Misfit by Adam Braver Page A

live totally outside the mainstream?”
    She thinks of Norwalk State Hospital, where the long white hallways feel like fault lines off which the private rooms splinter.
    Ignoring his question, she tells Arthur time isn’t passing fast enough, and that she can’t wait until the Reno divorce kicks in and they can be together again. He replies that at least being out in the desert is inspiring him to write. Maybe he’ll end up writing something for her. Maybe a picture. “How about we get through the next six weeks,” she says, “without the FBI getting another new thing to dig up?”
    â€œHow about it,” he says.
    â€œHow about it.”

    Because he loves her that much, he went to Nevada for the divorce, renting a cabin at Pyramid Lake sight unseen. The area, a terrain of flat valleys and low hills buttressed by dried lakes, a thousand years of geologic coincidence, is as different as possible from anything he ever knew growing up among tenement buildings that crowded the sidewalks. A desert allegedly guarded by poisonous snakes hidden in wait, ready to snap at the scent of a threat. And he had to walk vigilantly around the Pyramid Lake shoreline, keeping watch for quicksand. Apparently there were warning signs posted at one time, but they kept disappearing, and the county became weary of replacing them. Some figure the signs were just taken under by quicksand. Others accuse the Paiutes of stealing them in the night, with the idea that it would take only one or two fisherman being sucked under to ward off future poachers from this sacred area, though that seems a little far-fetched, aside from the fact that, on the rare occasion, rotted bodies have been spotted bubbling up to the surface, before being vacuumed under again just as quickly.
    Because he loves her that much, he went to Nevada for the divorce.
    That’s how much he loves her. And that love makes her love him back. Even more.
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    Going up Century Boulevard to the studio, Marilyn senses she’s being tailed. At the gates, where the guard checks her name off the clipboard, she hears shutters
clicking. She can feel binoculars zooming in on her as she scoots into her trailer on the back lot. Once inside, she draws the shades. The room changes to sepia. The sun beats down on the studio back lot while the cool Pacific air blows up Century Boulevard, creeping under the doorjamb. Being back in LA drains her. In only a matter of months, she grew used to the pace of New York, to the different expectation of craft and dedication. Even with Paula Strasberg here to coach her while she’s shooting Bus Stop , Marilyn still feels in between. Going backward and forward at the same time. She sits on a cushioned bench, then slumps, resting her head on the card table, the vinyl sticking to her cheek. She shades her face with her palm and reminds herself that if she needs to talk she’s supposed to talk in whispers. The bugging devices aren’t that good.
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    She calls him in Nevada at nine o’clock at night, from a pay phone on Sunset—just in case. Put on hold, she continues to drop coins into the slot, feeling shaky for the ten minutes it takes for Arthur to come to the phone. She leans against the side of the booth, her mouth practically touching the fingerprinted glass wall. When he finally gets on, her voice is trembling. She wonders what took so long. Arthur reminds her that she’s called him at a phone booth that is down the road from his cabin and that it was the landlord who answered and then went to get him. It’s a bit of a procedure, he says, going up and down the dirt road at
Pyramid Lake, especially in the dark of night. But it’s what they have. She waits for him to pause, and then interjects that she can’t handle it, and before he can say handle what , she says, “This crap of a moviemaking, and all the waiting,” and she swears she won’t have it anymore, and she feels like