fic: mr. demille (rpf)
mr. demille (we are ready for our close-up)
rpf. you know the expression well: a picture is worth a thousand words. you forget that often what goes unsaid matters most of all. diane kruger/michael fassbender. rated r. 4528 words.
notes: credit in part is dude to the always marvelous C, fated_addiction for letting me bounce ideas off of and being one of the best enablers around, *laughs*. also, this was written with notyourtea's current challenge, SCANDALS, in mind, heh. and as always: the following is not true. the end.
Something has to be done, but nothing too original, because hey, this is Hollywood.
(L.A. Confidential)
we're filming a movie called planet of love-
there's sex of course, and ballroom dancing
(Dirty Valentine, Richard Siken)
1.
Today the top three searches on Google are (in order):
1. Michael Jackson;
2. Big Brother;
3. Serial killers.
This tells you everything you need to know about what comes next.
-
2.
That’s a lie. This tells us nothing. This tells us people are curious about dead pop stars and their much muckraked legacy and whether someone will end up behind bars or not. This says that people like to watch behind the safety of television screens and cameramen the people who move in miniature pretend are not there.
This tells us most importantly that what we love is a good story, a juicy story, one that ends in expelled bodily fluid - be it blood, semen, spit, or D) all of the above - and that we like it when people slip. We like to kick them when they’re down.
In fact, we revel in it.
This doesn’t tell us anything about the two people of our story however. Or maybe it does. Keep an eye out; you might catch something we have missed.
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3.
There were eleven pictures leaked in total.
In the pictures, you see what the textbooks call copulation and the priests call sin and the boys on the subway call fucking.
You don’t know these people. You know the people they have pretended to be and the performances pulled in interviews and publications. You know the woman is named Diane and the man, Michael, and once upon a time they had been costars - at least in a more official capacity than this.
Like a detective, and any of us can be a detective if we know where to look, you know that one time in London, these two people drank too much (there are two glasses, empty, on the table behind them; there are two bottles, one poured empty and dry as well, the other still holding at half) and in their haste or their inebriation, their foolish tempting of fate, they did not close the curtains to her hotel room.
The view was perfect from the building across the way. But you know that too.
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4.
Her agent is the first to discover the photos.
“How could you be so fucking stupid?” is what Diane is asked. She does not know to what the agent refers; she catches on quickly.
“Oh,” is all she says when met with her own self, a month earlier and an ocean away.
“Oh.”
We’re not the only ones watching now. Pay attention. This is when it gets really good.
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5.
The first photograph isn’t really all that incriminating. If you eyeball it once, it looks like two people mid-conversation. And that’s what the photograph is of - there are no secret optical illusions here, no I Spy game underfoot. There are two people and they are talking. The problem is that if you go back for a second glance, you do a double-take, raise the picture to the light, put on those reading glasses you deny you own, you see something a little different.
You see the hand on the waist (his, hers, respectively). You see the proximity of two faces, even in this grainy print. You see how serious he is, how maybe in another context you would say concerned, but here he is just serious, he is concentrating and if anything Diane looks nervous in return.
In the first photograph, Michael and Diane stand talking. There is a film in black and white on the television screen behind her head and they talk and they pay it no mind.
You think that might be Grace Kelly on the screen behind her head. That, dear inspector, is irrelevant.
-
6.
When they were young and in their acting classes (or maybe they were more organic than that and laughed in the face of training and canned soliloquies, but it’s not like they have mantels of awards to show for said rebellion) or waited on line at a casting call, a sea of interchangeable and unmemorable faces, no one pulled them aside and said: they’re going to chase you with lights and they’re going to chase you with the shutter and the zoom. You’re never going to escape yourself, no one said. And maybe it’s like “break a leg” is code for a “good luck” superstition won’t let your tongue slide around - you don’t want to jinx the future.
You’re never going to escape yourself, no one said, because maybe they were unsure there was a person there worth chasing, worth the effort to hide from.
Maybe they were right. Are you going to argue on their behalf?
-
7.
Michael promotes his movie that summer and Diane lays low. She is cleaning her kitchen when he calls. She pulls the yellow gloves off with a snap and the smell of bleach is still too sharp.
“Can we sue them?” he asks her over the phone.
“What for? The pictures are already out,” she sighs.
“I want to fucking sue them.”
“It’s not worth it,” she says.
Michael sighs this time over the line.
“Do you ever think - do you ever think, that, fuck, I don’t know, that maybe if, maybe if no one knew - do you ever think about, you know, fuck, don’t make me say it for Christ’s sake, Jesus.”
Diane’s eyes fix on the digital clock on the microwave and she does not blink.
“No,” she says, “I don’t think about you.”
She hangs up first.
-
8.
The second photograph is where things get interesting.
In the second photograph, they kiss. Of course, the inherent problem with photos is their lack of motion. We think he kissed her first; you think so too.
His hand is large and it captures the expanse of her jaw. His eyes are closed and hers are open; there is a miniscule triangle of open space between their open mouths and if there was sound to accompany the image, we might hear her gasp and him say, “Yes.”
-
9.
Let’s do this right. Let’s start at the beginning.
-
10.
In a hotel room across the way, there were two men. The first spoke of Lily Allen and a nightclub and how much upskirts were earning on the market. “For her,” the second said, “not much.”
The second man looked out the window, and then he said: “Holy shit, mate. You can see right into that fucking hotel room.”
The first man had joined him. “You’re right. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”
“Isn’t that what’s her name?” the second asked.
“What’s who’s name?” the first asked.
“The broad, you wanker. She’s somebody. I recognize her.”
“Wait a tic. Yeah, yeah, yeah - she’s that German, that Tarantino one, shagging that Dawson’s Pike, River, Creek, whatever the fuck, bloke yeah?”
“That’s not the same bloke, I reckon.”
“No, sir.”
“Get the camera,” the second man said.
You know what happened next.
-
11.
As for the beginning of them, you should probably know this:
Quentin and Michael and Diane and Brad and Til and other people you don’t care about are in a bar. This is a long time ago and this is Germany and shooting is to begin within the month. They all hold their pints to their mouth and they drink. Quentin drives the conversation and Brad plays a good second, as you would expect. The rest of them just listen and they laugh at the appropriate intervals, but mainly they drink.
“So, we’re in a bar - and have you ever noticed that?” Quentin is saying. “How the best stories, those stories worth telling always start like that? ‘We were in a bar,’ ‘a man walks into a bar,’ - but I digress. We’re in a bar, and you know, we’re past a couple of drinks and into a few of them - ”
She does not hear the rest of the story.
Diane’s knee bumps against Michael’s knee under the table, and the first time it happens, it is an accident. We know. You don’t believe that. You’ve been taught and trained to believe differently, in those crafty things like ulterior motives. Stop squinting so hard. There’s nothing else to see here.
Her knee bumped his knee, and later, she steadied herself with a hand on his elbow as she rose to leave the table.
If we need a timeline, and we know, we do, you have no imagination, we can call this the starting point.
We can call this the point when trouble walks into a bar.
-
12.
The third photograph is far more indecent.
In the third, Diane has her hands hidden under his shirt. Their mouths appear fused together and she is clad in only her bra and a pair of tights. You can see a pair of shoes kicked off in the foreground; if you look a little closer, you can see his belt undone.
You can’t see their faces.
That bothers you, doesn’t it? Her hair and his hand obscure any view and besides, they’re too hungry, they’re too desperate; principles like distance and proximity have lost meaning.
You’d still like to see that though. We know.
-
13.
There are six questions journalists ask when covering a story:
Who, what, when, where, why and how?
You only ask the who and you only ask what and of course you want to know the how. You don’t care about the rest. You especially don’t care about the why.
But you should know this: the why is the most important part.
On Perez Hilton the headline reads: Kruger’s Treasure Plumbed.
Just Jared just says: Inglourious! Notorious!
In People, they call him a critically-acclaimed Irish up-and-comer (no pun intended, we’d imagine, People is not that crass). They call her “the divorced German actress, girlfriend of Dawson’s Creek alum…”
She is not the ex-girlfriend. Not yet. Don't look so anxious.
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14.
He was supposed to get his big break years ago. He’s said it himself, we’re not just being snide.
His big break was supposed to come with Spielberg, and then with Snyder, and now Tarantino.
He gets his break all right. He gets that household name. And it’s a Disney moral, be careful what you wish for!, tied to his name on the covers of tabloids and photographs of her mouth stretched around his cock.
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15.
The fourth picture is pornographic.
Diane is topless, she is on her knees.
Michael sits perched on the side of the bed and he is leaning back on his forearms. The bedspread looks like it’s the kind that is slick to the touch and it makes you wonder, if maybe, eventually, his arms slid out from beneath him, that he collapsed under his own weight, and had to scramble for purchase against the slippery bedspread.
You’ll never know.
In the picture, you can see her bare breasts and she is on her knees and Michael is on the bed and her mouth is open around his cock. In the fourth picture, she sucks him off.
This makes you uncomfortable; are we right? That’s okay though - it made us uncomfortable at first too. Sex is one thing. Sex is a shared effort. But this? This is something else. Maybe it’s the lighting of the picture or maybe it’s her nudity and the fact he still has a shirt on (but his pants around his ankles), maybe it’s the expression on his face - a curious mixture of surprise and desire and something you don’t recognize - but it all is a little too intimate.
Do you feel like an intruder yet?
-
16.
Vanity Fair calls.
They want her to do the July cover.
“We’re thinking something like, ‘Moving past the scandal: in her own words,’ it’s a little rough, but something like that, are you still living with Josh, where’s Michael?” they ask her all in one breath.
She turns down the cover. That surprises you, doesn’t it.
She turns down National Treasure 3.
That surprises no one.
-
17.
In a coffeeshop in New York, Diane hides behind a pair of large, red plastic sunglasses and a book, but we see her. She has a Danish in crumbs, ripped apart into the bite-size but otherwise untouched next to her elbow. She sips the coffee (or the tea, we are too far away to tell) and turns the page of her book.
The scarlet woman is reading Madame Bovary, and honestly we cannot make this shit up.
Perhaps she is shopping for a role, or perhaps cliché can really be that earnest and accidental and she has turned to the fictional for commiseration and comfort.
You think this is about a film, don’t you.
You are watching her drink her coffee or her tea and you are watching her read her book, but you have no sense of the periphery. On the corner, outside the shop, a construction worker rides his jackhammer into the ground and the entire block shakes with it. Sugar is upset from its bowl and the tea or the coffee sloshes in her cup; she steadies it with an equally trembling hand.
There is a table of women behind Diane, and one has brought a child in a carriage and they are laughing over a collection of wedding photos.
What you can’t know is that Diane hates these women.
Here’s the thing: one of these days one of these women will fuck it all up. One of them, maybe the mother of the sleeping kid with the stuffed turtle grasped tight, will fuck a man who isn’t hers. And she’ll probably be kicked out of this table in this coffeeshop in New York and her husband will probably want to kick her out too, but the spread of the news and the gossip and the consequences will extend no further than her home, this coffeeshop, the shared address book kept in a drawer next to the phone.
The kid wakes and throws the turtle on the ground. The jackhammer pauses and the silence is deafening. The women laugh and Diane hates them.
-
18.
Classify this under things you don’t know (also known as: things Us Weekly and Ryan Seacrest forgot to tell you):
Michael already has a girlfriend (American). She lives in Bel-Air (the swanky end) and truth be told, not much more is known than that. A number of inferences can be made though, about this girlfriend (American) who lives in Bel-Air (the swanky end). None are favorable; you’ve seen the films. That’s so hot.
That’s not the point. Spite is not the key. We don’t care about her, do we? She’s a tertiary character in all of this. If this was a film (for all the world’s a stage, and Willy Shakespeare needs a facelift), she would not get billing on the poster; on the Internet Movie Database you would have to click the full cast link to see her name. She does not matter here; she is window dressing.
That sounds a touch cruel, doesn’t it? We’re only following your lead.
You like her now because she makes this messier, don’t you? Busted, caught red-handed, much like our male and female leads.
Hey. Maybe that’s a theme.
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19.
In the fifth photograph he is between her legs; her back arched up and off the bed.
You can see the lines of his back, the way they ripple when the muscle is strained into force and motion. You can see her bent knees and the cascade of blonde hair, the tilt of a chin and the stretch of her neck.
Michael’s mouth is pressed to the skin of her collarbone and all you can see of their coupling is the bracket of her bare hips and his bare ass in between.
You’re blushing right now - you’re totally blushing.
-
20.
Today the top three searches on Google are (in order):
1. Michael Jackson (+ homicide);
2. Megan Fox;
3. Diane Kruger (+ naked)
It’s an honor.
-
21.
In pictures six through ten he fucks her and she fucks him back.
You can’t see as much as you probably wish you could.
It is a tangle of two bodies and at one point their hands are joined over her head. You can’t see his face, only hers - the open mouth, the small O her lips make, the dazed look of her eyes when they are not closed.
The television is still on in the background.
You had forgotten that detail. Don’t argue; you had.
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22.
It is an easy device to say: if you knew the truth you’d hate me.
That’s probably true.
The opposite is just as likely true as well. If you knew that we were lying, if you knew the words we are saying at this very moment were false, you’d hate us as well.
But we don’t say that. The lies serve as pardons, little masks for the truth you’d so hate us for to hide behind.
Diane says: “If you knew the truth you’d hate me.”
Josh doesn’t say anything, and maybe she expected that, it’s hard to tell. But she sits there with those sharp, hunched shoulders and that look of distracted worry, and underneath that, there sits something else. Something like calm, and something sure.
When he leaves - Vancouver, of all places - he takes his bags and he takes his belongings.
She remains calm until his cab disappears into the sprawl of New York traffic and then she starts to cry.
You don’t like this part. Either does she.
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23.
Everybody loves Josh now. And of course we all do.
The good guy takes the hit again. Poor, poor thing.
He just inked a deal to star opposite Christian Bale next fall. It’s a film about infidelity and aliens and there is a bad man and a good man and a woman in between.
Michael gets film offers too. He gets offers for every villainous role, great or small, demonic or just plain petty.
He does not get offered the Christian Bale movie; the villain has already been cast and he is not Josh.
No one knows what to do with Diane. We never know what to do with the bad girls, other than ship them off to Los Angeles with a plastic baggie of coke and a prayer for the worst.
(Diane poses for small European magazines and wears ensembles more costume than clothing; she reads scripts for films without budgets and films without stars. She drinks a lot of tea. This is disappointing for you, but sometimes people do that, sometimes they don’t deliver).
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24.
Picture eleven makes you feel guilty, doesn’t it?
In picture eleven, Diane is smiling and it is the saddest thing you have ever seen.
She has a hand in Michael’s hair and his face is buried in the crook of her neck. He holds her tight.
You’ve invented that last part. You have no way of knowing how loosely or how tightly he held her. But you’re pretty sure that in the picture he holds her tight. You’re pretty sure he’s holding on for dear life.
If it means anything, we think so too.
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25.
You know what you saw.
This is what you missed:
His hand covers the column of her throat and Diane tries to catch her breath. His body is heavy and damp on top of her. She blinks rapidly. “Oh, god,” she sighs. “Jesus,” and then, she laughs. She smiles and she laughs but it sort of sounds like she is crying. Michael looks up at her and then kisses her shoulder.
“I thought,” she finally says, when the laughing or the crying subsides, “that this would fix it.” Her throat catches on the word fix and Michael stills against her. His fingers dig into her side. She is still smiling but there is something broken about the stretch of white teeth and the lines at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes are wet and Michael watches her carefully. “I thought I could be rid of you.”
“Should I be offended?” Michael asks, the humor more self-defensive than good-natured.
Her smile falters. “No,” she says firmly. “No,” she repeats, and her hand runs down the back of his head and rests to cradle the nape of his neck. “No. I - ” and she stops.
Michael kisses her.
“I know,” he says. She kisses him back.
And if for a moment, that moment where his mouth is wet and it is hers, where she is open and she is his, she thinks something like this cannot end you cannot fault her. What she does not know is that this, London and the city outside her open window, his mouth, wet, and herself, open, is all the good they will have for now. That the good can end and give way to the bad, that there is a balance to these things and they have yet to pay their due. She does not know this and he does not know this and somewhere a camera has already snapped and they have posed unwillingly and she can taste her own skin on his tongue.
There are no pictures of this part.
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26.
And now.
They’re back in the kitchen where she lied once and she told him that no, in fact, she does not think about him, and if he thinks about her, then he thinks about her - it is not a problem for her to solve. Are you watching closely? You see the way she wrings her hands with the dish towel, the way she tries to hide her shaking fingers in all that yellow and white and blue fabric? You see the way he looks at her hands and he looks at the towel - you see the softening of his mouth? Because he knows. He knows that she’s a liar and he knows that he’s a liar and maybe this is one of those grand feats of love - the allowance for forgiveness and acceptance. It allows you to see the yellow and the white and the blue, the shaking fingers, and maybe those two tied together are that elusive thing we call the truth.
Who knows. They don’t know; they just feel. The towel’s probably soft and a little damp beneath her hands and she twists it like a rope to hang.
“Diane,” he says, and Diane, she stops with the towel, lays it on the counter behind her, and you heard him say her name. But did you really hear him say her name? We say a lot, you know, in the little stops and gasps of words and names and places. We reveal in the stretch of syllable and manipulation of sound. He says her name, and I know you heard it, but he said more than that. I think you know that too. Because this is the after and we already know what has happened before. They know it too, and of course they do, they lived it. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s where that expression comes into play, right? Can’t see the forest for the trees?
Watch the way she rubs at the back of her neck and you know that she’s lost, and you knew that he was lost when he said her name. They can’t see the forest because there are too many trees and it’s so easy to get lost in all that green.
“Michael. Don’t,” she says.
You know she doesn’t mean that, right?
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27.
Josh takes Vancouver and Diane keeps New York.
Michael comes to talk to late night hosts and for film premieres.
He comes for her, but he never tells her this and she never asks.
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28.
Perhaps these two are the exception and not the rule.
You know there are the others.
“I want,” they all say, and they reach - a child without aim.
They are the little children, they are the dead children. They do not grow and they do not learn; they speak an alphabet of jumbled sounds and broken noises - they cannot spell their letters. They are the children who cannot count, where one and one is a value less than two, than double - where it’s something greater, a property too dense for them to understand.
They are the children raised without limits and for every scraped kneecap and pointed elbow they clamor for more. These are the kids lost in the divorce proceedings, the shuffle of back and forth and carpools and empty parking lots. They hit back and they bite. They love - they hate - without reason.
They are the stunted and the coddled, the violated and the dispossessed. These words have no meaning to these wayward children, children who gamble and shoot for all the marbles without fully comprehending what lies at stake.
And you still want them? Don’t you know - damaged goods don’t always come for half the price.
You click the remote, you turn the TV on, no one’s computer actually says you’ve got mail anymore. And after that? You point and you laugh, and you say those three words that are supposed to make all of this - all the hair-pulling and the tears you don’t see, all that quiet anguish that makes us too uncomfortable to imagine, all that deep, dark personal hurt that sticks and clings to the insides of chests and the cavity of a ribcage - okay:
They deserve it.
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29.
This is the part that we don’t see:
There is a bathroom in her apartment and there is the fog on the mirror and dampness has settled from the hot water, now off, and the steam, now gone.
It is the holiday season. The tree is up in Rockefeller Center and snow threatens on the air. Diane holds a toothbrush up to her mouth and Michael wraps an arm around her waist, a towel slung low on his hips.
What we think you have somehow managed to forget is that sometimes people can fit together. Sometimes there is a grand plan and a scheme involved, that there are people in this world who eventually find those other people in this world and one day realize: yes, this is where I am supposed to be.
And if you believe in love, if you can still bring yourself to believe in something like that, then maybe this is it.
You forgot that. It’s okay though; most people do forget. That’s the greatest flaw in this plan.
He bends and he kisses her shoulder blade and when he kisses her mouth she tastes like the toothpaste, like the steam, familiar.
Know this: this is the part you’ll never see. And this is the part you will never know.
He kisses her mouth.
-
30.
fin.
rpf. you know the expression well: a picture is worth a thousand words. you forget that often what goes unsaid matters most of all. diane kruger/michael fassbender. rated r. 4528 words.
notes: credit in part is dude to the always marvelous C, fated_addiction for letting me bounce ideas off of and being one of the best enablers around, *laughs*. also, this was written with notyourtea's current challenge, SCANDALS, in mind, heh. and as always: the following is not true. the end.
Something has to be done, but nothing too original, because hey, this is Hollywood.
(L.A. Confidential)
we're filming a movie called planet of love-
there's sex of course, and ballroom dancing
(Dirty Valentine, Richard Siken)
1.
Today the top three searches on Google are (in order):
1. Michael Jackson;
2. Big Brother;
3. Serial killers.
This tells you everything you need to know about what comes next.
-
2.
That’s a lie. This tells us nothing. This tells us people are curious about dead pop stars and their much muckraked legacy and whether someone will end up behind bars or not. This says that people like to watch behind the safety of television screens and cameramen the people who move in miniature pretend are not there.
This tells us most importantly that what we love is a good story, a juicy story, one that ends in expelled bodily fluid - be it blood, semen, spit, or D) all of the above - and that we like it when people slip. We like to kick them when they’re down.
In fact, we revel in it.
This doesn’t tell us anything about the two people of our story however. Or maybe it does. Keep an eye out; you might catch something we have missed.
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3.
There were eleven pictures leaked in total.
In the pictures, you see what the textbooks call copulation and the priests call sin and the boys on the subway call fucking.
You don’t know these people. You know the people they have pretended to be and the performances pulled in interviews and publications. You know the woman is named Diane and the man, Michael, and once upon a time they had been costars - at least in a more official capacity than this.
Like a detective, and any of us can be a detective if we know where to look, you know that one time in London, these two people drank too much (there are two glasses, empty, on the table behind them; there are two bottles, one poured empty and dry as well, the other still holding at half) and in their haste or their inebriation, their foolish tempting of fate, they did not close the curtains to her hotel room.
The view was perfect from the building across the way. But you know that too.
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4.
Her agent is the first to discover the photos.
“How could you be so fucking stupid?” is what Diane is asked. She does not know to what the agent refers; she catches on quickly.
“Oh,” is all she says when met with her own self, a month earlier and an ocean away.
“Oh.”
We’re not the only ones watching now. Pay attention. This is when it gets really good.
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5.
The first photograph isn’t really all that incriminating. If you eyeball it once, it looks like two people mid-conversation. And that’s what the photograph is of - there are no secret optical illusions here, no I Spy game underfoot. There are two people and they are talking. The problem is that if you go back for a second glance, you do a double-take, raise the picture to the light, put on those reading glasses you deny you own, you see something a little different.
You see the hand on the waist (his, hers, respectively). You see the proximity of two faces, even in this grainy print. You see how serious he is, how maybe in another context you would say concerned, but here he is just serious, he is concentrating and if anything Diane looks nervous in return.
In the first photograph, Michael and Diane stand talking. There is a film in black and white on the television screen behind her head and they talk and they pay it no mind.
You think that might be Grace Kelly on the screen behind her head. That, dear inspector, is irrelevant.
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6.
When they were young and in their acting classes (or maybe they were more organic than that and laughed in the face of training and canned soliloquies, but it’s not like they have mantels of awards to show for said rebellion) or waited on line at a casting call, a sea of interchangeable and unmemorable faces, no one pulled them aside and said: they’re going to chase you with lights and they’re going to chase you with the shutter and the zoom. You’re never going to escape yourself, no one said. And maybe it’s like “break a leg” is code for a “good luck” superstition won’t let your tongue slide around - you don’t want to jinx the future.
You’re never going to escape yourself, no one said, because maybe they were unsure there was a person there worth chasing, worth the effort to hide from.
Maybe they were right. Are you going to argue on their behalf?
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7.
Michael promotes his movie that summer and Diane lays low. She is cleaning her kitchen when he calls. She pulls the yellow gloves off with a snap and the smell of bleach is still too sharp.
“Can we sue them?” he asks her over the phone.
“What for? The pictures are already out,” she sighs.
“I want to fucking sue them.”
“It’s not worth it,” she says.
Michael sighs this time over the line.
“Do you ever think - do you ever think, that, fuck, I don’t know, that maybe if, maybe if no one knew - do you ever think about, you know, fuck, don’t make me say it for Christ’s sake, Jesus.”
Diane’s eyes fix on the digital clock on the microwave and she does not blink.
“No,” she says, “I don’t think about you.”
She hangs up first.
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8.
The second photograph is where things get interesting.
In the second photograph, they kiss. Of course, the inherent problem with photos is their lack of motion. We think he kissed her first; you think so too.
His hand is large and it captures the expanse of her jaw. His eyes are closed and hers are open; there is a miniscule triangle of open space between their open mouths and if there was sound to accompany the image, we might hear her gasp and him say, “Yes.”
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9.
Let’s do this right. Let’s start at the beginning.
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10.
In a hotel room across the way, there were two men. The first spoke of Lily Allen and a nightclub and how much upskirts were earning on the market. “For her,” the second said, “not much.”
The second man looked out the window, and then he said: “Holy shit, mate. You can see right into that fucking hotel room.”
The first man had joined him. “You’re right. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”
“Isn’t that what’s her name?” the second asked.
“What’s who’s name?” the first asked.
“The broad, you wanker. She’s somebody. I recognize her.”
“Wait a tic. Yeah, yeah, yeah - she’s that German, that Tarantino one, shagging that Dawson’s Pike, River, Creek, whatever the fuck, bloke yeah?”
“That’s not the same bloke, I reckon.”
“No, sir.”
“Get the camera,” the second man said.
You know what happened next.
-
11.
As for the beginning of them, you should probably know this:
Quentin and Michael and Diane and Brad and Til and other people you don’t care about are in a bar. This is a long time ago and this is Germany and shooting is to begin within the month. They all hold their pints to their mouth and they drink. Quentin drives the conversation and Brad plays a good second, as you would expect. The rest of them just listen and they laugh at the appropriate intervals, but mainly they drink.
“So, we’re in a bar - and have you ever noticed that?” Quentin is saying. “How the best stories, those stories worth telling always start like that? ‘We were in a bar,’ ‘a man walks into a bar,’ - but I digress. We’re in a bar, and you know, we’re past a couple of drinks and into a few of them - ”
She does not hear the rest of the story.
Diane’s knee bumps against Michael’s knee under the table, and the first time it happens, it is an accident. We know. You don’t believe that. You’ve been taught and trained to believe differently, in those crafty things like ulterior motives. Stop squinting so hard. There’s nothing else to see here.
Her knee bumped his knee, and later, she steadied herself with a hand on his elbow as she rose to leave the table.
If we need a timeline, and we know, we do, you have no imagination, we can call this the starting point.
We can call this the point when trouble walks into a bar.
-
12.
The third photograph is far more indecent.
In the third, Diane has her hands hidden under his shirt. Their mouths appear fused together and she is clad in only her bra and a pair of tights. You can see a pair of shoes kicked off in the foreground; if you look a little closer, you can see his belt undone.
You can’t see their faces.
That bothers you, doesn’t it? Her hair and his hand obscure any view and besides, they’re too hungry, they’re too desperate; principles like distance and proximity have lost meaning.
You’d still like to see that though. We know.
-
13.
There are six questions journalists ask when covering a story:
Who, what, when, where, why and how?
You only ask the who and you only ask what and of course you want to know the how. You don’t care about the rest. You especially don’t care about the why.
But you should know this: the why is the most important part.
On Perez Hilton the headline reads: Kruger’s Treasure Plumbed.
Just Jared just says: Inglourious! Notorious!
In People, they call him a critically-acclaimed Irish up-and-comer (no pun intended, we’d imagine, People is not that crass). They call her “the divorced German actress, girlfriend of Dawson’s Creek alum…”
She is not the ex-girlfriend. Not yet. Don't look so anxious.
-
14.
He was supposed to get his big break years ago. He’s said it himself, we’re not just being snide.
His big break was supposed to come with Spielberg, and then with Snyder, and now Tarantino.
He gets his break all right. He gets that household name. And it’s a Disney moral, be careful what you wish for!, tied to his name on the covers of tabloids and photographs of her mouth stretched around his cock.
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15.
The fourth picture is pornographic.
Diane is topless, she is on her knees.
Michael sits perched on the side of the bed and he is leaning back on his forearms. The bedspread looks like it’s the kind that is slick to the touch and it makes you wonder, if maybe, eventually, his arms slid out from beneath him, that he collapsed under his own weight, and had to scramble for purchase against the slippery bedspread.
You’ll never know.
In the picture, you can see her bare breasts and she is on her knees and Michael is on the bed and her mouth is open around his cock. In the fourth picture, she sucks him off.
This makes you uncomfortable; are we right? That’s okay though - it made us uncomfortable at first too. Sex is one thing. Sex is a shared effort. But this? This is something else. Maybe it’s the lighting of the picture or maybe it’s her nudity and the fact he still has a shirt on (but his pants around his ankles), maybe it’s the expression on his face - a curious mixture of surprise and desire and something you don’t recognize - but it all is a little too intimate.
Do you feel like an intruder yet?
-
16.
Vanity Fair calls.
They want her to do the July cover.
“We’re thinking something like, ‘Moving past the scandal: in her own words,’ it’s a little rough, but something like that, are you still living with Josh, where’s Michael?” they ask her all in one breath.
She turns down the cover. That surprises you, doesn’t it.
She turns down National Treasure 3.
That surprises no one.
-
17.
In a coffeeshop in New York, Diane hides behind a pair of large, red plastic sunglasses and a book, but we see her. She has a Danish in crumbs, ripped apart into the bite-size but otherwise untouched next to her elbow. She sips the coffee (or the tea, we are too far away to tell) and turns the page of her book.
The scarlet woman is reading Madame Bovary, and honestly we cannot make this shit up.
Perhaps she is shopping for a role, or perhaps cliché can really be that earnest and accidental and she has turned to the fictional for commiseration and comfort.
You think this is about a film, don’t you.
You are watching her drink her coffee or her tea and you are watching her read her book, but you have no sense of the periphery. On the corner, outside the shop, a construction worker rides his jackhammer into the ground and the entire block shakes with it. Sugar is upset from its bowl and the tea or the coffee sloshes in her cup; she steadies it with an equally trembling hand.
There is a table of women behind Diane, and one has brought a child in a carriage and they are laughing over a collection of wedding photos.
What you can’t know is that Diane hates these women.
Here’s the thing: one of these days one of these women will fuck it all up. One of them, maybe the mother of the sleeping kid with the stuffed turtle grasped tight, will fuck a man who isn’t hers. And she’ll probably be kicked out of this table in this coffeeshop in New York and her husband will probably want to kick her out too, but the spread of the news and the gossip and the consequences will extend no further than her home, this coffeeshop, the shared address book kept in a drawer next to the phone.
The kid wakes and throws the turtle on the ground. The jackhammer pauses and the silence is deafening. The women laugh and Diane hates them.
-
18.
Classify this under things you don’t know (also known as: things Us Weekly and Ryan Seacrest forgot to tell you):
Michael already has a girlfriend (American). She lives in Bel-Air (the swanky end) and truth be told, not much more is known than that. A number of inferences can be made though, about this girlfriend (American) who lives in Bel-Air (the swanky end). None are favorable; you’ve seen the films. That’s so hot.
That’s not the point. Spite is not the key. We don’t care about her, do we? She’s a tertiary character in all of this. If this was a film (for all the world’s a stage, and Willy Shakespeare needs a facelift), she would not get billing on the poster; on the Internet Movie Database you would have to click the full cast link to see her name. She does not matter here; she is window dressing.
That sounds a touch cruel, doesn’t it? We’re only following your lead.
You like her now because she makes this messier, don’t you? Busted, caught red-handed, much like our male and female leads.
Hey. Maybe that’s a theme.
-
19.
In the fifth photograph he is between her legs; her back arched up and off the bed.
You can see the lines of his back, the way they ripple when the muscle is strained into force and motion. You can see her bent knees and the cascade of blonde hair, the tilt of a chin and the stretch of her neck.
Michael’s mouth is pressed to the skin of her collarbone and all you can see of their coupling is the bracket of her bare hips and his bare ass in between.
You’re blushing right now - you’re totally blushing.
-
20.
Today the top three searches on Google are (in order):
1. Michael Jackson (+ homicide);
2. Megan Fox;
3. Diane Kruger (+ naked)
It’s an honor.
-
21.
In pictures six through ten he fucks her and she fucks him back.
You can’t see as much as you probably wish you could.
It is a tangle of two bodies and at one point their hands are joined over her head. You can’t see his face, only hers - the open mouth, the small O her lips make, the dazed look of her eyes when they are not closed.
The television is still on in the background.
You had forgotten that detail. Don’t argue; you had.
-
22.
It is an easy device to say: if you knew the truth you’d hate me.
That’s probably true.
The opposite is just as likely true as well. If you knew that we were lying, if you knew the words we are saying at this very moment were false, you’d hate us as well.
But we don’t say that. The lies serve as pardons, little masks for the truth you’d so hate us for to hide behind.
Diane says: “If you knew the truth you’d hate me.”
Josh doesn’t say anything, and maybe she expected that, it’s hard to tell. But she sits there with those sharp, hunched shoulders and that look of distracted worry, and underneath that, there sits something else. Something like calm, and something sure.
When he leaves - Vancouver, of all places - he takes his bags and he takes his belongings.
She remains calm until his cab disappears into the sprawl of New York traffic and then she starts to cry.
You don’t like this part. Either does she.
-
23.
Everybody loves Josh now. And of course we all do.
The good guy takes the hit again. Poor, poor thing.
He just inked a deal to star opposite Christian Bale next fall. It’s a film about infidelity and aliens and there is a bad man and a good man and a woman in between.
Michael gets film offers too. He gets offers for every villainous role, great or small, demonic or just plain petty.
He does not get offered the Christian Bale movie; the villain has already been cast and he is not Josh.
No one knows what to do with Diane. We never know what to do with the bad girls, other than ship them off to Los Angeles with a plastic baggie of coke and a prayer for the worst.
(Diane poses for small European magazines and wears ensembles more costume than clothing; she reads scripts for films without budgets and films without stars. She drinks a lot of tea. This is disappointing for you, but sometimes people do that, sometimes they don’t deliver).
-
24.
Picture eleven makes you feel guilty, doesn’t it?
In picture eleven, Diane is smiling and it is the saddest thing you have ever seen.
She has a hand in Michael’s hair and his face is buried in the crook of her neck. He holds her tight.
You’ve invented that last part. You have no way of knowing how loosely or how tightly he held her. But you’re pretty sure that in the picture he holds her tight. You’re pretty sure he’s holding on for dear life.
If it means anything, we think so too.
-
25.
You know what you saw.
This is what you missed:
His hand covers the column of her throat and Diane tries to catch her breath. His body is heavy and damp on top of her. She blinks rapidly. “Oh, god,” she sighs. “Jesus,” and then, she laughs. She smiles and she laughs but it sort of sounds like she is crying. Michael looks up at her and then kisses her shoulder.
“I thought,” she finally says, when the laughing or the crying subsides, “that this would fix it.” Her throat catches on the word fix and Michael stills against her. His fingers dig into her side. She is still smiling but there is something broken about the stretch of white teeth and the lines at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes are wet and Michael watches her carefully. “I thought I could be rid of you.”
“Should I be offended?” Michael asks, the humor more self-defensive than good-natured.
Her smile falters. “No,” she says firmly. “No,” she repeats, and her hand runs down the back of his head and rests to cradle the nape of his neck. “No. I - ” and she stops.
Michael kisses her.
“I know,” he says. She kisses him back.
And if for a moment, that moment where his mouth is wet and it is hers, where she is open and she is his, she thinks something like this cannot end you cannot fault her. What she does not know is that this, London and the city outside her open window, his mouth, wet, and herself, open, is all the good they will have for now. That the good can end and give way to the bad, that there is a balance to these things and they have yet to pay their due. She does not know this and he does not know this and somewhere a camera has already snapped and they have posed unwillingly and she can taste her own skin on his tongue.
There are no pictures of this part.
-
26.
And now.
They’re back in the kitchen where she lied once and she told him that no, in fact, she does not think about him, and if he thinks about her, then he thinks about her - it is not a problem for her to solve. Are you watching closely? You see the way she wrings her hands with the dish towel, the way she tries to hide her shaking fingers in all that yellow and white and blue fabric? You see the way he looks at her hands and he looks at the towel - you see the softening of his mouth? Because he knows. He knows that she’s a liar and he knows that he’s a liar and maybe this is one of those grand feats of love - the allowance for forgiveness and acceptance. It allows you to see the yellow and the white and the blue, the shaking fingers, and maybe those two tied together are that elusive thing we call the truth.
Who knows. They don’t know; they just feel. The towel’s probably soft and a little damp beneath her hands and she twists it like a rope to hang.
“Diane,” he says, and Diane, she stops with the towel, lays it on the counter behind her, and you heard him say her name. But did you really hear him say her name? We say a lot, you know, in the little stops and gasps of words and names and places. We reveal in the stretch of syllable and manipulation of sound. He says her name, and I know you heard it, but he said more than that. I think you know that too. Because this is the after and we already know what has happened before. They know it too, and of course they do, they lived it. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s where that expression comes into play, right? Can’t see the forest for the trees?
Watch the way she rubs at the back of her neck and you know that she’s lost, and you knew that he was lost when he said her name. They can’t see the forest because there are too many trees and it’s so easy to get lost in all that green.
“Michael. Don’t,” she says.
You know she doesn’t mean that, right?
-
27.
Josh takes Vancouver and Diane keeps New York.
Michael comes to talk to late night hosts and for film premieres.
He comes for her, but he never tells her this and she never asks.
-
28.
Perhaps these two are the exception and not the rule.
You know there are the others.
“I want,” they all say, and they reach - a child without aim.
They are the little children, they are the dead children. They do not grow and they do not learn; they speak an alphabet of jumbled sounds and broken noises - they cannot spell their letters. They are the children who cannot count, where one and one is a value less than two, than double - where it’s something greater, a property too dense for them to understand.
They are the children raised without limits and for every scraped kneecap and pointed elbow they clamor for more. These are the kids lost in the divorce proceedings, the shuffle of back and forth and carpools and empty parking lots. They hit back and they bite. They love - they hate - without reason.
They are the stunted and the coddled, the violated and the dispossessed. These words have no meaning to these wayward children, children who gamble and shoot for all the marbles without fully comprehending what lies at stake.
And you still want them? Don’t you know - damaged goods don’t always come for half the price.
You click the remote, you turn the TV on, no one’s computer actually says you’ve got mail anymore. And after that? You point and you laugh, and you say those three words that are supposed to make all of this - all the hair-pulling and the tears you don’t see, all that quiet anguish that makes us too uncomfortable to imagine, all that deep, dark personal hurt that sticks and clings to the insides of chests and the cavity of a ribcage - okay:
They deserve it.
-
29.
This is the part that we don’t see:
There is a bathroom in her apartment and there is the fog on the mirror and dampness has settled from the hot water, now off, and the steam, now gone.
It is the holiday season. The tree is up in Rockefeller Center and snow threatens on the air. Diane holds a toothbrush up to her mouth and Michael wraps an arm around her waist, a towel slung low on his hips.
What we think you have somehow managed to forget is that sometimes people can fit together. Sometimes there is a grand plan and a scheme involved, that there are people in this world who eventually find those other people in this world and one day realize: yes, this is where I am supposed to be.
And if you believe in love, if you can still bring yourself to believe in something like that, then maybe this is it.
You forgot that. It’s okay though; most people do forget. That’s the greatest flaw in this plan.
He bends and he kisses her shoulder blade and when he kisses her mouth she tastes like the toothpaste, like the steam, familiar.
Know this: this is the part you’ll never see. And this is the part you will never know.
He kisses her mouth.
-
30.
fin.