by Jim Nelson
Rod looked up as though put-out by the effort. “Hey,” he said and returned to his work.
Then, in a jerk of his head, he looked me square in the face. His jaw loosened and fell. He straightened his back to stare at me. It had only been an hour since someone had gawked at me. On the bus, I think, two high school boys stared at me in unison as I boarded at Van Ness and O'Farrell.
“Cline’s excited to have scouted you,” he said, near-dumbstruck.
“Scouted?”
“You need a Coke or something?” Cline asked me. “Something cold?”
“Maybe a glass of water.” I added, “I’m still not sure why you asked me here.”
“He’s perfect,” Rod said to Cline.
Cline returned with a glass of ice water. After I accepted it, she held out one hand. It was cupped over, not to shake but to take mine and lead me to the futon couch. It had been pulled away from the wall for some reason. It stood before the cameras, unlike the other furniture off to the side. Twin camera lights on tall stands loomed over the couch like intrusive parents on prom night.
She sat in the middle of the couch. She patted the cushion for me to join her, which I did.
“You’re here because you are the exact person I sought when I wrote this script,” she said.
“What kind of person?”
“Trust me when I say you’re ready-made for this role. Filmmaking is what I do. I’ve shot three films. This one is my most ambitious, and you are what’s going to make it big.”
As impressive as all the equipment was in the room, it still came across as an amateur effort to my untrained eye. “Are we talking about a movie-movie?” I said. “Doesn’t it take months to make a film?” I held a full-time job in software. I’d taken a personal day off from work to audition. Making a feature-length motion picture meant quitting my job, and I’d yet to hear any mention of money.
“This isn’t Hollywood,” Cline told me. “This is punk filmmaking.”
I wasn't sure what that meant. I thought I knew what it meant. I should have asked.
“The film has a fifteen-minute running time,” she said. “We’ll have it in the can after four or five weekends of shooting.”
“Weekends?” I asked.
“All we need are a few days of your time,” she said.
“We’re entering Detachment in the Clay Street Independent Film Festival,” Rod said. “Movie critics up and down the West Coast will be there.”
“And you’re our secret weapon,” Cline said.
“Weekends?” I said. “That doesn’t sound too bad. How many lines do I have to memorize?”
Cline smiled an impatient smile. “You don’t need to memorize lines. It’s not a stage play. For each scene, we’ll go over the lines ahead of time. When you’re ready, we’ll start the camera and roll until it’s right. Then we move on to the next scene.”
A door opened in the hallway. A young woman emerged and snapped off the light behind her. She crossed the living room in bare feet, walking on toes the way young women so easily do.
She was tall and lithe and Nordic in hair and face. She wore a baby-blue T-shirt of thin cotton and cut-off denim shorts. The white strands of the cut denim contrasted vibrantly with her coffee-and-cream skin. What little clothes she wore hung on her effortlessly. Cline rose from the couch as she approached. I did the same out of awe.
“Melody, this is your co-star,” Cline said to her.
“Well,” Melody said to me. “Looks like you’re pre-approved.”
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“Pre-approved,” Melody said. “As in, you don’t need to audition. Cline’s already sold on you.”
I looked helplessly to Cline, unsure what to make of this.
“I was being hasty,” Cline said to Melody. “I need to see some interplay before I make the final decision.”
Cline peered up at me. I stood a good ten or twelve inches over her. Melody was nearer to my height.
“I do think we found our man, though,” she said with a confident smile.
Cline directed me and Melody to the futon couch. Melody reached under the wood frame and produced a feathered copy of a script. Sitting cross-legged on the lumpy cushion, she hunched over the script in her lap and began studying it. Cline and Rod murmured film tech to each other and arranged the equipment on the other side of the room. I sat opposite Melody, as far from her as possible, feeling helpless and awkward and out-of-place.
“Can I ask a question?” I said, breaking up the silence. “Why are there cameras? I thought this was an audition.”
“We need to see how you look on film,” Cline said. “The eye deceives.”
“Filming is ninety percent prep work,” Rod said, staring through a camera eyepiece. “Big productions will spend hours or even days prepping for eight seconds of shot film.”
“Don’t be nervous,” Melody said to me.
“Aren’t you?”
“Of course,” she said with confidence. “Butterflies and sweaty palms are part of the job.”
“You’ve done this before?”
She smiled and tilted her head five degrees to the side. “I’m an acting major at the New Film & Theatre School.”
“You go there with Cline?” And Rod, I supposed.
“That’s how we met. This is my second film.”
“You're a professional, then.” I was teasing a little.
“I’ve done commercial work since I was six years old,” she said without a trace of arrogance in her voice. She spoke matter-of-factly the entire time. “You never get used to being in front of the camera, trust me.”
“Six years old?” I said.
“Believe it or not, I was Little Miss San Luis Obispo,” she said with a light laugh. “The local paper sold advertising by photographing me at the businesses downtown. You know, Little Miss SLO Town at the ice cream parlor, Little Miss SLO Town shopping for new shoes.” She exhaled a bit of nostalgia. “It was a crazy year.”
“And now you're an actor.”
“I’m planning on moving to Los Angeles next year.” The confidence in her voice cracked. “I think I have a good chance. It's hard work, you know. What about you? Cline tells me this is your first acting job. What do you do for real?”
I did not want to tell her I was a computer programmer. A lifetime of experience informed me it would only distance her from me.
“I’m just curious how movies are made," I said.
“Sausages and politics,” she said.
"Excuse me?"
"Learning how films are made," she said. "Sausage and politics."
I wanted to confess on that couch exactly how nervous and skeptical I was of the entire project. I had dared myself to do this—I dared myself on the bus ride all the way across town—and I assured myself I would leave the moment it smelled wrong. Cline’s repeated temptations of auditioning with a pretty young girl only cemented my paranoia. Until I saw the pretty young girl and got a whiff of her hair and skin. Her cool vibrancy was melting.
Cline approached. She crouched on one knee between us. She motioned for us to scoot closer.
“This first scene is Wilmer coming home,” she said to Melody. “You’re greeting him at the door. He’s had a long day at work. You’re the first smiling face he’s seen all day.”
“Who’s Wilmer?” I asked.
“You are,” Cline said with an impatience I’d come to expect from her. “Melody is Angelica. Don’t worry about names. We’ll get to them later.”
“Should we block this?” Melody asked, starting to rise from the couch.
“Not yet,” Cline said. “Let’s do the scene right here, sitting down.”
Rod stared into a computer screen and ordered us to move closer until we were both in frame. Cline produced a single sheet of paper. It was from the first scene of the movie. My lines were highlighted in yellow. Melody and I faced each other on the couch. She remained cross-legged with her script in her lap. I sat twisted at the waist t
o face her. Melody’s bent knees pressed into my doughy gut and thighs.
The physicality embarrassed me. I grew hot in the face. I could only imagine how repulsed she was by my lumpy form. Melody had spent a lifetime in front of cameras. Mankind invented cameras for women like her. Thirty-five-millimeter cameras rolled off assembly lines in China and Vietnam and Mexico to photograph people like Melody. The camera was never intended for photographing someone who looked like me. A man who looked like me should be bankrolling the film, producing the film, not starring in the film. The paradox of the Hollywood industry is that it’s owned and operated by men who would never put men like themselves in front of the camera.
After we'd recited our lines at each other, Cline said, “Let’s try it again standing up. Let’s do it like Wilmer just walked through the front door.”
I was shocked by the intimacy acting demands. Cline and Rod kept the camera lens tight on us. In turn, Melody and I were tight against each other. I’d not been this intimate with a woman in years. Melody didn’t even realize we were being intimate. She looked bored waiting for Cline’s next instruction. The warm-day walk up Bernal Hill had left me ripe. I prayed Melody’s faint floral scent—a fragrance? Her shampoo?—was masking my unholy rawness. I’d brushed my teeth before leaving my apartment. Nerves made my mouth taste milky and sour, and my breath probably reeked of it.
The lines emerged wooden from my mouth. After more camera and microphone adjustments, Cline ordered us to read from the top again. I’d not seen the script until that moment, and I still only had the one page. Reading the lines cold, I had little time to consider what the film was portraying, or what the story was leading towards. The relationship Cline had written seemed utterly unrealistic. I was ten years Melody’s senior. The lines being fed to me made me feel another two decades older. Wilmer worked some kind of office job, I gathered. He did not seem particularly warm to Angelica when he arrived home.
“Cut,” Cline called out. Once again, I was confused, since I understood we were not filming these scenes.
Next, Cline asked us to rehearse a scene in the bedroom. She motioned for us to return to the couch. Confused, I pointed across the room to a door leading to a bedroom beyond.
“We’ll do the scene here,” Cline said to me.
She and Rod removed the dowels holding the futon couch in an upright position. The back and the seat unfolded and went flat in a single pivoting motion. She and Rod hurriedly unfurled blankets and threw on pillows to make the bed. I tried to assist and got snapped at by Cline.
“Just—” She held a palm at me, eyes closed. “Just stand right there,” she said.
Finished, she told Melody to lie across the bed. Melody passively complied with Cline’s every order. Once again, Cline and Rod stared at the computer screen while adjusting the camera. They called out requests to Melody, who shifted and slid about the bed, sometimes by mere centimeters, to get the shot Cline demanded.
“Now you on top,” Cline told me.
“On top of what?” I said.
“On top of her,” she said. She corrected herself. “Get on the bed beside her. You’ll be leaning over her neck and chest.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s okay,” Melody said quietly from the bed. “I’ll be fine.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “What are you asking of me here?”
“The scene is you two in bed,” Cline said.
“Doing what?”
“Making love,” Cline said.
“Hold on—”
“It’s not porn,” Cline said. “You’ll be kissing her neck while she reads her lines.” She added, “I need to see the chemistry between you two.”
“Don’t worry,” Melody said. She was flat on her back, looking up at me from the pillows. “There’s nothing tawdry going on.”
I shook my head. “I agreed to an audition. I’m here to read lines.”
“This is the audition,” Cline said, raising her voice. “We need to see how it looks on film. So far, it’s going great. Look—”
Cline emerged from the thicket of video equipment. She stood between me and Melody. She spoke with a lowered voice.
“Melody is a professional actor,” Cline told me. “This is what actors do. It’s all in the service of drawing in the audience and making them a part of the scene.”
I retreated from the futon bed. I headed toward the landing at the top of the stairs. Cline shadowed my retreat.
"I don't think so," I said over my shoulders.
“You think this is taboo?” she said.
“It doesn’t feel right.”
“You’re not hurting her. You’re not violating her space. You have permission.”
“Maybe I don’t like being touched,” I said quietly.
She needed a moment to process it. An amused grin crept across her face.
“You don’t want her to touch you?”
“It’s not funny.” I stood at the top of the staircase with one hand on the banister, hunched over and head down. I’d dared myself into this den. Now I dared myself to leave.
She coughed a single skeptical laugh. “Don’t you want to—you think she—what are you saying?” She grew serious. “Are you married?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you gay?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you a virgin?”
“No,” I said, annoyed.
She coughed another single skeptical laugh. “I told you at the bar that you’d be auditioning with a pretty young girl.”
“You didn’t tell me I would be climbing in bed with her.”
“What the hell did you think I was saying?” Cline exploded. “Haven’t you ever heard of the casting couch?”
I’d assured myself I could bail out of the audition for any reason. I’d found my reason. I took a single step down the stairs.
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Cline said. “When was the last time a woman as beautiful as this even batted an eyelash at you?”
“I’m sorry,” I called to Rod, although I had no reason to apologize to him. “I’m sorry,” I called to Melody, who was sitting on the edge of the futon watching the argument. “Good luck with the film.”
“Hold on,” Melody said softly.
Barefooted, she padded over to Cline and me. She held out her right hand for me to take. Dumbly, I shook my head.
“This is all make-believe.” She was looking me in the eyes. “Do you know that?”
“Something doesn’t feel right,” I said. I said it loudly, to God, to myself, to the world.
“When was the last time you were hugged?” Melody asked me. “When was the last time you were touched?” She ran the back of her fingers down my cheek. “When was the last time you ate a meal with someone other than yourself?”
Her caress made my face sizzle. The burning sensation was the purple bruise and black eye I’d received out at Lands End—in 2038, not 2010.
I was in a rabbithole. This was me, today, C.F. Naroy, Nexternet security consultant, auditioning for the role of Wilmer in Detachment. It was 2038 and it was 2010 and time and memory blended like saltpeter and sulfur make gunpowder. Melody never said those words: "When was the last time you were touched? The last time you ate a meal with someone other than yourself?" Those were my words placed in the software construct's mouth. The rabbithole was feeding my past insecurities back to me, amplified a thousandfold.
Past and present collapsed. With it went my willpower. I allowed Melody to take me by the hand. She led me to the futon bed. Cline returned to directing us from behind the camera. With the lens focused on me—with my face and hands and tongue filling the frame—I pawed and massaged and licked Melody’s neck and chest and face while she mouthed the lines she’d seemingly memorized on the spot. We rehearsed with my shirt off, we rehearsed with her in a bikini top, camera set up to make her seem nude. Cline left the cameras rolling between readings. The cameras recorded us in bed telling jokes. They film
ed us talking about the uncharacteristic warm spell going through San Francisco that week. Melody explained to me the differences between fashion modeling and acting. Her role model was Glenn Close, but she wanted to star in action movies like Sigourney Weaver.
Afterwards, we put on our clothes and rehearsed lines in the kitchen. Cline stood behind the serving bar and called out emotions, images, visuals, even colors to elicit different readings of the same lines. Acting began to feel natural to me. I felt at ease before the camera. With each take, Melody seemed looser around me. The final reading was of me coming home. We blocked the shot this time, me entering through the door while Melody waited for me in an apron drying her hands in a dishtowel.
Camera inches from our faces, I took her by the waist and tugged her in to me. “You’re the best, sweetheart,” I whispered, and we kissed long and passionately.
Cline called Cut! and we separated. Melody’s inviting eyes disappeared within a moment. Cline called Action! and Melody was mesmerized by my presence. Cline called Cut! and Melody returned to appearing bored, checking her phone for messages.
Around me, film equipment began to be dismantled and packed up. Cline discussed in a hushed back-and-forth some matter with Rod. Melody, without a word to me, told Cline to give her a call and left the apartment with a backpack slung over her shoulders.
One moment, I was a hot-air balloon sailing over the Pacific, the next, a hole had ripped in the fabric and I was plummeting to the ice-cold water below. I felt stripped down. I felt ashamed. Shame was pressing down on me, but no one was pressing it. I excused myself to use the bathroom. No one was listening to me, Cline and Rod busy dismantling the equipment. I pushed through the door and into an absurdly brightly-lit bathroom.
The fat yellow sun bore down upon me. Twenty feet below ran Andover Street, each side lined with parked cars and gingko trees brimming with leaves. I swiveled around. I stood before a door at the top of a narrow flight of stairs ascending from the sidewalk. It was the duplex on Bernal Heights. It was Wednesday, October 11 of 2010, a silver Wednesday.
The enormity of my mistake rushed me all at once. The audition was the worst decision I’d ever made. I’d just destroyed my life. In months, I would be the most famous clown on the planet. Soon after, I would be arrested and plea-bargain my way out of prison. The fate of the next twenty-eight years of my life–twenty-eight shitty, shitty years—was stored on a digital video recorder upstairs. Cline claimed she’d not filmed us, but of course she had, and she would use that footage to create Detachment.