Page 19 of Return to Whitmore
Charlotte’s knees clacked together. She considered writing back and telling him to leave her alone. Instead, she shoved her phone into the back corner of the kitchen and pressed the heel of her palm to the top of her head.
Chapter Nine
November 2001
It was Charlotte’s first time back in Manhattan since September 11th. She reached the city at noon on the Thursday before the film festival and went immediately to her friend Kathy’s apartment in Greenwich Village, where she threw down her backpack and collapsed on the sofa. Kathy was a filmmaker as well, mostly fiction and experimental art films, and since their first meeting in the fall of 1999, not long after Charlotte had left Nantucket for a second time, they’d been wonderful friends. Kathy put a tea kettle on the stove and pressed Charlotte for details about her life since summertime. “Where have you been?”
Charlotte’s head throbbed with a flurry of memories. “California, mostly,” she said, forcing herself upright on the sofa to smile.
“You don’t look tan,” Kathy observed.
“I was mostly in the editing suite,” Charlotte said. “Working and working and working.”
“Sounds like it paid off.”
It was true that Charlotte’s documentary film about the bars that Charles Bukowski had frequented in Los Angeles had been accepted to the festival that weekend, her first-ever success story after two years of struggle. Charlotte had opted never to use her grandfather’s last name to support herself in the film industry, which was something she often regretted. Plenty of people used nepotism to get ahead. Why did she think she was so special as to not? But in the official film world, she’d registered herself as Charlotte Whitmore—Benjamin Whitmore’s daughter rather than Jefferson Albright’s—so she’d decided to stick with it.
She didn’t want to fully acknowledge what her mother had done, especially now that she knew about her father’s brother, Ronald. Benjamin lost his best friend, and Francesca turned on him.
That night, Kathy and Charlotte went out in Greenwich Village, drinking beers in a cozy dive bar and watching the snow fall gently on the sidewalk outside. It felt strange to see such a peaceful scene in a city that such a violent attack had very recently hit. Charlotte woke up in California to watch the news and called Kathy immediately to check on her. When Kathy hadn’t answered, Charlotte had collapsed in tears and been unable to work till she was sure she was okay.
“How long are you in the city this time?” Kathy asked.
“I want to stay as long as I can,” Charlotte said. “Maybe six months? If I find a good place to live.”
Kathy said she knew of a few apartments in Manhattan that were being leased exclusively to artists. Charlotte said she’d set up a few viewings after the film festival. “I’m too stressed to deal with it till after,” she explained.
“I get it. Focus on this weekend. You can crash on my couch as long as you like.”
Charlotte’s film was set to premiere on Saturday afternoon at three thirty. Afterward, there would be a question-and-answer session lasting anywhere from thirty to sixty minutes. The film festival organizers had booked her film for a medium-sized theater because, apparently, they expected a great deal of interest in Charlotte’s documentary, given the subject. Everyone loved Charles Bukowski.
At least, that was what Charlotte assumed. But when she reached the theater, dressed in all black and her red lipstick pristine, all fired up for her premiere, she found only a few people streaming in from the lobby with popcorn and drinks. Immediately, her heart stopped with fear. There were maybe a hundred fewer people in the audience than she’d anticipated. Maybe everyone would come all at once right before it began? Perhaps they couldn’t find the theater? She returned to the lobby to wait, wondering if she should go out onto the street and usher people into the theater. The last thing she wanted was to watch her film with the nine or so people who’d shown up. It was too intimate. It was too embarrassing.
Charlotte had given a year and a half to the documentary, interviewing what felt like over a hundred patrons of various bars, residents of Los Angeles, ex-bartenders, and even a few semi-famous writers, some or all of whom had known Charles Bukowski. She’d worked herself to the bone in the editing suite, frequently forgetting to eat anything. She’d hardly made a single friend on the West Coast, choosing to put aside her personal happiness in honor of her artistic quest.
She’d done all this—and gotten into a festival. But that didn’t mean anyone cared what she’d made. It was disheartening, to say the least.
Charlotte waited till the very last minute to slip into the theater. She sat in the very back row and tried and failed not to count the number of people. Twelve. Twelve people had come.It was mortifying. Was it proof that she should stop making documentaries altogether? That she should give up her dream and go back to Tuscany—like her mother and sisters wanted her to? And where was Kathy? If only people knew who my grandfather was, she thought. They’d be here in droves. Just when Charlotte was sure nobody else would come, Kathy burst into the dark theater, waving her hand and saying a brief and raspy apology. She sat down and squeezed Charlotte’s knee and said, “This is so exciting!” Charlotte couldn’t smile.
“Are you okay?” Kathy asked.
Charlotte shrugged as the theater darkened.
A few seconds behind Kathy, another man came into the theater and found a seat in the middle. It meant there were fourteen people in a one hundred-plus auditorium. Charlotte shifted lower in her seat and prayed that everyone would leave before the question-and-answer session. She couldn’t take it, thirteen pairs of eyes upon her, thirteen pairs of eyes echoing their pity.
Charlotte had seen her documentary upward of two hundred times, it felt like. She had memorized every sound bite, every expression someone made. Even still, watching it like this was excruciating. In the middle, someone got up and left, and Charlotte was sure it was because the film was crap. The fact that they came back a few minutes later after probably just using the bathroom did little to ease her mind. Charlotte clamped her eyes closed.
When the film finished, one of the film festival organizers came to the front of the audience and smiled. Everyone was applauding. Charlotte thought they were surely faking it, especially when it seemed like they were itching to leave. Charlotte tried to gesture to the organizer to tell him that they needed to cancel the question-and-answer session, but he was already calling her forward.
“We have quite a treat for you today,” he said. “The director of this fine documentary is here today, and she’s eager to answer all of your burning questions.”
Three people in the audience bolted to their feet and hurried out. Charlotte’s cheeks burned with embarrassment and self-hatred. Maybe this was her first and last documentary, her only effort in the film world. Perhaps she could take the train directly to the airport and fly back to Italy.
On shaking legs, she took herself to the front and turned to face the “crowd.” The festival organizer handed her a microphone and said, “Amazing work, Miss Whitmore.” After that, even he disappeared through the double-wide doors, presumably because he had something better to do.
Charlotte thought she was going to throw up. Gripping the microphone with both hands, she gazed out at the crowd and sputtered, “Um, thank you for coming out. It’s a real honor to be featured in this festival, and, yeah.” She cleared her throat. “I’m supposed to open the floor to your questions. Does anyone have one?”
At first, nobody flinched. Kathy finally raised her hand and asked, “Can you tell us a bit about your process? How did you arrive at this topic?”
