Page 6 of The Dirty Version
Janelle drooped. Tash knew they shared the same thought: Noab had to cast her infant son into the ocean. The fundamentals of The Colony depended on it, the act both a bittersweet consequence of a fictional philosophy and a grueling example of its rules.
And in this dimension, Tash had already sacrificed so much in the same name.
She hadn’t adjusted the ending of the book to suit her parents or a literary formula.
She hadn’t softened it for her ex-fiancé or his objections—even when Zachary couldn’t separate the book’s fiction from their real-life facts.
Janelle grasped at a last straw: “But, Denise, don’t you think it’d be bad press for Braverman to ruin the final chapter of a book that has such a devoted following?”
Denise’s voice dropped dryly. “Look, guys, I support you and I support the book. But ask your film agent, Tash—I’m guessing right of integrity was thrown in as a feel-good. In actual practice, an entertainment studio would crush you in litigation.”
Tash held Janelle’s lamenting gaze. “Awesome.” Then she held her drink out for a refill. She’d wanted clarity before this phone call, but now she longed for a blur.
Denise took them off Bluetooth, car door slamming, her heels clipping competently on concrete.
“In summary, if I were your counsel, which I’m not”—her relief at this rather palpable—“I’d direct you to make nice.
Braverman could have already taken action to class your dicking around as a decline, Tash.
It sounds like the studio is giving you a last chance. You should probably play ball.”
Tash closed her eyes against the sky and the jungle canopy above her, hauling in its cleansing breath and exhaling her own impending capitulation.
“I know you don’t want to hear this—but write the scenes.
” Kindly, Denise’s closing piece of advice.
“Do it well, because we know you can, and maybe you’ll win the director over.
You’ll have to pick your battles. If Braverman likes your sex scenes, maybe you’ll convince him he should throw the baby out with the bathwater. ” Denise actually chuckled.
Janelle frowned at Tash apologetically. She reached to pull the phone off speaker. “Babe. Take it easy with the jokes.”
* * *
That afternoon, Tash and Janelle kicked it old-school with the college campus mainframe. They waved a send-off to the second semester, submitting final grades. Then they resolved to reread the most recent emails from Braverman together.
They headed to Tash’s favorite spot at Biscayne Coastal: the seaside, stunning-in-its-bungalow-chic-scruff, surf-shack-but-make-it-academic adjunct lounge.
Wide plank tables splayed beneath lazy fan paddles, and the side of the building facing the ocean was essentially open-air.
The college’s slack attitude toward its arts and letters staff could absolutely be dismaying, and Tash knew she was languishing there, rather than advancing on her career path—but the lounge’s breezy gull flap almost made it okay.
The fasten of a sarong knot, the grains of salt crusted on arm hair, the violence of reef break just before a sunset—the vista from the adjunct lounge had been endless inspiration for The Colony .
Also, the lounge had an industrial printer.
Which, when it was working and stocked with ink and paper, was a generous delight.
Tash printed out each of the adaptation’s original ten episode scripts. Then she printed comments from Brian Doolittle, Braverman’s head writer, who’d sent many of the marked-urgent messages she’d sidestepped. His official title was story editor, and he seemed like a total jerk.
Janelle flopped onto one of the lounge’s many beanbags bordering the golden-hour sand.
Boom box tunes wafted over on a breeze of portable grilling and light beer, from a squad of boisterous volleyball players bathing luminous in the fading sun.
Boys on boards rode the distant sea swell beyond them.
It looked like surfer centerfold, but the outlines of Noab’s island lurked in those pre-dusk waves, when the murk churned fiercest, and the coral was most eager to stab.
“What exactly does this fuckwit want from you?” Janelle herself was inspiration for the story: Her love for Tash lived in the island’s Sisterhood, and her wisdom resided in the island’s Lore.
Tash responded flatly. “The fuckwit wants me to give him tits and ass.”
Her attitude would need a lobotomy if she was going to oblige him—which, despite Denise’s warnings and Tash’s impressive tower of freshly printed paper, she had not fully convinced herself she was going to do.
Nevertheless, she and Janelle started reading.
The notes reiterated three priority scene additions, in Episodes One, Five, and Nine.
Noab’s discovery of Hewett’s shipwrecked body in Episode One went first—in the novel, Noab dragged an injured Hewett from rough limestone beach shallows, before the island’s savage sea-monster guardian could taste Hewett’s blood in the water; and Hewett remained unconscious as Noab brought him to shelter in a sacred Prayer Grove.
Noab had never seen a male body before because the island’s population was wholly women.
“And in simple terms, for us laypeople, this means...?” Janelle flipped back and forth through the papers, the TV-script format unfamiliar to her.
Tash rifled through her stack of corresponding comments and reported in staccato word-for-word:
“‘Camera open on interior Grove hut. Hewett, unconscious, draped across prayer slab. Noab attends to his body. Peels his clothes off. What happens then? What’s her reaction to seeing this unknown creature naked?’” In Tash’s dry affect, it sounded like a word problem on the SATs.
“‘Should be extremely sensual. This is the lead-up to their explosive sexual attraction. How best to set the tone?’”
Tash dropped the paper, capsizing backward into her beanbag. “Brian Doolittle, the story editor, is contractually prevented from writing it himself—so everything Braverman wants is phrased like this, with leading questions.”
Janelle had doodled a sketch of male anatomy in the margin of her printout, which she waved above Tash’s face. “What I’m hearing is that they want you to show us Hewett’s dick.”
Tash had to laugh from where she stared up at the fan blades. “Is that what you’re hearing? Because like I told you, Braverman said tits and ass—not dick and balls.” She shrugged horizontally, falsely imperious: “Although. I suppose the only person who could truly decide that is the sex designer.”
“The celebrity sex designer!” Janelle twinkled at the mention of Caleb Rafferty, whom she’d been crowing about when she wasn’t cursing Ram. She’d decided Caleb was Tash’s silver lining. “By far, that man is the best part of this production.”
“Why? You met him for five sloppy minutes. Don’t forget that he’s the enemy.”
Janelle’s raven curls caught the lilt of dimming sun. “No—he’s working for the enemy. Which, I agree, is problematic. But we were having such a great chat before you showed up. I liked him. He seemed funny and smart.”
Tash balked. “You thought he wrote subtitles.”
Janelle denied this. “No. I just wasn’t listening to the details.” She sighed performatively. “I got lost in those dreamy eyes.”
Tash had already chided herself for a similar detour into thoughts of Caleb’s hotness and had since resolved to shutter her vision of his fine points.
He could be an ogre or a knockout; either way she’d stay fixed on her book.
“Wonderful. Shall we call your wife and kids to talk about him a little more?”
Janelle clucked. “I’m not attracted to Caleb sexually, Natasha. I’m just saying. Objectively, he seemed sweet and nice.” She pulled Tash upright to sit properly. “His hands were also massive. Capable-looking. Probably calloused and rough.” A beat passed. “Or soft, if that’s how you like it.”
“Jan. Please stop.” Wrung out, Tash faced her friend, knee-to-knee on the floor. “Yes, he’s handsome. But this is going to be miserable enough without adding in another throbbing member.”
Janelle smothered her delighted expression. “But if you have to stomach these notes, you can also laugh.”
“I’m not there yet.” In each step of the novel’s revisions, Tash had reminded herself to steady on the female point of view—to portray for her reader what a woman might want to know about a character, what a woman would find sexy.
It was a challenging exercise, and it had the added benefit of allowing Tash to skirt any writing outside her comfort zone.
She itemized her apprehension: “I’ve never written explicit sex for a reason—I’m afraid I won’t be good at it. I feel like I’ll either sound like a pervert or a prude. Also, I don’t want to be responsible for asking an actress to take her clothes off.”
“Those are two very different issues.” Janelle slid easily into her more erudite persona.
“Forget whether or not you’re ‘good.’ You wrote a hit, so we’re not debating that.
” She shimmied straighter, bidding Tash to pay attention.
“But let’s drill down on the idea of exploitation, if you want.
There’s nothing wrong with a female character being sexy—I just think you’re associating it with shame.
Which is a trap laid by misogynistic vigilantes. ”
Tash envied Janelle’s mastery of theory. She navigated loaded ideas with a fluidity Tash couldn’t begin to approach. Janelle often saw possibility where Tash only saw fraughtness.
“I’m not associating it with shame. I’m associating it with cheapness.
” In grad school, Tash’s literary-journal-editor boyfriend liked to point out her inability to reconcile high and low—in her academic work but also in his highbrow justifications for his lowbrow sleeping with his interns.
“It just seems like a dumbing-down. Throwing in nudity for the headlines it might generate negates everything I tried to message in the book. My literary fiction will become mass-market.”
Janelle shook her head. “I disagree. I think you could choose to feel differently about this—maybe your literary fiction takes on another facet. Maybe making the sexuality more explicit grants the story access to a wider audience. And then the more that people choose to see it, the more they talk about its message. Which is ultimately what we’re after, right? ”
Tash gave up. “I don’t know.”
“I do.” Janelle brandished her copy of Episode One. “So, like I said—let’s lube it up.”
Tash winced.
Janelle only laughed again, congratulating herself: “Natasha—sex can be smart. If you need a testimonial, ask my wife.”
Tash’s gaze went to the shirtless volleyball players ass-slapping each other on the warm sand. She sighed. “I just don’t want to be a writer who says ‘rigid arousal’ and ‘hardened shaft.’ I’ll feel like an idiot.”
“No, totally. I get that.” Janelle nodded seriously. Before she grinned again. “I guess you’ll just have to ask your sex translator for some different words.”