I won’t tell if you don’t.
2004
Hollywood Hits is easy enough to get to, if you hop in the back of Zach’s sister’s car. The high school girls seem unfazed, happy to spend the afternoon shoplifting temporary tattoos from Wet Seal and eating sticky orange chicken from the food court. There’s nothing particularly appealing about Casey Papadopoulos and her friend Daria, but their overwrought mixtape and deep analysis of senior boys is a small price to pay for the destination.
“Don’t you guys want to go to the beach?” Casey asks, eyeing them in the rearview.
“Apparently not,” says Sebastian.
“I don’t get it,” says Zach. “Why are we going to a movie when we can just watch TV?”
“Film is art, television is furniture,” Viola says. She heard that somewhere.
“What does that even mean?” Sebastian asks.
Obviously, he wouldn’t understand. He still watches cartoons. She shouldn’t have to explain: films are vehicles for humanity. They elevate understanding, take you to unimaginable places. They are recorded and packaged and available to rent forever and ever from Blockbuster; the recording confers its own importance. Television is cardboard. It is cheap microwave dinners. It is designed to disappear.
She chooses the simpler argument: “The actors are better.”
“It’s that one with Orson Grey, right?” Casey asks. “That like, oldy-timey one?”
“Lola, you are obsessed,” Sebastian says.
“Shut up.”
“What’s it called again?” Daria asks.
“Malentendu.” Orson plays an aspiring novelist whose poor command of the language and proclivity for mishaps lands him in the custody of a beautiful prison warden, played by Juliette Binoche. She will watch this film as closely as she has watched all of his films, as closely as she has followed his narrowly avoided marriages and (happy!) breakups. Their imaginary relationship has blossomed in the margins of her life. The waiting room of the dentist’s office, for instance, where she flips through trash magazines, imagining her face next to his. Her name scribbled one hundred times in the pages of a notebook, Viola Grey (gray-violet, a whole spectrum of color and light emerging from the possibility). In the same notebook, she has written forty pages of a fictional saga in which she is sometimes his wife and sometimes the wife of the misunderstood Bond villain he plays on screen. As it turns out, Doctor Meltdown is actually very tender, and receptive to her feminine updates to his volcanic lair. It is childish, but she picks at her crush like Sebastian picks at the skin next to his fingernails.
“Sounds lame,” Zach says.
“Well, it’s not.”
“He was in that show with your mom, right?” In the rearview mirror, Casey’s eyes are bright.
“How do you know that?” Sebastian asks.
“Well, our mom used to watch it. Like, all the time.”
“Don’t be awkward, Casey,” Zach warns.
“What! It’s true. She’s obsessed, like, you guys are like these celebrity children.”
“She was only on it a few times, I think,” Viola says.
“Not the way my mom talks about it.”
“Really?” Sebastian is watching the back of Casey’s head with intensity, and Viola can see an idea lodging into his mind, can see it is going to become a problem. Her problem, probably. “We’ve never seen it. I didn’t think it was that big.”
The thought of her mother’s acting fills Viola with dread: otherpeople experiencing her, owning a piece of her that Viola will never know—better not to think about it. Casey is just exaggerating to be nice. Most people do. When it comes to dead people, everyone is always smarter or kinder or more successful than they were in real life.
Besides, if she had been really famous, they would have gone out to Los Angeles, lived glamorous lives. They would have known Orson, really. But, being sensible, her mother must have realized it was impossible to make it out there. She stayed home and took them on field trips and learned how to hit a tennis ball. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some die before they get the chance.
“No, it was like, a big deal. Like, back then. I mean, I’m really sorry, like for your loss and everything. It’s like, really sad. That she passed.”
“… Music the great communi-ca-tah, use two sticks to make it in the nay-cha…”
Zach is reaching to turn up the Chili Peppers, committed to changing the conversation through chaos. But it’s not enough to lift the fog that has descended, the strangeness of their mother’s name in someone else’s mouth, in someone else’s living room.
