Death of a Blue Movie Star

down.”
    She sat.
    Bob looked at Larry, who spoke: “What’s happened is we got us a call from the client.”
    “Both of us,” Bob threw in. “At nine this morning.”
    “Mr. Wallet?”
    Son of a bitch, the postpro house missed the shipment. She said, “I told the postpro to ship it right away. I threatened him. He absolutely guaranteed me—”
    “The tape got delivered to the client, Rune. The problem was they didn’t like it.”
    They want me to take a cut in pay. That’s what it is. House O’ Leather’s talked down the fee and they’re going to cut my salary.
    She sighed. “What was it he didn’t like? It was the dominoes, right? Come on. I did the setup three times. I—”
    Larry was playing nervously with a coin in his hand. “No, I think the dominoes were okay. “‘E said the logo was still a bit, you know, dodgy. But ’E could live with that.”
    Rune said, “The transitions? I did the dissolves real carefully….”
    Bob said to Larry, “Show ’er what he wasn’t too ’appy about.”
    Larry hit the play button of the Sony three-quarter-inch tape player. A colorful copyright slate appeared. The countdown from ten began, each second marked off with an electronic beep. At three, the screen went blank. Then:
    Fade in: the smiling daughter, explaining how House O’ Leather wallets were handcrafted from the finest cowhide, treated and dyed according to old family traditions.
    Cut to: Factory workers making wallets and billfolds and purses.
    Cut to: The daughter caressing a wallet (Model HL/ 141).
    Dissolve to: The dramatic domino shot.
    Cut to: Two women performing oral sex on a water bed as the closing credits for
Lusty Cousins
come on the screen.
    Rune said, “Oh.”
    Fade out.
    Larry said, “’E fired us, Rune. They aren’t paying the fee, they aren’t paying expenses.”
    Rune said, “I guess something kind of got mixed in.”
    “Kind of,” Larry said.
    Bob added, “So we’re out the profits and also out of pocket about seventy-five thousand.”
    “Oh.”
    Larry said, “I know it was an accident. I’m not suggesting it wasn’t but … Rune, you’re a sweet kid….”
    “You’re firing me, aren’t you?”
    They didn’t even bother to nod.
    “You better pick up whatever you got ’ere and ’ead out now.”
    “We wish you the best of luck,” Bob said.
    He didn’t mean it, Rune could tell, but it was nice of him to at least make the effort.

     
    Didn’t mean she was no good.
    Rune walked along the Hudson, staring at the olive-drab shadows stretching outward into the rippled texture of the water. Seagulls stood on one leg and hunched against the cool morning breeze.
    After all, didn’t Einstein get kicked out of school for failing math? Didn’t Churchill fail government?
    They went on to show everybody.
    The difference was, though, that they had a second chance.
    So that was it: no distributor. And no money for editing, voice-overs, titles, sound track …
    Rune had thirty hours of unedited tape whose value would go to zero in about six months—the time when the world would stop caring about Shelly Lowe’s death.
    She went home to her houseboat and stacked up all the tape cassettes on her shelf, tossed the script on top of them and walked into the kitchen.
    She spent the afternoon sipping herbal tea as she sat on the deck, browsing through some of her books. One that she settled on, for some reason, was her old copy of
Dante’s Inferno
.
    Wondering why that volume—not the one about purgatory or the one about paradise—was the best-seller.
    Wondering about the levels of hell people descend to.
    Mostly she meant Tommy as she thought this. But there were others, too.
    Danny Traub, who, even if he donated money to a good cause, was a son of a bitch who liked to hurt women.
    Michael Schmidt, who thought he was God and destroyed a fine actress’s chance for no good reason.
    Arthur Tucker, who stole Shelly’s play after she’d died.
    Rune wondered why descent seems the natural tendency, why it’s so much harder to go upward, the way Shelly was trying to do. Like there’s some huge gravity of darkness.
    She liked that,
gravity of darkness
, and she wrote it down in her notebook, thinking she wished she had a script to use the phrase in.
    If she hadn’t died would Shelly ever have climbed out of the Underworld like Eurydice?
    Rune dozed and woke at sunset, the orange disk squeezing into the earth over the Jersey flatlands, rippling in the angle of the dense