You Are Having a Good Time

by Amie Barrodale

  When she called, an English woman told her Victor was out. He returned the call in the middle of the night.

  “Is this an okay time to talk? I haven’t caught you sleeping?”

  “I’m awake.”

  “Are you sure? What time is it there?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s the middle of the night. All my clocks stopped because of the earthquake.”

  “Oh dear, Libby, you have to reset them. You have to keep a schedule, and you can’t do that if you don’t know the time. Let’s see, it’s eleven a.m. here, so it would be what time there? Three a.m. Are you ordinarily awake at three a.m.?”

  “To be honest, I haven’t been sleeping.”

  “Insomnia,” he murmured. “I’m sorry to hear that. I know what it’s like. I had insomnia for all of 1985. Where are you, anyway? Are you in bed?”

  “I haven’t gotten out of bed for two weeks. I just ended a relationship, not that I guess you want to hear about that kind of thing.”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to hear about it?”

  “Presumably you have more interesting, more relevant topics to attain to.”

  “Perfect!”

  “What?”

  “To attain to. I like that for Kate. Hold on, I want to jot that down.” He laughed. “I caught you at the right time. I’m normally not awake this early, but I went to Japan a few weeks ago and my circadian rhythms are still out of sync.”

  She sat up and arranged the pillows. Victor Vargas was calling her in the middle of the night and talking about one of the leads in the script he’d sent. All her previous roles had been supporting, or ensemble casts.

  “Why were you in Japan?”

  “Oh, money. I was there to arrange funding on the movie. I hate the country, though. I walk into a restaurant and bust the floor. I’m not even kidding, Libby. I put my foot through the floor of a restaurant, it was the tatami, and of course they’re Japanese, so they have to be polite about it. On our last morning, we had to get to the airport before dawn, and we decided to visit a shrine before heading off, but then we got turned around, so I went to ask a young policewoman directions, and she wouldn’t tell me. I joined my traveling companion and said, ‘I don’t know why, but she won’t tell me.’ My traveling companion pointed at my crotch and said, ‘It might have something to do with that.’ My pants were unzipped and my penis was hanging out. Hey, Libby? I really loved you in Bob’s last picture. I really think you’re terrific.”

  Libby walked the cordless into the kitchen and got a bottle of wine out of the refrigerator. Victor Vargas was praising particulars of her face in complicated ways, as if they were choices she’d made.

  “And your voice. There’s something so unusual about your voice, and it isn’t the accent, though I love your accent, Libby.”

  “My accent?”

  “Well, it’s subtle, but it is there—I hear it. It’s Southern, right?”

  “Houston, Texas—born and raised.”

  “Your whole life? What’s that like?”

  “Oh, you know. Texas. Blondes and big houses and things of that nature.”

  “Things of that nature.”

  “What?”

  “Just another weird idiosyncratic line for Kate.”

  He asked her again what Texas was like. She described her apartment complex, and her mother, and admitted she’d never met her father. She told Victor Vargas about her mother’s previous marriage and how it had ended. She told him the story of her mother’s first husband shooting himself in the leg in a Sonic drive-in. “The car filled up with smoke, and he said, ‘Don’t worry, it went all the way through.’” Then she told him how her mom slept a lot, and her earliest memories were of wandering around the apartment complex alone.

  “I went into other apartments and got into their closets. I remember eating a jawbreaker off some closet floor. I had to tear it out of the carpet fuzz, because somebody’d already sucked on it. One day, some kids threw dirt into our house, and I was too young to close the door. Later I saw a movie, and kids were doing that, or someone was, and I finally understood why.”

  “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

  “That’s right!”

  “Richard Dreyfuss, before he got so annoying.” He was satisfied with himself for knowing, like a kid trying to impress her. He gossiped about Richard Dreyfuss. He said the actor had been misdiagnosed bipolar and suffered from lithium poisoning. “I spoke to him during one of his so-called rapid cycles—the man was bored. He’s an overgrown child.” He said Dreyfuss had been using an earpiece for his lines for more than twenty years. When she said, “Interesting,” he laughed for a long time, and then he spoke bitterly about naturalistic acting. “He had most of his training at the synagogue.”

  “I had most of my training at the synagogue.”

  “Well.” He communicated, in the silence, that she was a better actor and a better person than Richard Dreyfuss. And the funny thing was, she believed it.

  The sky lightened—they must have been talking for three hours when he said, “What about the domestic violence?”

  “The what?”

  “It’s in Act II, you read all of it?”

  “I did, but I’ve been so out of it. Oh, you mean the party!”

  “When her husband punches her in the face two times, Libby, yes. The party.”

  “Well, doesn’t she ask for it?”

  “I don’t know, does she? Is she really asking to be hit?”

  “She says, clear as day, you know, hit me again.”

  “There’s a difference between wanting to be hit and asking to be hit again.”

  Libby cleared her throat.

  Victor said, “I wondered if she’d slept with another man downstairs and was trying to allay her guilt by placing him in a position of doing worse.”

  “I didn’t see that in the script.”

  “Of course. But if you’re going to play her, these are questions you need to consider. You’re going to want to read between the lines. Because I love you in Bob’s films. I loved you in Sentinel, but I got the impression you were trading on charisma. I want the tricks and I want more. I need you to do the work. We want you to read from the party scene.”

  She realized he expected an answer. “You want me to play the part?”

  “I want you to, yes. David, the studio head, wants me to go with a name actress, but I’ve told him that’s all wrong for this picture. Kate is fragile, and she’s confused, and a movie star isn’t going to be able to inhabit that. It’s one of those elusive qualities, fragility, isn’t it? Quite a bit like intelligence. You can’t hire an actor with a thirty-two IQ and tell him to play a scientist—there’s a stupidity in his eyes, and no matter what kind of genius he is, that stupidity is going to be there. Fragility is much the same. If I hire some Hollywood movie star, I’m not going to get that true open gaze, the one you so naturally possess. I’m having difficulty explaining it to them in a way they can understand. They keep sending me videotapes of movie stars making puppy eyes.”

  He laughed. She wasn’t sure what he meant when he said that she wasn’t a movie star.

  “Libby, you understand it because you’re a genius at what you do. But these are idiots I’m dealing with. These are people who try to get reservations at a restaurant because they read about it in a magazine. That’s what I’m talking about. I tell them I don’t care if Jane Lake is signed on. You can’t have Jane Lake playing Kate. Obviously not. We already have a doe-eyed star, for Judith, with Cynthia Wu. For Kate we need someone who’s mousy, someone who’s vulnerable, a person who’s been through a lot in her life, and it shows in her body and on her face.”

  Mousy? She showed wear on her face? Everyone said she looked younger than she was.

  Libby poured the rest of the wine into a glass. When she put the bottle back on the marble counter, the sound it made was distinctive, and Victor stopped mid-sentence. He couldn’t possibly know what Libby was doing. But she was sure he did. They
were both quiet. Libby brought the glass and went and lay down on the couch in her study.

  Victor shifted gears.

  “We need you to come into the studios to do a shoot. I need to show them Libby and then show them Jane Lake, and they’ll see it. But if we’re going to win this, Libby, and I think we will, I need you to make my lines work. I know Bob is loose with his dialogue, and he doesn’t mind some improvisation. I don’t do that. An actress of Jane Lake’s caliber doesn’t do that. I need you rock solid. I need you to know my lines. If you have to say them a thousand times, do it. Do your homework. Don’t walk in. One thing I hate, and I’m going to tell you right from the start, is seeing an actor over by the crafts table at four a.m. with a page from my script. And Libby? Don’t get in the way of the scene. Don’t get in my way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This movie is a small movie. It’s a realistic movie. It’s about family life, and it’s about middle-class life. It’s set in the home, and it’s about the received ideas that govern one woman’s inner life in her home. She tells herself she loves her husband and he loves her, but she knows the truth, and when she observes herself thinking about the truth, she suppresses the thought. In this scene, she recognizes that. So don’t let Libby get in the way of Kate.”

  “Well, wouldn’t that be good? I mean, given what you told me about the vulnerability I bring to the part, if I were to put myself into it?”

  “Uh-huh. No, that’s not right. I’m going to interrupt you now and put Terry on the phone, and he’s going to explain what we need to go forward.”

  The phone line was quiet for a full minute. Then Terry picked up a phone line.

  “Libby? Terry. Yes, I’m handling all the callbacks for Kate. I don’t know if Vic’s talked to you. Yes? Good. Well, let me tell you, Vic wants us to do all of the audition tape in a studio that isn’t so echo-y, so we’re flying all of you in. We need you out here Wednesday afternoon, two p.m. to two-thirty.”

  When they had made arrangements, Victor said, “Work on the lines, Libby. I want you for the part.”

  “Were you listening in?” Libby asked.

  “I have a feeling about us, and my feelings are never wrong, so if it doesn’t work on this picture, don’t worry about it. You’re a really good actor, and I’m sure I’ll use you soon. Oh, and, Libby? Is it all right if I call you again sometime?”

  He hung up the phone.

  * * *

  She made coffee and took her script to the attic. She read her lines out loud, dispassionately, all morning. Her throat started to get scratchy. She wrote her lines out in longhand, filling a spiral notebook. Then she sat and thought about Kate, and what she would have been feeling in the moment. At first she tried to remember bad relationships, being lied to, but then when she read her lines with those things in mind, she got distracted. She thought about the key emotion of the scene—she decided it was fear expressing itself as aggression, that it was fight or flight—and she tried to remember a time when she felt like fighting. She couldn’t get it, so she took her puppy for a walk. The damned dog was half poodle, and even though it came from a breeder, it was starting to act like a puppy-mill dog. It always wanted to go into her space—to walk right in front of her legs. Before she realized it, she was kicking the dog! When she got home, she read the scene again, and it worked, simply like that—thinking about her puppy, she got as angry as an ordinary woman would get if she was beaten. Angry at her damned stupid puppy, she recited the one line over and over—“Why don’t you do it again?”

  * * *

  A day after the retest, Victor called and said, “You blew Jane Lake out of the water.”

  “I got the part!”

  “Well, close. It’s all there, but you showed a little too much. Take a week. Try it again. Rephrase it. Make it simple and concrete so we can deal with it.”

  “I have another test?”

  “A formality, to wrap things up. I’m sending a cameraman to you. You’ll do it by video, and he’ll mail it to us.”

  Three weeks became a month and a half. She tried to reassure herself. Her mother worried for her, and she reassured her.

  “He said I all but have the part, so I believe I do. According to Victor, I blew Jane Lake out of the water. Those were his exact words. The last retest is a formality. He’s a perfectionist, but he’s not a sadist. I mean, he wouldn’t say that and then take it back. I hear he sometimes takes thirty, forty takes, to get it right when an actor walks across the dance floor. It drives people crazy. He had one actress who supposedly broke into his apartment, but then I heard he didn’t keep it locked and they were sleeping together at the time.”

  “Libby, we have another word for that in Houston.”

  “What?”

  “We call them assholes.”

  When Victor finally called, the conversation was relaxed. He told her she’d misread some of his lines and he’d changed them to reflect her reading. He apologized for being finicky about his exact lines. He said, “It’s the sort of thing a TV director would make you do.” Libby said, “Well, I didn’t see it that way, but I’m happy to go back to my initial reading,” and Victor laughed. He read to her from Jung’s Red Book. He asked Libby where she was sitting, and she said she was lying on the ground. He said, “Somehow I knew that.” He told Libby she should watch Star Wars, and she told him to watch La Jetée. He said, “How did you know I’ve always refused to watch Chris Marker? I’ve seen every other trashy movie ever made.”

  He asked if she had any questions about the edits.

  “I have one question. In Act Two, Scene Three, when Kate and Michael— The love scene. It says it’ll show the actress, ah, performing fellatio on the actor. Isn’t it a little unnecessary?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t have the screenplay in front of me.”

  He flipped through his pages and started reading aloud from the scene. “Michael, harried from work, still wearing his overcoat and carrying his attaché, closes the front door. Kate is sitting on the couch, watching TV and smoking a cigarette.”

  Libby said, “Please stop! I’ll do whatever it says, but please don’t read it to me.”

  “Good.”

  He sent a revision two days before she was supposed to fly out. There wasn’t a note in the envelope—it was just the script. It was printed on different-colored papers—white, blue, pink, green, and two shades of yellow. She flipped through it. He’d added some description to the sex scene. He’d gone into precise detail about the blow job and the cigarette. It felt like he was needling her, or making something private between them into art. She couldn’t decide which.

  * * *

  Victor was the center of the universe on set. He had small, pale hands and dainty little feet in beat-up running shoes. His handshake was limp, and he didn’t allow their hands to clasp. He barely grasped her fingers, then pulled his hand away.

  He said, “It’s so nice to finally clap eyes on you.”

  “It’s nice to meet you,” Libby said. “It’s like a dream.”

  A chubby woman with gray hair at her right temple came up behind Victor, rolling an orange armchair, and Victor turned away from Libby and got down on his hands and knees to look at its wheels.

  “Those are very nice,” Victor said. “Those are all right.”

  Victor took off his glasses and lay down to examine the wheels at close range. “Tell me,” he said after a moment, “how did you do it?”

  While the chair woman talked about the wheels, Victor lifted the upholstery, then let it fall to cover the wheels, over and over again. Then he said, “Where’s Liv?”

  A woman who had been hanging back fell into formation beside the first woman.

  “Liv, I like the color,” he said, “but I’m not sure about the fabric. It’s a little fuzzy, or something.”

  “Too fuzzy?”

  “I guess it’s okay,” Victor said. He had trouble getting himself up off the floor. The
chair woman offered him a hand, but he refused it. He turned red, trying to get up on his own by doing a stomach curl, but he got caught halfway up and had to roll over onto his hands and knees to stand. His back hitched on its way up; he rubbed it with his hand and said, “Vivian! Why isn’t Libby in makeup?”

  An exhausted old lady in black reading glasses and a pearl necklace came around a rack of clothes and took Libby by the arm. “I’ve been calling her at the hotel, Vic. I left messages. Honey, we need you here at four.”

  “I didn’t get any messages. I stay in the bungalow.”

  “She didn’t get any messages.” The woman repeated what Libby had said as though the explanation were an irresponsible excuse.

  Walking with the makeup woman, Vivian, Libby said, “I usually do my own makeup.”

  Vivian stopped, looked at Libby for a second, then looked back over her shoulder and said, “Here, let me show you something.”

  She walked Libby down through a garage, past several staircases leading to nowhere, to an adjacent studio’s storage space. She opened a door and said, “Behold!”

  The room was piled floor to ceiling with orange chairs identical to the one on the set.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Vic has been working on that chair for two months. That chair will be sitting to the left, in the living room, in the opening sequence. Then it will never be seen again.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Makeup … is important to Vic. Appearances … are important when you’re working with Vic.”

  Cynthia, Libby, and Victor were supposed to rehearse before filming, in a side room off the set. Cynthia was already there when Libby came in, five minutes early. She was in makeup, reading a novel. She put it to one side and stood.

  “We’ve met before, in Los Angeles.”

  “I remember, of course. At the party with the rock garden.”

  “Yes.” Cynthia told Libby she was honored to be working with her. She praised Libby’s work. She had seen all of Libby’s films, and had even seen her in a smaller production, off-Broadway, years before.