He’d asked her again if she’d been with anyone else, told her it was all right if she had, he only wanted to know the truth. No, she’d said. Only you. There could be no other answer.
His arm is around her; he is gripping her backside. “You saw the man you’d marry,” he says, his eyes half closed.
“But only maybe,” she says, “and not for a very, very long time.”
From there, the negotiations continue silently and are understood differently by each of them.
* * *
—
Sometimes she thinks she should accept Barclay and have done with it. There are worse lots than a husband who excites her body, a husband with money, a husband who is the reason she can fly an airplane. But the question of children makes her balk—that, and a more general disquiet.
He goes away for a few weeks in August. When he returns, he asks how her considerations are going. She says well enough. He asks how much longer she will need. She says she doesn’t know.
She has come to be grateful for Jamie’s absence. Without him around to worry and disapprove and with Caleb making himself scarce, she can more easily tell herself there is nothing to worry about, nothing to disapprove of. Wallace seems oblivious to the nights she is away from home. He spends most of his time in his studio, drinking and listening to the phonograph.
She wishes Jamie would come home but also that he would stay away.
Yes and No
Nine
It took me three days to read Marian’s book, Carol Feiffer’s book, the Day brothers’ screenplay, and Marian’s book again. I didn’t have a lot else to do, and I was tired of reality TV. Mostly I read in bed, though I took a bath each morning and another each night and read in the tub, too, ignoring my guilt about the drought. Being swallowed up by something—by Marian’s thoughts, by Carol’s breathless prose, by bathwater—was pleasant and primal, amniotic. One way or another I would need to emerge from this particular moment, but the question was into what? Limbo was comfortable as long as I could convince myself it never had to end, as long as I could hide in the unknown, be the Schr?dinger’s cat of casting decisions, both Marian and not Marian.
Hugo came by on the second afternoon on the pretense of wanting to “discuss” the books and the script, but I knew he was there to persuade, and he knew I knew, and he probably also knew how flattered I was and how hungry for flattery. “The character is an actor’s dream,” he said about Marian, casually, as though this observation were unrelated to any business between us. “There’s a foundation of fact but still an abundance of freedom.” Hugo had excellent intuition, so he surely knew I would balk if he applied too much direct pressure. But he also knew that, deep down, I was desperate to be told what to do. I’m not sure why he bothered. There were better actresses, more reliable actresses, actresses who looked more like Marian Graves. I think he got a kick out of getting people to do what he wanted while simultaneously doing exactly as he pleased, staging little subversions like hiring the recently disgraced.
Siobhan called on the third afternoon, having gotten wind of what was brewing and having decided she was opposed. “I don’t want us to rush into any decisions,” she said. “I think we should let the dust settle a little more.”
“It seems like a good project, though, doesn’t it? And a good part?” I said, wheedling. It wasn’t so much that I felt confident it was a good project, just that I didn’t want to have to weigh Siobhan’s opinion against Hugo’s. I wanted a consensus. I wanted a voice from on high.
“My hesitation has more to do with the timing,” she said. “I don’t want us to leap at the first opportunity and then end up being stunt casted. I don’t want you to be a spectacle.”
“Hugo says we’re always spectacles. He says the point is to be a spectacle. Are you against it because I’d barely get paid?”
“No.” The word popped out too quickly. She paused, and I sensed her recentering herself. “It just feels—to me, from what I know—like maybe too many people already want too many things from this project. The vision of it feels scattered.”
“So you think I shouldn’t do it.”
“I think you should ask yourself what you want from this. Why this project?”
I saw myself flying a plane over the ocean. I saw myself gazing out over a wasteland of ice. The version of Peregrine I imagined was good, even great, but I could only conjure fragments, only flashes of myself with swelling music in the background like the clips they edit together in movie trailers to make any crappy, pretentious drama look Big and Important. I saw myself raising my Oscar. But if that actually happened, what would be left for me to want? Or what if Siobhan was right and I was just being needy, letting myself be taken advantage of, throwing away my one chance at redemption? The future felt like a blindfold.