Magic Hour, Susan Isaacs [life changing books txt] 📗

everything except wear sunglasses and a false nose when he came over.” She stopped twirling her feet and started to do toe touches, flexing her calves as she bent over. She could have been stretching for a marathon; she was ready to run. She was not someone who could tol-erate being confined.

“Why would he ask his assistant to find something nice to say?”

“Busywork, maybe.”

“No.”

“When did he ask his assistant to read it?”

“A couple of months ago.”

“I’d just handed in my second draft then. Sy said he liked it a lot but that he wouldn’t have time to really go over it until Starry Night wrapped.”

286 / SUSAN ISAACS

“This was the rewriting you did based on his suggestions?”

“Yes.”

“Knowing Sy, was it possible he didn’t like it, even though he told you he did?”

She considered the question. “Knowing Sy, yes. Maybe he—I don’t know—wanted me back in his life for a while.”

She looked disheartened, as if she’d just gotten a brusque rejection letter in the mail. “But he did write me this nice note. Something like: ‘Skimmed it. Adore it. Can’t wait to really read it.’”

This could be another one for the good guys; if Sy had liked the screenplay, and if she had written proof, she’d have every motive for wanting him alive; a dead executive producer can’t make a movie. “He wrote you a note?” I demanded.

“Yes. He has little three-by-five note cards with his name.

He used one of them.”

“Typed or in his own handwriting?”

“I think he wrote it.”

“Did you save it?”

“It should be in my Sea Change file. In my office.” She stopped cold. “Oh, wait a second. You want proof that he liked it originally too. Right? Fine. Look in that same file.

There’s his original memo, the one he wrote after he read the first draft. Typical Sy. Eight pages, single-spaced, multi-syllabic. Talking about everything from character arc to how I misused the subjunctive mood. But filled with ‘brilliant’

and ‘trenchant’ and ‘poignant.’”

“What does ‘trenchant’ mean?”

She chewed her lip for a second. “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. It’s one of those words that nobody in human history has ever said out loud, and you don’t see it written that often. He also wrote it was ‘au courant.’ That must have been a shock to him. Sy had always told me I was born too late, that I be-MAGIC HOUR / 287

longed under contract to RKO—if there still was an RKO—because my writing talent was for great 1941 movies.

He couldn’t get over that I’d finally written a screenplay that would appeal to someone besides my Aunt Shirley, and a perverse USC film professor. An eastern, not a western.” She got off the bed and began to pace, which isn’t easy when you can only pace three steps forward and three steps back.

“You know, you had a search warrant. How come you didn’t read that file?”

“Robby Kurz probably looked at it and decided it wasn’t important.” I took out my notebook and jotted down: “Bon’s Sea file.”

“Not important? You’re hearing from people that Sy hated my work, that he rejected me—which would give me a motive to kill him if I was a homicidal maniac, which I’m not. And you say it’s not important?”

“It’s not our job to dig up exculpatory evidence.”

“No. It’s your job to railroad people.”

“Sit down.”

“I don’t want to sit down,” she snapped. “God, I feel so cooped up in here.”

I was pissed. I wanted her to like being with me. “Want to try a jail cell?”

“Do you? Maybe you can have the one next door. You know, when you go up the river for your Class D felony.”

Bonnie’s pacing got faster, more desperate. Suddenly she stopped short. Smiled. That phony, movie-biz smile, falsely warm, fraudulently agreeable. “Listen, I have a great idea.

We can share a cell! Have a hot affair after lights-out. Not just your conventional hot affair. I mean, a love affair. We’ll actually talk! Tell each other our life stories. The true ones, even when they hurt. Not the slick ones we make up to entertain people. And sex! We’ll do it standing up, sitting down, frontways, sideways—”

288 / SUSAN ISAACS

“Bonnie, stop it!”

“Why? I’m telling you, it could be magic. Like we were creating something the world had never known before. And then the next day—”

“I asked you to stop it.”

“—the next day you’d be free. You could forget it happened. You could forget it meant something.” She hoisted an imaginary glass. “Hey, I’ll drink to that!”

“I’m sorry if I hurt you,” I began. “That time of my life, I was a mess.”

I got up and walked into the bathroom. Moose followed.

No tissues, so I brought her a wad of toilet paper, knowing she was going to cry. I came back and put my arm around her shoulders, ready to absorb her sobs. But she pulled away and turned from me; she wasn’t crying, and she didn’t want me comforting her.

“Bonnie,” I said to her back, “in AA, one of the things we do is to make a list of all the people we’ve harmed. Then we’ve got to be willing to make amends. I know I harmed you. I’m not going to make excuses—”

“Gideon said you didn’t remember what happened.”

“I didn’t. But later, after he left…I remembered some of it. I know I’ll never be able to know what really went on between us—what we talked about. But let me just say how sorry—”

She turned back and gazed at me so straight I looked away.

“No amends, okay? I don’t want any magnanimous Twelve Step gestures that will make you Feel Good About Yourself.

Yes, you hurt me. But I let myself get hurt. I was playing a raunchy sex scene, and I tried to score it with violins. Well, I was the dope.”

“You know it wasn’t any scene.”

MAGIC HOUR / 289

“I know it’s history.” She sat down on the bed again, feet on the floor this time, hands in her lap. Mormon schoolmarm posture,