“For how much?” I’d ask, now priding myself as a professional.

Then there’d be a pause, and then I’d hear a dial tone.

I already had something over many of my colleagues: I was presentable—imagine Zeppo Marx crossed with John Garfield—had even, amazingly, been married, and still stayed in contact with my ex-wife, Jody. If you can’t deal with the present, you can always depend on the past. In our own ways, Jody and I both knew this.

It was during one of Jody’s usual phone calls—to ask me who was playing whom in an old movie we both, by chance, happened to be watching—that the whole thing began.

“You mean, the bandit?” I asked, muting the volume. “Akim Tamiroff.” Then Call Waiting, a recent upgrade to my phone system, clicked in. “Hold on. Hello?”

There was a pause. I heard a voice I recognized. It was old, and it was downbeat.

“Roy? It’s about your mother.”

—

I don’t mention my parents too often, and for good reason. Neither has the faintest idea what I’m doing with my life. Make that singular: my mother doesn’t, my father’s dead. But before he died, he didn’t have a clue about it, either.

It always surprised me about my mother, because she loved movies, so I’d assumed my obsession had some genetic basis. (My father, who worked in insurance, never liked to leave the house for any reason, let alone movies. His usual review after seeing one consisted of three words: “Piece of crap.”) My mother, however, persisted in hoping that my vast store of trivial information could lead to gainful employment, marriage, and DNA propagation. No such luck.

“What do you do with a thing like that?” she’d usually ask after I’d made the mistake of sharing some little-known fact with her, like, for instance that Maggie Smith had replaced Katharine Hepburn in Travels with My Aunt. “Why don’t you write your own column?”

“I put out my own newsletter,” I’d reply. “I sort of do that already.”

“No, I mean, you know, for real.”

I assumed she’d be encouraged by my discovery of the complete Ambersons, and the idea of dealing with her (“What do you do with a thing like that? Why don’t you join the FBI?”) caused me to stay mum.

Now Mom was the one who was mum.

Apparently she—as my aunt informed me on the phone—was no longer speaking. There seemed no physical problem; it was apparently a head thing. It wasn’t unprecedented—once, my mother had hidden under the kitchen table all afternoon; another time she’d been found wandering the neighborhood in her nightgown—but this event, or so my aunt believed, was a keeper. No amount of medication mattered. My mother was no longer a moving picture; she was a still.

“But what do you want me to do?” I asked Aunt Ruby, as I followed her down the stairs. I hadn’t been in the old family house in the Westchester suburbs since Thanksgiving; now it was March.

“Help pay for the upkeep,” said my aunt. She was a frighteningly practical and direct woman, a registered nurse, and my mother’s only other relation. She referred to her kid sister as if she were no different from the familiar, crumbling home we were in. That was life to Ruby: we all just became a question of maintenance.

“Well … for how long?”

“For as long as it takes.”

“But—” I stammered lamely, “she’s only seventy. She could live another twenty years.”

My mother was no vegetable. Lying silently in bed, she still showed a hearty appetite and flicked efficiently through TV stations. Her eyes had even sparkled a little when I walked in. Still, none of my small talk had brought a response.

“Twenty years or even twenty-five,” Aunt Ruby agreed, unhelpfully.

“Well, she’s got health insurance—Medicare—doesn’t she?”

“These days you can never have enough.”

This was true. I myself at thirty-six—the time everything “starts to go,” my aunt once remarked—was uncovered. I was running out of reasons to resist. “But things are just starting to pick up for me.”

“Good. Then it shouldn’t be a problem.”

I stopped at the front door. “You have no idea what might have caused her to become like this?”

My aunt only shrugged. “Something must have rubbed her the wrong way.”

For Aunt Ruby, the comment summed up diseases, accidents, even death itself. It made a funny kind of sense, yet I had to keep fighting this lost cause.

“Look, let me know if she says anything, okay?”

“Don’t worry, Roy. You’ll be the first to know.” It was the only time I had ever heard Aunt Ruby laugh.

—

I had no siblings, so I had no choice.

As usual, remembering trivia was my way to deal with anxiety. Standing outside the house, I remembered that the original stars of Sons and Lovers were supposed to be Alec Guinness and Montgomery Clift. The film was finally made with Trevor Howard and Dean Stockwell.

The picture had been nominated for the Oscar; my fate would be less prestigious. Just as I was on the verge of a new career in detection, I had to do something that I’d never done before, something truly frightening. I had to get a real job.

A WEEK LATER, I WAS STANDING ON THE STREET, HOLDING A BAGUETTE AND a balloon.

Trivial people take all kinds of part-time, low-paying jobs, some more humiliating than others. Through contacts, I’d managed to secure employment at the Farmer’s Market in Union Square. Here, upstate farmers sold produce to gullible urbanites willing to shell out exorbitantly for organic goods. A friend who’d been laid off from a film journal had been helping out at several stands and tipped me off to similar opportunities. I could do pickles, pretzels, or bread. The latter was a staple and so seemed the least demeaning.

“U-shin sent me,” I’d said, mentioning my friend.

Annabelle, the young lady farmer at the Nature’s Meal booth, had a pretty face the color and texture of a leather belt. She looked at my pale skin and slender frame with amusement.

“Okay, pavement boy,” she said. “Here you go.”

Then she handed me the balloon and the loaf. She pinned a button on my chest that read RISING BREAD, FALLING PRICES! Her bakery, located in Millwood, two hours from Manhattan, was having a sale.

“Just stand there,” she said, in a gruff and grizzled rasp. “And look pretty.” Then she shook her head in dismay, as she might have at a newborn calf too weak to survive.

I was secretly hoping that my city ways and her country manner would cause romantic sparks, as in a Tracy and Hepburn film. But Annabelle quickly moved away from me and arranged some zucchini and pear muffins.

As I stood there, mortified, I recalled that Spencer Tracy had been replaced by Gregory Peck in the movie of The Yearling. The whole film had been remade from scratch, just like, well, a burnt loaf.

Then, to my horror, I saw Abner Cooley.

Abner, of course, was the original trivial person success story. His Web site, PRINTIT!.com, had grown from a homemade operation—done, literally, out of his parents’ house on Long Island—into a grassroots phenomenon. It mostly featured negative gossip on forthcoming films secretly slipped to him by bitter studio underlings. Frightened and annoyed executives had seduced Abner with consulting jobs, and then he’d parlayed his popularity into a book deal and a TV hosting gig. The latter came courtesy of his boyfriend, Taylor Weinrod, recently promoted to V.P. at Landers Classic Movies, or LCM, the old movie cable network.

As his success had—you’ll pardon me—ballooned, so had Abner. Never a sylph, he now threatened to topple over from his own girth, and a wispy blond beard, as ever, couldn’t give shape to his face. Formerly obnoxious, he was now unbearable, and never more so than today, when he saw me … and my balloon.

“Milano!” he said, with barely disguised glee. “What a pleasant surprise!”

Abner had never forgiven me for my Ambersons coup, and seeing me in my current position clearly warmed his overgrown heart.