by Jack Hodgins
The big man thought about this. “What would top salary be for a teacher?”
Since Thorstad was not about to say “None of your business,” he could think only of feigning stupidity. “I’ve been retired so long I can’t remember.”
A server came by with a steaming pot of coffee, refilling cups without bothering to look at the people who would drink from them. “Thanks,” Thorstad automatically said, and “Sure” she said as she moved on, though it was impossible to know if “Sure” meant “You’re welcome,” or “I hear you but I couldn’t care less.”
Throughout this conversation the stout blonde had been smiling at Travis. “You’re an actor?” she said. “We couldn’t help overhearing.”
She might have offered him a best-actor award. “You seen Forgotten River?”
“We haven’t seen nothin’ lately,” she said. “We been on the road! If Herb turns on the TV it’s only sports or killings.”
Her husband studied Travis for a moment. “If the magazines are after you, you must be pretty good.”
“They haven’t killed my character off,” Travis said. “That’s something.”
“You the hero, then? You get the girl?”
“Just a friend of one of the main guys is all.” He was sorry, perhaps, to disappoint.
“How much they pay a young fella like you doin’ a job like that?”
Thorstad could see that Travis was tempted to answer this question with actual figures, but after pausing a moment he revealed only that he was paid by the episode. “Every episode I’m in gives me enough for a year of university—all expenses. At least that’s how my parents see it.”
“Poor folk, are they then?”
“Not really.” He said this without looking at Axel Thorstad, who knew what “not really” meant in this case. If it weren’t for the assistant across the table, Travis might have given this Arkansas gentleman his father’s annual income from dentistry and his mother’s average share of the profits from the company that bought up farms for condos and big-box stores. If they sat here much longer he could be exchanging all sorts of private matters with soft-drink strangers from Arkansas.
“You in the same show?” the woman said to Thorstad. She spoke carefully, as though to an unpredictable child.
“Backstage only—to see that he passes exams.”
“How nice,” the woman said with a noticeable loss of interest. “I’m sure you’ll be a big help.”
Before her husband could ask how much a backstage tutor was paid, she gathered her purse to her chest and began sliding in stages towards the end of her upholstered bench. “Well, it’s been lovely meeting you-all.” She grasped one leg of her jeans to keep it from riding up her calf, and put a foot blindly out as a feeler searching for floor. “But if we don’t get moving soon”—she found the floor and trusted it to hold her—“we’ll never get to San Francisco.” To her husband, who looked as though he had questions he hadn’t yet asked, she said, “C’mon, Hon, let’s go.”
Hon wasn’t quite ready yet to leave, but stood in the aisle for a moment shoving his wallet into his back pocket. “We give you folks a lift?”
“Thanks,” Thorstad said, “but we’ve ordered a ride to the airport.”
“Of course,” the woman said to her disappointed husband. Perhaps he’d offered to pick up strangers at every stop. “These folks are tee-vee stars. There’ll be a long white limo waiting at the door.” To Travis she said, “I never thought I’d want to see L.A. but now I’m not so sure.” Before moving on, she touched fingertips to Travis’s bare forearm—but waited, Thorstad saw, until she had moved a few steps beyond Travis’s field of vision before putting the fingers to her lips.
The woman’s husband followed reluctantly, but not before he’d raised a hand to his forehead in a farewell salute.
“You didn’t suggest she read the next issue of Teen TeeVee,” Thorstad said.
“I didn’t need to.” Travis had opened the cellphone again and frowned at the screen. “She was all ears while that reporter was here. Maybe I’ll get fan mail from ‘Alice in Arkansas.’” He held the little phone up and turned to aim it across the atrium towards the retreating tourists.
“What are you doing?”
“A picture to send the guys.”
Thorstad tried to make this casual. “So suddenly, just by crossing that border, I’ve become your assistant?”
“Sorry,” Travis said, smiling sheepishly. “I didn’t know what to say.” He ran his left hand back over his head, a sort of thoughtful caress. “The shirt stores won’t be open this early.”
Axel Thorstad hadn’t realized they would be crossing much more than a mere dividing line between nations. He’d known he would be responsible for the only child of wealthy parents but not for a “star in waiting” who had caught the attention of the teen media. He was not at all sure his life so far had prepared him for this.
“There’ll be shirt stores in the airport,” he said. Since airports had recently turned themselves into shopping malls, they were bound to find shirts Travis could leave undone for the readers of Teen TeeVee. “But maybe we should consider how I’m to be introduced in the future.”
11
That Elliot Evans was not only the executive producer but creator, head writer, and show-runner for his series as well meant little to Axel Thorstad, but when they drove onto the studio lot in Evans’s BMW, his position obviously meant something to the uniformed man in the little gatehouse, who barely glanced at the security card. “Morning, Mr. Evans. Good day ahead, I hope?”
“Mostly arguing with stupid people. You?”
“Mandelson drove in a minute ago, looking savage. Thought you’d like to know.”
“Well there you are, just as I said.”
The magazine writer was not with them now, though he had sat across the aisle from Travis during the flight. At the airport, Evans had suggested he wait and join them tomorrow. “A publicist will call. The kid has a few surprises to adjust to first.”
Without explaining what the surprises were, he’d driven them on a series of streets lined with tired-looking shops and shopping malls and drab private homes, the air thick with exhaust fumes. A tense, impatient driver, he’d shifted from lane to lane to take advantage of gaps in the traffic, cursing drivers who seemed determined to block him. At red traffic lights, he’d filled his passengers in on why he was so “pissed” when they hadn’t arrived last night, and why he hadn’t sent his assistant to pick them up today. Because of a stupid decision by “that idiot Geoffrey Burns,” certain changes had had to be made to the script, affecting Travis’s role—but he hadn’t got around to explaining these changes by the time they reached the studio.
So they had achieved their destination, these several hectares of Travis’s other world—once the property of a movie company in the early days of film but now a television network’s studio. Thorstad understood that the flutter in his gut had something to do with the movies he’d seen as a boy from the seats of the Capitol Theatre. Like everyone else on the continent, he felt he had been up this avenue of palms before, or another much like it. Any number of stars had come in past the little booth where the security pass must be shown—Lana Turner maybe, or Montgomery Clift— and then driven up this paved avenue past the office buildings where decisions were made by powerful executives, noticing pedestrians who might be actors or cinematographers, or even stunt doubles like Cliff Lyons and Fred Carson on their way to work. Little electric go-karts zipped this way and that. All of this had been just out of sight or perhaps disguised in any number of movies he had seen in the cinema, or later on the television screen.
“Man, I love this place!” Travis said—too enthusiastically, Thorstad thought, for a high school boy whose parents expected to add a lawyer to the family.
But he felt, himself, rather like a boy invited into a world where magic was created. A boy’s excitement vibrated in his solar plexus. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn might have worked in
these buildings. Marlon Brando might have slouched against that lamppost, smoking a cigarette. Or James Dean. How many times had he taken classes through Rebel Without a Cause?
They moved up past buildings the size of warehouses with giant paintings of movie scenes on the walls—oxen pulling a covered wagon, a police shoot-out—and trucks disgorging black cables that disappeared through doorways into white stucco buildings. They passed down a row of what might have been units of an “auto court” of the fifties, the sort of motel the lonely Joan Crawford character lived in before taking up with a man who was interested only in her money. And eventually they parked in front of a tall old Tudor-style building Evans referred to as the Writers’ Roost, the exclusive headquarters for Forgotten River and “home” to writers, producers, Evans himself, and any number of assistants.
Axel Thorstad carried his old leather bag of books and teaching materials inside, hoping it would be more useful in his hand than in Elliot Evans’s car.
The executive producer’s office was a large room with desks and computer screens and leather couches that faced one another across a coffee table. A framed poster dominated one wall, the title Forgotten River floating above a white mansion with well-dressed people gathered on a lawn to raise glasses while a border of threatening figures suggested a band of hostility. A dreadlocked assistant came out of a glassed-in side room to present Evans with a list of appointments and telephone messages. “Mandelson’s furious about something—wants you in his office at eleven.” Evans cursed through gritted teeth, slammed a fist on his desk, and quickly spun about as though checking the room for insurgents. A large bearded man appeared in an interior doorway with coffee mug in hand. “You’d better come have a look at this. I’ve just watched Klassen’s rough cut and the idiot’s ruined our cemetery scene!”
Evans checked a schedule on his desk and suggested that Travis take Mr. Thorstad with him to his trailer. “They’ll want you on set right away. Charlie has your copy of the rewrite.” Before they left, he warned that the “B plot” had been seriously altered and Travis’s role expanded. “Here’s where we find out what you’re made of!”
An obviously overwrought Charlie waited on the pavement outside one of the huge white buildings. “Thank God. Thank God ! We’ve got to get you ready fast, you can go over the scene while they’re fussing.” He handed Travis a thick multicoloured manuscript—“New draft”—as well as a thin sheaf of stapled half-size pages. “I’ll let them know you’re here!” He set off with arms up high—“Oh! Oh! Oh!”—and disappeared through a doorway to the building.
“Look behind you,” Travis said. “Ryan O’Neal.”
Three middle-aged men in jeans walked past, deep in conversation, but none looked familiar to Thorstad.
Travis prompted. “Got his start in—”
“Peyton Place. Yes, I know.” Elena had watched it every week and insisted he watch it too, believing that a high school teacher had an obligation to know what went on in the lives of adolescents when they were not in his classroom. It had not been reassuring. Though none of these three men triggered a memory of “Rodney Harrington,” he supposed Travis had reasons for being so sure.
But Travis was already absorbed in the pages of the new script. “Jeez!” He read a few lines on the yellow pages, and flipped ahead again through blue. “I’ve never been on screen so much!” Then he pulled his face into an obviously false suggestion of dismay. “This’ll keep me too busy for anything else!”
Of course it was not good enough for Travis to feign dismay. Thorstad with his bag of books followed him down the side of the long white trailer past an open door where a young woman shrieked and bounded down the steps to throw her arms around Travis’s neck. The embrace was brief. Travis laughed. The young woman was alarmingly thin, with nearly transparent skin and hints of fading bruises on her arms. Her nearly colourless hair had been hacked off in an amateur manner that suggested violence. Flesh could be glimpsed through several small tears in her jeans. Stepping back from Travis, she let her gaze drift indifferently down the length of Axel Thorstad, then went back up the steps and inside and closed the door.
“That was Rosie,” Travis said, climbing the three metal steps to his own door.
“One of your homeless?”
Thorstad ducked to go in through Travis’s doorway but came up too soon and grazed his skull.
“Rosie? Naw. She was just being herself! In the show she dresses up—the rich old woman’s granddaughter.”
This room was far too small and crowded for a man of Thorstad’s height. It contained a leather couch, a desk, a small refrigerator, a television screen, and a door to a bathroom. Its walls were decorated with photographs of singing groups and long-legged women, and another poster with the happy family group surrounded by angry faces.
Travis was clearly excited. “I’ve never had so many lines. Us homeless guys usually get, like, only a few short scenes—mostly as a crowd! But look!” He turned an open page in Thorstad’s direction.
It was not as though Thorstad hadn’t been thrown plenty of curveballs in his day—by principals, colleagues, students, secretaries, parents, school boards, and temperamental audiovisual aids. Though the flight had tired him more than he’d anticipated, he was confident he would think of something to bring Travis’s attention to exams. At least he didn’t have to compete with the journalist today.
When Travis had gone off to the makeup trailer, Thorstad made the mistake of sitting on the couch and closing his eyes while he considered a study schedule, if such a thing were possible. He took the elevator down to the foyer of last night’s hotel and went outside where he tried to cross the busy road without being killed, yet stood frozen before a gigantic freight truck bearing down. In the nick of time he wakened to the rustle of Travis changing his clothes.
He was barefoot, in a pair of jeans torn at the knees and a striped shirt far too large for him, its tail irregularly scalloped and charred as though flames had been extinguished on their way up his back. The tidy head of fair hair had disappeared beneath a shaggy wig. Dark hollows had been painted beneath his eyes. “There are viewers who find me sexy, believe it or not.”
He explained that for this afternoon’s short scene his fellow squatters had sent him to the home of the old woman who owned the derelict building. “All we want is, you know, to convince her to make it a legitimate shelter before winter kills more of us off.”
“You think it would help to tuck in your shirt?”
“I’m ahead of you.” He shoved the charred shirttail down behind his belt.
Thorstad left his bag in the trailer and followed Travis past a row of small bushes trimmed to resemble grazing deer, and entered a massive building with STAGE 5 printed in large gold letters above the door. They followed a cluster of cables ducttaped to the concrete floor, past stacks of furniture and partial walls, and down a narrow passage to an open space where a group of men and women in jeans and T-shirts appeared to be in a state of passive and indifferent waiting.
“The maid let me in,” Travis said. “She said . . .” He consulted his script. “She said she’d get Mrs. Bradshaw but she didn’t come back.”
Two of the men shook Travis’s hand and welcomed him back. “We heard you had a brush with bin Laden’s friends.” Laughter followed this.
The director was a young man named Paolo who gave up reading a newspaper behind a monitor to shake Thorstad’s hand and invite him to sit on one of the canvas chairs where he too could see the screen. Once a makeup woman had touched up his forehead, Travis handed Thorstad today’s small script and followed the director through a narrow entrance to a room visible only in the monitor. Though the walls were rough plywood with two-by-four studs on the outside, the interior appeared in the monitor as professionally finished as a room in Mrs. Montana’s house. White walls with gold trim. Behind the couch where Travis and the director settled into conversation hung an abstract painting as wide as the couch itself.
Lit by powerful st
anding lights, the living room was a small intense arena of brilliant colours—the painting bright with powerful reds and yellows, the couch a dazzling white, the leafy plants a garish tropical green. Travis’s fire-damaged shirt was a far more vivid blue than it had been in the trailer, his face and hands a much healthier colour than they were in real life. The world outside the lighted set was now a drab cluttered storage barn on a chill concrete pad, a rough workshop where just behind that plywood wall you might find stacks of lumber and half-built sets waiting for the workers to return.
Men and women paced back and forth outside the set, or stood to chat, while one man with a heavy tool belt at his waist sat engrossed in a Harry Potter hardcover. Whatever their jobs, they obviously weren’t needed yet, but neither were they free to disappear. They nodded to Thorstad, if they noticed him looking their way, but seemed preoccupied with actively waiting. The director came out and looked into his monitor, and then talked briefly with a woman holding a clipboard, who drew his attention to something in the script. He explained to Axel Thorstad that they had set everything up with the stand-ins while waiting for Travis to arrive. “So we’re ready to go.”
Thorstad put on his glasses to read the half-size stapled-together sheaf of pages Travis had given him. This was the script for today’s scenes only, but the front page listed the names of the numerous producers, the writer, and even the address of the nearest hospital—presumably for emergencies. The scheduled rehearsal time for Scene 4 had passed while they were travelling in from the airport. Apparently this was the second of eight days of shooting.
The dialogue was surprisingly sparse. What was an actor supposed to do with Ella’s not a maid. She’s a nurse. Of course it was realistic enough. Glancing through the scene that would follow he came upon He was layin’ on the road like he was dead. Also realistic, of course, but it caused an involuntary cringe in a lifelong teacher of English.