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Wright so fast, R.J. had to blink to be sure he wasn’t seeing things.
    “I’ll pay you two thousand a week to come work for me,” Janine Wright said.
    “I advise against that,” said Murray.
    “Twenty-two-fifty,” said Janine Wright.
    R.J. felt the breath leave him and for a few seconds he couldn’t get it back. Finally he managed to shake his head. “Can we start over? I don’t think we’ve been in the same conversation since I got here.”
    “So what do you want?”
    “I want to talk about this picture you’re making, the remake of As Time Goes By .”
    “You don’t have a leg to stand on!” Murray barked. “We own all worldwide rights to this remake and if you think—”
    “Shut up, Murray,” Janine Wright said.
    “I’m not going to sit here and—”
    “Yes you are,” she said, and looked at him briefly. He shut up. He seemed a little paler than he had been.
    Janine looked at R.J. and smiled; not like she was happy or amused, but like he was a brain-dead kid she had to talk to. “Twenty-five hundred dollars.”
    “Jesus Christ, lady, for what?”
    “For looking like your father.”
    R.J. could feel something happening on his face, almost as if he was watching it, not like it was his face at all. It was somewhere between a snarl and a sneer. Everything about this woman and her pet lawyer made his skin crawl, made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck, made him want to grab her by the lapels of her $500 bathrobe and shake her till her teeth rattled.
    “Listen,” he told her, fighting for control, “I’m not going to plug your remake for you. If I put on a fedora and call in the cameras, it will be because I want to stop the picture, not because you’re paying me to make people want to see a half-wit, brain-dead, watered-down, scummed-up, weak, sick, silly, stupid copy of something that’s more important to a hell of a lot of people than—”
    “Including you?” she asked. She hadn’t even blinked at the name calling. “It’s important to you?”
    “Including me,” R.J. said. “And since I do look like him, I think I can get you a lot of negative publicity if you go ahead with this thing.”
    She just looked. “Negative publicity?”
    “Yeah, you know. Look-alike son calls project a lame sack of shit, scion of great actor heaps scorn on greedy, brainless, soulless studio—that kind of thing. Get the fan magazines involved. Organize protests. Maybe a nuisance suit. Hell, lady, I haven’t even thought about it and I know ten ways to pee in your soup.”
    Janine Wright smiled. “Okay. Great. Do it.”
    “Gotcha,” said Murray.
    R.J. blinked. He had thought he was getting somewhere, really felt like he was on a roll. “What?”
    She leaned back. “I said, go ahead. Do it. Call your press conferences. Organize boycotts. Sue the shit out of me. You’re gonna do for free what I would have paid you for, shit-for-brains.”
    R.J. was surprised to see his hands were trembling. He’d never wanted to hit somebody so badly. “You would have paid me to sue the shit out of you?”
    “Absolutely. Including court costs. Now you can pay for it yourself. This is fucking great.”
    “Why?”
    She stood up. “I don’t have time to teach kindergarten to half-wits. You ever hear the expression, no such thing as bad publicity?” She moved toward the door.
    “I’ve heard it.”
    “Well, the way things are today, it goes even further. Bad publicity is the best kind. People hear you hate this movie, they’ll go see it just to find out why. They’ll buy a ticket just so they can agree with you.” She opened the door. “Assholes. And they say TV is stupid. I wonder why. Get out.”
    R.J.’s head was spinning. He felt like the private eye in an old movie, realizing somebody had slipped him a mickey. It was in the drink, he thought, except I didn’t have a drink.
    “Come on, get out,” Janine Wright repeated. “Before I have to call security. Forget the white gloves, those