The Starlet

by Mary McNamara

  “Mercy,” Angie said, hurrying over, “you stop this right now. You heard what Ben said. The light is going, they need to shoot the scene right now, so you just have to pull it together . . . Here,” she said, fishing in her purse and pulling out an inhaler. “This will make you feel better. You’re all woozy or something. Did you eat breakfast?”

  “No, I didn’t eat breakfast, because I’m not allowed to eat breakfast, because you told me yesterday that my ass looked fat in the black pants. Hi, Gabe,” she said, fitting herself more securely against him, lifting his arm so it was encircling her. “Do you think my ass looks fat?”

  “I never answer questions like that,” Gabe said, his voice only slightly less tense than his arm. “My sense of self-preservation is far too strong.”

  “Well, maybe you should eat something,” Angie said, still trying to fit the inhaler in Mercy’s hand. “Why don’t you take a few minutes, you could even take five minutes and relax. Find your focus. I’ll tell the others you’ll be ready. In five minutes.”

  “Angie,” Steve murmured, drawing her away. “Give her some room. Go take a walk, have a cup of tea, or better yet, why not go back to the villa? Mercy and I need to do a little visualization, I think.”

  “You will not. Because you’re fired, too. I saw what you did, Mother. We’re shooting a love scene,” she said, turning to Gabe and Juliette. “And I’m supposed to strip, I’m washing myself and I strip, and then Michael, or Roberto, comes in behind me and touches me and, well, you know. Sort of like that scene in that Amish movie with Harrison Ford. So we’re doing it, and I look up.” She pushed herself away from Gabe, her hands gesturing wildly, her gown all but falling from her body. “And there’s my mother. Taking pictures.”

  “I always document your work, honey,” Angie said, reaching over to pull up the shoulders of the shift so that Mercy’s breasts were not exposed.

  “With your cell phone? Please. Me and O’Connor liplocked, his hands on my tits.” She slapped her mother’s hands away, her eyes flashing crazy green. “And what the fuck do you care if Gabe sees my breasts, or Juliette, or anyone, for that matter? Or is the problem that they’re not paying for the privilege? Where were you going to sell those photos anyway? To Perez or TMZ? Or your new favorite spot, old deadanddying.com?” Angie blanched, and Mercy laughed. “You didn’t think I knew about that, did you?”

  “Mercy,” Angie said, and suddenly her tone was desperate.

  “I saw what else was there, you know,” Mercy said, her voice reaching high and cracking. “Have you ever seen this website, Juliette? It’s very special. Marilyn Monroe’s pubic hair and bits of Heath Ledger’s sheets, autopsy reports and toxicology reports and everybody’s health records. Lloyd’s there, too, isn’t he, Mom? A lovely photo, taken by someone who clearly thought the world of him . . .”

  “Mercy!”

  “Someone had their trusty cell phone out the night he died. Wonder who that was. I saw you, Mother, coming out of his room. I know what you were doing. Oh, my God.” Mercy moaned, swayed, and turned white. Gabe and Steve grabbed her under each arm, as she tried to catch her breath and steady herself. “Give me the fucking inhaler, Mother, and go back to the villa,” she said finally, her voice low and trembling. “Or I swear to God I will shut this fucking movie down, if only for the sheer pleasure of making sure you never make another penny off of me again.”

  “Go, Angie,” Usher said, wading in, his voice kind, his face a study in unflappable sympathy. “It will be fine. We’ll sort things out. You’re just exhausted, aren’t you, Mercy? You know what you need? Carbohydrates. I say to hell with all this slimming nonsense, you’re a gorgeous young woman, let’s get a biscuit or two in you and you’ll be right as rain.” Putting his arm around her waist, Usher began leading her away from the castle, toward a small craft services tent, but Mercy refused to let go of Gabe’s hand. “All right, Gabriel, will you join us? And Juliette as well? Lovely. Deep breaths, Mercy, my girl, deep steady breaths. No need to get yourself so excited over nothing. You and your mother just need a little break, that’s all. Nothing surprising about that. Everybody’s been working so hard, and you trying to make big changes in your life on top of that. Now, here we are, sitting down, and let’s see about getting that tea, then.”

  Juliette had to admit Usher was handling the situation beautifully. Mercy sat and Angie went and by the time Michael and Golonski appeared, their faces twin studies of dread and preemptive anger, Mercy was eating a sandwich, while Usher lectured mildly on the importance of creating a clean and healthy chemistry in the body and brain. “And that means eating more than once a week and drinking water, not all this bloody green tea everyone keeps pouring into themselves, which is liquid caffeine, i.e., a diuretic. May keep you slim, but only by dehydration. In the Little Book, I devote several chapters to this very thing and I think they are actually helpful. I remember the time Richard—Gere, that is—and I went to visit the Dalai Lama . . .”

  Gabe was scowling, but only slightly; from where she was sitting, Juliette could see that, under the table, Mercy was resting her hand on his thigh as a person might rest her hand on the head of a faithful retriever.

  “Everything okay?” Michael said, his eyes going first to Juliette. Almost imperceptibly she shook her head. Though dashing in his ruffled white shirt and knee-high leather boots, he looked old in the late morning light, the skin around his eyes puffy and dark, his mouth pulled small and tight.

  “It’s fine,” Mercy said flatly, not looking up from her sandwich. “I’m sorry I wrecked the shot.”

  O’Connor looked down at the back of Mercy’s head, and the look on his face was so gentle and kind that Juliette’s heart thudded in her chest. Crouching beside his costar, Michael put his hand in the middle of her bare shoulders. “Sweetheart,” he said softly, “I know how hard these scenes can be, and I know that you and Lloyd had something you and I do not and that things are not going the way you expected.” Mercy’s eyes filled with tears, several dripped onto her plate, but still she did not move, and neither did O’Connor. “If you meant what you said, if you really don’t think you can do the scene, then I’ll back you, Ben’ll back you.” Juliette glanced up at the director standing behind them and almost laughed out loud, so far was Ben from agreeing with this statement. “We’ll figure something out.” Michael shifted himself into a more comfortable crouch. “It’s a movie, princess. Just a movie. Nothing worth losing your head about, certainly nothing worth crying about.” O’Connor brought his face close to hers and stroked the top of her head. “You’re doing great. You are amazingly great. So you just tell us what you need to make this work. Because we are totally in this thing together.” He kissed her temple like a father kissing a beloved daughter and gave her hair another stroke. “All right?”

  Mercy nodded, still not looking at him. He waited a beat, then, with a sigh and a pat on her shoulder, he raised himself from his crouch and turned to go. But before he could, Mercy grabbed his hand, and with one fluid motion pulled herself up out of the chair, wrapped one hand around the back of Michael’s neck, pulled his face down, and kissed him. Softly at first, then more deeply, passionately.

  “No,” she said when she finally pulled away into the vacuum of shock that now surrounded her. “I think we should leave the scene as it is. And we better get through it now. While the light’s still with us.” And, throwing down the napkin she still held in one hand, she walked purposefully back toward the set with a confused but visibly relieved Golonski right on her heels.

  After a moment of stunned silence, Gabriel began to laugh. Juliette, who had half risen from her seat when Mercy made her move, straightened her back but was otherwise rooted to the spot, staring at O’Connor, who was staring after Mercy. He pressed his fingers against his lips and turned slowly to Juliette.

  “Tell me,” he said. “How ridiculous did that look? On a scale of one to ten. No, don’t tell me. I’ll wait for the critics to tell me.” Without another word or
look, he stalked off.

  “What are you laughing at?” Juliette asked her cousin, slightly nauseated by a rush of mixed emotions.

  “That girl,” Gabe said, shaking his head in admiration. “She’s the most amazing person I have ever met.”

  The rest of the shoot went remarkably well, or at least that’s what everyone said at dinner when the entire crew gathered in remarkably good spirits. The set designer had solved some sort of huge problem which Juliette did not quite understand, ditto the best boy. Michael was holding court with Golonski and Joseph and was in fine movie star form; at one point, he called over a trio of Australian tourists to join them. Mercy seemed more like herself than she had in days. Not that anyone honestly knew what that self was like. She sat at the end of one of the long tables on the patio, talking earnestly to Gabe as if they were the only two people present, and actually eating something, neither herbal supplements nor inhaler in sight.

  When Juliette sent a questioning glance at Usher, he raised his palms in a gesture of pleased bafflement. As the interns brought out plates of salami, then rigatoni in wild boar sauce, then chunks of lamb grilled in wine and rosemary, genial conversation rose and fell along the tables, bursting now and then in friendly argument or splatters of laughter. Only Angie was strangely silent, sitting three tables over from her daughter and communing mostly with a bottle, then two bottles, of white wine.

  “It does feel odd that I’m finally shooting in Italy and I’m playing a painter,” O’Connor was saying. “I mean, the cop is more like it, but it seems a shame I made The Undisturbed and The Second Sicilian back in the States, with Santa Barbara standing in for Sicily. How much fun would it be to do a mob picture here in the old country?”

  “Terrific if you want to perpetrate all those wonderful stereotypes of a don in every piazza that Americans have gorged themselves on all these years,” Gabe said.

  “Well, they may be stereotypes,” Michael said, “but you can’t deny that organized crime exists. There was just recently that big piece in the New Yorker about the new drug state here, and that journalist who just wrote the book on the Mafia had to leave the country, right? I’m trying to option that book; that’s a great story.”

  “I’m not saying it doesn’t exist,” Gabe said, “any more than I would say it doesn’t exist in Los Angeles or New York. But the assumption that Italy is run by the mob, and that the mob is somehow cool and romantic, that just makes Americans look stupid.”

  “I’m sorry if I have somehow contributed to the declining IQ of our country,” O’Connor said. “Though I did win an Oscar for The Second Sicilian . . .”

  “That’s just my point,” Gabe said. “Those kind of movies always get a lot of attention because Americans have this weird romantic relationship with ‘organized crime,’ not to mention the basic assumption that Italy, or Europe, or Mexico, for that matter, are somehow intrinsically more corrupt. There are rarely any American mobster movies, you’ll notice. They’re always Italian-American, or Irish-American or Russian, always tied to a decadent European tradition.”

  “Oh, you’re just taking a position, Gabe,” Mercy said, with a teasing intimacy that startled Juliette. “You can’t argue that what is essentially an international crime problem doesn’t have international roots, and some people argue that crime fiction is the only thing keeping certain cultural traditions alive anymore. And anyway, the mobster is just another version of the master criminal. We’d be lost without him. Though it would be nice,” she added with a conspiratorial smile, “if the him were a her once in a while. What do you think, Joseph?” She raised her voice slightly. “Why don’t you write a mobster movie for me? Since Michael wouldn’t let me be in The Second Sicilian.”

  She flashed her wicked smile at O’Connor, who, like everyone else at the table, was clearly dumbstruck by Mercy’s sudden excursion into literary theory—Juliette had to wonder who she had lifted that little speech from. But he quickly caught himself, and raised a glass in acknowledgment.

  “So,” Mercy continued, “stop trying to make Michael mad when everyone is in a good mood for once. Tell us the story of the Giotto instead. You tell it better than Juliette and it is my favorite story ever. Seriously. You should listen to this, Golonski; I swear it’s your next film.”

  Gabe was still stuck mid-rant, not quite sure how the conversation had been so neatly wrangled and, like O’Connor, a bit taken aback by Mercy’s burst of oratory. But when she offered him her most dazzling smile and the full attention of her shining golden eyes, his frown faded. For a moment Juliette could see the couple the two might become, each indulging the other’s dramatic excesses, stopping each other before things got out of hand. The couple the two might become if Mercy wasn’t such a bottomless pit of need. If she wasn’t a drunk and a drug addict. If she wasn’t a movie star.

  Juliette swallowed hard.

  With a rueful shrug and a grin that told everyone he knew he was being manipulated, Gabe complied, telling the story of the very pious Contessa Gabriella, who had funded many of Giotto’s local works and introduced him to some of the reigning families. Giotto had, in fact, often visited Cerreta and had, according to a letter from the contessa to her sister, given her a great gift of rare beauty in the Place That Only God Knows. Some family members thought this meant the artist had touched her soul. “And some,” he added with a grin, “had a more lewd interpretation.” But others, including Juliette’s father, believed he had painted a fresco for her, though there was no mention of it in any of the artist’s notes or biographies. Still, Gabe and Juliette had spent the better part of an entire summer searching the entire property for it, but it had never been found.

  Golonski was captivated, and even Carson was interested enough to look briefly away from her BlackBerry.

  “I love the image of two children alone in a ruined castle, searching for a lost masterpiece,” the director mused. “I wonder, is there any way we could include something like that in the second act?” He glanced over at Joseph, who literally writhed in anguish.

  “It wasn’t quite as romantic as that,” Gabe said. “We were hot and sweaty and we fought a lot about where to look. I don’t think anyone but Uncle Peter thought it was true; my folks just used it as bait to keep us out of their hair.”

  “I don’t see why we can’t just have that image, somehow,” said Golonski. “Maybe in a dream sequence.”

  Beside him, Joseph Andrews choked so hard O’Connor had to thump him on the back six times before he could breathe again.

  After dinner, Carson corralled Michael and Mercy into the library to “go over a few pages,” while Gabe retreated to his office, followed closely by Usher, who seemed intent on establishing a friendship if not partnership. The interns cleared the table and everyone drifted off, leaving Juliette with a very drunk and vaguely weepy Angie.

  “Oh, you don’t have to bother,” Angie snapped, when Juliette asked if she wanted some coffee or a bit more dessert. “You don’t have to bother about me. No one has to bother about me. I’m just the mother. Just the incredibly pushy, bitchy, impossible mother. Just the paid help, really. But I’m leaving tomorrow. This time I am really leaving. I’ve had it with all of them. Let my darling daughter fend for herself for the first time in her goddamn life, let the rest of them deal with her in her natural state if they think I’m the one making trouble. They don’t know what trouble is.”

  With her blond head nodding emphatically and her words sliding together as if they were moving across ice, Angie looked like a drunk in a movie. All she needed, Juliette thought, was a frowsy evening gown and a piano player. Tempted though she was to leave her there, Juliette leaned over her and put a hand under one elbow.

  “I think you should probably go on up to bed,” she said gently. “It’s late and it’s been a rather harrowing day. Everything will be fine tomorrow. These things blow over.”

  “No, it won’t,” Angie said, not budging. “We’ve come to the end of the line, Mercy and I. You have no id
ea,” she said, peering up at Juliette miserably. “She has no idea. The things I’ve done for her, the things I do for her. She isn’t normal, you know. She never was. As a baby she screamed constantly. For the first six months of her life. Constantly. She never slept. We never slept. And then she didn’t speak until she was four. Six months of shrieking followed by three and a half years of silence. She was like a ghost, that kid. She had rashes, she had food allergies, she couldn’t bear to wear long sleeves, she refused to put on socks. For years she wouldn’t wear shoes. You couldn’t get them on her feet, and if you did, she kicked them off. We had to carry her everywhere. When she finally did talk, she didn’t talk. Not like a normal kid. She just recited. She would recite everything she had heard that day. Everything. You can imagine. Then she learned how to read and she would recite everything she read. Cereal boxes and newspapers, storybooks and whatever was on the label of the cough syrup. One time we had a barbecue and she recited our tax returns.”

  At this Angie suddenly laughed, shaking her head, and Juliette laughed with her until Angie’s laughter turned to tears.

  “We took her to doctors and they told us she had a learning disability. A learning disability! She could read Shakespeare at five! Maybe it was autism, they said, or Asperger’s, or hyperactivity. Everyone suggested we medicate her, but I put my foot down. No pills for my baby.” She took a gulp of wine. “Ironic, huh? Maybe if I had medicated her then she would not be taking so many drugs now. I don’t know. Nothing any of those doctors said explained the way she was. And then one day she said she wanted to be an actress, and we thought, Oh, good, that’s a way to channel it. Because we didn’t realize, she didn’t want to be an actress—she already was an actress. That should have been the diagnosis.” Angie lit a cigarette and took a drag. “That was the disorder. She’s an actress. Everything else”—she blew a soft raspberry and waved one hand in the air—“it’s just the trappings. She’s nuts, my daughter. They’re all nuts, these people. Every. Last. One. And if they aren’t when they start, they are by the time they’re done.”