by Sharon
"Alan, we have a fortune invested in Carrie's costumes," she said. "I mean—thirteen changes, Alan. Carrie is a size ten on top, a size six on the bottom. If you could just hire a girl with something like those proportions…"
The director as father figure. It was part of his responsibility to issue meaningless reassurances, so he did that while wondering silently what size Susan was. She looked like she could buy her clothes in the little boy's department.
Ben Rose was more interesting prey. Wilde made the announcement to him with careful simplicity.
"I want to hire Susan Peachey to replace Carrie." Nice. Dispassionate. As in, I want a Perrier with lime. I want to risk multiple millions of studio dollars on an inhibited Amish girl with no acting experience.,
Ben had enough innocence left in him to laugh. When he realized this was no joke, his brow tightened briefly like an angry jack-o'-lantern's before he relaxed into the authority figure that kept flamboyant young directors in line. He might be wearing a brown checked shirt, but Wilde could almost see the older man growing a smoking jacket and ascot, adopting the suave disgruntlement of a men's-club resident disturbed over his evening paper. Ben started with logic, his tone rational, if a little irritated.
Wilde settled back in his chair with a cigarillo in his mouth, listening with patience, letting his eyes communicate to Ben the futility of opposing him on casting Susan. Ben's face crumbled into frustration, then into fear and bullying, and finally into good, solid wrath. "Damn it, Wilde, quit your James Dean act and discipline your damned hormones. Where do you get the nerve to expect us to risk blowing this picture just to make sure you get laid?"
A roomful of bickering people fell into an interested hush. Here it was: the secrets of the director's libido set up for display like sculpture on a pedestal in a gallery. Inside him, some remnant of sensitivity flinched. Outside, his expression remained flawlessly neutral.
He gave them nothing to fuel their arguments, and the vacuum of his poise caused embarrassed moisture to gather in Ben's eyes. Wilde prolonged the moment, waiting it out. Silence was one of the more practical forms of aggression. He could see Ben's determination beginning to wilt as the producer realized he had gone too far.
The older man crushed out his cigarette. He paced to the window and back.
"Can she act?" Ben snapped out finally, fighting for dignity.
: "I don't know." Wilde focused on the small gesture that rid his cheroot of ash, wondering if he ever would be able to give up smoking completely. It was the symbolic capsule of every pleasure—quickly over, dissolving into a smear of carbon and smoke. It was good to remember. He wondered what Susan knew about pleasure. Anything at all? "She doesn't have to act. She can be herself."
Ben looked grim. "I suppose it would be heresy to suggest that herself might not have the kernel of an idea how to bring a character alive for the camera?"
So that was it. Wilde recognized the producer's defeat, the reduction of reasoned argument to baiting. They would give him what he wanted. Always. Ultimately, they'd have let him cast an elephant in the part if they'd thought it would make money for them. The native wisdom was to "give Wilde his head." His string of commercial successes had left his financiers with an almost superstitious reluctance to thwart his creative decisions. Susan was beautiful, and Wilde wanted her. It was that simple. Fortunately, these things had nothing to do with sanity.
In midafternoon that same day Alan left the set in the hands of his parade of assistants and went to find Susan. He reached the tiny schoolhouse in time to see the children departing. Susan's children. There was a clear-eyed charm about them, the irresistible freshness of rural childhood. Smiling and unspoiled, isolated from the nether world of Saturday-morning cartoons, video games, and rock music, they piled out of the schoolhouse door, looking curiously sweet in their old-fashioned clothes. At the bend in the road he parked the Jaguar, watching the laughing schoolchildren gather among their engaging cluster of transportation, riding away through the long grass in many directions like expanding star points—boys on horseback with dangling shoelaces, four bonneted little girls bouncing in a pony cart, a brother and sister riding tandem and without a saddle on a mule, their bare toes trailing pink and dusty against the animal's rough belly. Barefoot. Was it that warm today? Strange to realize that he'd given up noticing the weather unless it annoyed him. What other major forces of nature had he stopped factoring into his life?
The children disappeared, leaving winsome, vulnerable images with Kim. He turned the car into a graveled drive. The school, and a stable behind, sat like a pair of toy houses on the rise of a wooded hillside. A truck tire hanging from a gnarled apple tree was the only play equipment in the wide mowed yard, but Wilde picked out the hopscotch patterns drawn in the dirt and the worn angles of a baseball diamond. Two sheds near the tree line confused him until he recognized with amusement that they must be outhouses.
Susan appeared in the frame of a front window, her eyes questioning. The sound of the car's motor must have drawn her. Again a shock made his senses jump. So beautiful. So damned beautiful. Like some overromantic establishing shot from a neo-Dickensian costume drama, she stood quite still, her posture perfect, her screen-goddess eyes lavish with curiosity. She gave him a tentative wave, and then watched openly as he crossed the yard. An honest response. No games, then? You need more armor, Susan. Caution was the one thing she was likely to learn at his hands. A painful thought, that he had the potential to harm this fragile person, but he held on to the feeling, letting himself experience it, letting it run like hot rain through his awareness. Pain, guilt, anything was better than the saline sterility of his inner life. The continued numbness had become unbearable.
Two scarred wooden steps led upward to a double screen door, its rusted mesh belled outward by small eager hands. The tired spring creaked a welcome.
Stepping inside was like entering a time warp. Half-forgotten incense of childhood assailed him—chalk dust, crayon, and strong hand soap. Diffuse light pearled through the windows, a honeyed softness glancing off varnished wood on the desks and floor, tinting the room in sepia hues so that everything looked as though it were trapped in an old photograph. He made himself see detail: the black-iron wood stove, low coat hooks, colorful alphabet letters and animal pictures ringing the walls, an aged set of World Book encyclopedias, and her desk, clustered with papers, an outdated globe, three apples, blue and gold wild flowers in a glass. The chamber was richly evocative for him, as though he had been here before, many times. But of course he never had, and he wondered if the one-room schoolhouse was a thought picture etched in the collective American memory.
Susan had remained by the window, too fascinated by him to think about moving. He had returned, as he'd promised, and this morning had really happened. With a suddenness that startled her, he stopped looking around the room and smiled directly at her.
"Hello, Amish."
There was a brief temptation to be affronted, but something in his knowledgeable smile would not allow it. She had a funny feeling inside, like a tickle, that made her smile back and say, "Hello, English."
As before, she had the sensation that he was too much to fathom at one time. Yet she could barely glimpse that thought before he spoke.
"Why did you say 'opportunist' was today's word?"
How quickly ideas came to him. Perhaps it tired him, the imaginative flow of his mind, like gazing too long into a bright flame. It must give him no quiet.
"Each day I try to learn a new word."
His pliant mouth crooked at the corners in a smile. His eyes beguiled. "You must know a lot of words, then." He relaxed against her desk, possessing it, his expression attentive. "How would you describe me?"
She had no understanding of how he achieved it, or even if the effect was deliberate, but she felt a lifting sensation in her chest, the curl of a response to him as a man. Her gaze made an involuntary traverse of his body, where supple muscles gave exquisite form to the jeans and swea
ter she had seen on him this morning. Since then, she had been shaky inside, filled with half-formed fleeting decisions and questions. Now he was here and very real and she was becoming preoccupied with the worry that he might touch her again. It amazed her that his smile could have such power to bite and enthrall at once.
"It would be difficult… I've never known anyone like you, so interested in everything. I would say you seem to be a man who thinks well of himself." She watched the barb increase in his smile. "And that you're accustomed to having power over others… and you're very clever, more clever than most people. I should think that would be difficult, because you'd often be frustrated, or disappointed in those around you."
He flashed on an errant childhood memory of his father, the face scarred with fatigue and envy. Kid, there are luxury cars with sticker prices lower than your IQ. He remembered his own smothered impatience, the thing he had long since learned to control. Control. It was an area where he excelled, except that the threads of urgent desire spinning within him as he looked at Susan had no fiber that resembled control. She was much more awake to him than he'd assumed. And he wanted that, needed it; to wake her up, all over, all through her. "An interesting diagnosis," he said.
She watched him walk around the room touching things—the stove, the wall poster painted by the children that read "The Lord Is My Shepherd," a bat, glove, and ball on a low shelf—as though it helped him see them better.
"Conceit and disillusionment." His voice was light, enchantingly playful, as he ran firm, graceful fingers along the binding of a prayer book. "Can the patient be saved, doctor?"
The little-understood shaking inside her grew worse. "He can if he wills it so."
"Very practical. Though I'm afraid it's not what I had in mind." You're so tender and earnest, darling. The more he saw her, the more imaginary she seemed, like a fairy come to dance in his palm. You need to be protected from me. But there's no one to do that, love. No one. "Have you thought over my offer?"
"Oh, yes. I could hardly think of anything else. But if you could listen for a few minutes, there are some things I must tell you."
"Tell me, then."
It was a new experience, someone trying to talk him out of starring her in one of his films. She had no experience. She wouldn't be able to understand what he wanted of her. She had never even been to a movie. She didn't quite understand what they were. Was it like television? She had seen television once, when she had visited her sister in the hospital after a tonsillectomy. Her sister's roommate had a television, and Susan had seen a story about a street where people lived with a giant yellow bird and an angry monster whose home was a garbage can. Were movies different from that? She sat on a table as she spoke, her fingers curled around the edge beside her thighs, her expression sincere, the soft stretch of skin beneath her cheekbones carrying the misty flush of her hesitant excitement. Like many of the children, she was barefoot. Not quite touching the floor, her feet were long, straight, and lovely, the flesh clear and ivory under the deep blue of her skirt. Her delicate ankles and the vague outline of her slim legs under the fabric were sweetly stirring. She was as much myth to him as woman, exotic Americana. Becky Thatcher grown up. For all its fanatic excess, her culture was far from charmless. The notes pinned to her bulletin board had amused ,him.
The boys—Aaron and Elijah—may go barefooted today if they wish.
Mrs. Nisley
Our children have my permission to go barefoot today if it warms up like it did yest.
Fanny
These people have made themselves so damned innocent.
He answered her questions with care, subtly encouraging her confidences, taking care not to threaten her, assuring her that he wouldn't hire her if he had any concern that she wasn't able to handle everything he would require of her.
"Is it decent, Mr. Wilde?"
"Decent?"
Susan saw that he said the word almost as though he didn't know what it meant. He had been scanning her corkboard as he spoke to her, his attention casual, focused, it seemed to her, in a dozen directions at once. But her question drew his full attention back to her.
"We don't go so much for stories like yours, full of things that are not. Monsters, animals that talk." She remembered the Pooh Bear squabble. "Well, mostly no animals that talk. It isn't the kind of thing we like." She tried to search his bright, unfathomable eyes for answers. "In Exodus it says, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath.' We don't allow ourselves to be photographed, you see. Not at all. Even our books have no images of people in them. Would you care to look?"
She slid off the table, bringing him a reading book from her desk, and held it open with unsteady fingers, showing him, as though it might have some power to convince him, to make her world steady once more. "It's a good way, don't you think? To do what the Bible says?"
So Becky Thatcher grows up and begins to doubt. Why don't you understand that I make a lousy Father Confessor, darling? We can hardly let a little thing like your moral integrity interfere with the things I want, can we? He studied the illustrations, line drawings of a barn and pasture, a horse and buggy on a dirt lane, a bare kitchen. No people. No things that are not, no animals that talk. No Dr. Seuss, no Ezra Jack Keats, no Maurice Sendak. No photographs anywhere of Susan in diapers, riding her first bike, dressed for Halloween. He noted the soft heat of anger in his chest, liking it.
A seed-company calendar on the wall held a pedestrian photograph of a maple coining into leaf, tie lifted the cardboard frame, gathering her attention to it.
"Is this evil?"
"You don't think so." Again there was an implied question in her words.
"No more than a reflection of a puddle. If it's a photograph, why are you allowed to have it?"
"It's on a useful thing, a calendar. It's not so bad to have a bit of that, just for pretty. The old farmers used to say it like this: chust for pretty."
He smiled. "That's all a movie is, a string of pictures hooked together so they appear to move. It's not so bad; just the same as this calendar."
"I can't figure out why you think I'd suit."
The way he was smiling also was an enigma to her. He said, "Don't worry about it. You're exactly what I need. What did you mean when you asked me if the movie was decent?"
"You must have 'decent' out there in California."
"I suspect we have a different version of 'decent.'"
"Is there anything in it to make me ashamed?"
"I'm not sure. What sorts of things make you ashamed?"
She became embarrassed, the more so for his bright glance of inquiry. After a moment he laughed softly and said, "I see." His smile was burning and lazy. "Is this your first sin?"
She couldn't imagine why that irritated her, but it did. "Of course not."
"No?" He pretended to be aghast.
She thought. Then, with a grin, "When I was little, I dared my brother to lick a flyswatter."
"Did he do it?"
"You bet. It was a triple dog dare."
Then he said peacefully, "I triple-dog-dare you to accept my offer."
Her smile faded. Her thoughts whispered with the shock that she was really considering what he asked.
He came toward her, and she felt her heart compress in uneasy excitement with each step he took. He spread his arms, resting a hand on either side of her knees along, the edge of the desk. She was inches from that engaging mouth, his voice intruding softly into her blank, chilly alarm.
"You want to do it," he said, letting the force of his will breathe conviction through her numb confusion. "I know you do. You're too honest to deny it, Susan. You want it. I promise there's nothing to make you afraid. Work with me. And I'll keep you safe."
It seemed like a long time before she felt herself nod. Filling up inside with the horror and wonder of what she was doing, she absorbed the light, seductive impact of his hand as it cupped the unders
ide of her jaw.
"Don't look so worried, Amish." His wayward mouth held the trace of a self-mocking smile. "You might discover you like being a sinner."
Looking back on her conversation with Alan Wilde, Susan recognized two things: First, she'd never expected the devil to show up at her doorstep in dungarees, with wonderful eyes and a hypnotic smile. Secondly, she was going to be in his movie, although she knew it was wrong and ridiculous. She was going to do it, and then it would be over, and she could give the money to Rachel. So much money. She could hardly wrap her mind around the sum of it. For Rachel it would mean rest from the killing pace of college by day, working by night.
She had to do it.
An understanding of Alan Wilde for sure was hard to come by. He found her a curiosity, that much she knew, and she suspected he meant to give her some small task as one might do to employ a child, to give himself time to study her. It ought to offend her, she supposed, but how could it when she saw he had an irrepressible interest in all things? Rachel was like that, full of wonder, and Susan couldn't bring herself to believe there was anything guilty in that.
Do you like Alan Wilde, Lord?
Confirmation bathed her, soothing, bringing love and clean feelings.
But then, you love everyone, don't you?
Amused confirmation.
Is he a sinner, Lord?
Confirmation.
A bad one?
Confirmation. Then, Stay close, Susan.
I'll try.
Again the love and confirmation. I know you'll try.
Chapter 6
Susan reached her folks' farm that night in the deep dusk. She could see a star through the blades of her dad's windmill. They had lights on in the house, and in the barn, and there was something especially cheery and inviting about a lit building this time of day. She liked the way dim light came out the dusty barn windows onto the cobble of smooth stones on the gravel drive and its fringe of sweet clover. She could smell sorghum cookies baking in the kitchen and fresh starch from the linens swaying on the wash line.