Warning: although there is nothing explicit, this chapter deals with sensitive and potentially offensive "adult" themes. I gave it an M rating for a reason that will become obvious. Talbot's and all its employees are my own invention and do not reflect any person or company past or present. Except, of course, for the genius of Alan Silvestri, who is NOT involved in any of the events.
Chapter six – Catastrophe
"I haven't been able to give him a child, Sam, and it's been killing us both inside. I can't look at him without shame, and I don't blame him..."
"Don't blame him? Auntie, he's the one who's cheated and lied!"
"Sam, dear, of course I'm angry. Of course I feel betrayed and let down and made worthless. But this has been going to Hell for a long time... In a marriage, there is nothing that is not shared. I could not cope with being sterile, and it made him feel excluded and helpless. I'm not saying it's my fault... I just don't know how else it could have ended."
"Aunt Joyce... I don't know how to say this... It's not that I don't want to help, or to listen, it's just that I don't know how! I think I am the wrong person... I know I will never have children, and I can't imagine suffering like you seem to... How can I say something that will help?"
That was not all, of course. To Samantha's mind, both logical and proud, Joyce sounded confused and self-abasing. She could not conceive being treated so badly by a man, being lied to, being betrayed (and with a far less attractive woman, too – she had only met Hank's Spanish secretary once, but she did not think she even came close to tall, shapely, beautiful, sweet-smiling Aunt Joyce), having her man fathering a child by another woman, and somehow ending up blaming oneself. If it had been her... well the man might not have ended up castrated, but she would probably have mentioned the possibility to him.
"You helped just by listening, my dear. Sometimes we just need to talk and talk... and maybe cry... and feel that someone somewhere is paying attention."
...
After all the storm and stress, things seemed to die down. Months passed as if in suspended animation. Rosario, the secretary, grew more and more heavily pregnant, and six months after Joyce's talk with Samantha, she gave birth to a boy whom she named Enrique. Joyce offered to adopt the baby, but the offer was not well received, and it seemed increasingly as if Hank's future were to be divided between two households.
Nobody knew what they wanted. Buffy was kept out of the quarrel, to the extent that she barely knew what was going on – and she did not want to know either. She was becoming what she wanted, the clique leader in her own little world, and her parents' troubles were not a thing she wanted to get around. More than one of her friends had parents who had had children by different partners, even managed two or three households, and it did not seem to bother them. Although Buffy did not speak to anyone, either to her friends or to her parents, about meeting a man called Merrick and about the strange things he was telling her about her dreams. She kept up the cheerful bubble-headed facade and tried to avoid any encounter between Merrick and her friends or her family. She was still somehow hoping that this new problem would just go away. And Joyce was distracted by her antiques business, which was growing at bewildering and, one might say, ironic speed. In fact, while the household was dying, its three members seemed to be individually prospering.
...
Indeed, Hank's career seemed about to strike the top. First one movie he had championed against his bosses' doubt, then another, became major critical and commercial hits. "Arizona", a strangely old-fashioned yet compelling Western, featuring a group of straight-arrow heroes and avoiding both deconstruction and steampunk, had seemed a sure-fire loser to everyone but him. "It's a great story," he had said to doubting company directors, "and you don't need to make any apologies. You're not rewriting history in the service of Political Correctness; a large number of cowboys were in fact black and Mexican, and some native Americans also worked in similar areas – especially as sheep herders and horse raisers. And they were in fact, as a whole, pretty much outsiders. If we have chosen to make cowboys the heroes of our folk tales, these are our heroes. And there is no reason why they should not be honest, brave, and tough. Look, the main thing is that the script makes it points by story developments, not by telegraphing them to you. And it has one of the most memorable female characters we've ever had. You talk of the 'Talbot heroine'? This will be a Talbot heroine to remember." And it all went as he said; with a touch of the Monkey's Paw, alas, as the unknown but brilliant Danish actress hired to play the heroine, was diagnosed with bone cancer during production. She struggled to finish the movie, never performed anywhere else, and died after seven years of agony. This was not anything even the most cynical movie executive would have wanted, but it would certainly insure extra fame for her one splendid, iconic performance as the brave little immigrant who finds herself leading four cowboys – a Mexican, an Anglo, a former slave, and a Pawnee – on an apparently impossible quest to demolish a corrupt senator and his links with the nascent Italian underworld in New Orleans. The climactic scene in which Pia Sorensen, her character, all dressed in light tan and white against a background of black and brown furniture and panels, gets up from the floor, stands up in the face of the senator and pronounces his doom as one character after another, her four heroes and many policemen and journalists, enter the room one by one to form a crowd of inexorable purpose and power, while Alan Silvestri's music swells to a visionary climax, had audiences across the world standing up and applauding. It was great moviemaking and a stirring assertion of the value of honesty, courage and friendship in the face of cynical greed and treachery.
And then there was "Annina the Vampire." Again, Hank Summers' watchword had been, "play it straight." Do not make vampires cute and sympathetic. Make sure the audience understands that they are dangerous and destructive, that they are in the grip of a ghastly thirst; and then you will have a 'Talbot heroine' if she simply refuses to kill and struggles against the monster in herself. It was, in fact, a really difficult feat of tightrope walking, a movie meant for children but in a context where death and cruelty are primary though largely unseen factors; and it managed to avoid traumatizing children, while remaining uncompromising enough to please adults. And it had an intense poetry of separation and loss. Annina is separate from humanity, cannot walk with them; her only friends are ghosts. In the eyes of all the protagonists, ordinary human things such as brewing breakfast tea, or typing a letter, are suffused with an aching nostalgia, the sense of looking almost at a lost paradise. And yet the one thing Annina never does is to be self-indulgent. She rejects the society of vampires and is rejected by them, and the last we see of her is a lonely figure walking a lonely path, followed by ghosts. If "Arizona" had ended with a triumphant climax, "Annina" ends with tears very close to the surface – and yet it is in its own way equally heroic, with the poetry of the narrow gate and narrow path. By coincidence (or was it?), Hank had produced a story that resonated with the coming life path of his own daughter Buffy. And indeed, Buffy loved the movie.
Hank had wanted his Danish star to play Annina, but her illness had forced a rethink, and the part had been rewritten for Madison Mackay, one of Talbot's underage TV comedy stars. Madison was unarguably exquisitely pretty, already a veteran at twelve, could act and take direction, and famous; but Hank found himself missing Pia at every step. Plus, he loathed Madison's mother, a whorish caricature of her daughter's loveliness, who spent on the set every minute that she could distract from her daily work of finding other ways to exploit her daughter. One could not imagine a woman less suited to understand the movie her daughter starred in, and in fact she was continuously trying to interfere, usually with bad ideas. Altogether, and in spite of the artistic and critical success of the movie, shooting "Annina the Vampire" was less enjoyable than its predecessor.
But it was a triumph. Both movies had the names of other people as director and executive producer, but everyone at Talbot's knew that they were Hank Summers' projects. He was ready for the top, and so it was that in the spring of 1994 he was invited to spend the week-end at the mansion of , one of the company bosses – a clear mark of being about to be co-opted into the elite.
Joyce was pleased for him, and Buffy should have been too – and pretended very creditably to be. But Buffy's mind was elsewhere. She was suffering from her own sense of guilt. The murder of a pair of boys had been bad enough, but the butchery of her classmate Cassandra had struck her to the heart – the more so because she heard her cheerleader friends treat the dead girl as if her death was a joke. And she was aware that only a few months earlier, she had been like them. She had wanted to be like them! She had mocked Cassandra and treated her cruelly. And now she would never be able to say that she was sorry.
That night she began to seriously hunt for vampires, with the full intent to slay them without mercy.
...
Hank had a feeling that it would be well to visit in a style that showed respect, and so he blew a considerable amount of his savings on a Mercedes Benz W124. And when he reached the mansion, he was glad – except for a few battered old jalopies, obviously private caprices, all the cars were of that quality or higher, with a scattering of Jags and RRs. And he was delighted when Ross himself, a suntanned, well-trained and well-looked-after sixty, came to shake his hand and invite him in.
The place was full of guests, most of them in shorts or bathing costumes, chatting and sunning themselves. Hank recognized most of the bosses, several creative artists and high-level employees, and a number of people from other corporations, including two or three TV anchorpeople. There was an awful amount of beautiful women and children, some of whom he recognized from the studios. Nobody seemed willing to stay inside, and Hank congratulated himself on bringing his bathing shorts.
Ross called one of the children, and Hank recognized Madison. He was slightly embarrassed; she was wearing quite a tight bikini, and it was easy to see that since the shooting of "Annina" she had begun to take firm strides towards womanhood. As the father of a girl her age, Hank felt in a slightly false position. Not that Madison seemed bothered; smiling and chattering, she took his hand and started walking briskly towards the mansion.
Hank Summers' sense of unease was growing. There was something about the girl's chatter – was it silly, or was it just coy? – about the padding of her bare feet, about the dozens of people in beachwear, exposed skin, and children all over the place – something there felt abnormal, outside daily reality. Things did not add up. He tried not to think and feel the thoughts and feelings that were rising unbidden in his mind.
The child's hand pull on his grew stronger, and he realized that he was holding back. There was something in him that was beginning to feel that he was being dragged into something monstrous; and that crossing the door of the hospitable mansion before him would expose him to nameless dangers.
The next thing was that the name for his fears was suddenly there, brought back from dirty old showbusiness gossip and bits of lore that in some cases went back decades – some of which he had heard from his father in his cups – as he was being showed into the room reserved for him. And every last doubt vanished in a wave of horror, when the thirteen-year-old in the bikini closed the door behind her and smiled in a way that did not belong to children.