Beautiful Ruins (10)

Here she was, barely twenty-eight, working on a studio lot, not doing what she’d dreamed, exactly, but doing what people did in this business: taking meetings, reading scripts, and hearing pitches—pretending to like everything while finding myriad reasons to make nothing. And then the worst possible thing happened: success— She can still hear the pitch: It’s called Hookbook. It’s like a video Facebook for hookups. Anyone who posts a video on the site is also auditioning for our TV show. We snatch up the best-looking, horniest people, film their dates, and follow the whole thing: hookups, breakups, weddings. Best of all, it casts itself. We don’t pay anyone a cent!

Michael set up the show at a secondary cable channel, and just like that he had his first hit in a decade, a steaming pile of TV/Web synchronicity that Claire can’t bear to watch. Michael Deane was back! And Claire saw why people worked so hard to not get things made—because once you did one thing, that became your thing, the only thing you were capable of doing. Now Claire spends her days listening to pitches for Eat It (obese people racing to eat huge meals) and Rich MILF, Poor MILF (horny middle-aged women set up on dates with horny young men).

It’s gotten so bad she’s started to actually look forward to Wild Pitch Fridays, the one day she still might listen in on a random pitch for a film. Unfortunately, most of these Friday pitches come from Michael’s past: people he’s met in AA, people he owes favors to, or who owe him favors, people he sees at the club, old golf partners, old coke dealers, women he slept with in the sixties and seventies, men he slept with in the eighties, friends of ex-wives and of his three legitimate children or of his three older, less-than-legitimate ones, his doctor’s kid, his gardener’s kid, his pool boy’s kid, his kid’s pool boy.

Take, for instance, Claire’s nine thirty: a liver-spotted TV writer who played squash with Michael during the Reagan years and now wants to make a reality show about his grandkids (proudly displaying their pictures on the conference table). “Cute,” Claire says, and “Aw,” and “How sweet,” and “Yes, they do seem to be over-diagnosing autism now.”

But Claire can’t complain about meetings like this unless she’s ready to hear the Michael Deane Loyalty Lecture: how, in this cold town, Michael Deane is a man who never forgets his friends, holding them in tight clench and staring into their eyes: You know I’ve always loved your work, (NAME HERE). Come down next Friday and see my girl Claire. Then Michael takes a business card, signs it, and presses it into the person’s hand, and just like that, they’re in. People with a signed Michael Deane business card might want tickets to a premiere, or the number of a certain actor, or a signed movie poster, but usually what they want is the same thing everyone here wants—to pitch.

To pitch here is to live. People pitch their kids into good schools, pitch offers on houses they can’t afford, and when they’re caught in the arms of the wrong person, pitch unlikely explanations. Hospitals pitch birthing centers, daycares pitch love, high schools pitch success . . . car dealerships pitch luxury, counselors self-esteem, masseuses happy endings, cemeteries eternal rest . . . It’s endless, the pitching—endless, exhilarating, soul-sucking, and as unrelenting as death. As ordinary as morning sprinklers.

A signed Michael Deane business card is a form of currency on this lot—the older the better, in her estimation. When Claire’s ten fifteen flashes a card from Michael’s days as a studio exec, she hopes for a movie pitch, but the man launches into a reality pitch so awful it might just be brilliant: “Paranoid Palace: we take mental patients off their meds, put them in a house with hidden cameras, and fuck with their minds; turn on a light and music comes on, open the refrigerator and the toilet flushes . . .”

And speaking of meds, her eleven thirty seems to have gone off his: Michael Deane’s neighbor’s son striding in wearing a cape and a chinstrap beard, never making eye contact as he pitches a television miniseries about a fantasy world he’s created all in his head (“If I write it down someone will steal it”), called The Veraglim Quatrology—Veraglim being an alternate universe in the eighth-string dimension, Quatrology being “like a trilogy, except with four stories instead of three.” As he drones on about the physics of this fantasy world (in Veraglim, there’s an invisible king, an ongoing centaur rebellion, and male penises are erect for one week every year), Claire glances down at the buzzing phone in her lap. If she were still in the market for signs, this would be a good one: her career-challenged, strip-clubbing lunk of a boyfriend has just gotten up—at twenty minutes to noon—and texted her this one-word unpunctuated question: milk. She pictures Daryl in front of the refrigerator in his underwear, seeing no milk and texting this inane question. Where does he think this extra milk might be? She types back washing machine, and while the Veraglim guy drones on about his schizoid fantasy, Claire can’t help but wonder if Fate isn’t fucking with her now, mocking the deal she made by giving her the worst Wild Pitch Friday in history—maybe the worst day of any kind since eighth grade, when an alarmingly gushy period arrived during a coed PE kickball game and dreamy Marshall Aiken pointed at the blossom on her gym shorts and screamed to the teacher, Claire’s hemorrhaging—because it’s her brain hemorrhaging now, bleeding out all over the conference table as this wing-nut launches into book two of The Veraglim Quatrology (Flandor unsheathes his shadow-saber!) and another text arrives from Daryl, flashing on the BlackBerry in her lap: cereal.