The Master of Happy Endings

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The Master of Happy Endings Page 27

by Jack Hodgins


  Thorstad hoped the man could be reasonable. “Surely an hour or so—”

  “I turned my phone off this morning,” Travis said, “thinking I—”

  “Don’t!” Evans was evidently not in the mood for excuses. He stepped inside, his eyes blinking rapidly behind the rectangular glasses. To Thorstad he said, “Just stay where you are and let me take this boy to the studio, where something might be salvaged from the day.”

  Seeing Travis’s frightened face, and flushed with sudden sympathy, Thorstad assumed the blame. “It was my decision to take him out where he could study undisturbed. He has those exams to pass.”

  Elliot Evans crossed the room and turned to address them from behind the table and the vase of eucalyptus boughs. Perhaps he’d been an actor once himself. “He has a job to do! A job he is paid to do. He also has a contract that hasn’t been renewed. I should have kept him in his trailer even when he isn’t needed, just so I’d know where he is. Obviously you can’t be trusted.”

  Travis tried. “Oonagh Farrell was helping me with my lines.”

  Evans, it seemed, was fighting hard against a temptation to explode. “You have a director. We have coaches if they’re needed. We expected you to handle this role on your own!”

  Thorstad was surprised at how quickly regret and guilt could become a surge of anger, an interior physical clench as though he was prepared to launch into a fist fight or a free-for-all. No one had ever accused him of being untrustworthy. His body didn’t seem to know that physical violence was out of the question. The tendons in his throat felt tightened to the point of snapping. “Are we supposed to believe your work is more important than ours, just because there’s so much money involved?”

  Evans leaned forward, as though to address a thick-skulled child. “It’s a simple matter of doing the job he’s paid to do if he doesn’t want someone else to do it instead. If he wants to work, he has to take it seriously.”

  “Please!” Travis said, moving to stand in the open doorway. “Let’s just go!”

  But Evans hadn’t finished with the accused. He came out from behind the table as though to head for the door, but stopped too close to Thorstad. “You bloody teachers, you’re so used to thinking your classroom is your kingdom you imagine your job more important than the work the rest of us do.”

  For a moment, Thorstad wasn’t even sure it was himself who’d shouted Stop! though he was aware that he’d raised an arm, an open hand. “I won’t have you bully him! I won’t have you bully me with your sneer.”

  “I’m going,” Travis said, already outside and hurrying down the steps. “I’ll be in the car!”

  Evans’s forearm struck Thorstad’s raised hand aside. “I thought his mother was a pain in the ass—but you! We’ve taken you into our home, we’ve put up with you at the studio, I would have thought you might be a little grateful.”

  Thorstad hauled in a deep breath and laced the fingers of both hands together, to prevent them from acting on their own. “It was a mistake,” he said, as calmly as he could manage. “We lost track of the time. People sometimes do.”

  Evans exhaled impatiently and walked to the door. “Just remember why he’s here.”

  From the deck Thorstad watched the BMW snake its way down the hill towards the highway, where heavy traffic raced in both directions. There was no traffic on the ocean’s surface, and nothing at all on the horizon. By the time he recognized her voice she had been speaking, it seemed, for some time, from some distant corner of his mind. “I had decided I had nothing more to say to you, my darling, and the time had come to leave you to your own devices, but I cannot allow you to turn away from this conversation feeling that you are in the right and he in the wrong, because surely you of all people shouldn’t need to be told that you are hardly the servant of love when you let your drive to succeed overtake your compassion and empathy and, of course, humility, since you’ve always insisted that teaching is less about drilling information into heads and more about passing on values and attitudes and habits—so I wonder when you began to forget this and started to—”

  He said “No!” to this, and went back inside the guest house where he turned on the bathroom taps, he flushed the toilet, he switched on the little bedside radio, gathering up as much noise around him as he could. He knew what she would say and he did not want to hear. That the teacher and the executive producer were closer to being two of a kind than he’d imagined. He said “No!” to this at the empty centre of the guest house, refusing to believe this even when it came from somewhere within himself.

  18

  When it came to choosing a costume for his role in the ballroom scene, Thorstad could not bring himself to dress as Geoffrey Chaucer, which would have seemed presumptuous even to himself. From the rack of costumes Camilla Evans had arranged to have wheeled over to her husband’s office, he selected an outfit that was, he supposed, generically medieval. In a brown tunic, brown leggings, a hooded cape, and with a purse at his belt, he was no one of importance, neither a wine merchant, a scribbler, nor a servant to a prince. The leggings and sleeves were too short, of course, but it was likely that the occasional citizen in Chaucer’s time had worn hand-me-downs that left wrists and ankles exposed.

  He was still surprised that Evans had not prevented him from taking part. By the time he’d telephoned Oonagh to report the confrontation that had taken place, he was convinced he could not stay on here any longer. “I shouted at him. I called him a bully! I raised my hand as though to hit him!”

  Oonagh did not seem to take this seriously. “Elliot Evans has been called a bully before. I’m sure he let you ride in his car today, didn’t he? In to the studio?”

  “He did.”

  “And the boy?”

  “Dead silence last night. Dead silence at breakfast. Dead silence in Evans’s car. I’ll be a chaperone now and little else, I suppose—make sure he gets enough sleep and keeps his distance from ‘evil influences’—including helpful actresses.”

  When Camilla learned of Thorstad’s friendship with Oonagh, she’d insisted her husband put his anger behind him and offer the actress a visitor’s pass to the studio for the shooting of the costume ball sequence. “She was so wonderful in The Trip to Bountiful, I swear I could hear her think!” But Oonagh would be in front of cameras herself for much of the day, and could promise only to stop by in the evening “in order to catch Axel Thorstad playing dress-up.”

  Because he’d struggled into his medieval outfit in the washroom next to Evans’s office, Thorstad was given the opportunity to view scenes shot the day before outside a “dressed” hotel in the city. Evans and Paolo needed to examine these outdoor scenes before shooting today’s interiors, but made it clear that the opinion of onlookers would not be welcome.

  Camilla Evans was dressed as Marie Antoinette, her friend Louise as a diminutive Annie Oakley. Louise’s husband was occupied elsewhere, presumably in his costume as a cosmetic surgeon for the stars. When Thorstad asked about Harold and Lyle he was told they’d gone back to Texas, taking with them the disappointing news that there was no appetite for another law-firm series at the moment, even one where all the lawyers were gay.

  In the opening sequence they were looking at the front of an upscale hotel with a carpet running out to the drop-off bay. Police stood warily by at either end of the block, keeping an eye on the crowd of shabbily dressed men and women who’d formed a human cordon across the front of the building. As a stream of costumed people stepped out of cars and approached the front door, the human chain broke apart to let them go in to their fundraising ball, one couple at a time. Bouncing placards challenged the guests’ sincerity—“Hypocrisy Wears a Friendly Face”—and questioned where the money would go—“Into Whose Pockets? Not Ours”—but no one was denied entry. An ostrich was followed by a grinning white-faced mime and a pair of clowns.

  The camera lingered on Travis for a moment. “We want him to be recognized later,” Evans explained. Travis hadn’t told Thorstad about
his role in the ballroom scene. “We’ll want to cut in a close-up of Craig somewhere around here so we’re not surprised when we see him later. He should have been closer to the entrance.”

  Paolo jotted in a tiny notebook while Evans explained to the watchers that the next sequence would appear in the midst of what they would shoot this afternoon. “Here comes Dolores.”

  A long black limousine glided into the picture. When it had stopped, the driver came around to help a stout elderly woman get out from the back seat, dressed in layers of pink net decorated with sparkling stars, and holding a wand. “Queen of the Fairies,” Paolo said.

  “She must have loved this,” Evans said. “A grand entrance.”

  Paolo laughed. “Remembering the old days. An Oscar waiting behind that door.”

  Thorstad thought of her small chubby hand in his. “You thought this old dame had died off years ago—admit it.” But she was still here, still working, long years after swooning in the arms of Gregory Peck.

  Light exploded from press cameras. A reporter pushed a microphone at the wealthy woman and asked if the money raised would go towards converting her derelict building into a proper homeless shelter. “Will the Fairy Queen become a Fairy Godmother and give these people somewhere safe to sleep?”

  But the Fairy Queen did not acknowledge anyone, even those who refused to allow her to reach the hotel door. When the Riverboat Gambler pushed Travis aside, Travis pushed back. The other protesters roared.

  “We’ll look at this again,” Evans said, “once we have the interior sequences to work with. It’s time to go to work.”

  The briefing room for the Extras was in Stage 7, only a few minutes’ walk across the lot. Here Thorstad, along with Camilla and Louise and more than fifty others in costume, was herded into a large unfurnished and undecorated room where they were addressed by a woman with a clipboard. Glasses hung on beads against her chest. The dancers, she said, were members of an actual ballroom-dancing class hired for the occasion, and were being briefed elsewhere. Speaking from one side of her mouth— a tough hombre—she instructed the Extras to act as though they had been dancing only moments before but were currently taking a break. Some—“You, you, everyone to my left”—were instructed to pick up drinks on their way into the ballroom, and to hold them throughout the shoot as though they had just come back from the bar. Her chained glasses were raised to her eyes, the clipboard consulted. “There will be chairs against one wall, and this group, over here to my right, will sit on them throughout.” The remaining Extras, including Thorstad, were to engage in muted conversations while watching the dance. They might flirt, or admire costumes, or simply discuss the weather, so long as their words could not be heard. “And don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself! Imagine you are a background mural— barely capable of animation.” The scene they were about to be part of, she explained, had already been rehearsed several times with the ballroom dancers and the actors’ stand-ins.

  While they were being led across the lane to another building, Louise promised Camilla and Thorstad there was no way she would sit on her butt once the riot had started. “I intend to get in a few good licks! What can they do about it then?”

  Inside the sound stage, a fleet of assistant directors led them onto a polished hardwood floor and distributed them along the length of two white walls, where vertical mirrors alternated with tall sprays of crimson gladioli and velvet-cushioned chairs. A small orchestra had already assembled on the raised stage. A revolving chandelier hung from the raw undecorated beams, above which were stacks of lumber, sheets of plywood, and various pieces of stored furniture. Cameras looked down from a gallery above the third wall.

  Not long ago he could have found a way to bring this experience into his classroom. An insider’s glimpse of the television world might have been useful before showing a televised Macbeth. He might have assigned a writing exercise in which you were to recount an experience where you felt like a mere “extra” in the drama of someone else’s life. As it was, he felt a bit unnecessary. It didn’t help that he could not avoid standing out above the others. He should have exchanged places with the unhappily sitting Louise.

  Beyond the rim of the hardwood floor, crew members were busy with cables attached to a large camera mounted on a trolley. But once another group in costume had filed in and taken up their positions as couples poised to dance, the several standing lights came on, flooding the entire room. Now Thorstad, instead of looking in from the shadows, was inside the effulgent world of excessive light this time, where everything and everyone was brighter than life. Crew and onlookers were invisible out there in what he knew was the chilled dusky world of an oversized storage shed.

  Once the now-familiar words had been shouted from out in that dark, and the hired dance class began to whirl about the floor to music by some member of the Strauss family, the trolley moved down the length of the open wall carrying the seated cameraman with it. The Mother Superior confided to Thorstad that she felt as if she were in a Jane Austen movie. “I dare you,” she said, and nudged him with a black-clad elbow, “to dance with a Mother Superior out on that floor with the rest.”

  He laughed. “Do you think no one would notice? I’m a guest of the executive producer. I’d be tossed out on my ear and made to sleep under a bridge.”

  Annie Oakley scowled out from her chair against the wall, waiting for the fireworks to begin. He hoped not to get in her way.

  The afternoon stretched well into the evening, with breaks to visit the canteen for coffee and pizza or slabs of chocolate cake. Most of it was a matter of waiting for half an hour of camera-shifting and heated discussions in order to shoot for three or four minutes. Thorstad moved as unobtrusively as he could amongst the crowd, to keep his legs from tiring. When Oonagh appeared in a corner of the gallery amongst a small group of observers, he imagined how uninteresting this must be for someone used to being the centre of attention. You couldn’t see Oonagh as an “Extra” in anyone’s show any more than you could see her as an “Extra” in anyone’s life.

  Once the Queen of the Fairies had entered the ballroom with her husband and family in tow, she had little time to enjoy the applause before Craig Conroy and Travis burst in through the door behind her, followed by several additional protesters from the crowd outside. Conroy stood firm to shout: he wanted a chance to address the assembly, to explain. But even a society charity ball must have bouncers, and naturally a costume ball would have bouncers in costume. Two, three, four green elves with impressive shoulders attempted to persuade and then push and finally drag Conroy and Travis and the others back out through the door.

  But they poured in again, with still more of the protesters behind them, and spread out amongst the alarmed dancers, knocking people out of their way. It wasn’t long before Louise had abandoned her velvet-cushioned chair and thrown herself into the brawl.

  Again they were instructed to freeze. For a moment Thorstad thought this might be so that Annie Oakley could be sent home, but it became clear that this was so a camera could be moved to where it would shoot a scene in which elves and other costumed folks pursued Craig Conroy up a zigzag staircase to the gallery. It was obvious now that they were called Extras not only because they were expendable and easily replaced, but because they were compelled to be as passive as a field of cattle or a stand of Douglas fir while others were living the story. It was not all that different, now that he was confronted with it, from a forced or unprepared-for retirement from a beloved career.

  During his life in the classroom he had considered his role to be a facilitator working from the margins rather than an instructor pontificating from centre-front, but this had certainly not made his role extraneous. If anything, it had made him more actively involved in the individual student’s work. That he’d refused to be preacher, professor, or hectoring boss man did not confine him to the role of mere overseer. He had never been, in other words, an Extra.

  He was an Extra now. All fights resumed. Conroy s
tood behind the balcony railing and shouted again for attention, but no one paid attention, just as they’d been instructed. Eventually defeated, Conroy stepped back and came down the stairs to the dance floor where his double waited, wearing identical clothing. Once Paolo had spoken to both men and returned to his monitor in the darkened outer world, the double ran up to the top of the steps and climbed over the railing, where he bent his knees and launched into a jump, plunging to the floor where he rolled forward once and leapt again to his feet. After doing this jump three more times, he then threw himself into the crowd to set about freeing Travis and another protester from the elves.

  After what seemed like several hours of shooting and re-shooting, Thorstad joined the crowd of dismissed Extras at the canteen truck parked outside the main door to the building. Here a long table had been set up with pizzas, coffee urn, soft drinks, and a large box of packaged snacks. A happy Annie Oakley reported that she’d got in a few good blows with the butts of her pistols. “There’s some will notice bruises in the shower tomorrow.”

  When Thorstad recognized Craig Conroy’s double amongst those at the table, he waited until the man was alone for a moment, eating his triangle of pizza from one hand while holding a coffee in the other. When he stepped up to express his pleasure at once again watching him at work, the man thanked him but looked puzzled, perhaps by “again.”

  “A few days ago you told me your grandfather had been a stuntman as well.”

  It seemed to take a moment for him to bring this previous conversation to the surface. Perhaps it was the medieval costume. “Oh. Sorry.” He shook his head, blinking away his confusion. “Yes. He was pretty good in fights. You know—barroom brawls in the Old West? I remember one time he brought me into the studio to watch. He would’ve loved it here tonight, mixing it up with this crowd. Once he stunted for Randolph Scott. You heard of him?”

 

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