex suggests. They’re spending the day together while Richard and Anita are in Buffalo. “That’s what all the guys who are losing their hair are doing these days.”

  Ben scoffs. “All the gay guys, you mean.”

  “Bruce Willis,” Rex offers. “He wasn’t gay last I checked.”

  “It just doesn’t matter to me the way it matters to you and Richard,” Ben tells him.

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” Rex says, running a hand through his own dirty-blond locks, still thick enough for now—but for how long, Ben wonders, how long?

  “You’re just twenty-six,” Ben says. “You’ve got hair to spare. Wait a few years.”

  He looks at his watch. They’re going to be late if they don’t leave soon. He opens his closet, running his fingers across the shirts hanging there, trying to choose the right one.

  “I think Richard looks very sexy with a receding hairline,” Rex says, “especially now that he wears his hair really cropped.”

  Rex and Richard have been together for almost six years now. Ben has to acknowledge that his early predictions were wrong, that the union is apparently durable. Rex isn’t that much younger than Anita, but Ben had loved teasing his brother that he was robbing the cradle. Sexy Rexy—as all their friends inevitably called him—was, after all, not just young but a porn actor. Or an erotic artiste, as Rex chose to style himself back then.

  But Rex has turned out to be a pretty solid guy—despite his love for Alanis Morrisette and his habit of wearing too short electric blue hot pants. He puts up with Richard’s arrogance and sarcasm in ways Ben has never been able to manage. Ben likes Rex. He’s used him in a couple of his short films as a way of helping him move beyond his porn image. Now Rex has put together a one-man show about the Barrymores called Broadway Royals. Rex plays, sometimes all at once, every Barrymore who ever trod a stage or mugged a camera, from alcoholic Jack to feisty little Drew. When the show ran for a week at the Actors’ Playhouse last year, all agreed he was best as the queenly Ethel.

  Of course, Ben hadn’t been able to make any of the performances, not even the Sunday matinee. It had been crunch time over at the ad agency where he worked, with Ben splicing boring travelogue videos together late into the night, every night. Finally he just told Anita to go to the show without him. He feels bad about that, and he has promised as soon as Rex does the show again, he’ll be there for opening night—wherever it is. Rex, of course, never held it against him; Rex doesn’t hold grudges. But Richard, the grudgemeister, certainly has—just as he’s held everything against Ben these last thirty years.

  “No, not that one,” Rex tells him now as Ben withdraws a plaid shirt.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s dull. You have such pretty blue eyes. Wear something to set them off.”

  Ben smirks. “We’re just going to see my agent. It’s not like I’m babe hunting.”

  “Is he still officially your agent?”

  Ben shrugs. “Well, neither of us has fired the other. I just haven’t been able to get him rocked for anything since One Chance.”

  “What do you need him for anyway?” Rex is looking at himself in the full-length mirror on the wall. Ben notices the boy wonder seems to be getting a little paunch. “I don’t have an agent. If this idea is really as good as you say it is, why not just make it yourself like you have your other films and try to get it distributed on your own?”

  “Because Xerxes knows people.” He replaces the dull shirt in the closet and fishes around for something else. “And you gotta know people to get anywhere.”

  That’s why none of his films since One Chance, One World have been distributed outside of New York. Ben’s convinced that if Xerxes had gotten behind them they’d have been hits on the festival circuit, the way One Chance had been. Without Xerxes, Ben just didn’t know the right people. Xerxes was based in New York, but he was affiliated with William Fucking Morris, for God’s sake, and flitted between the left and right coasts as often as most people crossed Fifth Avenue.

  Ben remembers a time when Xerxes returned his calls. That was when Ben had been touted as a new young breakthrough, when One Chance, One World was the talk of the circuit. Xerxes took Ben with him to lunches with New Line execs. He invit
ed Ben to parties at his posh house in Greenwich, where he’d stand eating herring on a cracker between Danny DeVito and Jessica Lange. Once Xerxes had even introduced him to Jane Campion, but Ben had been too dry mouthed to make conversation.

  Now the invites no longer arrive in the mail. The lunches have ceased. It’s increasingly rare for Xerxes to return Ben’s calls. Today’s appointment was secured nearly three weeks ago.

  “Things are constantly changing in the industry,” Ben tells Rex, turning to look at him. “That’s why I need an agent—why I need Xerxes. I’m not going to make a film funded by what’s left over from my ad agency paycheck again.”

  Ben sighs. He turns back to his closet, riffles through the shirts hanging there. Some he’s had since he was a teenager. He settles on a shirt Anita bought him for Christmas last year, a solid baby blue oxford.

  “Much better,” Richard agrees.

  “You sound like my mother,” Ben sighs.

  “No one can sound like your mother,” Rex tells him.

  Ain’t it the truth? How often Mom finds her way into the unlikeliest of moments. “Benjamin Cartwright,” she’s saying now. Ben’s just a gangly teenager, and she’s sitting in front of the television eating Drake’s Coffeecake Juniors. “If you don’t start taking care of yourself, no girl’s ever gonna want to go out with you.”

  He peels off his T-shirt, slips on the oxford. “Anita likes me just the way I am,” he tells Rex, buttoning the shirt.

  “That’s good,” he says with a smile, “’cuz there’s always Richard to reference.”

  “Richard’s just a gay clone,” Ben says. It’s true: Richard started pumping iron five years ago, filling out his string bean Sheehan body quickly and with apparently very little effort. Richard looks good—Ben gives him that. His transformation had actually been a bit eerie to watch. They’ve got the same dimples, the same freckles on the shoulders, the same receding hairline. But when Ben looks at Richard he sees what he would look like cleaned up and beefed out: big rounded pectorals, chiseled abs, carefully contoured biceps and triceps. And styled hair, moisturized skin, and Versace shirts.

  “Come on. We’re going to be late if we’re going to go uptown and then back,” Rex says, looking at his watch now. “Remember we’re meeting Richard and Anita at seven.”

  “They’ll never be back by then. They went all the fuck way up to Buffalo.”

  “I told them we’d meet them at Big Cup at seven and decide about dinner.”

  “Well, it won’t take me long with Xerxes.” Ben pulls on his sneakers—worn, dirty—and laces them up. “I just want to present this new idea to him in person.”

  “And you’re not going to tell me what it is?”

  “You can hear it when I tell him.” He stands. “Ready, Sexy Rexy?”

  “You know I hate it when you call me that,” he says.

  “Make you a deal. If Xerxes likes this idea, I’ll never call you that again.”

  If Xerxes likes this idea.

  Ben likes to tell people he’s an award-winning filmmaker. And he is, damn it. He is. His twenty-minute film, One Chance, One World, took second place in the very prestigious National Student Film Festival in 1989. So what if that was nearly a decade ago? He’s made others—little, no-budget shorts that never really got seen, but he’s still a filmmaker, damn it. Hey—Emily Dickinson never got anything published until after her death. Did that make her not a writer?

  But she was busy, that little voice—Mom’s?—says inside Ben’s head. She was forever scribbling something down as she looked out that damn window of hers in Amherst. Meanwhile Ben hasn’t worked on a film in almost a year.

  He used to say he was determined to direct a major motion picture by the time he was thirty. When that milestone passed, he decided it hadn’t been realistic, and has settled on forty instead. Now when he tells people his goal and lets on that he’s just thirty-four, he can bask in their assurances that he still has plenty of time.

  He had this great idea last summer. Rex would play a boy right off the bus from Arkansas, stepping wide-eyed into Times Square in New York, and Anita would play the prostitute who suckers him and then promptly falls for his innocence. But Xerxes—when Ben had finally been let in to pitch it to him—said it had been done, a million times, and there was no way he could get him any financing for it. “You’ll have to raise the cash yourself, Benny Boy,” he told him. “But if you believe in it, do it. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

  Like so many of his ideas, however, this one evaporated in the late-night humidity of his cramped apartment in Hell’s Kitchen during the dog days of August. He worked a goddamn nine-to-five job, after all, editing commercial videotape at Penn’s Advertising Agency, and when he got home at night, he was tired. Damn tired.

  “You know, I’m not some rich kid with a trust fund who can spend all day shooting and scrap whatever footage he doesn’t want,” Ben has bitched regularly to Anita. “I know plenty of those guys. I went to school with them. Annoying rich kids with pretension dribbling like snot out of their noses. They don’t have to hold down a fucking goddamn boring full-time job just so they can pay the rent and buy groceries. They might cry poor, but Daddy’s money will take care of them in a pinch.”

  Of course, it was Ben’s daddy’s money that had enabled him to go to NYU—but it only existed because Daddy had dropped dead, and his life insurance had been earmarked for Ben’s and Richard’s college education. Oh, had Mom ever squawked about that: “I can’t touch the goddamn account. Can’t even put on a new roof. It’s all for you to waltz off to school with.”

  And Mom could never understand why he chose film school—could never see what possible benefits would come out of that. Making movies wasn’t a real job to her. Not like journalism, the field Richard chose. Even after One Chance, One World came out and gotten some impressive media attention, Mom had just said, “I don’t know, Benjamin. Maybe next time Richard can help you with the dialogue. He’s the writer, after all.”

  Ah, what did Mom know? To her, Richard could do no wrong. That’s because he’s always indulged her. Watching those silly four o’clock movies with her back when they were in high school. And now—he was killing her, for God’s sake! The last time they were all up in Chicopee with her, Richard brought her a goddamn coconut creme pie and she’d eaten practically the whole thing in fourteen-and-a-half-minutes. (Ben knows; he timed her.) “Let her be,” Richard tells him. “Let her have some pleasures in life.”

  Yet Ben can’t forget the taunts of his classmates: “Ben, son of Orca.” Somehow the slurs were never directed at Richard. Mom would sit for hours on the overstuffed brown corduroy couch in the years after Dad died, the shades drawn, the living room dark and dusty. She said she liked it dark so she could see the television better. She’d always been addicted to the tube: she’d named her sons Benjamin Cartwright—after Lome Greene on Bonanza—and Richard Kimble—after David Janssen on The Fugitive. And together they were Richard Benjamin, Mom’s all-time favorite actor. (Of course, Benjamin became Ben, but Richard has stubbornly refused to be called Rich or Rick or—“heaven forbid,” he’s sniffed—Dick.)

  Mom and Richard have always had this bond that excluded Ben. It was bad enough before Dad died, but afterward, Ben often felt outside, as if he had no one, no family. Mom and Richard would sit there together in the living room eating Devil Dogs and watching the soaps, crying over poor Nola on The Guiding Light, who finally got her comeuppance from that handsome Kelly Nelson but who was, down deep, just a scared little girl trying to find her way. That’s what Mom would blather about at the dinner table. “Ah, you guys are full of shit,” Ben would tell them on his way out to his afternoon paper route. Mom would snap that he should watch his mouth, that she didn’t like boys who swore.

  He’d been Dad’s boy. He took some solace in that. It was a queer situation. Mom and Dad hadn’t exactly had the most loving marriage. Way before Dad got sick, he started sleeping in the den, and he and Mom often went d
ays seeming not to notice the other. Mom and Richard would be curled up on the couch watching soap operas, and Ben and Dad would be rebuilding an Oldsmobile in the garage. That was just the way it was in their house: two factions, two families, sharing little else than a toilet and a pot roast dinner on Sunday. When Dad died, Ben was like an expatriate, a man without a country. Mom and Richard still had each other; Ben felt he had no one.

  Thank God for Dad’s life insurance, Ben thinks. Without it, he and Richard would still be trapped back in Chicopee, watching their mother get fatter and fatter like a creature out of the mind of Lewis Carroll. Thank God Dad got us out of there.

  Who’d have thought old Francis Xavier Sheehan would have had such foresight? Working in the rubber factory, he was determined that his boys would never have to follow in his grimy footsteps. His insurance policies—and numerous student loans—allowed the two working-class Sheehan boys of Chicopee, Massachusetts, to graduate from the Columbia journalism program and the New York University Film School.

  But what good does a degree from NYU do you when you still have to make a living? “If I was in L.A., it’d be easier,” Ben has said to friends when they ask how his film career is progressing.

  “Then let’s go,” Anita has pleaded. “Let’s move to Hollywood.”

  “Not yet, sweetheart,” he’s insisted. “Not until I can save up more cash, get a couple more pictures under my belt. You want to arrive in L.A. a somebody.”

  He remembers the six months he spent in Los Angeles as a nobody. Everyone back in New York had thought One Chance, One World—a quasidocumentary short about the nuclear arms race—would be Ben’s ticket to fame. It won him second place in the National Student Film Festival, and that did entitle him to a six-month scholarship on various Hollywood lots. But bright young whiz kids are as plentiful as raw footage in Tinseltown—and most had far better connections than Ben. The first-place winner was given the rush—and was today a hotshot director for Disney—but Ben, as befit second place, was barely acknowledged. He usually stood at parties near the food so when no one was talking to him he could pretend to be one of the caterers.