It is relatively easy to pack up your life when you’re twenty-three, and Sadie was significantly finished by the time Dov returned from the break.
“What the fuck is this?” he said.
“I’m…Well, I’m going to California,” she said.
Unfair had acted quickly, she explained. Sam had already gotten a referral for a new team of doctors. He had left before Christmas so that he could get the surgery scheduled. Once he’d committed to this course of action, he said he wanted it done as soon as possible. New Year’s Day, Marx and Zoe flew out to L.A. to find office space for the company, and an apartment for the two of them. They found both in Venice, where Marx determined the cool kids in tech were. Sam and Sadie didn’t need apartments yet—Sam would stay with his grandparents until after he’d recovered from the surgery, and Sadie would stay with her parents and could house hunt from there.
Dov listened quietly until she was done. He was silent a moment before he said, “Like thieves in the bloody night. When were you planning to tell me?”
“It happened fast,” she said. “It wasn’t personal.”
“We’ve spoken dozens of times since you must have decided all of this.”
“Yes, but it’s hard to talk to you when you’re in Israel. You’re always so distracted when you’re with Telly.”
Dov sat on the bed and watched Sadie empty the bureau. He squinted, as if it were a problem with his eyes. He put his head in his hands.
“Do you want me to ask you to marry me? Is that what you want?” “No,” Sadie said. “You can’t anyway.”
“Do you want me to get a divorce right now? Because I will.” He reached for the phone. “I will call Batia right now.”
“No,” Sadie said. “And I don’t believe you. If you were going to do that you would have done it.”
“Are we breaking up?” Dov asked.
“I don’t know,” Sadie said. “Yes, I think we are.”
He pushed her down on the bed, and he pushed his tongue into her mouth, and she lay there limply. “You think you’re a cool bitch now, don’t you?” he said.
She looked Dov in the eye. “No. I just want to go to L.A., and help my friend, and make my game.”
“Sam is not your friend, Sadie. Don’t fool yourself.”
“That’s what my partners wanted to do, and that’s what I’m doing.” “Partners. You wouldn’t even have a company if it weren’t for me,”
Dov said. “I gave you Ulysses. I set you up with publishers and industry people. I gave you fucking everything.”
“Thank you,” she said. “For fucking everything.” “Take off your clothes,” he said.
“No.”
“You think you’re tough now, don’t you?” She knew what was coming. He pushed her into the headboard, and he reached into his nightstand drawer and he snapped the handcuff around her wrist and to the bedpost, as he’d done so many times before. Sometimes, it had aroused her, and sometimes, it had annoyed her, and sometimes, it had frightened her. This time, Sadie felt nothing. She didn’t fight him. She let it happen. He reached under her skirt, between her legs, and he yanked her underwear off, and then he threw it across the room. He wouldn’t have sex without her consent, but he felt free to make her uncomfortable and embarrassed. He slammed the door to the bedroom, and she could hear him smacking something—the wall? the sofa?—in the other room. She picked up the phone with her free hand, and she called Sam. His grandmother answered the phone.
“Sadie Green! When do you arrive?” Bong Cha said. “The day after tomorrow,” Sadie said.
“It is so nice that you kids are still friends, and that you both are coming home. Your parents must be so excited,” Bong Cha said. She was clearly delighted to have Sam home.
“They are,” Sadie said.
“Ichigo is everywhere. Did you know there was a billboard on Sunset?
Did Sam show you the pictures we took?” “He did,” Sadie said. “Thanks so much.”
“Oh, it’s no bother. Dong Hyun is so proud of you two. He tells everyone how Sam and his childhood friend made this big game all by themselves. He says that he always knew you two would do great things. He has a huge Ichigo poster at the pizza place, but of course, you’ll see it soon.”
“Definitely. Is Sam there?” Sadie tried to stretch out her shoulder, but it was hard with her arm over her head.
“Oh, I will give you Samson! One moment.”
“How’s California?” Sadie said once Sam was on the line.
“Dry. Hot. Traffic,” Sam said. “I keep seeing coyotes everywhere. But the offices Marx rented are sweet.”
“At least there’s that,” Sadie said. “How’d Dov take the news?” Sam asked.
Sadie could hear Dov loudly playing Grand Theft Auto in the other room. “What I expected.” She felt as if she were already in California.
“Do you want to talk about the game?” Sadie asked. “I do,” Sam said.
About a half hour later—Sadie was still on the phone with Sam, discussing Both Sides—Dov came into the bedroom, and he unlocked the handcuff. “Who are you talking to?” he whispered.
“Sam,” she said.
“Tell him I say hello,” Dov said, in a normal, professional voice. “And good luck.”
She spent the next day packing up her life and intermittently arguing with Dov, going over the same ground. He told her she was nothing; she, in turn, said nothing. He apologized; she packed. He insulted her; she packed.
He apologized again; she packed. The last thing she packed were the handcuffs. She slipped them into the zippered pocket of the large duffel she was planning to check. She didn’t want Dov to use them on some other girl. She wasn’t sure if this impulse came from a sense of sorority or sentimentality.
Dov drove Sadie to the airport even though she said she could call a car. In the best of moods, Dov was an unpleasant, belligerent driver—he gestured, cursed, honked excessively, cut people off, passed on the right, rarely signaled—and Sadie avoided car rides with him as much as she could. On this morning, Dov’s driving was subdued, but he decided to pass the time lecturing Sadie about the folly of her exodus from Boston. He expressed his concerns through a series of histrionic rhetorical questions concerning L.A.’s shortcomings, all of which Sadie, a native Angeleno, already knew: Did she know about the earthquakes? The fires? The floods? The drought? The smog? The homeless? The coyotes? The general sense of looming apocalypse? Did she know that drugstores closed at ten? What would happen if she needed cough syrup or batteries or legal pads after ten? Did she know there weren’t any all-night diners or bodegas or takeout? Where would she eat? Where would she get decent bagels or pizza? Did she know that the only things people in L.A. ate were avocados and sprouts? Was she ready to be into juicing? Was she aware that the tap water caused cancer? Sadie! Whatever you do, do NOT drink the tap water! Did she know how dry the air was, and was she prepared for the constant allergies? Did she know that cell phone coverage was terrible? Did she know that no one in L.A. read books or went to the theater or followed current events? That their brains were pulp because they all worked in entertainment and spent their spare time getting plastic surgery and going to the gym? Did she know that no one walked, not even one block? That they drove from their front doors to their mailboxes? Did she still know how to drive? And the traffic, Hashem, had she heard about the traffic? Was she prepared to spend the majority of her waking hours en route? Wouldn’t she miss the seasons? Did she know that it never rained there, and when it did rain, there were mudslides? Wouldn’t she miss the rain?
When they reached the airport parking loop, he said, “I feel like I’ve fucked everything up. I’m a fucking genius so I don’t know why I fuck everything up all the time, but I do. I want to stop, but I don’t know how.” He took her suitcases out of the car, and he moved them to the curb. He pulled her tightly into him, crushing her head into his mesomorphic chest. “I’m a beast, but I fucking love you, girl,” Dov said. “For better or for worse, you can take that on your travels.”
—
For the flight to California, Marx had booked her a business-class ticket, and Sadie felt fancy. Even though her parents were wealthy, the family had always flown in coach. Her father, a business manager to movie stars, had seen too many of his clients go broke, wasting money on fripperies like luxury travel, divorces, restaurant investments, and second homes they never used.
Sadie settled into her seat. She accepted the heated washcloth, the orange juice in a glass flute, the small cup of warm nuts. She opened the window shade. It was not quite 7 a.m., and the sun was rising, a delicate, white blotch in a grayish sky. The plane took off, and she made sure to take a last look at Boston Harbor, which was covered in ice. She knew she wouldn’t be back anytime soon.
It was only 10 a.m. when Sadie arrived in Los Angeles. Marx and Zoe picked her up at the airport. Zoe thrust a bouquet of multicolor gerbera into Sadie’s arms. “Welcome home,” Zoe said.
Zoe was wearing a long, white maxi dress, and Marx was wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans. They looked, respectively, like Stevie Nicks and James Dean. Both wore sunglasses. “You guys are so Californian already,” Sadie said. “I was born here, and I look way less Californian than either of you.”
Marx and Zoe drove straight to the office—Zoe driving, Sadie in the front seat, Marx in the back. Sadie was tired from the flight, so Zoe did most of the talking. Zoe was the anti-Dov, eager to tell Sadie about her
California discoveries: Had Sadie gone to the Griffith Observatory? Had she been to movie night at Hollywood Forever Cemetery? The Cinerama Dome? The Greek? The Hollywood Bowl? The Getty pavilions? LACMA? The Theatricum Botanicum? The Bob Baker Marionette Theater? The Watts Towers? The Museum of Jurassic Technology? Did Sadie have magic friends and had she been to the Magic Castle? Had she tried green juice? Had she ever gone to the donut place that looked like a donut? Hot dogs were gross, but had she been to Pink’s? Had she taken one of those tours of celebrity homes on the double-decker buses? Had she been to the restaurant that was built around a tree? What was her favorite place to hear live music? The Whisky a Go Go? The Palladium? The Troubadour? What was her favorite part of town? Which canyon was her favorite for hiking? The sun was always out and it never rained, wasn’t that so great?
“They say there’s no culture here, but I’m finding plenty of things to do,” Zoe said.
“She loves it.” Marx was appreciative of his partner’s exuberance.
It was a tourist’s list, but Sadie liked Zoe anyway. She was intelligent, but her intelligence didn’t get in the way of her enthusiasm.
“You’re from Beverly Hills, right?” Zoe asked. “The flats,” Sadie said.
“The flat part of a place named for its hills?” Zoe said. “You can’t have hills without flats,” Sadie replied.
“Yes,” Zoe said. “That’s the truth.” Zoe turned to Sadie. “I’ve decided we’re going to be great friends, by the way. Don’t bother trying to resist me. I’ll stalk you until you submit.”
Sadie laughed.
The Venice office was on Abbot Kinney, which in 1999 didn’t have a single high-end chain store to its credit (or deficit, depending on your point of view). The space was industrial and, aside from bathrooms and a half- dozen offices along its perimeter, undefined. Its significant architectural details were massive, steel-framed casement windows and concrete floors, which Marx had the customary plans to warm up with wooden furniture, rugs, and plants. Compared to the cramped space they had left, Abbot
Kinney felt colossal, and its expansiveness caused Sadie to feel a fleeting anxiety bordering on kenophobia. When she spoke, her voice echoed. “We can afford this?”
“We can,” Marx said. Venice was still relatively cheap—Santa Monica’s shabby cousin—and Unfair Games was flush with cash. “The realtor said Charles and Ray Eames’s office was down the street.”
Sam emerged from one of the offices. “Hello, colleagues!” Sam turned to Sadie: “What do you think?”
“I think Both Sides better blow it out,” Sadie said.
“If you go up to the roof,” Marx said, “you can see a majestic, if terribly narrow, strip of ocean.” His phone rang: It was the movers with their Cambridge office boxes. “I have to meet them. You two go on without me.”
But when Sadie and Sam reached the landing, they found the only access to the roof was a steep spiral staircase. It was the kind of structure that gave Sam trouble, and Sadie was surprised Marx hadn’t warned them. “We don’t have to,” Sadie said.
Sam sized up the staircase, and then he nodded. “No, I’ll make it. I want to see this unimpressive vista for myself.”
As they carefully ascended, Sam leaned on Sadie, but only a little. He talked as they went so she wouldn’t notice his discomfort. “I was trying to remember the name of a game. It was around the time you started bringing the laptop to the hospital. There was a kid who’s trying to save his girlfriend.”
“But of course.”
“And a scientist whose brain was taken over by, maybe, a—I want to say—a sentient meteor? And there was a character with a green tentacle.”
“Maniac Mansion,” Sadie said.
“That’s it. Of course, it’s Maniac Mansion. God, we loved that game. I was thinking, we should make something set in a mansion sometime.”
“And each room is a time-travel portal.”
“Maybe all the people from all the different periods who ever lived there are there.”
“And they’re not happy about it,” Sadie said. By then, they had reached the top of the stairs. “Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For the use of your arm.”
On the roof, if she got on her toes and craned her neck, she could, indeed, see the Pacific. It wasn’t a magnificent view, but it was there. And, in any case, she could feel that she was near the ocean—she could smell it and she could hear it and the air felt like it, too. She took a deep breath.
The space Marx had chosen was so immaculate. Sadie loved clean, bright things, and she felt hopeful. It was right that they should come to California. California was for beginnings. They would make Both Sides, and it would be even better than Ichigo, because they were so much smarter than when they’d made Ichigo. Sam would be healed, and she wouldn’t be angry at him anymore—it wasn’t his fault that people thought Ichigo was his. And Sadie would be brand-new.
—
That night, Sadie borrowed her father’s car and drove into K-town. She parked the car in the alleyway behind Dong and Bong’s New York Style House of Pizza.
Framed posters for both Ichigo games were prominently displayed on the wall of the pizza parlor. The only other poster was for a Korean beer, JjokJjok. The poster was from the ’80s and quite faded. It had a picture of a smiling Korean woman and the tagline “What’s the most beautiful woman in Koreatown drinking?”
Sam was waiting for her at a booth toward the back.
When he saw Sadie, Dong Hyun came from behind the counter to hug her. “Sadie Green! Famous person!” he greeted her. “Same order? Half- mushroom, half-pepperoni?”
“I don’t eat meat anymore,” Sadie said. “So just mushrooms. And onions if you have them.”
Using one of the many keys on the key ring attached to his belt, Dong Hyun unlocked the Donkey Kong machine. “You kids play as much as you want.”
“Shall we?” Sam said.
As they approached the Donkey Kong cabinet, the Hall of Fame screen came up: Only one of S.A.M.’s scores remained—the top one. “Your record stands,” Sadie said. “You think you can beat it?”
“No,” Sam said. “I’m too out of practice.”
While they waited for the pizza, they played several rounds of Donkey Kong. Neither Sam nor Sadie was good anymore.
“You know the best thing about Donkey Kong?” Sadie asked.
“That it’s named for the villain? The innovative use of barrels as weapons?”
“The necktie,” she said. “It’s brilliant design. Without it, the question of his dick would always be hanging out there.”
“Literally.”
They both giggled at their adolescent joke, and they felt twelve again.
Dong Hyun served the pizza, and Sadie and Sam sat in a booth. Sam didn’t eat—it was after seven and his surgery was scheduled first, the next morning. “You’re seriously just going to watch?” Sadie said.
“I don’t mind,” Sam said. “I think you love pizza more than I do anyway.”
“When I was a kid.” Sadie made a face at him. “You sure you don’t mind?”
“I mean, I mind a little, but there’ll be other pizzas, Sadie.”
“You never know,” she said. “This could be the last pizza in the world.” Sadie hadn’t eaten since the plane that morning, and she ended up eating almost the whole pie. “I didn’t know it,” she said, “but I was
starving.”
Around eight, Sadie drove Sam to the hospital. It was past visiting hours, so only immediate family were allowed to accompany patients into their rooms. But when the nurse asked Sam who Sadie was, Sam answered quickly, “My wife.”
They went back to Sam’s hospital room. Sam didn’t feel like sleeping yet, so they sat side by side on the bed and looked out the window, which faced another almost identical building.
“A game that takes place in a hospital,” Sadie said. “Who’s the main character?”
“A doctor, I guess,” Sadie said. “She’s trying to save everyone.”
“No,” Sam said. “It’s a zombie attack, and this kid has cancer, and he’s got to somehow get out of the hospital alive and save as many of the other kids as possible.”
“That’s better,” Sadie said. She reached into her bag. “I found this in my desk at home and I was waiting for the right time to give it to you.” She handed him several waterlogged sheets. Across the top it read: Community Service Record: Sadie M. Green. Bat Mitzvah Date: 10/15/88.
Sam was delighted when he figured out what it was. He flipped to the back to look at the total. “Six hundred nine hours.”
“It was the most community service any Bat Mitzvah had ever done. I don’t know if I ever told you, but they gave me a prize,” Sadie said.
“You better have brought the prize with you!”
“What do you take me for?” She reached into her bag again and removed a small heart-shaped crystal paperweight that was inscribed: Presented to Sadie Miranda Green, for Her Outstanding Record of Community Service, June 1988, from Hadassah of Temple Beth El Beverly Hills. “They gave it to me when I hit five hundred hours. It drove Alice crazy, which is why I think she told you, though she denies that was the reason.”
“This is a quality prize,” Sam said.
“Those Hadassah ladies don’t mess around. It’s Swarovski or Waterford or something. Alice was so jealous!”
“Who wouldn’t be?” Sam enclosed the paperweight in his fist. “This is mine now.”
“Of course,” Sadie said. “That’s why I brought it.” “You’re sentimental tonight,” Sam said.
“Back in L.A. Back at the hospital with you. Starting all over again. No Dov. New game. New office. I guess I am.”
“I thought you were worried I was going to die,” Sam said.
“No. You’ll never die. And if you ever died, I’d just start the game again,” Sadie said.
“Sam’s dead. Put another quarter in the machine.”
“Go back to the save point. Keep playing, and we’ll win eventually.” She paused. “Are you scared?” she asked him.
“I’m relieved, more than anything, I think,” he said. “I’m glad it’ll be done. But it’s strange because I’ll also miss this useless foot. It’s been with me my whole life, of course, and I can’t completely deny that it’s been lucky.”
“How so?”
“Well, if I hadn’t been in the hospital, I never would have met you,” Sam said. “And we never would have become friends. And then enemies
—”
“I was never your enemy. That’s all on you.”
“You were my enemy,” Sam said. He held up the paperweight. “This precious proves it once and for all!”
“Don’t make me sorry I let you have that.” Sadie grabbed for it, but Sam held it away from her.
“I’ll never give it back. But then we were friends again. And if I hadn’t had a messed-up foot, we never would have made Ichigo, and we wouldn’t be here, twelve years later, sitting in another hospital, less than a five- minute walk from the first one.”
“You can’t know that,” Sadie said. “We could have met at some other time. Our childhood homes were five miles apart, and we went to colleges that were less than two miles apart. We could have met in Cambridge. Or we could have met before that, at one of those smart-kid things in L.A. that you were always shooting me those dirty looks at. Don’t deny it—”
“You were my mortal enemy!”
“That seems strong. I remember it as a period of reserved cordiality. But returning to my original point, there were many other ways—indeed,
infinite ways—we could have met.”
“You’re saying all my pain and suffering was for nothing?” he said. “Complete waste,” she said. “Sorry, Sam. The universe tortured you
because it could, because it will. The enormous polyhedral die in the sky was rolled, and it came up ‘Torture Sam Masur.’ I would have shown up in the game of your life either way.” Sadie yawned. She was starting to feel deathly tired. She’d been up for eighteen hours and she’d eaten so much pizza. She smiled sleepily at Sam. “I’m not your wife.”
“My work wife,” he said. “Don’t deny it.” “Your work wife is Marx,” Sadie said.
“And I was saying it so they’d let you come back,” Sam said. “The key to getting what you want in a hospital is telling the right lies in an authoritative voice.”
She yawned again. “I’m still so jet-lagged. I should drive home. I feel like I haven’t driven in so long that I’ve become a bad driver.” She shook his hand, which was their parting custom. “I’ll be here when you wake up from surgery, okay? I love you, Sam.”
“Terribly,” he said.
After Sadie left, Sam wasn’t tired, so he decided to take a last walk on his rotten foot. By this time, the foot could bear almost no pressure, and Sam was on crutches. But still, he wanted to remember what it felt like to be two-footed. He found himself walking over to the children’s hospital, where he’d spent so much time, where they’d devoted so much effort to saving the thing that would, in several hours, be excised for good.
He went into the waiting room and a girl, not much older than Sadie had been when he met her, was playing a game on a laptop. In the perfect world, Sam thought, the game the girl is playing is Ichigo. He looked over at the screen: it was Dead Sea.
“Do you like that game?” Sam asked.
“It’s kind of old, but I like killing zombies,” the girl said. “My brother says I look like the Wraith.”
As Sam walked back to his hospital room, he felt the surprisingly sharp point of Sadie’s crystal paperweight in his pocket, poking his thigh. He
reached into his pocket, and he took it out. He looked at the little paperweight and he laughed at himself. How angry he had been at Sadie! How much righteous passion he had devoted to holding this grudge! He had thought himself so mature when he’d decided to cut her out of his life, but his reaction had been embarrassingly childish and over-the-top. He’d once tried to explain the falling-out to Marx, and Marx had not even understood it. No, Sam had said, you don’t understand. It’s the principle. She was pretending to be my friend, but she was just doing it for community service. Marx had looked at Sam blankly, and then he said, No one spends hundreds of hours doing anything out of charity, Sam. Thinking of this and looking at the little paperweight, Sam’s heart swelled with love for Sadie. Why was it so hard for him to say he loved her even when she said it to him? He knew he loved her. People who felt far less for each other said “love” all the time, and it didn’t mean a thing. And maybe that was the point. He more than loved Sadie Green. There needed to be another word for it.
He wanted to call her right now and tell her, but he knew she was jet- lagged and would be sleeping in that mint green four-poster bed, under the rose-print sheets, her parents down the hall. The thought made him happy. His best friend had come back to their hometown for him. He wasn’t a fool; he knew what Marx had been doing when he’d insisted they move their business here. Marx had let him think that they were moving for Both Sides, for Sadie, for himself, and for Zoe even. But the truth was, they had done it for Sam, because Sam had been afraid of facing the winter, because Sam had constantly been in pain, because Sam had been afraid of the surgery and it was obvious to everyone that the surgery could not be put off. They had been worried about him, and they had wanted to make his life easier. And so they invented reasons—some of them even compelling and real. And they had not done this for the game or the company, but because they loved him, and they were his friends. And he felt grateful.
He took off his clothes, carefully setting the crystal heart on the nightstand, and he changed into his pajamas. He took a last look at his foot
—adieu, old friend—and then he got into bed, and he went to sleep. As was often the case when he was in the hospital, he dreamed of his mother.
—
For the first several months of being in Los Angeles, Anna did not work at all. She steadily auditioned for movies, soap operas, commercials, voice- overs, but hadn’t received so much as a callback. When she asked her agent why she was striking out so much, he said not to worry. “You have to let them get to know you, Anna.” Her agent insisted she had a young look, and he advised her to revise her résumé to say that she could play parts from thirteen to forty.
A few days after Sam’s tenth birthday, she did get a callback for a Saturday-morning cartoon show about tiny singing blue trolls, but in the end, they decided that they wanted someone whose voice was less ethnic. Briefly, Anna wondered what was “ethnic” about her voice: she was a native Angeleno. It was never any use to dig down on rejection feedback, though. Maybe they didn’t like her because she was no good, not talented, too short. Maybe they didn’t like her because they were racist or sexist or harboring some other secret prejudice. In the end, they didn’t like her because they didn’t like her. She wasn’t going to reason them out of their dislike. She wasn’t going to teach anyone anything.
While she waited for her big West Coast break, she took classes: acting (voice, auditions, movement), dance, yoga, computer programming, memoir writing. She meditated. She went to therapy. She worked at her parents’ restaurant when they needed the help. She watched her bank account diminish—she and Sam had far fewer expenses now that they were living with her parents, so it didn’t go down as quickly as it might have. But there were expenses. Life was expensive anywhere you were. The classes cost money, though she considered them necessary. She’d bought a used car. She needed new headshots and clothes. She paid her parents room and board, even though they said she didn’t need to. Eventually, she’d need money to find them their own place, in a good school district, better than the Echo Park one her parents were zoned for. And she needed to work, because if she didn’t work soon, she’d lose her union health insurance, and
Sam would lose coverage, too. She told her agent: Send me in for anything. I will literally do anything.
In September, she had three auditions. The first was for the national touring company of South Pacific: the minor role of Liat, with the possibility of understudying a larger role. Anna thought South Pacific was racist, and a national touring company would mean being away from Sam for the whole year. The second was for the role of an “ethnic” maid on General Hospital who would end up having an affair with the male lead of the show. The character’s name on the sides was Ximena, but Anna’s agent assured her that the producers were open to all colors: Ximena could be LaToya could be Meimei could be Anna (but probably not literally Anna, because that sounded too white). And behind door number three was a model/hostess gig on a newish game show called Press That Button! The program was meant to be a competitor to The Price Is Right and was hosted by Chip Willingham, who was famous, though Anna wasn’t quite sure for what, maybe just being a host of things. The show was replacing one of their two spokesmodels. (Though they weren’t really spokesmodels, in that they were rarely called upon to speak.) Anna was short to be a model—she was five-foot-five—but if she wore her highest heels, she was shapely enough and slim enough and high-cheekboned enough to present as a model. In addition to an Asian, they were looking for someone in her twenties with “a great sense of humor,” which usually meant that some degree of humiliation would be involved. Anna didn’t want the gig anyway. Game-show model was not real acting. Anna had gone to Northwestern and had even done a stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Anna had been on Broadway. Anna was trained. Anna had craft.
At the audition for Press That Button! she was given a pair of red stilettos and a skintight black cocktail dress, and told to change. The producer, who was female, said, “We’re the classy game show.” The woman looked at Anna expectantly.
“Wow,” Anna said. “That’s…” She could not think of anything else to
say.
The producer had Anna go through a series of exercises: opening and closing a curtain at the right pace, presenting an empty box, leading a contestant backstage, carrying out a big check, laughing and applauding politely.
“Bigger smile, Anna,” the producer called. “With teeth and happy eyes!” Anna smiled bigger.
“That’s great! Laughing is important, too. Chip needs to feel like you think he’s funny, even when he’s not being funny. Do you know what I mean?”
Anna laughed.
“Very good,” the producer said. “Maybe a different kind of laugh? Something more genuine. Like Oh Dad! You’re so corny, but I still love you. That kind of laugh.”
Anna laughed, in a genuinely bemused way.
“Good, good! You’re good. I completely believed that.” The producer looked at Anna. “You’re a little petite, but I like your look.” The producer nodded. “Okay, so I’m going to have you meet with Chip now. The thing you need to know about Chip is that he’s super old-school, right? He’s not a bad guy, but he’s not into, as he puts it, any women’s lib stuff—he’s fine with women, but he doesn’t want to hear about it. Also, he went to Dartmouth and he likes people to know that. Your job is to laugh at his jokes, and be gorgeous like you are, and stay out of his way, as much as possible.”
The producer led Anna into an office with a star on the door. The producer knocked. “Chip, I’ve got someone for you to meet. The girl that might replace Anna.”
“I’m Anna,” Anna said.
“Sorry. The girl before you was called Anne.”
The first time Anna saw Chip Willingham, she thought that no one had ever looked more like a game-show host than this man. He was tanned and buttery, like a quality handbag; his hair had the color and rigidity of onyx; his teeth were enormous white rectangles. He gave the impression of being handsome without actually being handsome, and she could not begin to
guess his age. He turned his head over his broad shoulders and looked Anna up and down.
“Go in,” the producer instructed Anna before closing the door behind
her.
“Short,” Chip said. “I am,” Anna said.
“Tits.” He paused. “Small.” He paused again. “Apples. Some men like
apples. Some men don’t.”
Anna laughed the Corny Dad! laugh. She couldn’t wait for this to be over. With any luck, she’d get the national touring company of South Pacific. It would pay well enough, and while she’d miss Sam, at least he’d be with her parents.
“But women are the ones who watch our show. Your apple tits are perfecto for daytime.”
“That’s what my mother always told me,” Anna said. “You’re funny.” Chip did not laugh. “Come closer.”
Anna didn’t know why, but she did. He looked at her face. He ran his index finger down the bridge of her nose.
“Exotic. The last one was an Oriental, too.”
“Orientals are rugs and furniture,” Anna said. “Not people.” “Chinoiseries are furniture,” Chip said. “Turn around.” Again, Anna didn’t know why she did, but she did.
“Ass,” he said. “Big apple.” He smacked her on the rear and then he clutched her right butt cheek, his manicured fingernails penetrating her crack. “Firm.”
Anna laughed, Corny Dad! And then she slapped Chip across the face. She walked to the dressing room to find her clothes. She didn’t cry.
The female producer stopped her as she was leaving. “How’d it go with Chip?”
Anna shook her head.
“For what it’s worth, I think he really liked you,” the producer said. “It wouldn’t have gone that long if he didn’t like you.”
“What happened to Anne? The girl who had this job before.”
“Anne. It’s, well, it’s a tragic story. Anne died quite suddenly.” “My God,” Anna said. “Chip didn’t murder her, did he?”
“It must have gone well in there,” the producer quipped. “Anne was driving with one of her boyfriends on Mulholland, and they missed their turn, and…You know Los Angeles. She was a sweet kid. Only twenty-four. From Oakland.”
“Her last name wasn’t Lee, was it?” Anna didn’t know if she could bear it if it was.
“No, it was Chin.”
Anna started to cry. She was crying for the other Anna Lee, who threw herself from a building, and this Anne, who, no doubt, had also had Chip Willingham’s fingers where they shouldn’t have been, and herself: Had it come to this? She questioned her life choices—from auditioning for the school play her freshman year of high school, to deciding to come to Los Angeles because a woman, who had nothing to do with her aside from the coincidence of her name, had thrown herself from a building on a frigid night in February. The producer patted Anna on the shoulder. “It isn’t as bad as all of that. She didn’t suffer.” She handed Anna a tissue.
Three days later, Anna’s agent called. “Great news!” he said. “You booked Press That Button! They loved your ‘feistiness.’ That was the word they used.”
“What happened to South Pacific?”
“Who cares?” the agent said. “You hate South Pacific.” “What about the soap?”
“They decided to rewrite the role as a poor-white-trash type. Forget about it. Press That Button! will pay better than either of those other gigs, and if the show runs forever, you can afford to send that son of yours to Harvard-Westlake or Crossroads. And if something better comes along, I’ll get you out of Press That Button! I promise. It’s easy money, Anna.”
For its three-year run, Press That Button! was a completely nondistinctive version of a 1980s daytime game show, a completely nondistinctive form. Its variations included regular people paired with celebrities to answer trivia questions; an abusive, flame-haired mascot
called the Button Monster; carnival-style games; the studio audience maniacally chanting Press! That! Button! as directed by the prompter. The handful of times Sam had gone to watch tapings, he had found the whole thing delightful—far more entertaining than the theater his mother had been doing in New York.
For her contributions, Anna was paid $1,500 a week, more than she had made when she’d been in A Chorus Line, and though the job had little to do with the work she had trained for, the only difficult part of it was avoiding Chip Willingham’s advances. The more she avoided him, the more he sought her out. The more aggressive she was in rejecting his advances, the more determined he seemed to make them. He seemed to like the rejection, though he also liked telling her how replaceable she was. “There are a million Anna Lees in this town,” he’d say. In order to get through it, she began to imagine herself in a parallel game show. Winning was, among other things, keeping her job.
Even if there were “a million Anna Lees,” this Anna Lee was still one of a handful of Asians on American network television, and there turned out to be great value to this. She became a local celebrity in K-town, something she had not expected. She found herself with an endless array of paid- appearance opportunities: celebrity judge for Miss Koreatown, ribbon cutting for a Korean grocery store, ads for Korean beauty products, the openings of restaurants. She became the spokeswoman for a Korean beer called JjokJjok, and her face was on a fifty-foot-wide billboard on Wilshire, with the slogan “What’s the most beautiful woman in Koreatown drinking?”
Anna, her parents, and Sam drove to Wilshire to take pictures with the billboard. Dong Hyun pulled out his bulky Minolta 35mm film camera. His eyes teared, and he patted Anna on the arm, and mumbled something about the American Dream. He had not known what the American Dream was or when he would know if he had attained it, but the American Dream might very well be his daughter on a billboard, selling JjokJjok beer to other Koreans. Who was to say it wasn’t? “Dad,” Anna said, “it’s just a billboard. It’s not a big deal.” Anna was embarrassed by the attention, embarrassed by
the work she was doing. Simultaneously, she was proud that she had recently signed a lease on a town house in Studio City, which would put Sam in a superior public-school district. She was proud that her dad was proud.
“The most beautiful woman in Koreatown,” Dong Hyun said with reverence.
“It’s an ad guy, trying to sell beer,” Anna said. “I’m not the most beautiful woman in Koreatown.”
“She isn’t,” Bong Cha said. “There are many beautiful women in Koreatown.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Anna said.
“I don’t want you to get a swelled head,” Bong Cha said. “All this attention.”
“Let Sam settle it,” Dong Hyun said. “Do you think your mom’s the most beautiful woman in K-town?”
Sam looked at Anna. “I think you’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” Sam said. He was twelve, on the verge of being more man than boy. Every day, Sam became more of a mystery to Anna, even his smells, once so familiar, were a mystery, and there was a feeling of mourning to this. Yet, still Sam knew with certainty that his mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. It was on the billboard because it was true.
Anna and Sam drove back to Studio City, and she got a bit lost in the Hollywood hills. Maybe she had extended the drive on purpose. Maybe she had wanted to get lost. It was pleasant to drive with the top down, with your son on a warm California night in June. She had recently bought the car. A silly emerald-green sports car that had been her first real splurge.
“Did you know I went to the performing arts high school?” Anna said. “It’s not that far from here.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah.”
“Maybe you’d want to go there?”
“I don’t think so, Mom. I’m not really a performer.”
“True. But the thing that’s cool about it is that kids from all over L.A. go there, so you meet everyone. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but L.A.,
well, it can be a bit tribal. The eastsiders stay on the Eastside, and westsiders stay on the Westside. And the east, where we stayed with Grandma and Grandpa, isn’t the east, it’s the west. Because technically, anything west of the L.A. River is the west.”
Sam and Anna shared a laugh at the expense of the people who cared whether they lived on the east or the west.
“So, when I was at performing arts school, I had a boyfriend,” Anna said.
“Only one?” Sam teased.
“This particular one was the grandson of one of the old studio heads. Family money, you know? And he lived on the west, in Pacific Palisades, which is about as west as you can get, but he was always driving over to the house to see me. And he could get across town really fast. Like, lightning fast. Like, I’d call him, and then he’d be at my house in seven minutes. And you know how long it takes to get places around here. So, I ask him, ‘Bro, how are you getting to my house so quick?’ And he gives me this crazy look, and he says he can’t tell me, ‘It’s a secret.’ ” Anna, a good performer, paused for dramatic effect, and to make sure Sam was still listening.
“So, did he ever tell you?” Sam said.
“No. He was kind of a jerk, and we were always fighting, so we ended up breaking up not long after that. But last week, I told this story to Allison, the other model on PTB, and Chip overheard us, and he said, ‘He was obviously using the secret highways.’ ”
“Secret highways?”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I said. According to Chip, when L.A. was first being developed, the heads of the studios built secret highways. Highways that only they knew about, so they could get places fast. Chip thought my old boyfriend, who you’ll recall was the beloved grandson of a studio head, probably knew about the highways. Chip said there was one that supposedly ran from east to west, from Silver Lake to Beverly Hills, and another that ran north to south, from Studio City to Koreatown. Chip offered me ten thousand dollars if we could find them. Like I’d ever tell Chip if I found a magical secret highway.”
“We should find it,” Sam said. “That way, we can get to Grandma and Grandpa’s house fast.”
“We should!” Anna said.
“We can be methodical about it,” Sam said. “We’ll take a slightly different route back to Studio City each time we go. And I’ll draw a map, and eventually, we’ll find it. I know we will.”
They were winding up toward Mulholland, when all at once, a blur of fur darted in front of their car. Anna hit the brakes and swerved a little. The animal froze. In the headlights, Anna could see it was a medium-sized dog, or perhaps a coyote, with blondish fur. An all-American.
The animal scurried away.
“Oh my God,” Anna said. “Do you think we hit it?”
“I don’t,” Sam said. “It looked fine when it ran off. Just scared.” “Was it a dog or a coyote?”
“I don’t know,” Sam said. “How can you tell the difference?”
Anna laughed. “I don’t honestly know myself. We’ll look it up in Grandpa’s encyclopedia next time we’re over there.”
“Does it matter which one it was?” Sam said.
“I guess not.” She paused. “Maybe I’d feel a bit worse if I had killed someone’s pet. A coyote belongs to no one. A coyote is wild. But it’s probably wrong to feel that way. A coyote has as much right to its life as anyone else.”
She turned off the car to steady herself. Anna and Sam were left in darkness. Anna was unfamiliar with the new car, so she could not easily locate the emergency lights. Her hands were shaking. “God, it’s dark,” Anna said.
Sam would remember the lights first. Two of them, like a pair of eyes, growing quickly wider, larger, seeking them out in the night. Sam would remember having an irrational thought: We’re fine, because the car can’t see us. We’re protected by the darkness.
Then, the high-pitched squeal of tires, the metal crumpling, the glass shattering like a scream.
It will turn out that the driver had been speeding, but the accident won’t have been his fault. The streets were narrow—barely room enough for two cars to pass. He took the turn a bit wide and crashed his heavy sedan directly into the hood of Anna’s lightweight sports car, most of the impact on the driver’s side and on Sam’s left foot. How could that driver have been expected to know that a car was there? Why would a car be stopped just below Mulholland, without any lights on? How could he know a boy and his mother would be in that car?
From the passenger seat, Sam could see his mother’s face, illuminated by the other car’s headlights. Her skin had particles of glass on it, and she looked as if she were sparkling. He tried to reach for his mother to clear the glass from her face, but he found that his left leg was pinned against the dashboard. He felt no pain—that would come later—but he couldn’t get free enough to reach her face, and the constriction panicked him. He could smell her blood, mingling with her tuberose perfume, and he could see that her chest and abdomen were crushed by the caved-in dashboard. But it was the glass. It was the glass on his mother’s pretty face that disturbed him the most in that moment, and he tried again to reach for her to brush it off. He felt a strange shifting in the bones of his foot as he pulled for her. And with that last unsuccessful reach, he began to feel his body again. He began to shake violently, and he felt like he couldn’t breathe. “Mom,” he said to the still-warm body next to him, “it hurts.” He craned his neck so that he could rest his head in the groove of her shoulder, and then he closed his eyes.
The man in the other car walked toward Sam in a daze. He called to them desperately. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you there. I didn’t see you. Is everyone okay? Is everyone okay? Is anyone alive? Anyone?”
Sam opened his eyes: “I’m here.” These were the last words he would say until the day he encountered Sadie Green in the game room.
In games, the thing that matters most is the order of things. The game has an algorithm, but the player also must create a play algorithm in order to win. There is an order to any victory. There is an optimal way to play any game. Sam, in the silent months after Anna’s death, would obsessively replay this scene in his head. If she doesn’t take the job on Press That
Button! and if Anna can’t afford to buy the new car. If Anna buys the new car but drives directly home after dinner. If the first Anna Lee doesn’t jump from that building and if Anna never comes to Los Angeles. If Anna doesn’t stop driving after she hits the coyote. If Anna finds the emergency lights. If Anna never sleeps with George. If Sam is never born. There are, he determines, infinite ways his mother doesn’t die that night and only one way she does.
