Scapegoat Pt. 07

**

Over the next several months, Eloise found herself musing about Trevor often. Not that she intended to. It was just that everything was topsy-turvy at home. Douglas was becoming monomaniacal about his film project. There were problems with the script. the shooting schedule, the location filming, Douglas's dream cinematographer was diagnosed with leukemia! Everything was collapsing at once. Worse, the almost unlimited budget Bill had given Douglas was nearly completely exhausted. All this stress and aggravation was taking a toll on the famous actor. He was so preoccupied that he rarely had any time for Eloise. It was like living with a stranger! The calm, sensitive, mature, and very cool man of her dreams had become an insecure neurotic mess. When they did make love, it was perfunctory on Douglas's part. The analogy of Ahab was more than apt.

Nothing that Eloise did could break Douglas out of his funk. What was worse, Eloise knew that the project was a dog. She suspected that Douglas felt the same way, but he would never admit it. An apocalypse via virus, leaving a handful of survivors, while timely and topical, wasn't all that sexy. The simple virus of "Earth Abides" just could not compete with apocalypses featuring zombies or occult forces, artificial intelligence run amuck, or good old nuclear holocaust. The novel was prosaic with long passages of elegiac text, making it difficult to film. It was also horribly dated. The central biracial love story certainly raised eyebrows in 1949. Today? Only racists would care.

Eloise tried as gently and compassionately as possible to tell Douglas to put aside his dream, at least for now. But to Douglas it was a sunk fallacy he simply could not shake.

"Bill's money is almost gone! What am I going to do, Ellie?"

"Put the project on hold, sweetheart. Everyone needs a break. What you have so far will appeal to new investors. But they have to see a calm and focused filmmaker. Let's take a vacation, catch some sun, read, and decompress."

"But Ellie."

"No one will think badly of you for calling it a day. Look at all the great film productions that never saw the light of day. Orson Welles never completed "Heart of Darkness," Aronofsky's unfinished "Dune" is legendary. Maybe you should think in terms of a coffee table book to spark interest and investors.

"I can't quit now."

"Who says so? You are the only one that believes that."

"I'll come up with the money to finish this from somewhere."

Eloise kissed Douglas and wriggled her body provocatively against his.

"Master, I've been a bad girl. I deserve a spanking and heavy shagging to atone for my misdeeds."

Douglas took a long look at Ellie. He kissed her. The subsequent sex was just OK.

As Eloise lay beside Douglas, she recalled all the girlfriends in her old life who were stuck in bad marriages. The worst cases were like Eloise's current reality. A husband that wasn't cheating with another woman, or a drunk, or a bore socially, but one so caught up in his hobbies or career that the wife was little more than an afterthought. Those women had sex lives just like Eloise's now. She recalled her late lamented Bob, of her young master, and of Trevor. She and Douglas hadn't even had a decent conversation in months!

"To think I signed away my freedom only to end up in a distracted, bad sex, almost loveless relationship," she said softly. "This movie is going to break him and then what will happen to us?"

Sleep was very long in coming.