Movie Stars

Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction

THEY GOT DOWN TO THE BUSINESS OF DICE. PUFFER AND BRICK TOOK most of Laurel’s money. They tried to be nice and let her win some back, but she didn’t want their charity.

Hurt couldn’t focus on the game, which was called ace-four twenty-four and played with a worn leather cup. He had watched the men playing it at the bar on multiple occasions, but it remained obscure to him. His mind went away. He thought about writing on the bar napkin but recalled the look that Brick had given him over that habit in the past. And rightfully so. There was something trashy about trying to capture other people on a napkin, or on any kind of paper. Sometimes he was experimenting, writing little stories that would fit on a napkin. But most of the time he was a jackal, stealing people’s biz. “Very fly,” Laurel had said about something, and it seemed sweetly antiquated. He had to jot it down.

While the rest of them played dice at the bar, Hurt tried to stop doodling the blurbs he thought he might get (“Sweeping”) and concentrate on the holes in the outline of his multigenerational domestic literary novel. What had really happened to Mr. Timberlake’s late wife? Hurt had assumed a lingering cancer. But what if the son, Skunk, were to blame for his mother’s death? That was always a winner. Forgot his humble place as a craftsman of pie catalogs, became ambitious, tragically so, wrote about his mother on a napkin. And what, suicide? That earnest cliché?

Hurt remembered some women’s butts he had seen on TV. Why? There had been a suicide on the show. His brain was trying to tell him something.

They were characters on a space show and whenever they went marching up the ramp into their spaceship you could see their butts.

Their pants were tight but gave the impression of being sturdy, accurate, and functional, as though the special-effects team had researched them. You thought, yes, those are what space pants will really look like in the future, made of silver car upholstery. These pants are necessary for their well-being and survival in the subzero wastes of outer space. It is a coincidence how you can see the outlines of their butts.

It was a universal joy, looking at the butts of hot ladies in space-suits. People had been doing it since the dawn of entertainment.

Hurt got the notion that Skunk’s mother had been a calendar model in the late 1960s, a pinup in astronaut gear, cocking a big ray gun against a cheesy, wrinkled backdrop of the moon. A calendar called Hot Ladies of Outer Space. No, Hot Ladies of Science Fiction. It could be a book title, one of those book titles that promises something other than what the book delivers to teach readers a valuable lesson. Hurt could be one of those dudes who goes slumming in genre fiction to universal acclaim.

Interesting to have a fat loser like Skunk, who probably spends all his time on the computer looking up images of hot ladies in space-suits with the “safe search” option turned off, discover that his revered mother had been one of those very ladies.

When did “hot” become a synonym for “sexy”? Every word he ever chose reminded him of how much he didn’t know and was too tired to find out. Sexy Ladies of Science Fiction.

His pen was poised, doing nothing over the napkin. Hurt wasn’t going to remember any of this when he got home.

Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction. Would have sounded classier, more respectable to the ears of the time.

It was a problem, marrying a leggy international beauty to a meek little priss like Mr. Timberlake. Or was it kind of perfect?

Mr. Timberlake lived in Hurt’s house, and by extension in a town like Hurt’s town. There would be a chemical plant slowly poisoning the surrounding areas: huge pipes through which they blast a scent like magnolia that covers the town and makes everyone feel relaxed. It’s to cover up the acrid stench of fatal chemicals.

It would be a perfect place for the Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction calendar tour. The headquarters of the chemical company are in Rome. The Italian chemical company is one of the sponsors of the calendar—the sponsor. They are sending the Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction on a tour of all their chemical plants for publicity. Hurt’s novel would span the globe. “A globe-spanning tour de force,” he jotted.

What kind of job would a gentleman like Mr. Timberlake have at a chemical plant?

He might have been a research chemist who now in his retirement maintains a small personal laboratory in a back shed. There he creates the most refined soaps the world has ever known and gives them out on special occasions. He never sells them.

Mr. Timberlake has a superior sense of smell. This gives him a reason to sit in his dilapidated lawn chair, soaking his feet, staring at nothing, smelling all the many smells of nature in their many combinations, smells so subtle that no one else can discern them, and he translates them into soaps that the layman can enjoy — soaps that hint at the smells only Mr. Timberlake can smell, soaps that represent the nearest we will ever come to experiencing the world through Mr. Timberlake’s extraordinary nose. He considers everything to be nature, including diesel fumes. His ideas are so advanced that he seems like a crackpot to many, including his resentful and belittling son Skunk.

What does it say about the relationship that Mr. Timberlake has given his son such a nickname? Or that Skunk has given it to himself, in defiance?

The soaps of Mr. Timberlake are ethereal. They dissolve like the skirls of foam on the shore.

What was a skirl?

Look up skirls when you get home, Hurt.

Everybody Hurt knew had a nice phone, the kind you could sit in a bar like this and look up skirls on.

Not Hurt.

Hurt had a bar napkin. Hurt had bupkis.

Bar napkins were supposed to make you feel like Hemingway or Picasso.

The soaps of Mr. Timberlake can barely withstand a single dampening. It’s like washing your hands with a frigging moonbeam.

Skunk spends all his time losing money on internet gambling. Some bad men come to him.

Your father’s recipes are worth a fortune. We want to analyze them so we can make the soaps last longer. (This is strictly against Mr. Timberlake’s elegantly expressed philosophy of soaps.)

All Skunk has to do is distract his father while the bad men use bolt cutters on the shed door.

But then something goes horribly wrong. So the dust jacket would say.

Hurt felt that this version of Mr. Timberlake was becoming too brilliant and grandiose. Mr. Timberlake was no wizard. And who was that lousy son of King Arthur? The one in black armor? That wasn’t Skunk, no sir. Skunk didn’t have the black metallic heart of a usurper. Mordred.

Forget the magical soap that makes your dreams come true. It put Hurt in mind of that awful movie where Dustin Hoffman was a benevolent gnome who owned a shop where all the toys came to life.

Dustin Hoffman would be great as Mr. Timberlake in the movie version, though. “Hoffman returns to form in this sure-to-be-timeless classic.”

He wrote MALE SECRETARY on the napkin and everyone was too busy shooting dice to notice. Hurt tried to remember why he shouldn’t be writing on the napkin, which brought him back to his original idea. How had Skunk inadvertently caused his mother’s death by writing on a napkin?

There was the tontine angle. Hurt had wanted to write about a tontine ever since he had encountered the concept on an episode of The Simpsons in 1996.

Forty years ago, all twelve Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction made an appearance in the lobby of a swank Miami hotel. They laughingly hid an antique brooch under a three-foot-tall cylindrical ashtray filled with immaculate sand. The last surviving DLOSF will come back and claim it.

Now all of them are gone except Sally Silver and her best friend, her friend who never left the business, her rich and glamorous friend who lives high on the hog as the hostess of a literary salon and occasionally plays faded old beauties in somber independent dramas about Alzheimer’s disease. If Sally Silver hadn’t ditched it all for Mr. Timberlake, this might have been her life! But she is not jealous. It has been so long since she has seen her old friend. A trip to Miami will be just the thing to revive both of their spirits, for of course the old movie star with all her attainments and glory has secret troubles of her own.

Skunk volunteers to chauffer. When they reach the old movie star’s house (she lives somewhere on the way to Miami, wherever rich people have country estates between Mississippi and Miami) they get a surprise: a third Dazzling Lady is still alive after all — a tart-tongued old alky who was Sally Silver’s sworn enemy in the olden days. Now she’s a sassy granny who wears mascara and tells it like it is!

A terrible car crash on the way to pick up the object of the tontine. It is Skunk’s fault. He has been writing about his mother on a napkin. She is offended and Skunk is banned from the car. So he leaves her. Or she leaves him. They part. She takes over. But she’s too old and blind to drive.

If Skunk hadn’t written on that napkin, he would have been driving, and his mother would be alive today, etc.

What about the napkin is so offensive?

What would this woman — whose model name was Sally Silver — find offensive?

Before we can know, she needs a history.

She needs to give up the life of an international model for Mr. Timberlake.

Why?

Mr. Timberlake does something gallant that attracts her attention. He takes up for her. He is presented as a contrast to her avaricious manager.

They run away to a neighboring county and are married by a justice of the peace. It is a purely romantic impulse.

What is the history of the woman whose actions we have described?

A farm girl from Kansas, whisked away by the jet set, having lost touch with her rustic roots, temporarily mad for the horses and cows, the barns and bales she sees through the windows of her limousine. Does she place all her affection for her past into the person of this courtly, even virginal man who does her a kindness?

Wouldn’t she come to regret it?

Hurt didn’t want to make either of them unsympathetic. They are devoted to one another, yet heroically unsuited.

She starts her own business from the home, designing and hand-sewing a line of science fiction — themed headbands.

She has a hot, sloppy affair with the town’s bachelor farmer, a gentle giant based on old Puffer over here, whatever his real name was. Hurt had never caught it.

One night, the night after Skunk has been banned from the car, they are driving through a mist, a silvery mist. And they come upon a hitchhiker, their old friend Olivia, standing weirdly beside a deserted country road in the silver mist, wearing the silver slacks that made her butt so famous, the silver jumpsuit, her beehive hair as it looked on her TV show, except now it has turned silver. Otherwise she looks strangely young. She is a beautiful old African-American woman with limpid eyes. Hurt was clearly seeing the woman who had played Uhura in the original Star Trek series. He couldn’t stop himself, she appeared out of the mist.

Of course, the silver pantsuit was his own invention. Well, he had stolen it from that other TV show. But if not for his magnificent, writerly brain making connections…

He was too fond of the word silver.

We hear about Olivia only from inconclusive e-mails and phone messages sent from the road. She never speaks, she never eats, she just rides with them, a harbinger of something. She is solid enough. The other women prod and pinch her. Skunk and Mr. Timberlake have a hard time piecing together this information. Isn’t Olivia dead? Didn’t she die? Everyone seems to vaguely recall hearing that Olivia had died at some point.

When they get to the hotel, it’s not there. It burned down in the 1980s. Maybe Olivia walks into the space where the hotel used to be and disappears.

It would be nice if the burned-out old hull of the hotel was still standing, but would that be realistic?

Skunk knew about the fire.

Here lies the heart of his culpability.

He knew the trip would end in blackened timbers, that the past had vanished and could not be reproduced or recaptured, no matter what that old gasbag Faulkner said. It was the prefab tragic ending of Skunk’s story, which he was writing for a national magazine. A human-interest piece that would elevate him from the world of pie catalogs forever. Skunk was, like Truman Capote as depicted in motion pictures, pushing reality, nudging it toward a desirable outcome for his article. Only his mother didn’t cotton to being used as human interest, especially without her knowledge, especially by her own son. And now to discover that he was willingly driving them forward into heartbreak!

Upon discovering the ruination and emptiness of life, the old women are destroyed. Their oldness comes out. Olivia — representing their glory or something — has melted and merged with the ashes and now they are just three tired, sick old women on the highway. Thus depleted of their essences thanks to Skunk’s machinations, and speeding along in the wee hours of the night because they wish to put as much distance as possible between them and the site of their mortal dreams, one of them falls asleep at the wheel — it has to be her, it has to be Skunk’s mother, and he must be haunted by the question of whether she fell asleep at the wheel or did it on purpose — and they drive under a rumbling log truck, and the Dazzling Ladies of Science Fiction are no more.

Part of Hurt knew that this all had to do with his pending divorce. How he got from there to matricide was not something he wanted to consider. If you thought about such things too much you couldn’t write.

MALE SECRETARY looked charming on the napkin. A pedestrian job for Mr. Timberlake, but one of deep attentiveness and servitude, like that sad butler in the book about the sad butler.

Mr. Timberlake is like the sad butler who could only cry on the inside!

In the book, people would always be trying to “help” him “reclaim” his “dignity” by saying “personal assistant” or “executive assistant,” and Mr. Timberlake would proudly insist on his respectable station as a male secretary of the highest order and would never let anyone get away with trying to gussy it up in newfangled lingo as if it were a secret shame.

Why was Mr. Timberlake Skunk’s father? Why wasn’t Skunk’s father more like Hurt’s father?

Hurt’s father was an agile and boisterous man, unlike Mr. Timberlake in every way.

And why was Skunk’s mother dead? What would Hurt’s mother make of that?

When was the last time Hurt had visited his parents?

What about Hurt’s brother, who lived so far away?

What about Hurt’s sister?

In your last novel you gave the characters your parents’ names. You think if you amass and collate a sufficient amount of superficial details — how stiff the legs of your father’s pants got after a week on the shrimp boat, how he picked the trash fish out of the nets, how after a while he would see the sun on the horizon and not know whether it was coming up or going down, about the swells so high nothing could be cooked on the stovetop — a true portrait will emerge.

What you end up with is just fiction.