Mario said, laughing, “Maybe you and I together would make a fair imitation of Parrish, at that. Takes two of us to make one of him, though.”
“I don’t know,” Bart demurred. “Granted, I never saw Parrish when I was old enough to know what I was seeing. But from what people say, you’re not such a bad imitation after all.”
“Believe me,” Mario said quietly, “if you’d seen Parrish fly, you’d know the difference.”
“I wish I had, then. Anyhow, Mason wanted to get some pictures of me swinging, up there”—he pointed—“and the producer’s representative rushed out and shouted—” He imitated a high, accented squeal: “‘Hey, what’s the metter witya? Don’tya know dis guy’s face, we got it insured for a hundred t’ousand dollars! Whatya t’ink we got da stuntmen here for—’”
Mario threw back his head and laughed. “How does it make you feel, darling, to know your beautiful face is worth so much?”
Bart said, with an affected gesture, “Really, it makes me feel just too precious for words . . . . I mean, it’s nice to be loved, but this is ridiculous!”
Mario gave him a warning look.
“Watch it, Bart.”
“Was I getting a little too—”
“Much too,” Mario said in an undertone.
“Sorry. I keep forgetting. I don’t usually do that.”
Tommy, who had listened to this interchange in silence, suddenly realized that all three of them had forgotten Stella. Did she know what was happening, or would it pass over her head as the eccentricity of actors? Then he saw her faint, withdrawn smile.
She’s wise. Well, hell, she knocked around with a carny when she was a kid. She can’t be all that innocent, either. And she must have heard Johnny call Reeder the biggest fag in Hollywood. This means she knows about Matt, too. And irrationally he was disturbed. He wanted to protect Stella, to shield her from this knowledge. The girl with the clipboard came up to them again.
“Mr. Reeder, on the set, please. Mr. Santelli—” She looked hesitantly from Tommy to Mario and finally decided on Mario. “They want some shots of you two doing the same thing, on the same area.” She added to Tommy and Stella, “They’re going to want you two later, with Miss Benson and Mr. Haynes.”
A makeup man came and fussed over Bart, adjusting his hair, flicking over the corners of his mouth with a makeup brush, sponging a shiny highlight from his nose, fastidiously dusting invisible crumbs from his vest. Bart suffered these attentions with a sardonic grin, then watched the makeup man repeat them on Mario.
Stella watched them go, smiling.
After a minute she said, “They’re old friends, aren’t they, Tommy?”
“Yes, I guess they met each other when Matt was just a teenager.”
“Were they—” Stella broke off, her face under the unfamiliar red hair looking a little troubled. “I don’t know how to say this. You know what I mean, don’t you?”
In her gentle voice there was not a hint of condemnation, but Tommy lowered his eyes. Finally he muttered, “I guess maybe.”
So Stella knew. At the same time, Tommy was relieved—that, knowing, she did not reject either of them—and disturbed. He faced the knowledge that he had not wanted Stella to think of him that way.
“You know about that, Stel? And you—you don’t care?”
“Why should I care?” she asked, opening her eyes very wide. “You’re about the best friend I ever had, Tommy. I always felt we were kind of alike, you and me. We were both sort of—sort of lost in the family, different. It’s like you were really my brother, only I never had a brother—or a sister, either. I never had anybody.”
“You had me, Stel. Always,” he said, covering her small band, so that it almost disappeared within his own.
“I think I kind of fell for Johnny, right at first, because he was the first decent guy I ever met. He wasn’t acting decent just to try and con me into—into bed with him. He brought me to his house, treated me like one of the family, like I was a respectable girl, like Liss or Barbie—”
“You were a respectable girl,” he said fiercely. “You always were, Stella!”
“I tried. Only I was so young when Dad died, and I had to fight all the time, and when Johnny brought me home, and I was—was part of the family— Oh, I can’t begin to tell you what that meant to me! They were all so good to me.”
“Stella,” he said gently, “you were pretty good for all of us, too. You’re the best woman flyer they ever had in the family since Lucia.”
“I hope so. I wanted to be,” she said. “Only you were more—more like my kind of people. You came from outside, too. Seeing the way they took you in, I could—could believe that maybe someday I’d be part of them. Like that. And do you think I can’t see—can’t see what it is you see in Mario?” she said, fumbling. “Mario is so special. Oh, I don’t know how to say this without you getting the wrong idea. Don’t get me wrong—I love Johnny, he’s my husband. But what I feel for you is something different, something special, and what I feel for Mario—he’s something, something—oh, God, I don’t know how to say this without you getting the wrong idea! It’s more than love. I—how can I say this?—I adore him. So I guess,” she said, swallowing hard, “that I can understand what he is to you. More than anybody else in the world could ever be.”
He was still holding her hand; he squeezed it, tight, not knowing what to say. Her hands were flyer’s hands like his own, thin and bony and dried with resin. With her hands in his he could forget the bizarre makeup and know only that she was his Stella, his own Stella, more his own than if he had been able to tell her of his love in any conventional way.
“Yeah,” he said in a whisper, “I guess you do understand, don’t you, Stel?” And he added, in so low a whisper that she could hear it or not as she chose, “I love you, too, Stella,” and knew it was the only way he could ever say it or ever would.
~o0o~
Before long they came to photograph Stella for the long shots, and back shots, on and off the flying rig, with the actresses who were playing Eileen Leeds and Cleo Fortunati. From a distance there was a real resemblance between Bart and Mario; they were nearly the same height, and both men had the build and the walk of athletes or dancers. With Mario’s hair bleached, it was possible, at a quick look, to mistake one for the other, and when the movie was shown, Tommy would at times be uncertain whether any given shot was Mario or Bart. It would never be possible to mistake the slight, boyish Stella for either of the rounded, bosomy young actresses, except in the most distant shots.
Later she came back, rubbing her eyes.
“What’s the matter, Stella?” Tommy asked.
“The lights up there hurt my eyes. And they feel like I got something in them.”
Bart said, troubled, “You have to learn not to look at the lights, Mrs. Gardner—may I call you Stella? I’ll talk to Wally Mason about having them repositioned for this afternoon’s shots. You should have mentioned it sooner.”
“I didn’t know they could be moved. I’m used to the lights in the top of the tent, but these are so much brighter. I keep seeing them even now, like spots—”
“I’ll talk to the director. Next time, speak up if something’s bothering you,” Bart admonished, and went off to find Mason.
Finally Jim Fortunati came up and said, “Go up and see if the lights are okay now, Stella. You too, Tommy.”
Crews of men were hauling the various bars of lights around; long before they were finished repositioning them, Mason was irritably demanding to get started again. “Isn’t that all right yet, Miss Santelli?”
“I—I guess so,” Stella said doubtfully.
“Okay, let’s get on with it!” he called.
“We need some falls,” Fortunati said. “Spare footage, protecting shots. A lot of them, so we can pick the ones that look best.”
Mario laughed. “The way to get that,” he said, “is to have Tommy and me work on the triple. Just work on it, the way we do at home; I stil
l get it only about two times out of three. If we get a good one you can use it, and you’ll get lots and lots of falls.”
“Sounds okay to me,” Fortunati said. “Okay, just carry on for an hour or so, the way you would practicing, and we’ll pick up all the falls you take.”
Tommy said, “If Matt’s going to be doing a lot of falling, I want that net loosened. A net as tight as the one we’ve been working with will bounce him right out on the floor.”
“If we could get that, it would solve all our problems,” Mason remarked.
Fortunati said, “Too loose a net and you won’t get any realistic-looking falls at all. It just looks soggy. Anyhow, too loose a net and you get your hands and feet tangled in the mesh and you can get hurt that way. I like to work with a fairly tight net myself, in practice.”
Tommy knew this was an old wrangle; each aerialist had his own preferences, and most performances were compromised. Mario said, “I can handle the tight net, Jim.”
“Not as tight as that one, Matt. You get the riggers to loosen it some, or I’m not going up there, and that’s that!”
He stood waiting for Mario’s exploding rage, and prepared to stand firm against it, but Mario looked at him with raised eyebrows for a minute, thoughtfully. Then he said, “You heard him, Jim. Have them loosen up the net some.”
Tommy scrambled up to supervise the riggers. After a time he came down and said, “Okay, Matt, check that one.”
Mario hauled himself up into the net and checked it by bouncing up and down in it. “Oog,” he said, “waist deep.”
Mason shook his head. “That won’t do,” he said. “We need some shots of you flyers falling into it, strung up the same way it was when you came down this morning.”
It was another hour before a suitable compromise could be reached between Mason’s desire for a tight net that would give dramatic bounces and falls, and one loose enough that Tommy would allow Mario to attempt repeated triples with the inevitable falls. At one point Mason got angry and demanded, “What kind of troublemaker are you? Fortunati told me you people were easy to work with—”
“Listen,” Tommy said, climbing down out of the net and facing him, “Matt’s not a professional stuntman. I am, and I know what we can handle. Call up a union representative and get him here on the set and ask him!” This was one of the first things Angelo had told him: that if he doubted his ability to perform any dangerous stunt, he should insist on a union representative to negotiate a safe compromise.
“You union people, all you ever do is hold us up,” Mason snarled.
Fortunati said, “Mario, I’ve seen you work with a net tighter than that.”
“In performance, sure,” Tommy said, “when he only tried the triple once, maybe a second try if he missed it. This is a rehearsal net, for ten, twenty tries.”
Mario shrugged and suggested a compromise. “Look, I’ll do it three times the way it is now, fixed for the show. I’ll miss once, maybe twice. After that, we fix the net looser for the rest of the falls. Okay?”
Tommy still felt doubtful, but it seemed a reasonable compromise to him, too. It was perfectly true that during the years Mario had worked on the triple, perfecting it, he had learned to fall under any and all conditions. It was better to try it this way than for Mario to work up a nerve storm about it.
He was beginning to feel fatigued himself. The ordinary flying acts were brief; practice sessions could be extended, but not under this kind of pressure. Mario climbed to the platform and signaled for the first triple.
Tommy began to work up his swing, lowering himself backward, timing himself to Mario’s movements. There was complete silence. Mario came off his trapeze, spun over, again, again—before there was time to know it consciously, Tommy sensed that Mario had missed, was falling. For a moment he thought Mario would go past the net entirely and hit the spreader ropes, but at the last fraction of a second, he managed to roll into a tighter ball and skid down toward the center.
Tommy hoped the cameramen had gotten that and that it was what they wanted. His own breathing was a little ragged. As long as he lived, he knew, as often as Mario missed a triple, he would never, never be able to take it for granted.
Stella was on the platform, her eyes covered with her hands. Hell, are her eyes still bothering her? Stella was so pliant, so used to taking orders, she might not speak up and yell bloody murder if something went wrong. Should he demand another halt? But he was eager to get this sequence over, too. He began to work up his swing again into perfect, timed phase for the repeat triple. He knew Mario was off and swinging, spinning toward him. Then hands and wrists interlocked, the moment of near-unendurable strain just before the momentum of the trapeze took the worst of the weight. He could just see Mario’s face, fuzzy and unfocused, beneath his own. Peripherally he was aware of the knife-edge of the flying bar, of something marginally wrong . . . . Mario struck the bar with his head, square across the bridge of his nose, and fell like a stone. At the last minute—more by unconscious reflex than by design—he twisted, managed to land on his back in the net, and lay there motionless, blood gushing from his nose.
Mason was shouting, “Don’t cut! Don’t cut! Keep it rolling, get it all on film . . . .”
Tommy said furiously, “Ghouls!” Mario lay motionless, and Tommy dived down beside him, his heart pounding.
Stella dropped the bar wrong. She never does that, never!
Jim Fortunati ran toward the net, looking scared. “Matt! Tommy, is he all right?”
“Knocked out,” Tommy said. “Get some ammonia or something.” With the handkerchief in his own belt he pressed firmly against the bleeding nose, pulling the unconscious man upright so the blood would not run down his throat and choke him. At the edge of his visual field he saw one of the cameras still running.
One of the men on the set handed up a glass tube. “Break it under his nose,” he said, and Tommy snapped the vial, smelling the sharp sting of ammonia. It reminded him, disconcertingly, of the terrible fall he had taken in the practice room. Mario stirred and pushed it away. The front of the white and silver costume was a ghastly mess of splattered blood.
“I’m okay. What happened?”
“You smacked the bar with your face. Stella dropped it wrong.”
“Yeah, poor kid, said she couldn’t see what she was doing—” Mario muttered, automatically mopping at the blood.
“Put your head back,” Tommy cautioned, pulling a spare handkerchief from Mario’s belt and adding it to his own.
Mason came running up. “You okay, Mr. Santelli? You want a doctor?”
“I’m okay. But get me some ice, or something—”
“Go back by the Coke machine,” Jim Fortunati said, and in a few minutes they brought a bucket of ice and some towels. Mario held it against his face until the bleeding slowed to an ooze.
“Somebody get me a washcloth, to get this stuff off—”
“You’re sure you’re okay?” At Mario’s repeated assurances, Mason said, “Okay, look, I want you to do one more thing, then. I want you to go up, just like that, with the blood all over your face and costume, and give me something, anything—doesn’t matter, just so we get you like that, with the blood all over you.”
Jim Fortunati said flatly, “Matt, you don’t have to do it. If he wants a shot like that, he can get it tomorrow with fake blood. What are the makeup men for?”
But Mario started upright, his eyes gleaming, with the old devilish grin. “Hell, no, I’ll give you your shot!”
Tommy protested, “No, Matt, you’ll start bleeding again—”
“Quit fussing, Tom. I told you that a long time ago.”
Mario stood up in the net and began to walk jauntily toward the aerial ladder. Tommy sat still, disbelieving, but finally, when it was apparent that Mario really meant to do it, he shook his head in dismay and climbed to the catch trap again. Mario climbed the ladder with his old flair, every movement so precise, so exhilarated that Tommy was baffled; even from here
he could see that Mario was riding the crest of one of his sudden, manic, euphoric moments.
Dammit, that’s when he does his best flying. But why now?
On the pedestal board he held up three fingers—the signal for a triple.
He’s crazy. Did the bar knock all the sense out of him? Or is he so damn high he doesn’t care what happens? Tommy shook his head angrily, but Mario repeated the signal, and without giving Tommy time to refuse, grasped the bar and swung out, working up into the extra height of the giant swing. Tommy began his own swing. It was too late for anything else. To fail him now would be murder.
I’ve got to be there, to catch him just right, this time. The shape he’s in, he doesn’t know what he’s doing!
Mario reached the height of his swing and spun off the bar. A split-second thought raced through Tommy’s mind: Jim Fortunati figured it out once, that when the flyer comes off the bar he’s traveling sixty miles an hour, a mile a minute . . . . Tommy saw blood break again from Mario’s nose. Their hands and wrists meshed, blood briefly spattered him again, but Mario was swinging beneath him, securely held, smiling in fierce elation, ignoring the blood pouring down his face.
“You,” Tommy said between his teeth as they swung, “are out of your goddamn mind!”
But against his will, Mario’s elated smile reached him. This was the old Mario; ten years ago, Mario might have done something like this.
“Let me go, Lucky,” Mario said. “I’m going straight to the net; Stel’s having trouble with her eyes again. I don’t think even Mason thinks he can get any more shooting done today.”
By the time they were all down, Stella’s eyes were red, and she was blinking away tears that kept streaming from the reddened lids. Mario’s face had to be cleaned, too, and the bleeding stopped again with ice. Tommy drove them home, but by the time they reached the Santelli house, Stella was frightened, shrunk into a corner of the seat, very pale.
The Catch Trap Page 78