Andre addressed Carola: "Drink?" She nodded. He pointed to the scotch bottle on the liquor shelf, and she nodded again. "Ardennes?" he asked me.
"No, I don't think so." Andre was quiet as he got ice for two drinks, pouring a hefty amount of scotch into each glass. His face was set hard as he passed Carola hers. Would he confront me with her here? "Andre?"
"Ardennes?"
I felt the pit of my stomach tighten. The way he glanced at me,
quick but loaded. How could he know? Did I have guilt smeared all over my face? Could Alma have told? So soon? Not Sylvia? Someone from the production was here; saw me leaving Grant's room with the Detective? Oh, I'd have to come up with something huge. This was awful. . . . I don't think the best actor in the world could lie their way out of this one. Was I going to have to confess? Jump off the balcony? It wasn't as if Andre would start a big wronged- husband row, though he'd probably rather I'd gone to a different location. I just didn't want him to know.
"I've stopped production," Andre said. He downed his drink, poured another. "Carola, out of the kitchen. Come sit." He was standing at the table. She'd lagged behind near the door, as if she might make a fast dash for it. "Why is it so dark in here?" He pulled back the glass curtains; L.A.'s afternoon brightness spilled over the sitting room.
"You shut down your movie?" That's what this was all about? I almost laughed with relief— but of course it wasn't funny.
Carola sat on the couch, literally on the edge of her seat. I looked from Andre to her and back to Andre. He shrugged. Carola said, her voice barely above a whisper, "Andre— we— fired the actress."
"No!" Fired Luce Bouclé? Oh, boy. This was the stuff tabloids dined on: "Production Halted: Actress Booted out on Her Fanny!" It was something every actor lived in dread of happening to them. I don't think Andre had ever taken such an extreme measure before. I felt almost as if it were me he'd sacked, but maybe that was the other issue, which for the moment, happily, was fully eclipsed.
"Carola, not so gloomy. We are well rid of her; we will shoot around her scenes until she is replaced."
Carola didn't look convinced. They'd probably been shooting around the lead for days. There was the bond company to consider, and how would the producers take the news? The film would begin hemorrhaging money, if it wasn't already. Not to leave out the actress herself: contract broken, her people in a fury. Variety and all the other rags would milk the story dry; focus especially, cruelly, on how the actress would try to save face.
"Andre? What will you do?"
"It must be contagious. You are gloomy too, Ardennes? I will find a way." He passed a hand along my guilty back, the same back Detective Collins had recently made his own.
I moved away. "I'll see if there's anything to eat."
"We are not at a funeral, no need for a spread," Andre said, looking into his second drink.
Not quite a funeral, but any way you looked at it the situation was bad. I pictured Jonas Campion taking the news. Producers have heart attacks over less. Campion wasn't the type, but someone under him was going to choke on this one. Andre— if Campion could make it stick.
"You're not concerned?"
"Concerned, not hysterical," Andre replied nasally.
"I'll get some cheese and crackers to go with the drinks," I said, heading into the kitchen.
The Christmas after Daddy died I sat in a chair for hours. I’d refused to go with my mother to my grandmother's, where aunts, uncles and cousins gathered as they always did for a gigantic meal and piles of gifts underneath an enormous, bright- as- day tree. How was I supposed to celebrate? How could my mother? I had no way to know it would be Grandma's last Christmas, and except for some childhood cats I'd had no experience of death.
I was the only one I knew at school who wasn't freaked by the idea of my parents doing it. I mean, they didn't paw each other in front of me or act like sloppy teenagers, but they were organic, natural, so I wasn't grossed out by the idea of sex between "old" people. That Christmas my mother was alone for the first time since I'd known her. She must have been dead inside, but it wasn't her way to draw attention to herself. He'd been sick with leukemia, caught too late. After about a year of wasting away the disease suddenly accelerated, and the shock of seeing him gnawed alive from the inside was numbing. I was away at boarding school for most of the ordeal, so I only got to see him that way at Thanksgiving. He was gone the day after I returned to school and I had to turn right around and go back home.
I'd been sent out of the city for the last three years of high school because my mother didn't like the tone of things for city kids those days. I don't think she thought I'd join a gang or anything moronic like that, but to me it felt like I was being hauled off to a Connecticut prison. It was actually all right at the all- girl revue, as we called it; I made more mischief there than I probably would have back in New York. I think Dad didn't like me being sent off either. I was only a two- hour train ride away and I came home any weekend I wanted. Still, I was the only one of my friends to be shipped out.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda had no place in our little household. We were forward- thinkers who treated trouble as a nuisance to be weathered. The line we used when something really bad came along was At least it's not the Ardennes. Even when he realized he needed help, way past the subtle, then stronger signs of something wrong, my father said the six months they maybe could have salvaged for him with earlier rounds of chemo was not something to cry over. If he had one regret, it was his first wife. He wished he'd seen more clearly before they married that she was a depressive. Her mental states hurt him and eventually their kids and, of course, her too. He didn't understand depression. Who does? he asked. He regretted too that he probably hadn't cared enough, possessed sufficient compassion to stick by her. She became a cloud over the household. She got custody when they split up because at the time two things were true that aren't any longer: Depression was a matter of bucking up, and children belonged with their mother, almost no matter what.
We had a conversation about all this one time because I told Dad my stepbrother was wacko and had threatened me. "He hates me, Daddy," I said. "Does he have to come here?" I was six, and my stepbrother, Alec, was about to graduate from high school.
"Alec doesn't hate you. He's mixed up," Dad said. "Can you try to be nice to him anyhow?"
"He's mentally ill!" I said. That was what we all said about anybody we didn't like in the first grade. That it might be true was meaningless because I didn't know what the words meant in the first place, but hearing that must have hurt Daddy. Alec was a troubled teen, but he straightened out in the army. He didn't see action like his father, but time stationed in Germany gave him a different perspective, I guess, because he took the GI Bill and became a legal advocate for soldiers. He behaved gently at Dad's funeral. He'd started to look like my father, which was very weird for me at the time. I guess Dad knew his son turned out okay. I don't know.
I didn't mind my half- sister, Arlene, so much. She was older than Alec, so she'd basically always been an adult. I just assumed she'd started out that way and I had trouble with the idea that she was my sister. She always acted surprised when she and Alec came to see Dad— which by the time I was six was nearly never— that there was this little kid running around and that I was her half- sister. She painted my finger- and toenails pink once, wedged cotton wads between the toes and told me I had to blow on my hands and feet until the polish dried and to quit squirming. That's pretty much my whole childhood memory of her.
Anyhow, I sat in a chair in my room for hours on end, not turning on a light as Christmas day waned into Christmas night, taking only bathroom breaks and trips down to the kitchen for milk and cookies. I wasn't thinking so much about my father being dead. I was thinking about myself and the promise I'd made him to go college. My mother had gotten me hooked on books early and I figured I could give myself as good a liberal arts education as any school could, and one that would mean something to me, so why should I wast
e time at a university? Dad wasn't against acting or the arts; he just knew what a tough life it could be. My parents didn't baby- talk me, and they didn't hide trouble when it came, like the insecure times when my father wanted to quit one job for another, or when he struck out on his own with insufficient financial backing. Our family didn't believe finances ruled. There was always enough to live on and sometimes— more often than not— plenty of money for the three of us to live well. If he could take chances, why couldn't I?
So his dying sort of set me free. When my mother came home that night, laden with the gifts I hadn't been there to open, I let her know I'd be saving her a bundle because I wasn't going to school after I graduated. I would have dropped out anyway, I told her, so I was not blaming breaking my promise on Daddy's dying. She looked tired as I made my case, seated in her armchair on the other side of the round lamp table from Dad's armchair, in a corner of the living room with windows that overlooked the Hudson River. The armchairs were raised up on a little triangular platform— like a small stage— with a couple of Persian rugs instead of the wall- to- wall carpeting in the rest of the living room. I think the stage had been there when they'd bought the place, so I was used to it, but none of my friends' apartments had a stage. I stood where I always did, in the middle distance between the king's and queen's armchairs, just at the edge of the platform. It was where I'd stood for years, giving little declarative performances. My parents were my first audience, more so than the typical only child's attention seeking— which I effectively was, growing up. I hadn't sought their approval so much as I secretly watched to see how well I performed vis- à- vis their response. I even think they were complicit, or at least he was, calling me his little thespian when I came to them about a science project or a hated homework assignment, and maybe I hammed it up a little extra to please him. My mother would caution against showing off. Her sense of decorum was her own— not something lifted from a code of etiquette. Julia Thrush's carriage was impeccable right to the end, and, luckily, I inherited that from her, and her long legs. Her modulated voice was clear into her seventies, and she had a melodic laugh. When it came around to teenaged rebellion my problem was more about there being nothing to rebel against than anything they did that I found offensive. I'd slouch on purpose to annoy her; answer Dad in irritated monosyllables, but that didn't last long.
She didn't argue that Christmas night, didn't try to convince me to go to college, waving her hand impatiently when I told her I despised the whole concept of school, gearing up to pitch my case. "Don't use a word like despise as if it was chewing gum, Ardennes. And try not to exaggerate; words are powerful tools as they are. What will you do if you don't go to school?"
I glanced at Dad's chair to see how I was going over with him. Naturally part of me was bluffing. I meant what I said, but the pros pect still scared me and I was game to being talked out of my decision until maybe summer— I needed a bit of wise resistance to test my resolve, but that was Daddy's job. It's so inconvenient when people die. You can go ahead and imagine what the deceased would say in a given situation, but you're only filling in blanks. Dead means dead. I think it came home to me in that moment, when I needed him to say it was okay for me to break my promise. He probably would have talked me into trying one semester, but he was silenced for keeps. I was on my own.
As I looked at his empty chair my lips began to quiver and my eyes filled with tears and my face got hot and I fell on the floor and threw myself over my mother's lap — drama queen in pain— and cried until I was weak. She kept her hand on my back until the flood subsided, her dress drenched with my hot tears and snot. "Get us each a glass of red wine," she told me when I was played out.
"For real?" I said. We were going to share a glass of wine? Quelle sophistication. I was suddenly grown up! That meant being fatherless hardly mattered in that heady moment; it would be Mom and me from now on. And so the two of us made a plan: I'd stay in the Riverdale apartment with her, and I'd audition at the Actors Studio or maybe sign up at HB Studio. If no one would take me I'd find a theater group, some acting venue: hit the sidewalk auditioning for plays all over New York. There were theater groups like weeds back then, from Brooklyn to the Bronx; artists could still live and work on the cheap — the city had not yet been made over in the image of big- box developers artificially ratcheting up rents and profit margins in real estate heaven. We'd give it a year, we agreed, and see where I stood. Then, like an utter child, I sat at my mother's feet and opened my Christmas gifts. My mother gave me Uta Hagen's Respect for Acting.
"Mom! You knew all along." I threw my arms around her, ready for another spasm of overwrought emotion.
She gently pushed me off so I was seated on the little stage; a tableau of mother and daughter, father gone missing.
"Ardennes, listen to me. . . ."
I turned my face up in rapt attention; I would obey my queen's every command. "Ardennes, you have a kind of drifting mind . . ." I was no longer rapt. "I can't think of another way to put it. Acting— listen, now—" I was ready to bolt, off the stage, out of the room, race down the hall to my room and slam the door shut behind me. "Steady," my mother said, using the one voice I had yet to disobey, which she used only rarely and which on that day had an added note of fatigue. I heard the note and stopped.
"I'm listening, Mother."
"You have talent to spare; I have no question of that. But you will make things harder for yourself than they have to be."
I had no idea what she meant.
I still don’t. My head in the refrigerator, I was wondering, as I often have since she made her inscrutable pronouncement, exactly what my mother meant by a drifting mind. Way in back I found some cheese to put with crackers to feed to Carola and Andre, who were downing scotches like lemonade on a hot day. If my father could weather setbacks, so could Andre, once he stopped bottle diving. It wouldn't help at all for him to learn of his wife's recent indiscretion with a cop, so I could in reasonably good conscience bury that for the—
Who was that knocking at the door? My face must have blanched at the sight of Grant Stuart standing on the other side when I opened up, smiling under a young head of beach- blond hair. Had I left something on his floor: panties, perhaps, a bullet fallen from the Detective's holster? Was he here to warn me, unaware his boss was at home?
"Ms. Thrush . . . it's an honor— I mean, we met before." He held out his hand.
I barely brushed it with mine, thinking what the honor could be, this time or any other. I waved him in. "It's Grant, right?" He nodded solemnly, not quite taking his eyes off me, just shy of staring. It seemed as if humor had deserted Andre's production company altogether. " Andre and Carola are inside," I said. "Can I get you a drink for the funeral party?" I indicated the living room area.
"What? Oh, no, thank you." He walked toward the others in the sitting room. Grant looked Midwest trusting to me— Iowa, perhaps— too trusting to suspect his floor had been the recent scene of illicit activities. What was Grant Stuart doing in a dirty business like film production anyhow?
Andre and Carola were on their separate phones. I followed Grant. He sat down heavily next to Carola, on the couch. I stood leaning along the dividing wall to the kitchen.
Andre ended his call. "Grant?"
"Sir." He stood up. Such Midwestern manners, probably votes conservative, queasy in his sexual orientation— deep down— and that neatness to his room; nothing against neatness, just a little out of touch with himself, I'd say.
"We have a situation— care for a drink?" Grant declined again. "I have no idea how long production will be halted, Grant, but it will be."
"I know. I was thinking, Carola is doing great and Timmy O'Malley is ready to step into second AD. I'd like to be excused— no contractual difficulties or anything— I just want to head back out to Iowa."
Huh, got it on the first try.
"You have not been happy?" Andre queried.
Grant sat back down. "Oh, no. It's just I may not be ri
ght for this sort of thing; I've enjoyed immensely— working with you has been an education, an honor—"
Double bingo; I must be psychic today: He doesn't belong in this dirty business, and he knows it, sensible boy. None of this was funny. . . . I was just the odd wheel in the room, and a broken one at that—
"I think you said you wanted to write screenplays, no?" Andre said. Grant nodded, looking humbled and slightly noble. "You are dismissed with all my good wishes. And you will receive credit on the film." Carola was now off her call and listening. "Carola will handle your room bill with the hotel, and any monies due, of course."
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