"Actors tend to be bleeding liberals, Detective, and show- offs with insides like scared little rabbits."
"That include you?"
"I quit the business, remember?"
"So we drop it?"
"I won't press charges."
"If he's carrying a weapon, you won't have to."
I handed over Eddie's card. Detective Collins studied both sides. "Where's the shoe store?"
"Down on Sunset, the Shoe Horn or something like that."
He looked up. "That discount dump near the In- N- Out?" I nodded. He looked at my shoes, then flipped the card over again. "This address is there." He lifted his chin toward the hills. " Maybe he knows your White Shirt pal? Maybe they're in it together . . . extortion, possible kidnap. Maybe you're in on some kind of setup."
I shook my head. "Back up. White Shirt has a Mercedes sports car in his garage; Eddie's in the shoe store—"
" Could be lovers."
"I'd have seen them."
"They don't want to be seen. But they've seen you." He lifted a shoulder. "You have binoculars here?"
"No! What do you think I am?"
"You tell me."
I sat down on the couch. This was turning out badly. What did I expect?
"What did your husband say about giving Eddie a job?"
My voice came out muffled. "I didn't give him the card."
"No?"
"Andre's on a movie; he's all over the place all times of day and night."
"He's busy?"
" Movie people make lousy spouses. You don't need a gossip columnist to tell you that."
" Would that include ex– movie people?" I shrugged, looking down at a small brown stain I hadn't noticed on the carpet before. He said, "I guess they don't call it Hollyweird for nothing." Was he making a joke? I looked up and laughed. I couldn't help it; the line didn't fit the character saying it. "You have a nice laugh," he said.
My cell phone rang. I let it ring.
"Answer it." He nodded once toward the phone in my hand.
I picked up the call. "Andre?" I listened, then said okay and we hung up. "My husband is stopping by for some new sides— script pages— he forgot. With his assistant director," I said, facing the officer of the law whose presence in my hotel room was beginning to unnerve me.
Detective Collins stuffed Eddie's card into his pocket. "Mind if I keep this?" He didn't wait for an answer. "I'll go up the hill, check out this address and get back to you," he said, moving toward the door.
"You don't want to meet Andre?"
"What for?"
Detective Collins wasn't gone six minutes before Andre and Carola came in. They'd probably passed each other in their cars.
I guess I took my cue from the Detective and didn't bring him up to Andre, or Eddie Tompkins either. I kept up a busy chatter, giving Andre the scarf, showing him the new sweaters. "A good color," he said. "And cashmere. Perfect." He gamely tossed the scarf over his shoulder. He glanced in the mirror, made an adjustment, and thanked me with a kiss to my cheek. Turning to Carola— who I only then noticed looked pale with worry— he said he'd look over the new pages now. He found them on the table, where until a few minutes ago Eddie Tompkins's card had sat. "We will see if they are an improvement for her." The word her was loaded, a freight train of contempt. I understood Andre had been calmly indulgent about the scarf, that his mood underneath was murderous. He put his glasses on, moved toward the bedroom, and read the pages.
Carola confided to me in a low voice the lead actress was proving a disappointment.
"Can't learn her lines?"
Andre looked up from reading. "She is a whore." His tone was glacial.
Carola shook her blond head, chewed a fingernail. "She knows the lines but brings nothing to them."
I knew the actress's work. Luce Bouclé was all right, if too reliant on her physicality over a character's interior, not gorgeous but compelling to watch, French. I'd joked when Andre cast her, "Have you fallen for another actress?" And he'd joked back that I was jealous at last. I wasn't.
"She is impossible, devoid of spirit, a corpse!" Andre almost shouted. Poor Carola visibly shrank. Andre was not a man to raise his voice, so when he did, it was that much worse. His burst of anger would have to do with the fact that he alone had cast Luce Bouclé, had auditioned no one else. I was tempted to ask if she'd auditioned well, but this was not the moment to suggest that a mistake had been made even if I meant it humorously.
Andre tossed the pages onto the bed. He'd read them standing in the double doorway to the bedroom. He'd had the writer come up with changes that would nurse the actress along, give her less to say but more reaction. "This is all explanation," he said of the fix. He picked the three pages up off the bed and swatted the paper with the back of his hand. " Utter junk." He handed the pages to me. "Ardennes, will you read this?" I scanned the first page. "No, no, out loud, please."
He was asking me to read cold? I glanced at Carola. She was a wreck, biting whatever was left of her fingernails. I breathed. I took a minute to read the first page to myself, breathed again, exhaled, and read as convincingly as I could.
"No," Andre said. "Stop. Don't go on, please. This is terrible. Terrible. Carola, have you the original with you?"
Carola nodded, dug into her bag and pulled out a script. She looked up at Andre, a question on her face. Andre looked at me. "The pages?"
Carola hurried through the script, found the needed pages and handed me her battered copy.
"Andre, I'm not a circus dog to bark on cue."
"Ardennes, just, please, read for me." He spoke in his director's voice. I felt a chilly spasm down my neck, and my buttocks clenched. What I wanted was to carefully put the script down, to say firmly, no, I would not just please read for him or for anyone else. But Andre had on that demanding yet wide- open listening face I knew so well. It was a face I'd not been able to challenge as an actress. I wet my lips, suddenly deathly thirsty. "Ardennes? Will you refuse to help us for one moment of your day?"
I looked at the page. At a glance I could see the writing here was real, lines an actress could chew and digest. The character, Anne, is talking to the police. I let out a hard breath and began: "Mr. Lawson is no longer at this address, Officer. He's gone, you see, and now there is laughter again. There's a trail of lies and slime behind Mr. Lawson, and no one cares where he's gone. . . . Do you know how to kill a garden slug, Officer? You lay traps with stale beer; they die and the flowers live. I wonder who sat down and made that discovery about the beer. Have you ever heard of that trick, Officer?" I continued with the scene, already feeling Anne's ache and her crazy hope. The directions called for her to execute a little dance, suddenly to dance, her body knowing she is free ahead of her mind. The dance is not described. Andre and his actress would have to work it out. I thought of Beckett's Godot, Lucky's dance. But no, this would be faster, lighter, stiff— because Anne is lame— but graceful.
Carola and Andre were silent when I finished; they looked rapt. I broke the silence, handing the script back to Carola. "I have such a headache all of a sudden." Andre looked steadily at me for what seemed like a very long pause, even for him.
"Come, we'll go," he told Carola.
"The sides?" she asked him.
Andre shook his head. " Leave them; they are worthless. We know now how the lines are meant to be spoken." He went for the door. "Oh, before I forget, Ardennes, here is the extra key to Grant's room— 302— on the other end." He gestured toward the room to the right of the landing. "I have lent him the printer you were using. If you need to, just go take it." He tossed the plastic pass onto the table and went for the door again. I hadn't realized the printer was gone and wondered when it had been taken off my desk, and by whom.
Carola reminded me that Grant Stuart was the second AD. I glanced at the white- and- gold passkey on the table and nodded. She said she hoped my headache would soon pass. She followed Andre out, closing the door. I felt sick on top of a splitting he
adache, so when Zaneda knocked on the door soon after they left, it wasn't my make- believe ankle injury that was killing me. I'd forgotten I was supposed to be hurt.
Hotel maids know everything. The shoes you wear, the undergarments. They witness the bed stains; the time of the month and the signs of sexual activity. A good maid has seen it all. Disheveled bath towels thrown on the floor, the makeup and the creams, the brush full of hidden gray hairs, and the paperwork left lying around— they see that too, if they bother to look. My sense of the staff at the Hotel Muse is that they are involved, they cooperate, and they report back. The Muse is friendly, the snooping not malignant. The Hollywood location suggests a certain sort of guest, film people, journalists, and plenty of foreigners; not your typical Hollywood tourist hole. All the more reason to keep a lookout.
Zaneda was friendly and bright. Alma, her alternate, was also amiable, with better English and shrewder, more on the lookout for tips. Our extra coffees and teas and bath products, the bits of attention here and there, reflected that and also the awareness that Andre was an important figure. Plus we are long term, which called for greater investment on the maids' part. I had cachet too, whether they knew it or not, though the mystique was faded. Not that the tingle of elusive fame once achieved is ever entirely extinguished.
With so much of Andre's crew occupying so many rooms we were bound to make waves. Sometimes there was partying late, loud with the pungent smell of weed carried on the nighttime air. Once or twice management made a call, which I fielded on the house phone. Those calls should have gone to the line producer, but Andre had negotiated the rooms and was staying here and was in charge, so complaints— though they were never quite that— went to the head of the movie family, and since I was here so much of the time that, by proxy, became me. Management was always apologetic.
The maids asked me questions too. So I shouldn't have been surprised when Zaneda asked if everything was all right. Detective Collins had arrived in an unmarked car and left minutes before Andre and Carola replaced him in the suite. The Detective had stayed perhaps twenty minutes, long enough for Zaneda to observe him come and go; long enough for a possibly illegal immigrant to sniff out the law. Zaneda could have been anywhere: changing another room's sheets, carrying out a big bundle of wash to be picked up in the hotel van, or bagloads of trash, or fluffing pillows and scouring sinks and toilets— unseen eyes seeing everything.
But what did she mean by all right? If she said she'd seen a man come and go, she'd be stepping on my privacy. The man that had come and gone could have been anyone, a lawyer, a producer . . . but there was that cop stink to him, and gentle Zaneda would have the wariness natural to a third world transplant. Anyone who says hotels are anonymous has their head up in the dark; hotel walls have eyes and ears and mouths that talk.
She rang the bell. She hadn't cleaned the rooms, she said; was running late with more guests than usual for early spring. We were standing in the doorway, and I let her know I'd made the bed already. She looked at my ankle.
Sharif 's unopened box of Epsom salts was on the kitchen counter, right behind me. Assuming she'd seen me, Zaneda had surely noted I was not limping when I went out in the car and again when I came back. I wasn't favoring the foot now. Good thing I'm not with the CIA; I couldn't even remember my own cover story. Word was out I'd hurt myself on hotel property. Was that what Zaneda meant by asking if I was all right?
I stepped aside from the doorway. A drafty current was wheezing down the open- ended corridor. "See what you think, if the room needs cleaning."
She didn't come in. "Is up to you. But fresh towels, soaps? What ever you need."
"I'm okay, Zaneda, thanks; está bien, todo bien. Will you come back, clean tomorrow? Mañana?"
"Tomorrow is Alma."
"Ah, you're off ? Wait one minute." I went for my purse, not limping— the hell with it— and found a twenty. Usually we tip a ten to the maids every week or so. I gave her the twenty. Her eyes lit up at the amount. She made the usual polite protest. "For los niños," I said. She said okay and took the money with thanks and a quick glance at my ankle, then tried for my eyes. I'm guessing she was guessing the big tip was for the man who'd come to my rooms, la policía, and for her ignorance of that fact. I reached down to rub my ankle, making it seem unconscious. I might make a lousy intelligence agent, but I could still perform. I smiled and closed the door.
Alone, I was left to try and untangle a day that was beginning to feel like a trashy airport novel. Should I dive into a bottle of scotch or scrounge around for an aspirin? I didn't do either; the aspirin would sit badly in my stomach and the scotch would change nothing. I was rattled, but not by Eddie or the sudden involvement of Detective Collins in my life; those things were trouble enough. What Andre had just made me do was worse.
The hardest thing about ending a part on stage is coming down from the high, shutting that down. This happens in film too if the part has any meat on its bones. Even if the acting is a struggle from word one to word last, the body systems quicken. You might feel like you're about to have a stroke standing up before an audience or in front of the camera's cold eye as you utter your first line. Maybe there isn't a molecule of saliva in your mouth and an ocean is pounding inside your skull and you are sure you are trembling so if you have to pick up a prop — a glass, say— that could slip and crash and shatter into a thousand pieces, there is still the rush. Get past the first sentence and hear your voice take control, your body snap inside the character, and feel being heard, listened to, watched, seen, clung to . . . not ego but power, the power you own over the words. With a good part the writer's voice comes alive through you, the emotions rising naturally out of the words, no gimmicks to rouse a tear, a laugh, a shout. Maybe I got that from Joe, about the writer's voice, or maybe from reading so much, I don't know. But even the crap parts, done truthfully, carry a rush. Never mind that it's not you; never mind that it's all an act. . . .
Okay, let's lay it bare: It's a sham, entertainment, a passing waste of time, a numbing of time; a make- believe magic show of inconsequential emotions and tired stories told over and over again; a three- ring circus of prancing ponies, seminude girls and pretend tough guys, manufactured machismo, guns shooting blanks, and simulated sex. For all that, some of us believed it was real. Some of us remembered what Aristotle talked about. Some of us understood somewhere deep down that our job was to say things that couldn't be said, emote to catharsis, pass through taboos and yearning and fear and hope and all the other murky misunderstandings we call communication and mostly fail at miserably in real life. Good theater embraces that, attempts that level of communication.
Andre's script— The Dance— is about Anne Dernier, a ballerina, and her agent, Mr. Lawson. She's an Isadora Duncan type, an original. Mr. Lawson— always Mr. Lawson even after they become lovers— wants control, to take her to the top. He gives up all his other clients for her. She's spry and joyous— the actress would want to tap a bit of Gelsomina from Fellini's La Strada (well, I would). Mr. Lawson ridicules her childlike sense of play. There is a scene at an amusement park, Anne and a boy spinning, the Ferris wheel lighting up the night sky. "It's like dancing!" Anne says, throwing her head back. But there is an accident; she's thrown from a ride, the Mouse— not even a dangerous ride, but her belt was not secure. The carnival turns to sideshow horror; her legs are broken. Mr. Lawson has followed her— he thinks she's fallen for the boy, but the boy is only a friend, a fellow dancer. Lawson sees the accident and abandons Anne. Years later he finds her tending bar at the same amusement park; her friends are carnie types— clowns, snake charmers, magicians, dwarfs; outsiders.
"Serving drinks to nobodies. Always drawn to nobodies," Lawson tells her.
"I like freaks," she responds. "They're more real."
There is a clown, Mr. Chuckles, whose unrequited love for Anne has evolved into devoted protection. She could choreograph, Mr. Lawson tells Anne; she was a genius, being lame shouldn't stop her, why did she give up
? Chuckles tries to warn her against Lawson, but she falls under his spell a second time and makes a comeback. Lawson finds her an apprentice, a young dancer who looks a little like her younger self. Anne's dances become darkly comic, modern Grimm's tales: strange, filmy figures swirling across the stage— a Powell/Pressburger tone, the critics' note. She attains an audience once again and begins to slip out of Mr. Lawson's grip. She attempts to make him laugh, the one thing he cannot control; if he laughs, she wins. She tells him there are rhythms beyond the ego and that he misses everything essential, is only half human. He seduces the young apprentice, letting Anne know he is in control, that he will humiliate and torment her if need be. Mr. Lawson is killed and suspicion falls first on Mr. Chuckles, then on Anne. The audience won't know if she's killed him or not; there is a trial, but nothing can be proved, and of course the audience wants him gone. Anne forms a dance troupe with the young apprentice as her lead. Her tragicomic ballets are beautiful: sensuous and grotesque, haunting and mesmerizing.
I started going over the lines I'd read to Andre and Carola. That opening line about Mr. Lawson had to be read with a kind of mad euphoria but at the same time innocence. I'd lifted my hand at one point, the free hand not holding the script. I remembered every modulation and tone change. I didn't remember every word, but close. If I kept churning the lines, all the words would come back to me of a piece. I picked up the new pages Andre had thrown down. He was right; they were terrible, the life sucked out of them.
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