Pretty as a Picture Read online

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH LITTLE

  Dear Daughter

  Biting the Wax Tadpole

  Trip of the Tongue

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Little

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Little, Elizabeth, 1981– author.

  Title: Pretty as a picture : a novel / Elizabeth Little.

  Description: New York : Viking, [2020] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019017547 (print) | LCCN 2019018361 (ebook) | ISBN 9780698137431 (ebook) | ISBN 9780670016396 (hardcover)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Humorous fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3612.I8755 (ebook) | LCC PS3612.I8755 P74 2020 (print) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017547

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Elizabeth Yaffe

  Cover image: Andriy Onufriyenko / Getty Images

  pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For Annabel and Robyn

  CONTENTS

  Also by Elizabeth Little

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Life in the movie business is like the . . . beginning of a new love affair: it’s full of surprises, and you’re constantly getting fucked.

  —David Mamet

  PROLOGUE

  They say a picture’s worth a thousand words.

  That’s not what I’d say.

  I’d say it depends on the picture. I’d say it depends on the size and the color and the subject and the print and the framing and the focus and the composition. I’d say it depends on what you were doing the hour before, the day before, the year before, the life before. I’d say it depends on whether you’re looking at it on a wall or scrolling past it on a screen or cutting it carefully out of a book, digging your knuckle into the gutter of the spine because the margins are so small and the blades are so long and it’s impossible to get a straight line, but you don’t want to dig up a guide and an X-Acto knife because you aren’t willing to wait, you have to have it, you have to have this picture, right now, and your kitchen scissors are close enough and good enough—yes, good enough—and Jesus Christ, Marissa, when will you get it through your thick head: Imperfection is a price happy people pay to cradle the weight of something they love.

  That’s what I’d say.

  But I understand some people prefer the cozy imprecision of “nice round numbers,” so I’m willing to pretend, for the moment, for the sake of argument, that a single picture is indeed worth one thousand point zero zero words exactly.

  It would follow, then, that two pictures are worth two thousand words.

  A hundred pictures, a hundred thousand words.

  At that rate it wouldn’t take too many pictures before you’d have in front of you all the words there ever were in all the world and more besides, more words than anyone could thread together into anything resembling sense.

  Think about that the next time you go to the movies.

  * * *

  —

  If you want to trick the human eye into believing a series of pictures represents continuous motion—what first-semester film school students learn to call “persistence of vision”—you’re going to need to present your audience with about sixteen frames per second. More, if you’d like, but no fewer.

  Sixteen. Not round, but still a number people like to hang on to. It’s often said that 16 FPS was the standard frame rate in the silent film era, but that’s wrong—there was no standard. Those cameras were hand-cranked, and directors varied the frame rate from scene to scene depending on the rhythm that suited their story. But once talkies came along, picture had to sync to sound, and since then, the frame rate used in movie production and projection has been 24 FPS, with a few exceptions I won’t let myself go into, because according to Amy no one wants to hear what anyone thinks about Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.

  By this reckoning, at eighty-five minutes, your average movie is made up of 122,400 frames. So if a picture’s worth a thousand words—well, that average movie must be worth 122,400,000 words.

  One hundred twenty-two million.

  In the wrong hands, that’s too much. Too much information, too much possibility. No one can find a signal in all that noise. You might as well eat a library. You might as well drink a dictionary. You might as well ask an actor how they’re feeling.

  That’s why they come to me. The editor.

  Give me enough time. Give me enough space. Give me a dark room and a roll of film, a Steenbeck, a Moviola, an Avid NLE, a director with a vision and an actor with some craft.

  Give me an X-Acto knife and a guide.

  Give me this, and I’ll do all the things with pictures I can never do with words. I’ll slice and stitch and lace and weave and cut and wipe and fade. I’ll crack open the body of the beast and slip my hands beneath its beating heart.

  Give me a movie and I’ll find the meaning; I’ll find the truth; I’ll find the story.

  Sometimes, if I’m very lucky, I’ll find all three.

  ONE

  Not that I manage to say any of that out loud.

  Of course I don’t.

  Sometimes I think everything wrong with my life can be located in the space between what I should have said and what actually came out of my mouth. No matter how hard I try, no matter how well I prepare, the right words are, for me, forever out of reach. Not because they catch in my thro
at. A cat hasn’t got my tongue. None of the usual phrases apply. It’s a more comprehensive kind of collapse. When faced with any real conversational pressure, my personality just goes offline, AWOL, and no matter how hard I try, it doesn’t respond. Catastrophic system failure.

  Speak, I tell myself in those moments. Speak.

  Like I’m Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, lying barefoot in the back of that truck, gritting my teeth and trying to force my insubordinate body to bend to my iron will.

  Speak.

  But I’m not Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. I didn’t train with Gordon Liu. I don’t know the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, and I don’t have the body to pull off a yellow leather motorcycle suit. So I never get my toe to move. I never drive that truck to Vivica A. Fox’s house. I never get revenge and I never find my daughter. I just starve to death in a hospital parking lot.

  And in real life, when asked to explain to a potential employer why I’m the best candidate for a job I desperately need, I don’t deliver a rousing monologue about the exhilarating, all-encompassing, soul-shifting, life-shaking power of cinema. Instead I just comb my fingers through my ponytail for the seventeenth time while mumbling something about my work ethic.

  Then, to top it off, I shrug—I shrug—and I say:

  “I just really like movies, I guess.”

  My agent makes a sound so pained I’m genuinely worried I might have killed her.

  * * *

  —

  I don’t know what else Nell expected, it’s been six years since I’ve had to look for work. Six years since Amy hit it just big enough that we could coast from feature to feature to feature without having to hustle for work we hated in the interim. It took some doing—the plumbing in the Mid-City two-bedroom we shared was more vague promise than functional reality, and six nights a week we ate rice and beans we bought in bulk—but eventually she was able to stop taking AD gigs; I was able to stop doing TV. We found a rhythm that worked for us, postproduction bleeding into preproduction and back again, and if I didn’t have time for a social life, I wasn’t particularly bothered: I got to live and work with my very best friend.

  But last month I decided it was time to start thinking about getting my own place, and Amy and I put the new movie on hold so we could figure things out.

  It didn’t take long to realize that blowing up my personal and professional lives all at once wasn’t exactly the smartest thing I could have done. For about three days it felt freeing. But then I ran out of new-release movies to see.

  And so, this afternoon, I found myself pacing the inadequate length of my short-term rental in Burbank, restless, anxious, fingers fluttering at my sides. I had finally managed to work up the nerve to send a few emails to old colleagues, hoping I could pick up an episode or two of I truly didn’t even care what, but either they didn’t remember me or they were all out to lunch or Gmail was down for everyone but me.

  By two p.m., my nerves—already frayed by the arrival of my credit card statement—drove me to a desperate act: I made a phone call. I left a message for my agent explaining that Amy and I were taking a break, that I needed a job, and, therefore, that I might actually be willing to take her advice for once.

  I should have known something was fishy when she called me back right away.

  “You have a meeting,” she said.

  “Who with?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about that. Get here by six, I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Today? At rush hour?”

  “You want a job or not?”

  “Nell. Have they even seen my reel?”

  “Don’t worry about that, either.”

  “The more you say that the more I worry.”

  She sniffed. “Worry, don’t worry, either way this is the only open assignment that isn’t scraping memory cards for Transformers 7. So if you want it, be here at six.” She paused. “And maybe do something with your hair.”

  She hung up without saying good-bye, and I wished, not for the first time, that I were an agent, too.

  Imagine being able to end a conversation whenever you want.

  When I arrived at Nell’s office—ten minutes early, despite a slowdown at Coldwater and Mulholland—I still didn’t have a clue what I was walking into. Nell hadn’t mentioned a script or a story or even a logline, so my best guess was that she’d arranged for a late-day meet-and-greet with a producer too green to know this was a below-the-line agency. As a strategy, it didn’t make much sense: Nell knew my personality wasn’t my strongest selling point. I figured she was planning to keep the meeting short.

  Nell gave my ponytail a tug when she saw me. “You got this,” she said, all historical evidence to the contrary.

  And that’s how I found myself sitting here, across the table from two agents, three lawyers, and an important studio executive, interviewing for a job I know absolutely nothing about.

  I obviously forgot the important executive’s name immediately. I think it has a “y” in it, maybe? He’s wearing chunky statement glasses and a plain black T-shirt that probably cost more than my car payment. He’s the picture of bland, reflexive courtesy, steepling his fingers and leaning forward in his chair, nodding at every third word no matter what that word is.

  After more than a decade in the film industry, I can confidently assert that this particular demeanor indicates one of the following:

  measured enthusiasm

  catatonic boredom

  a recent corporate-mandated webinar on best listening practices

  I suppose it could be worse.

  I blink his face back into focus. I think he’s finally saying something relevant.

  “—coming in this late in the game is somewhat less than ideal, obviously, so what we need here is a quick study.”

  My eyebrows go up. “And you called me?”

  “Well,” he says, “we’ve been told there’s no one better at watching footage and knowing exactly what the director’s trying to say.”

  “It helps that they usually give me a script.”

  The executive beckons to one of the assistants stationed along the back wall. She pulls out a folder and hands it to him. He slides it across the table toward me.

  Inside is a photo. Glossy, eight by ten.

  “That’s not a script,” I point out.

  “No,” he agrees. “It’s a still. And I want you to tell us what you see.”

  I draw a breath, preparing to explain to the room at large why this is a terrible way to gauge an editor’s skills (for a start, my job is putting pictures together, not picking them apart), but then I catch a glimpse of the photo, and because at heart I’m just a dog who happens to be into a very particular type of squirrel, this is all it takes to send my thoughts racing off in a new direction.

  It’s a medium close-up of a young woman asleep on a beach, and the first thing worth noting is that she’s being played by Liza May, Oscar-anointed ingenue and the reigning, relatable queen of the “Stars, They’re Just Like Us!” social media sphere. Last time I saw her, I think she was waxing her mustache on Facebook Live.

  So this is a big-time job. For a big-time director. No wonder Nell was so responsive.

  The second thing worth noting is that the woman is dead.

  Her body occupies the left half of the frame, visible from the shoulders up, the straps of her neon orange swimsuit the only discordant shade in an otherwise tranquil palette. Her hair is silky, taupe and raw umber and dark blond, streaked by the sun. It falls in layers over her cheek; one strand teases at the corner of her mouth. Her eyebrows have been thinned out, which makes her look older than she is, but she’s barely wearing any foundation, which makes her look younger than she is. Her skin is smooth and very clear.

  She’s lying on a weathered wooden beach chair with a white canvas cover. Her arm is stretched
out over her head, her cheek pillowed against her right biceps, her profile radiant in the golden light of a late summer afternoon, that time of day when the angle of the sun and the particles in the atmosphere do what a reflector or bounce board can never quite match, what color grading can’t quite pull off.

  “Well?” the executive asks. “What do you think?”

  “I think magic hour’s a nice time to die.”

  The executive adjusts his glasses. “How do you know she’s dead?”

  “Well—” I draw out the word as long as I can, buying time to reverse engineer my own thinking. It’s been a while since I’ve had to deconstruct the gut certainties that make me good at my job.

  I stare at the picture until my eyes start to water, searching for something, anything that might help me stand out. Eventually my finger lands on a faint line that slices vertically through the frame, just past the edge of Liza’s chair.

  “The split diopter,” I say.

  “Explain,” he says.

  “It’s a half lens you stick on the end of the camera if you want to keep two different planes in focus at the same time—like bifocals, but for the movies. So we have Liza here, in the foreground, and then all these beachgoers, there, way far away in the background—but they’re both in focus, right? That wouldn’t be possible without a split diopter. I wish people used it more often, but I guess De Palma kind of beat it to death back in the seventies and eighties, and now it’s not—”

  The executive holds up a hand. “Yes, I know what a diopter is, thank you.”

  My mouth snaps shut.

  “What I’m wondering is how that tells you she’s dead.”

  I sneak a glance at the door. “You know, I’m not the best at putting this stuff into words. Maybe I could just show you my reel?”

  Nell wraps her hand around my wrist and whispers in my ear.

  “Robots, Marissa. In disguise.”

  “I get it,” I say, and even I can tell my voice is tight and unfriendly. I edge my chair away from the table until I have enough room to jiggle my foot without accidentally kicking anyone. After a few seconds of this, I’m able to explain myself. “Since this is a studio movie, it’s a safe assumption the crowd’s being kept in focus because they’re an important part of the scene. Because we’re waiting for one of them to notice Liza—to find her. The prospect of discovery, that’s what’s driving the tension here. It wouldn’t be dramatic if she were just taking a nap.”