AREA 47

SECTION 89:

COURTNEY, Chapter 6

When the telephone call from Alex Lancôme came, Courtney was in the backyard, destroying her poetry.

The year before, when the endless rejection had gotten to be too much, she had burned all her work.  The collected works of Courtney Foulke Ryan, up in flames.  She had used the big 55-gallon drum, lit the pages one by one from a single white candle, and thrown them into the smoking drum of ash.  She had felt like van Gogh, doomed to fail throughout her lifetime; then to be posthumously declared a genius.

But why should the world enjoy the fruits of her labor, after her death, if she could not enjoy them during her lifetime?  The world refused to acknowledge her genius.  Therefore she would cheat the world of her genius.

Now she was more mature.  Burning the two full drawers of typed pages had been too melodramatic.  No one had been impressed with the gesture anyway.  Silly to advertise the event.  No point, really, in talking about it much afterward.  Her mother had acted as if nothing had happened.  The only severe reaction had come from Julie, her high school best friend, by letter since she was working toward her MBA at Stanford.  And Courtney felt foolish rather than heroic afterward.  She mentioned it rarely; when she did, she felt embarrassed, and the gesture was so far outside the range of most people that they couldn’t even relate to it, much less understand it or sympathize with her.

Yes, this year she was lots more mature.  Each page was cut vertically, down the middle with the scissors, 7 or 10 pages at a time.  The right halves would be thrown away tonight in a random waste container.  The left halves would go in one week, in another waste container.

The emotional mood was exactly the same as last year, however.  Exactly the same.  Quiet, heartbreaking despair; dead dreams being flushed down the toilet.  And the physical location was the same: under the shade of the back porch extension, beside the avocado trees.

Dad’s career had been tragic, too.  He had failed at more things than most men would even think of attempting, in five different States.  Mom had supplied fifty percent of the family’s income working at various temporary and secretarial jobs.  Dad had always had the big dream of making it big.  It had cost him job after job, as he built up a small stake, and invested it in another scam that would leave him busted and despondent, jobless again.  Then, the family would pack up, a little shamefully, and head out for greener pastures.  Courtney averaged a different school for the first nine years of school.

Between the lack of money, and the fact that they were always moving around, Courtney never had her teeth straightened.  Mom didn’t want to start with one dentist, and finish with three other dentists.  Later, when they had settled down, and had a bit of money, Courtney decided that she liked her teeth the way they were, and wasn’t about to open up her mouth for a bunch of metal.

The family restlessness was hard on Courtney in other ways too.  No point in making friends, or getting really close to anyone, because it would be time to move again soon.

Courtney had the role of new kid in town down.  The girls usually hated her for her looks; Courtney felt sure that the other girls were somehow sabotaging her social life.  Courtney fended everyone off: Introversion.  She dressed plain as sugarless Kool-Aid.  She daydreamed in class——and she was always years ahead of everyone else; the silent, nearly straight A-student.  Courtney purposely choked in class, partly out of boredom, but mostly to avoid attracting attention to herself.  She was an avid reader, reading classics when other kids were wrestling with comic books.

It was in Los Angeles that Dad finally struck gold.  It was a pseudo-gyroscopic, anti-sway bar, installed in the trunk of high performance cars to dramatically increase their cornering abilities.  Dad was one-third partner and one-third owner of the new company.  The device sold like Frisbees.

And her dad had his first heart attack.  He ignored it.  The second one, two months later, buried him.

Courtney wasn’t sure where the impulse had first come to be a writer.  But one day, during high school, it was so strongly established that she realized that she would one day be one.  Possibly it was all the books she was reading.  She fantasized regularly of herself being a famous writer.  It would be the reconciliation of their family (the black sheep of all their richer relatives who moved in the higher social circles).

Courtney actually finished the last three years of high school at Glendale High.  But by that time, her introversion tendencies were completely established.  She had never developed much in the way of social skills, except a bitingly sharp wit, and a tendency to surprise people with her off-the-wall remarks.  Later, near the end of her freshman year at college (Reed College, full scholarship), the impulse to write had become so strong, so overpowering, that she had dropped out of college.

Monstrous ego and blind determination.

Mom was supportive, and welcomed her back home with free room and board.

That year she had earned exactly $2,720 by writing.  She had sold one short story and four articles.  The articles she hated.  The short story had been edited down so that she hated it.  She lived at home, some weeks hardly venturing out into the city at all.  She wrote 12 to 15 hours a day, five or six days a week.  That first year, she wrote 65 short stories.

Her mother had been beautifully understanding of her introverted life’s goal.

But there was no market for short stories.  Or, at least, no market for her short stories.

In frustration, she had burned all her work.  The depression had torn at her soul, forcing her to do something drastic.  The only survivors were the pieces in circulation in the mails.

The force that had driven her to burn her work, pushed her into a 180-degree flip: from writing to modeling.  Everyone had always brainwashed her about how beautiful she was.

If I can’t be a famous writer, I’ll be a famous model!

It was as if she was trying to renounce all her values, to corrupt herself.  She felt deliciously naughty.  Good girls go to heaven, Courty goes everywhere.

She was signed immediately to the first agency she approached, and put on their head sheet at a starting rate of $65 an hour.

But within a month, she knew that this road was not the road for her.  Coping with the awesome level of rejection was beyond her.  Plus she was so ignorant of the details of the business.  Courtney relied heavily on the make-up girl.  It was one thing to open up her Post Office Box and find returned manuscripts and rejection slips.  But this was something else.

Thirty girls in a small room.  Exquisitely beautiful, luscious, sexy girls, dressed to kill; the level of bitchy competitiveness heated to an intolerable level.  Then one or two yuck-pup guys would enter the room.  “Hi, girls.  Stand up.  Say, ‘Putters makes me say Wow!’  Smile . . . OK, you with the red hat, please stay.  The rest of you, thanks for coming.”

Devastating.  The profession was an ego destroyer.

Good girls go to heaven, Courty goes nowhere.

Courtney plunged back into writing with a new intensity.

However, Mom put a condition on the room and board: Courtney had to establish a social life.  A job, or dating, or something.  Outside interests.  Courtney had few friends, and her mother knew that that was not healthy.  Besides, for such a lovely young flower to be hiding away from the light was a shame (Mom’s words).

So Courtney joined an aerobics class, and began also working out every day at Bo & Frank’s Health Club.  There she met Vlad, who had been on a twenty minute health kick.  Soon, he quit the club, but not before coming on to Courtney in every way imaginable, and charming her into dates.  One day she thought Vlad was a kook——then, the next day: Boom!  She was painfully in love with him.  She didn’t know what could possibly have happened.  It was such a fast switch, and so drastic.  No, she told herself.  I’m not in love.  I’m not in love.

In those days, he had driven a 300ZX.  Impossibly cramped.  Courtney never would have believed it physically possible in that tiny cramped space, but it was in that 300ZX, pulled off of Mulholland Drive, that she gave up her virginity at the age of 22.  In a crazed, irrational fever, she had just . . . jumped on him!

It was only after he dropped her off back in front of her home that she came to her senses.

But she said yes to a date the next night, and again, this time in a motel, she tumbled.

It must be love.  She couldn’t say no!  She couldn’t even say maybe.

Vlad moved away from home, and into his own apartment.  He asked her to move in with him.  Courtney discussed the problem with her mother, who fatalistically insisted upon birth control but no shacking up with Vlad.  Her mother said no for her.  Nevertheless, four or five times a week, every week, their passionate affair continued.

She tried a new tack: poetry.  (And now I’ve got something to REALLY write about!)  And she started to achieve regular publication in small literary journals and occasionally in commercial magazines.  There was very little money, but it was publication.  Courtney felt sure that if she could just get a publisher to put out a book of her collected poems that it would sell; it felt right: she had found her proper form, her correct scale.

Novels were completely beyond her; they were just too BIG.  Her writing was too flighty for rational articles, plus the long hours of specific research were a complete drag.

Short stories were closer to her forte, but she didn’t quite have the requisite cynical, slick, ultra-clever, politically correct, organized delivery; or the maturity to compromise (Courtney equated literary compromise with artistic prostitution).  Worse, Courtney was always trying to SAY SOMETHING ABOUT REALITY with her stories, and this seemed to be the main objection editors had with her fiction.  Routinely, her short stories were admired for their plot pacing and unique, poetic sense of phrasing, but criticized by magazine editors for not having the politically correct approach to sexuality and interactions between the sexes.

“Huh?” she would write back.  “I thought this was a Free Society, not a communist satellite where Art has to toe the Party Line!”  Bzzzzzzzzt——Incorrect Response.

Courtney did not realize that for any high-placed reader or editor to comment at all upon her work, was highly unusual——they LOVED her writing, they just couldn’t use it in their publications because it was slanted wrong, and their criticisms were intended to help Courtney adapt to their requirements; the most essential requirements being political correctness and conformity to a proven formula of ego-massage that would never attack the audience’s self-concept.

But to Courtney, it seemed as though a new brand of the unreal had been developed, that ought to be organized in bookstores and libraries next to the Science Fiction section, called Politically Correct Social Fiction, which would be about “ideal” and impossible social relationships.  The politically correct American male was faithfully married, fixed breakfast in bed for his marriage partner (the terms “husband” and “wife” were not politically correct), rode a bicycle with child-seat to work (bike-pooled with his baby, picking up another baby en route), where he was a licensed child care specialist earning thirty-five cents an hour over the minimum wage; when he came home, he cleaned house, gave their child a bath, made their child presentable, cooked dinner, did the dishes, and still found energy to be cuddlesome in the bedroom.  His politically correct marriage partner was a business executive and a vice president of an international Japanese corporation and the mother of their one child, with a salary in the high six figures, who flew a helicopter to the office and had insisted upon a prenuptial contract.  In the politically correct plot the female marriage partner comes home from work by copter and plays with her child (quality time), dictates a few letters, changes into a wild dress, flies out to a late moonlight rendezvous with her secret lover, is driven back home by limousine, and finally forced to submit to a long monotonous backrub lovingly delivered by her bicycling babysitter followed by longer and even more monotonous cunnilingus as she contemplates the wreck of her life, decides to divorce the schmuck, marry her secretary, and hire her secret lover as a business consultant; in the brilliant divorce courtroom climax, her marriage partner has his child care license revoked and is disgraced as an unfit mother (term only politically correct when applied to the male sex), and left penniless and jobless, her child is genetically proven to be a bastard and given up for adoption, whereupon the heroine flies off, completely unfettered, in her helicopter with her male secretary and secret lover consultant and new handsome helicopter pilot to swing a multi-million dollar deal and swing.  Courtney knew it was politically correct, because she wrote precisely such a story synopsis as a joke, sent it to Metro Woman, and was astonished to find herself contracted to finish the story for a down payment of $1,200 (which Courtney returned, check uncashed).  The verdict was clear: there was no place for her in the world of magazine fiction, it was just too ridiculous; if they all were so keen on rewriting her work, let them WRITE IT THEMSELVES!

With poetry, she dived right in, and swam.  No one would DARE tell a poet to rewrite her poem!

But book publication was not forthcoming; the book publishers did not dare to publish Courtney Foulke Ryan.  Depression.  Thoughts of destroying her work again.  Boyfriend Vlad trying to cheer her up, with a surprise trip to Yosemite.

Enter Byron Reed.

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So there was Courtney: in the backyard, cheating the world of her genius.

“Courty!” Mom called, from the rear sliding glass door.  “It’s Alex Lancôme from——”  Her voice faltered.  It couldn’t be the Alex Lancôme, could it?  “From the Lord & Jessen Corporation!”

“What?”

“Courty, come to the phone!”

“All right.”  Courty cut the last of the stack of her poetry.  She felt ripped; her guts wrenched out, and stomped on.

I quit writing once, and came right back to it.  Am I doomed to go on writing, to go on failing miserably throughout my whole life?  What’s wrong with me?  Why can’t I improve?  Maybe I just have no talent at all.

“Courty!!”

“Suck!” Courty said, using language she had learned to habitually use from Vlad.  She was trying to cure herself of it, but when she got emotional, the naughty words just flew right out.

Courtney went inside and picked up the extension in the kitchen.

“Yes?”

“This is Alex Lancôme.  I’m a photographer currently on assignment with the Lord & Jessen Corporation.  Am I speaking with Courtney Ryan?”

Mom was around the corner, silently asking if she could listen in.

Courtney wearily signaled an affirmative, and said, “Unless there are clones of me running around in the world in more advantaged circumstances.  Then, I suppose I should defer.”

Telephone silence.  The gentle click of Mom picking up the bedroom line.

“I’ll have to remember that one,” Lancôme said, in an amused voice, after the pause.  “Vlad Capek gave me your telephone number.  A guy by the name of Byron Reed took some pictures of you last weekend at Yosemite.  He gave me your . . . excuse me, he gave me Vlad’s telephone number; Vlad gave me yours.  I’m very impressed with the pictures of you.  Do you follow me, so far?”

Courtney’s heart was suddenly pounding ferociously.  It was like an infusion of new blood.  Instantly, her depression was gone, forgotten.  Her whole body felt hot.  This was fantastic!

“I’m following,” Courtney said.  “But you’re not moving quickly enough to get out of LA.  It’s growing faster.”

Courtney could hear Mom groan in almost silent frustration.

“See here——” Alex Lancôme started to say.

“Over the telephone?!” Courtney interrupted.

This created another period of silence.

Mom was humming and squeaking at the same time, making background noises of exasperation at her impossible daughter.

“Well,” Lancôme said, in an unwell voice.

Pause.

“Perhaps I have the wrong clone,” Alex Lancôme said.

“Perhaps,” Courtney said in a nonchalant voice that completely went against the whirlwind of emotions blasting her.

“Ms. Ryan, kindly listen for a few moments.  I am looking for a new face to launch a new magazine.  I would like you to try out for it.  If you are chosen, it will probably involve a six figure contract to do extended modeling for the magazine.  If.  And let us lean heavily on that critical word, Ms. Ryan: if.  This is a women’s fashion magazine.  Ms. Ryan, I am not selling anything.  You have not won a lottery.  This is not some damn contest.  I saw some pictures of you, I’m interested.  That’s it.  No promises!  I’m told you used to model, if you are interested in——”

“Mr. Lancôme,” Courtney interrupted.  “I have kindly listened.  But this conversation is irrelevant.  You already have the information you require.”

And with a wild, happy smile on her face, Courtney hung up.  She was so excited she was tingling.

Then she heard Mom talking in the bedroom, obviously trying to retrieve the situation.  Bless the dear.

Courtney shook her head as she ran into Mom’s bedroom.  Mom was talking a purple streak of apology and gesturing wildly at Courtney with her free hand.

Courtney reached down beside the bed and unplugged the phone.

Mom was so shocked and outraged that it stunned her.

“Courty!” Mom wailed.

Courtney gave Mom a warm bear-hug.  “I love you, Mom.  You’re great!  But trust me.  Please.  I know what I’m doing.”

COURTNEY, Chapter 7
 

Copyright 2005 Area 47