Cheating at Solitaire(5)
3
Once, when he was younger, Carl Frank had liked to tell people that he didn’t believe in God but did believe in the devil. He didn’t tell people that anymore, because somewhere along the way it had become true. God was, as he understood it, a benevolent being, a cosmic Superperson whose first and most important characteristic was to wish his people well. Carl had been around for a long time, and he didn’t see any sign of anybody wishing anybody well. Even on a purely mundane level, the here and now, the day to day, all that was in evidence was bad luck and bad faith. Even the good luck was bad, more often than not. When he thought about the people he worked for, and the people they had him looking after, he sometimes wondered if there wasn’t a malevolent Superperson out there somewhere, making sure that everything turned out as badly as possible.
About the devil, though, Carl had no need to get metaphorical. The devil was a person just like you and me, except not, and she lived in a cloud of celebrity she had done nothing to earn. In fact, she had never earned anything in her life, unless you counted the money people paid her to go to their parties, which was considerable. It made Carl stop and wonder every time he thought of it. A million dollars just to show up at a party, when you didn’t sing or dance or act or even sling hash in a cafeteria? A million dollars just to sit there and be. That was not luck, it was sorcery, and the devil’s name was Kendra Rhode.
The pain-in-the-ass’s name was Michael Bardman, and he was getting hard to hear on this cell phone. Cells never worked all that well on Margaret’s Harbor, but in weather like this they were about as reliable as a schizophrenic on LSD. Of course, it was impossible to explain that to Michael Bardman, because he had never been on Margaret’s Harbor in the winter, and wouldn’t come. Michael liked L.A. Michael liked New York. Michael liked some place in the Greek islands where he could spend all day on his boat making phone calls to people he could have been screaming at in person if he weren’t so intent on taking a vacation. Carl wondered what it would be like if somebody decided to give Michael Bardman a taste of reality, and then he didn’t. The Michael Bardmans of this world, like the Kendra Rhodes, lived in an alternative universe.
The snow looked like a solid sheet of white outside the big front windows of the Oscartown Inn. Carl took a long sucking pull at his Scotch and water and waited for the tirade to be over. It was the same tirade he had heard yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and the only reason he wasn’t scared to death that he was about to lose his job was that he knew that Michael Bardman knew that there was nobody out there who could do it any better.
“Let me try to explain this to you again,” he said, when Michael’s screeching had subsided momentarily. Michael Bardman had made something of a career of screeching. It was what he did instead of actually producing movies.
“You keep explaining things to me,” he said, “and I keep telling you I don’t want your explanations.”
“You also don’t want me to walk out of here in the middle of everything, so you’re going to have to listen to them. We’re in the middle of some kind of huge snowstorm. They call it a nor’easter—”“I don’t understand why everything has to stop because of a little snow.”
“It’s not a little snow, it’s a lot of snow. Half the island has already lost electricity and the rest will probably go before morning. We can’t film at all, outside or in. And it’s not your problem anyway. We’re not a month and a half late because of a snowstorm.”
“It’s costing a fortune. And on a movie that isn’t going to make all that much. I mean, it will do all right, but—”
“But it’s not going to be Lord of the Rings. Yes, I know, Michael, I know. But nothing is going to get any better, or any cheaper, as long as that woman is here screwing things up. And she’s not just screwing things up, Michael, she’s doing it deliberately.”
“I don’t see why my actors have to drink like fish just because Kendra Rhode drinks like a fish. If Kendra Rhode jumped off a cliff, would they all just jump in after her?”
Carl looked down into his Scotch. His glass was half empty. He would never have been so fatuous as to describe it as half full. He couldn’t believe he had just heard what he had heard. He was having a very hard time not bursting out laughing.
“Listen,” he said. “Kendra Rhode does not drink like a fish. She gets other people to drink like fishes. She’s never late to appointments. She gets other people to be late to appointments. And, like I said, she does it deliberately. She likes to see people crack up.”