“I don’t know what you mean, Charley,” Beth said.
“He means Oscar week, Beth. Don’t you read trashy magazines?” Candy hissed. “Like even daughters of directors have … face peels and get their hair styled by Kevin Lee and Sally Hershberger …”
“How would I know about that?” Beth asked. Candy sighed.
“I hope I’m not being ignorant here or presumptuous, but so that your honored father-in-law and mother-in-law, as well as my family, and of course Candy and Eliza and Ben … I procured such tickets and if you would accept them, I would be so much in your debt.”
At just that moment, George Karras stood up and said, “I’d love to say something if I can. A really brief something, if you’ll let me. I just want to add my congratulations to Vincent and Kerry and to my Spiro, my Sam, not only for giving us all a beautiful granddaughter but for this amazing achievement. And I want to thank Beth and Pat for your great hearts. For letting me have a part in the life of your boy I so love.”
Beth glanced at Pat, ordinarily cool to George if he spoke at all, who had often said he would have been happy if Ben had never spoken to George again. Pat was dashing a tear from his eye. Would wonders never cease.
“So, Bethie,” Charley Seven said again. “I wonder, will you accept this?”
In answer, Beth threw her arms around as much of Charley Seven as she could manage and squeezed. “This is like Christmas morning and … and Stella’s day rolled into one! Charley, how can I ever thank you?”
“Please,” Charley said, the only evidence of what now had to be nine ounces of straight whiskey a few beads of sweat on his forehead that Charley delicately patted away with a pocket square. “The honor is mine. Imagine my father’s face seeing Marco Ruffalo’s name up there as cinematographer … you can’t imagine it.”
Then Charley Seven said that he and Maria needed to get home now and that he would see himself out. Maria blew a kiss. Pat excused himself from George and watched as Charley walked, stolidly as a pyramid with feet, in a straight line to Beth’s front door, which he opened and closed without a sound.
“What did he say?” Pat asked. “He crossed off the debt, right?” Beth nodded. Pat said, “Damn it. Well. We have to let him. God bless him.”
“He’ll die like a dog on the expressway,” Candy said. “How much can a person drink standing up?”
“He doesn’t drive his own car, Candy,” Pat told her. “There’s been a guy sitting out by the pool for an hour. He’s wearing a coat but he won’t come inside. And Charley’s a very big person. In size, I mean. Not influence. Although, that too, apparently. Did he tell you about the tickets?”
“Yes,” Beth said cautiously.
“I told him he had to ask you.”
“Well, Pat, how do you feel about those tickets?” Candy asked.
Pat said, “Look, I have my problems with Charley Seven. But I’d have taken those tickets from the devil himself.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Beth tried ginger ale to settle the wobbles in her stomach. Waiting for Eliza to finish nursing Stella and put the last touches on her outfit, Beth felt as parched and nauseated as she had when she ran the Police Benevolent 5K with Candy.
Suddenly, the bedroom door banged open.
“Vincent!” Beth said.
“I’m sorry, Ma. Dad let me in. Is it okay?”
“Of course,” Beth said. “I haven’t seen you since you said you were having lunch with Barry Levinson and you were going to puke. Did you? Have lunch, I mean? Now I feel like I’m going to. I can’t believe it’s almost time!”
“I didn’t puke. Rob and I went from lunch to some meetings.”
As the rosy glare from the tall windows slipped away, Beth noticed that Vincent’s face was so white she could see the blue vein in his forehead, his hair so wet he might have climbed out of a pool.
Beth jumped up. She asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, Ma.”
“What’s wrong, Vincent?”
“We … sold it,” said Vincent. “We decided to sell the movie to a studio we could maybe work with later. In case we don’t win. Think of how many formerly Oscar-nominated documentaries you can think of. None, right? We really don’t have much of a chance. But we still got … a lot of money.”
Pat and Candy appeared in the doorway with Eliza and Adriana, holding Stella.
“How much is a lot?” Eliza asked bluntly.
Vincent said. “It’s three million.”
“Dollars,” said Eliza and sat down.
“And a couple points of the future revenue. Less the money we’re giving Kerry and Ben.”
“Huh,” Beth said. “I’m glad I’m sitting down.” She breathed, “Oh, Vincent. Oh, honey. You’re a millionaire. With your second film.”
“And I’m a thousandaire,” said Ben, coming into the room, adjusting his bow tie.
“You’re a hundred-thousand-aire,” Vincent said. Ben grinned. Vincent looked around. “Winning would sort of be over the top now. Like … too much to ask. Is this me or all the dope I smoked?”
“I’ll ignore that,” Pat said.
Vincent went on, “It’s really not that much …”
“In what universe?” Pat asked. “Come here.” He held Vincent close and kissed him. “Buon lavoro, Vincent. I love you.”
“I love you, Pop. I’m shaking.”
“Eliza, we’re sort of rich,” said Ben. “By the way, you look like a million bucks, Beth. You too, Liza.”
“Three million bucks. I owe you, bro,” Vincent said. “I, Ma … I just wanna go to sleep. Can I just camp out here and you tell me how it all comes out?”
Fifteen minutes later, Beth had to practically haul Vincent up to go put on his tux. He still looked as pale as though he’d spent the past five years farming mushrooms.
All of them assembled in the hotel lobby at four p.m.
The Cappadora clan and Beth’s relatives, the Kerrys, spun like a human carousel to gape at the sight of Ben Affleck strolling with his two toddlers, nodding to Hugh Jackman who was sipping a tonic at the bar. Cameron Diaz swept past.
The elevator doors opened and Grandma Rosie appeared in a beige and gold Chanel suit with Grandpa Angelo in gray tails with a cravat and a pearl stickpin.
“Where did you find that?” Beth asked her mother-in-law. “It’s … you look like a model, Rosie!”
“In the closet,” her mother-in-law told her. “Grandpa and I wore these after the war. Now they’re vintage. And we’re vintage.”
They were all clustered in the hall when Charley Seven strolled up, rolling side to side like a moving monument, a fat Cuban in his hand in defiance of signs that prohibited smoking on pain of death.
“I thought you didn’t smoke,” Beth said, without thinking.
“This isn’t smoking,” he said. “They took the same position at the front door. I don’t understand people’s thinking.”
“Charley, it’s been just amazing,” Beth told him.
“A thousand thank-yous,” said Eliza. “Charl—I mean, Mr. Ruffalo.”
“You look like a bouquet of lilies,” Charley Seven said. “I guess this worked.” He checked his watch. “Eliza, do you want to go check on the baby before we leave?”
“I just came from feeding her and I don’t want her to cry. Adriana is the sweetest girl. You won’t let us pay her? Or you?”
“It’s all taken care of,” Charley Seven said. “But I thank you most kindly. The cars are outside.” Charley Seven paused. “Oh, Paddy, you can’t bring cell phones, even if they’re turned off.”
His eyes smoldering, Pat pursed his lips and slipped his slender phone from his interior pocket. Parting with his phone made him feel as though he’d been disconnected from life support.
“I have a silent beeper inside my belt buckle if anyone needs me,” Charley Seven said. “Let the world spin without us for a few hours.”
Pat laughed. “A belt-buckle beeper. We’ll have to call you Double-O
Seven now,” he said.
Vincent finally arrived, just in time to say goodbye. His parents would join him at the Independent Filmmakers Dinner, but everyone else, cameras in tow, was heading to the Kodak Theater. Vincent carried a telegram from George Karras, which he gave to Ben.
With the exception of the therapist Tom Kilgore and his mother’s dad, everyone who had ever played a pivotal role in Vincent’s life stood facing him in the lobby of the Paloma Hotel. Ten had come from Chicago. Mom’s brother Paul Kerry had come from Seattle with his eldest daughter, Erin.
Some of them had slept on the plane. Some hadn’t slept at all.
He looked at Grandma Rosie and Grandpa Angelo, Ben and Kerry, Dad and Mom and Candy and Eliza, as if they had materialized from the dreamless sleep he awoke from that morning. He thought of the others—Rob, the families. Vincent wouldn’t even be here except for St. Markey Ruffalo, the weird kid with the crazy ability for the camera. He remembered Markey waiting for four hours in the rain outside the Whittiers’ mountain home until the drops were dappling the surface of the creek in the exact rhythm of Kerry’s song, which he was listening to through headphones.
Just then, Beth dropped her fancy little red leather clutch. Lipsticks and brushes and business cards fell out along with an envelope that scattered invitations to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards.
Vincent’s heart nearly stopped.
“Everybody give all the tickets to the ceremony to Candy, please,” he said. “No offense, Ma.”
“None taken,” Beth said. “I don’t know if I’m in town or not.” They all gave their tickets to Candy.
“That’s Kate Winslet,” Kerry hissed, loud enough so that the desk clerk glanced up and smiled. “It looks like she has a sunburn. Who would get a sunburn before the Oscars?” The fine-boned, tawny-haired actor, severe in plain white satin, slipped past them into the dark recesses of the fabled bar. He ought to reprimand them, Vincent thought in some vaguely self-conscious way; but what the real hell, he was doing the same thing, ogling Kate Winslet’s rear end. He was a nobody-somebody and tomorrow he would be a former nobody-somebody. But his brother and his sister and his mother and his eighty-year-old grandparents had flown through the darkness to rejoice, as it said in the Bible, for their sheep that had been lost and was now found. And damned if he was going to deny that he was a boy from the West Side of Chicago.
“Buona fortuna, ’Cenzo,” said Angelo.
“I’ll see you there, Grandpa,” Vincent said, kissing Angelo’s soft, ancient cheek.
Beth would never be able to remember later what they ate. Was it Asian or Italian? Chicken or beef? Somehow letting inane details gnaw her, even years later, was satisfying—like using a fingertip to smooth an old scar.
“Why do you care?” Pat asked her, once, as they lay in the dark, face-to-face, neither daring to breathe lest they wake the other, knowing the other was already awake.
“Just to remember something … else,” she told him.
The award for Best Documentary Film would be the first of the least, following Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
When the Cappadoras arrived, the sun was still shining in California but people in Illinois gathered at the bar in The Old Neighborhood to see past Meryl Streep and Robin Williams, trying to catch a glimpse of a restaurant owner’s kid from Chicago. Kenny the bartender did see Beth as she slipped her camera out of her red evening bag and shot Harrison Ford signing autographs and laughing out loud at something Julia Roberts whispered to him as she swept past in layers of crinoline.
He didn’t see a guard examine Beth’s camera and her credentialing letter from Eye on Chicago magazine. Her eyebrow arched in triumph, Beth put on a new lens and took a few more shots of the impossibly lovely, impossibly cachectic young women, with thighs like biceps and eyes like the dials of watches, who stopped to drop a shoulder and pose before gliding on. The men were thin, too; but something, perhaps in their clothing, concealed the extent of it. The women’s dresses were sewn on, as Eliza’s was. They were draped and ruched to hide torsos that were only rib cages and breasts that were only nipples.
Finally, they were led to their seats and sat and waited for Vincent and Rob to approach—freezing like kids playing Statue Tag as Annette Bening and Warren Beatty assured them there was no reason to stand up to make way for them down the aisles to their seats. Like collection dolls come to life, the faces more familiar to Americans than some of their own family members drifted past and kissed and touched each other softly—the exquisite, the legendary, the heartbreakingly gifted, the mad and the reckless, the meticulous and the obsessed.
And then there was Vincent, looking as resplendent as any actor in black on black with an open collar. He slipped into his seat. Like nits, they all applauded so that Vincent almost forgot that his hair was “done” and was about to start clawing it with his open hands when Kerry held them down.
“I feel guilty, Pop,” Vincent told Pat. “I feel guilty we got this money because of what the movie is about. I should start a foundation with the money.”
“Vincenzo, there are enough foundations,” said Grandpa Angelo. “When the time is right, you’ll know what to do for good with your money. You’re not a fool. Good films are important. And these also cost money.”
“Okay, Grandpa,” Vincent said. “Okay.”
One word from Grandpa was like one word from the Pope, Beth thought. Still, Angelo had the same effect on her. It was as though he’d been thinking over whatever problem you had for years and finally had decided to let you in on the answer.
And then the music rose and golden platforms rose and golden icicles descended and two gigantic gold pillars in the shape of host Ellen DeGeneres appeared, just before the woman herself.
“This is the surprise tonight. It’s a new era. Tonight, the people who don’t get Oscars will be getting Ellens.” She gestured to the pillars. “They’ll be chocolate. At least, once they’re in the car, they can bite my head off!”
Soon, the names of five identical young men that Beth only dimly recognized were introduced, in snippets of roles as cavalrymen in World War I and the saviors of twelve-year-old girls sold into sexual slavery. Morgan Freeman was nominated for his role in a film about a young basketball star drafted into the NBA out of high school. He played the hero grandfather who helped steer the boy back to some semblance of his lost innocence.
One of the identical young men won.
“Always a bridesmaid, huh Morgan?” Ellen asked. “Except when you aren’t? What, do they just put your name down first and then fill in everyone else’s? It’s like people at the Grammys used to thank Stevie Wonder for not making an album that year.”
Then Sissy Spacek took the stage with an actor Beth remembered as a child actor in a series of sci-fi movies—who had grown up to look something like an elongated elf.
“You’re young enough to be my son,” Sissy Spacek said. “They promised me a hunk.”
“You’re little enough to be my daughter,” he replied. “They promised me a curvy Brazilian.”
“Movies are supposed to be make-believe,” said Sissy Spacek. She laughed. “Don’t you bother to put those cards up there because I can’t see ’em anyway! I’m too vain to wear my glasses when I’m dressed up! We count on movies to give shape to our dreams and our nightmares and to alter our consciences and always, we hope, make us laugh. But only one of the four nominated documentary films is a laughing matter, and that one is Scream Queen, the story of a young woman whose face you’ve never seen, but whose voice you’ve heard a dozen times, in some of the hottest horror movies of the past decade. You try it sometime. Just go out in your car and give a good scream. You’re not going to sound like Paul McCartney. Screaming is a gift, as you’ll see …”
It was funny. The girl, Brenda Gelfman, who had a whole repertoire of screams, from little shrieks to death wails, was a chubby brunette from Brooklyn with a mop of black curls.
“Our next nominee,” sa
id the elfin actor, “is a story within a story. Twenty-two years ago, a little boy was kidnapped in a hotel lobby. Nine years later, Ben Cappadora returned to his family unhurt. But ever since then, his family, and especially his older brother, has struggled to come to grips with what this particular loss of a child means to a family and to a community, and, I suppose, to all of us. These families still wait and hope. Let’s watch a few moments of No Time to Wave Goodbye, a film by Rob Brent and Vincent Cappadora.” They watched the excruciating, unsparing minute when the camera never wavered as Al Cafferty explained how they had told Alana to wave to them, even if she was with her coach, and of the surveillance cameras at the door that saw nothing, until they recorded a tiny shining thing, Alana’s good-luck bear.
As the presenters introduced One Shot, the journey of a shot of heroin from its grower to the middlemen to the nude women who stood at long tables and cut the product surrounded by thugs with guns to the Princeton-educated junkie whose own husband didn’t know of her addiction, Vincent leaned over to whisper to Beth, “This one is the winner.”
Beth tensed muscles in every part of her body.
Then they heard the words “unprecedented access” and “never-before-seen footage.” Vincent said, “There aren’t very many surprises in this town. It’s all over the street. One Shot will win. This guy will be the next Spike Lee or something.”
The final nominee was Buffalo Gal, a raucous and vivid film about young girls who rode the rodeo. A chasm of silent anticipation opened after the last moments of the twangy soundtrack died away.
Pat reached over Beth to cover Vincent’s hand with his own. He said, “At Christmas you would have given your front tooth to even be sitting here. We all think you already won. Right? Am I right?”