by Sharon
As slowly as he had given her the details of his body, he withdrew himself from her, and she stood breathing shakily, a captive in the circle of arms that no longer held her, but again were braced casually against the trailer. In the universe behind her closed eyes, she was aware of a curious instability in her legs. She fought it and her own sense of inner upheaval. Anger was rare for her, but she experienced it now, as in a dream, enveloping but vague.
He studied her, giving her time, and then spoke to her in a soft tone. "What was that like for you?"
She didn't answer him, so he waited, breathing in her scent and the fragrance of the cosmetics they had used so sparingly on her, a sophisticated scent out of place on the lilylike face below him.
When she opened her eyes, it was to show him the flame of her anger. Ducking under his arm, she walked quickly away from him with her hands clasped behind, her skirt floating like a bright wing over the bricks.
When he came beside her, she tilted her head to look at him, and the force with which she met his eyes surprised him. "You play with something that's holy with no more care than a child uses in playing with a toy."
"Not something holy. Something human. I wasn't playing. You were entitled to a warning. But that's probably the only one I'm going to give you."
Her flesh stung. She couldn't withdraw her gaze from his eyes, with their hints of disillusionment and remote kindness. "I see. You do a thing genteelly or not at all."
"Some variation of that." His expression was uncovered briefly, and what she saw beneath was stark, like pain but more bleak, as though he were investing her words with a lifetime of dark irony visible only to him. Torn from her anger, unstrung to her soul, she glimpsed the shadow of his sadness and its twisted complexity, the infinite path of empty mirrors reflecting one another into the void he saw within. He thinks he's going to hurt me. He expects to. And he's deeply sorry.
Then, in one of the abrupt shifts of subject that never failed to disconcert and fascinate her, he said, "If I were you, I wouldn't feel shy about the dress. You're very well covered up. You do have a body under all that?"
His question was absurd, the tone conveying a kind of sincere concern, as if it had just occurred to him that she might not, and the only conscientious thing to do was inquire.
Instead of running in the opposite direction as fast as her legs could carry her, which she knew she ought to do, she answered him, "I suppose I do. A body of sorts."
"Stomach? Thighs?"
"The whole catalog," she interrupted quickly.
He laid a hand on her shoulder and leaned closer. "Perfect. Where can I place an order?" .
Warm sunshine struck her hot cheeks. They'd stepped from the area where the trailers lay like a mass of giant larvae and came into the crowded yard in front of the house where Alan had told her they would film today.
People swarmed around them, busy in strange ways, moving confidently and seemingly without direction through complex tasks that had no meaning for her. A young man in a baseball cap and frayed sneakers handed Wilde a cluttered clipboard that he studied and handed back. "Fine. But I still don't like the set. It's too"—glancing at the housefront—"well composed. Loosen it up a little. And get rid of that damned soldier marionette. Who put that thing in? The characters in this film have just come twelve hundred miles in a wagon. They didn't have room for four-foot puppets."
"Max likes the puppet." The young man looked nervous. "He says it has a surrealist thrust."
"Well, thrust it back whence it came. We're not submitting this to Cannes, so there's no point in trying to foist artsy conceits on an unsuspecting populace."
Though it was given with a smile, Wilde's order produced a flurry of response on the set. Strolling forward a couple of feet to watch the changes, his interest seemed so focused there that Susan didn't immediately realize his next words were directed at her.
"You didn't answer. What was that like for you?"
The voice compelled her like a gentle hand. She leaned on the white picket fence ringing the yard and pressed against it, wanting to force the tension from her body. Not looking at him, she said, "It-was like being fed after years of starvation. But it was like being fed something bitter."
Of all things he had expected, it was not this insightful, articulate reply. Her words so touched his heart that he had to force himself to remember he didn't have one. What hidden thoughts were there still behind that expressive face? He had been seeing her in two dimensions, as a caricature, an extravagant beauty whom he would have given ten years from his life to possess. And here she was, being more, much more: intricate and appealing and fervent. A new emotion touched him, one that was incomprehensible and strangely unpleasant, and he tried to grasp it and hold on, but it slipped from him like sand running through his fingers, and he was left with the simple, unsatisfied shell of his need.
"They tell me you wouldn't look at yourself in the mirror this morning! Is that a sin too?"
"I don't know. Perhaps not, if you don't do it much. My mother doesn't care for them, though, so we never had one in our house. I believe she thinks they are… not modest."
"What about the English clothes you are wearing? Evil stuff, yes?"
She sighed. "I've gone against so many of our ways by working for you that I can't keep count. I had no idea—"
"That I was going to introduce you to debauchery beyond your wildest dreams?" Long, sensitive fingers gently applied themselves to her nape, the motion raking her spine with tiny shivers. "I've scared you, haven't I? I'm sorry." One finger traced a bewitching path up and down the hollow there. His voice seduced. "Poor lady. So tender. Never fear. You have only to survive this for six weeks."
"Six weeks!" She spun around to face him, her skirt billowing vigorously against his legs.
"Six weeks is the time we need to film."
"Oh, no, no—"
"Susan, Katelyn must have told you—"
She interrupted desperately. "She told me you were making a movie that was two hours long. Naturally, I knew it would take longer than two hours to complete, but I thought sure that in a day or two…"
"My dear beloved girl, one can hardly make a thirty-second commercial spot for television in a day or two. We're working with a hundred and twenty pages of script, of which we can shoot three, maybe four pages a day. For -every foot of film I can use, I have to toss nine. Six weeks, Amish."
"But that's so long! Mr. Wilde… It would be impossible. Please understand. I can't."
Can't. Bad word, Susan. She was distraught, her brown eyes revealing the panic of a trapped animal, and he knew that if there was a speck of residual decency left in him he would let her go.
"I'm afraid it's too late to reconsider," he said. "You've signed a contract with us, and I'm sure you understand that's a legally binding agreement."
The color had disappeared from her cheeks, and she appeared aghast, as though she expected him to throw her in jail any minute, which revealed eloquently how little she knew about the legal system. Katelyn could have had her out of the contract in less time than it took to say lex non script a.
Distress made her feel sticky and coldly sick to her stomach. Six weeks of lying to her neighbors and freindschaft. Six weeks of exhausting intimacy with English strangers and the affront of an unaccustomed culture. Six weeks of Alan Wilde. And she wanted it so much. She wanted it.
Ten minutes later Brian Randall, the young man with the clipboard, caught up with Max near the camera-dolly tracks. "Did you ask Wilde about the marionette?"
"Yeah."
"Well? What did the great man say?"
"He said—and I quote—'Get thee to a growlery.'"
Staring at Max's retreating back, Brian shoved his baseball cap to the back of his head and said, "Huh?"
Chapter 8
Alan's goal was to capture the love story with rich sweetness, to film it as though it were a beloved classic.
Polly Bates stands on the porch of a white clapboard house w
ith a gabled roof. The building, lavishly trimmed with gingerbread, is painted white. A discreet sign by the door announces that it is an inn. Polly looks at the yard in front of her. It is littered with wooden chests and deerskin-covered trunks. The lids of many of the chests are open; some are half-unpacked to reveal silk-fringed lamps, a silver tea service, a gilt canary cage, delicate china. Rough men pass by the yard. Some guffaw at the sight of the refined housewares. Others sneer. A few direct sly glances at Polly, who does her best to ignore them. The clothing of the men and the tools they carry suggest they are loggers; the sad condition of the dirt track beyond the yard hints at just how primitive the village beyond may be. The household clutter in the chests and trunks suddenly seems poignantly out of place.
Tired but determined, Polly walks down the porch steps and over to a trunk. She kneels to withdraw a leather-bound law book. Ferns ring the base of the porch. The rich green of the plants is a perfect cinematic backdrop for Polly's beauty. The loose spiral of an escaped curl caresses the corner of her lips. She smiles slightly, as if it tickles her.
A man stops. He is young and darkly handsome, but hard experience has lent sharp edges to his features, and has cast mistrust into blue eyes that refract light like broken crystals. The hardness fades as he watches her. Longing takes its place.
She looks up into his eyes for the first time. The lens frames the two of them lovingly as the world fall to silence around them. The film captures one flawless moment… and the essence of a theatrical tradition many centuries old.
Polly's father calls to her from a third-story window. The spell is broken. She is flustered, and runs inside to join him. When she returns to the innyard, the young man has gone, but a spray of cherry blossoms rests on the books she was unpacking.
Tavern life has its disadvantages for Polly. She must avoid the barroom, where men brawl and drink. She appears startled when she has to step over a lolling drunk on the stairs to her third-floor bedchamber. Stagecoaches arrive at midnight, disturbing her sleep. When she complains to the proprietress that the linens are unclean, Polly is roundly informed that only the most gentlemanly patrons have used the napkins before her, and as for the towels, each one had been used by more than a hundred people since last washed and she is the first to complain.
She wakes to the soft light of morning. Against the rumpled bedclothes, she is a vision of loveliness, with dark tumbled curls and immaculate ivory flesh. On the pillow beside her she discovers a plume of cherry blossoms. Her surprise grows into alarm. She searches the room, her Victorian night-robe flowing like cream around her body. She is alone, the door locked from the inside. But lace curtains flutter around her open window. She is drawn there to gaze outward at the sky, saturated with the rosy blush of dawn. Unthinkingly, she touches the blossom to her cheek. The two fragile shades blend. A single petal slips innocently between her breathlessly parted lips.
After the scene played during that evening's rushes, Ben Rose made a joke of fanning himself vigorously, and one of the production assistants playfully dumped a cup of crushed ice over his own head. Wilde went alone to his suite to stand in front of an open window and let the cool night wind brush his face. He tasted the honey of a single petal on his tongue.
Polly wanders through a forest filled with luminous blue mist that swirls to the tops of the trees that tower above her. Drops of water cling to her dark curls and shimmer like jewels.
She enters a clearing beside a mill where a moss-hung wheel turns slowly in the silvery current of a stream. A small wooden footbridge arcs over the stream.- Sound effects sweeten the voice of the water as Polly steps onto the bridge, whose entrance is draped with the fronds of a weeping willow.
The mist parts before her. Suddenly she sees him standing across the bridge, watching her. Him. The young man she has seen once in front of the inn. She is unsettled— she seems even to be considering flight, her face dramatically pale above the black velvet of the cloak she pulls protectively closer about her. Yet something she can't understand holds her as he makes his slow approach.
He is quite close before tension overcomes her, and she stands poised, like a wild creature assessing some unknown peril.
He speaks. "Would you like a kitten?"
Her face shows clearly this is not what she was expecting. "Have you one?"
He lifts a hand to show her the tiny black kitten curled into the bend of his arm. "We have too many cats in our stable. Some might go hungry if we don't get rid of a few of them." He looks down at the kitten. "She's healthy. Would you like her?"
She nods.
He starts to lift the kitten, which doesn't appreciate being disturbed. Its back arcs like a Halloween cat's, and it spits furiously. "Damn," he says.
"Cut."
He starts to lift the kitten, but its small claws unfold, minute needles that cling like burrs to his jacket. Polly begins to laugh.
"Cut!"
He lifts the kitten and passes it into Polly's hands. She carries it to her cheek, where it fluffs itself softly against her clear skin.
The young man says, "My name is—"
She finishes for him. "Burke. I know. They talk about you at the inn."
"What do they say?"
"That your father is the richest man in the county. And that…"
It's clear that she can't continue, so he supplies the words for her. "That my mother was an Indian sorceress."
"Yes."
"Do you believe it?"
Polly is an educated young woman. She considers herself enlightened, beyond superstition. "Of course not." She looks straight into his eyes. Her own show the wealth of her spirit and strength. "But they also say you gamble and drink liquor."
"Which you do believe." The screen fills with her upturned face, and his, with its enigmatic smile, as he says, "I could change."
The offer shocks her with its implied promise of a future for them. This is going much too fast for her. She begins to walk quickly away. He joins her, keeping pace.
"Did you—" She cannot ask the question. Was it he who came into her bedroom and left cherry blossoms on her pillow while she slept? She begins to run, her cape flaring in a black wave behind her. This time he makes no move to follow.
After ten feet or so she swings around to walk back toward him, meeting his eyes.
"Thank you for the kitten." Again she turns to run, and vanishes like a sprite into the mist.
He stares after her, then looks downward. The camera slowly travels lower, to his pocket, where there is a stem of cherry blossoms.
She was not what Alan had anticipated.
She had no sense of "making an impression" so he had to learn her layer by layer, like uncovering an overwrapped gift.
The first day had been murderously difficult. Putting Susan behind cameras had made him feel as though he were raping her. The lights might have been emitting deadly secret rays, and the cameras might have been leaching out her soul, to judge from the way she stared at them. The technicians and actors intimidated her. And her trust in him had ebbed. He was afraid she was going to bolt. She was under too much pressure… the newness, the strangeness of it all, and part of it had come from him.
He used perceptiveness with her that he didn't know he possessed; he was gentle as he had never been. But he could not give her what she needed most—strength.
Then had come the surprise. Susan knew more about strength than he could have taught her in a lifetime. As Ben Rose said, it almost seemed as if the soundness of her mind couldn't tolerate the despair of chaos. By that evening, she had begun to heal. He saw the first evidence after the hours of careful tutoring when she had interrupted him, bending forward to sweep up a handful of grass and toss it at him like fragrant confetti.
"You don't have to tell me a thousand times," she had said, smiling at him like a street urchin, overpowering him with the surprise of it. "I can do it."
The funny thing was, she could. He had expected to pull an adequate performance from her through intui
tion, camera angles, and technique. He could have made any woman attractive on film; but a face like Susan's he could turn into a myth made flesh—which was more than enough for his purposes. He hadn't guessed that on film she would go far beyond it.
By the complex quirks of nature, she was wonderful on film. He had explained acting to her as a pretending game, not as an interpretive art. In some mysterious way, then it seemed natural to her. And, after he showed her a camera, took it apart, let her touch it, and detailed the way it worked, she began to lose her fear. In fact, after several days she was less self-conscious in front of a camera than anyone he'd ever worked with. She'd grown up without photographs and without physical vanity, so the cruel tricks of light and focus meant nothing to her.
Off camera, too, she was more than he'd imagined: livelier, more impetuous. Joyous, one cast member had called her.
She'd said, "I can do it." And she did it beautifully.
The other thing she did beautifully was physically complement her costar. 'David Thorne was playing Adam Burke. Watching them together was like seeing black swans pair in a mythical courtship rite.
In his mid-twenties, David's face had matured from the androgynous beauty of his teen years. He was the bad boy of a renowned British theatrical family, and had been brought up spouting Chekhov from his cradle. With one sibling in the Royal Shakespeare Company and another producing plays in Paris, David had taken off for Hong Kong, where he had made a series of remarkably bad Kung Fu movies that had made him both a strong international cult figure and rich enough to free-base. But he was worth the small fortune Wilde was paying him, because he was the best. He could dissect emotion into a thousand subtle shades, and by the slight alteration of facial muscles' become plain or sensual. He could shed blackness over the lightest phrase or project warmth that could raise the temperature of a theater ten degrees.