The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [87]
Annie kept the house clean, prepared their meals, went on daily three-mile runs, and watched at least one old movie on the VCR, while Buster spent nearly the entire day in his room, at work on something so necessary to him that he could not explain it to Annie. She had walked into his room one time when he was writing and she saw a piece of paper, which read: We are fugitives. We are the fugitives. We live at the edges. We live on the edge. The law is hungry for us. The law is skinny with hunger for us. A town filled with gold-seekers. A shantytown filled with gold-seekers. We live on the edge, a shantytown filled with gold-seekers. We are fugitives and the law is skinny with hunger for us. We=? The edge=?
“Buster,” she asked, pointing at the scribbled words, “what is this?” He shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I’m going to find out.” She left him to bang away on his computer, the violent sound of his hands building something out of nothing. She was slightly jealous of how easily he could carry his art around with him. Unlike Buster, she needed screenwriters like Daniel to give her lines and directors like Freeman to tell her how to say them, and actors like Minda with whom to interact. She had always thought that Buster’s solitude, writing all alone in a tiny room, had helped to undo him, but now she thought that making something with no one else’s interference might be interesting. And yet it was impossible for her to imagine anything other than acting, the way she took the lines and made them believable, the way she processed direction and made the action possible, the way she looked at another actor and convinced herself that she loved them. She sat in her room, watching a movie where an actress, beautiful and predatory, stood under a streetlight, a handkerchief in her mouth, having transformed from a panther back into a woman. Annie wished she had been an actress in those days, when things were bizarre and yet no one seemed to notice or care.
Annie had only checked her e-mail once since fleeing L.A. There had been an e-mail from Daniel, which she had deleted without reading. There had been an e-mail from her agent, which had the subject line of Rethinking our business relationship. She had deleted that without reading it. There had been nothing else but spam.
When she logged on again, she saw that she had a new message from Lucy Wayne, her director from Date Due. Annie had not talked to her in quite some time, had been so embarrassed by Freeman’s movie and the subsequent hoopla over her personal life that she avoided contact with Lucy, afraid of being told that she had proven to be a disappointment. The subject line read: News. Annie clicked on the message and it read:
Hey Annie,
I have tried to call you about a hundred times. Your agent said you had gone AWOL, but he gave me your e-mail to try and reach you. I’ve been thinking about you, and, after I heard about your parents, I got worried. I hope you are okay, though I can’t imagine that you are in a good place right now. I know how complicated your relationship was with Caleb and Camille and, though we haven’t talked in a while, I’d love to see you again.
The main reason I’m writing is that I’ve finished the screenplay for my next film, and I’ve been thinking about you a lot. This character, this woman I’ve been writing about for the past year and a half, is someone that I couldn’t picture in my head without thinking of you. I guess, in a lot of ways, I wrote this character with you in mind. And I don’t know what your situation is right now, how interested you are in acting, but I think you’d be perfect for the part. I’m lining up financing, though after Paramount basically killed my last movie with all their bullshit, I think I’ll be going the independent route again. So there won’t be much money, but I hope you’ll