by Sharon
Prickles of sensation continued to shiver through her limbs. "It comes all at once."
He touched her face. "It's been building for so many weeks, we can uncover it quickly."
"What you mean is, you know how to uncover it quickly."
"Yes," he said quietly.
Hardly thinking, not thinking at all, she came back into his arms, holding on, her cheek pressed against his rapid heartbeat. She whispered fiercely, "This is crazy."
"No. Everything else is crazy. This is the only tiling that makes sense."
Walking back to the farm beneath the first sprinkle of starlight in the animated cluster of her family, she found herself looking upward, searching out the little star that rode the northern sky above the Swan.
Alan's car departed the Hostetler farm, but stopped partway down the country lane and backed into the farm driveway, where he spoke out of the window to Luke.
"Are you really going to cook that bunny?"
"Well… the Zooks'll cook him."
"Let them eat cake. I'll buy him."
The image had the power to make Susan smile all evening, of Alan, worldly and discriminating, holding the brown, long-eared rabbit, rubbing the tip of one long finger over its nose.
Past bedtime she sat alone, balanced on her porch railing, her arms around the big square oak corner pillar, leaning her face into the cool wood. A big, old moon was on a slow rise. It glowed on her bare toes, rimmed her arms in white luster, and made shiny reflections in the dark windows. Down in the marsh, the bullfrogs kept up their ticklish-belly bass, like the distant plucking of wide red rubber bands. Minty resins from the spruce she'd planted with John made the air a bouquet.
Home. Her home. She'd never wanted anything more. Never before.
Lord, twenty-five years I pray to you, lead me not into temptation. And now this.
A breeze moved through the grass in quizzical whispers. Am I leading now, Susan, or are you?
She smiled in acknowledgment, and then the smile faded and a memory tore at her, instant, sharp, of Alan's body coming against hers. Each hard plane, each warm sinew came alive again down the front of her, gripping her with agonizing need. She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the pillar, her body aching.
Chapter 15
Something is terribly wrong.
It is night. Polly searches through a cranberry bog, searches for her husband. Around her, twisted vegetation takes on an iridescent blue glow in the mist. Her cape flares behind her. Her hair is dark and streaming. Will-o'-the-wisps ignite near her skirts, throwing light on her face, which is white with fear… and stunningly, heartbreakingly beautiful.
The scene had the quality of a hallucination, the poetry of an Arthur Rackham drawing for a fairy tale.
Filmed in a large shed near the hotel, the scene was the product of crude but dramatic special effects—a fog machine, sodium lights. .Alan had placed Susan on a treadmill in front of a huge screen onto which footage of fantastic foliage had been projected from the rear. And he'd found it easy to set a good performance from Susan. She was frightened by the equipment, the exhausting repetition.
It was not so simple, however, for Alan to help her with the scene that came next—Polly seeing her husband turn into a monster.
Alan had directed this sequence of sophisticated special effects back in California at the Lucasfilm facility. In it David's body decayed in a slow, horrific explosion from which the monster emerged like a giant larva, metamorphosing by degrees into its new form. In his time, Alan had seen some brilliant cinematic wizardry, but this was in a class by itself. During a screening of it for the crew the night before, everyone who had been eating stopped abruptly. One of the cameramen had dropped his head between his knees, and a grip had run from the room.
"Maybe it's a bit much," Alan had said to his visual-effects supervisor. And they'd both grinned.
Susan's job was to show such horror, such terror, that she established the credibility of the transformation scene in the viewer's mind.
Alan had allowed David on the set—a bad decision, probably—but David had done such a superb job with Susan so far that it seemed appropriate. He hadn't quite anticipated the intensity that David would bring to this sequence. There were reasons for it, of course. Scenes like this could make a movie or ruin it. At present it wouldn't even get into the movie. Susan, reacting to nothing but a yardstick held up to give her a focus point and David's coaching, had dissolved into helpless laughter in every take.
They took a short break in late afternoon while Susan was having her makeup restored for the fourth time. Consulting briefly with Tim from the second unit, Wilde was interrupted by David, who snapped, "It isn't coming, Alan."
"It will."
"Not at this rate. Her head's in the wrong place. You've got to show her the footage of the transformation so she has some idea of what she's supposed to be reacting to."
"David, that isn't pretty stuff, and this is the lady who hasn't even paid a visit to 'Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.' It might end up having a terrible impact on her. Anyway, we've already suggested it to her and she says emphatically that she doesn't want to see it."
"Make her."
Wilde felt a strong academic curiosity about how fully his internal recoil expressed itself outwardly. "No."
"It's her bloody professional responsibility to look at it."
"She isn't a bloody professional."
"Alan, maybe you haven't realized what you've been putting in the can. This is going to be an incredible picture once you finish massaging it together in editing. It's going to do for fantasy what Gone with the Wind did for the Civil War. Let's don't fade on the home stretch because you've let your personal appetite cloud your judgment."
His patience kicked into third gear. David needed Susan's performance to make himself look good. Perfectly understandable. The bigger the picture threatened to be, the greater the panic. Again understandable., The personal reference he let slide. David was prone to that sort of thing.
Alan had no sense of making a mistake when he put his hand on David's shoulder and summoned up what Joan called his father-figure stance.
"I'll make it work, David. It's taking her a little time to give us what we want, but I never thought it wouldn't. Don't bring your frustration into this. Take off, have some fun. Leave Polly to me."
Distracted by a quick conference over lighting, keeping his finger on the pulse of production in a mosaic of areas, he was vaguely aware that David had gone back to Susan and was talking to her, making explanations. She was listening intelligently, nodding often. Her voice, with its neat sibilants and friendly intonation, came to him across the noisy clatter and conversation on the set.
"It's no use. I can't be afraid of a yardstick."
Speaking to Tim, his gaze strayed reflexively to Susan. He saw David take her hand, turn up the small palm, and strike her hard there with the yardstick.
"Are you afraid of it now?" David asked.
She had not cried out. Her eyes were open and incredulous, then irritated. "No."
He struck her again. "Now?"
Alan couldn't even feel himself moving; he experienced a sensation like flight: his body high and light, suspended. He didn't know he was going to hit David, didn't feel the pressure of the impact, only saw David fly backward, trying for a fraction of a second to find his balance. The actor seemed to realize it was impossible and then abandoned himself to the momentum, expertly lax, tumbling for what seemed like a long time. A chair fell, a lamp. Crew members were turning, staring. Some obviously hadn't seen David strike Susan and were finding it difficult to believe that the director had just punched out the leading man.
David ended the fall in a roll and came to his feet, wild with fury. Everyone within reach who wasn't frozen with surprise launched forward to stop him.
"David, use your head. Not here…"
"Enough, already. Are you both nuts?"
Joan said, sounding scared, trying to humor him, "Da
vid, we all know you could kill him, but please don't. Can you imagine what it would take to replace him? We'd go another week off schedule."
Wilde could see. the others were looking to him, expecting even now that he would pull it all together, snatching calm and certainty from chaos. But his mind continued to dissociate from the act, the emotion that had provoked it. He was detached and languorous, as if he'd barely waked from a long sleep.
David, shedding restraint, had to bring his breath under control to speak. "You consummate maniac. It isn't my fault you've spent your life in some kind of flagellant's coma. I've had it, do you understand? Don't act out with me because someone fed you cleaning fluid to make you cry in a movie when you were a kid. "
To Susan, watching, the air had a terrible weight.
Silence came, the silence within a silence of an empty room, made violent by David's erratic breathing. Nothing so formed as thought came to her, only a desperate distaste, because she couldn't understand David's words. They were some English insult with images unknown to her. Then she looked at Alan. And she knew the insult had not been random. It had struck at the soul, caused deep agony in a brilliant human being who valued above all things the privacy of his spirit.
Later she would learn the story wasn't a secret, that it had, in fact, appeared in a major newsweekly. Though no one had ever discussed it with Alan, there wasn't anyone in the room who hadn't heard it—repeated it, in fact.
None of this she knew, but she could feel the guilt and the embarrassment. The air became stale with it. There was only that, and her crushing sense of Alan's isolation. The whole world might have withdrawn from him, he seemed that alone, his face shorn of feeling, and she had the sense of him by himself in some vast space, on the endless reaches of a deserted planet. She wanted to go to him and touch him, but the sphere he built around himself had already been so violated that she held back, sick with hurting.
Seconds passed. The haze seemed to leave Alan's eyes. "It wasn't cleaning fluid," he said in that mild way he had, as if it were something that needed to be said. And then he stood there, as if he didn't know what to do next.
"Alan?" Ben Rose stepped closer, his exasperated expression imperfectly concealing his deep affection and concern. The tension in his face heightened when Alan turned slightly to face him. "For God's sake, Alan, go take a break. Just… take a break for a while, will you?"
After a short pause Alan nodded. Susan watched him half-turn, this time toward her. He smiled gently at her. His expression carried a faint hint of apology and something else, an inscrutable emotion that was too fragile to be named. Though she couldn't name it, it took her breath away.
He said softly, "Are you all right?"
"Yes."
In the same disturbingly passionless tone he spoke to David. "Don't hurt her again! Do you understand? Nothing here is worth that."
Then he walked off the set. She stared at the open doorway after he went through it. The edge of her gaze caught Joan. The red-haired woman stood to the side, gazing sightlessly after Alan, her posture composed, one arm loose at her side, the other crossing her chest in a horizontal bar. The skin over her high-boned cheeks looked ashen.
There was a numb pause, and then Ben Rose rounded on David. "You're an uncivilized son of a bitch and I don't care if you walk the picture."
"I'm tired of pretending I don't know what's happening here," he said simply. He looked at Susan. "Well, Ben, look at her face now. You may not like my methods, but never say they don't work. Let's film."
And because in this world time meant money and money was all, they did.
David disappeared before they finished, and Susan had to seek him out. She knew more than she had at first, whom to ask to find his entourage, then whom in the entourage to ask.
David had gone to his luxurious suite, which rambled over the full upper story of the main guest house. There were hints, strong ones, that she shouldn't penetrate the stronghold.
She walked in anyway and found him half-reclining on a canework silk couch, with the curtains drawn over the late-afternoon sunlight. He had one heel braced on a vast exquisite carpet from the Orient, the other leg sharply bent at the knee. His rough-textured black shirt was sleeveless. One bare arm rested against his thigh, his fist clenched, the graceful sinews rigid. Rubber tubing strangled the youthful flesh of his forearm. He was injecting something into a vein in his wrist with a hypodermic needle.
She might have made a sound, she wasn't sure, or he might simply have sensed her presence. He looked up at her, his eyes widening.
"Of all the damn things," he murmured, emptying the needle, withdrawing it. His eyelids clamped down. He set his teeth and gasped out, "In a minute." Pushing his shoulders back into the cushions, he lay prone, one foot flat on the rug.
The ornately cut cheekbones seemed more sharply defined. Once, his breath became uneasy and he restlessly arched his back, dragging up his shirt impatiently, uncovering his chest. One of his hands remained limp against the carpet's subdued sheen, compulsively clasping the syringe, his thumb lazily caressing the plastic barrel.
He turned his head slowly, studying her, then said thickly, "If you'd looked the way you do right now for the camera, I wouldn't have had to hurt you."
The indistinct focus of his eyes brightened with amusement. He opened his hand around the syringe, offering it. "I ought to do it for you. Then you'd understand how good it is."
He continued to search her eyes. After an extended time, he sat up, using the strength of his arms, dropping the syringe on a glass side table, shaking his hand before he recaptured her with his shrouded gaze.
"Come in. There's no need for you to stand huddled by the door. I'll try not to eat you. I can see you're good and harrowed, but it's too late for either of us to do anything about that now." He paused. "You do understand what you're seeing?"
She had come another foot or two into the room, grasping the back of a chair with moist, shaking fingers. "You've… put something into your blood."
"Synthetic euphoria. Tell Alan I've allowed you to see what you just saw and he may feel compelled to drive a fist into the other side of my jaw. You should have knocked."
"I know that now. I'm not in the way of it. We don't—"
"Don't what?"
"Have doors that need knocking on. Not in daylight."
"Admirable," he continued to regard her with half-opened eyes. "I suppose you've come to ask me about Alan."
"Yes."
"No one would talk to you, would they? His friends are too discreet. The others know you're close to him. They don't want it to get back that they were setting themselves up as experts on his joyous childhood." He'd been pulling off his shirt over his head while he spoke, the shapely muscles taut, rippling with small tremors. "I'm not especially disposed to elaborate myself."
"Why aren't you?"
"He wouldn't want you to know. He doesn't seem to recognize his early existence as part of himself. He's disowned it. Too maudlin. Or maybe just too crazy for others to come to terms with. I don't know. How much do you want me to tell you?"
"Enough to understand."
"I owe you that, I suppose." He rubbed his face in the folds of the black shirt and emerged with reddened eyes. "Sit down. There's no reason to look so distraught. The one thing you're feeling bad about happened years ago; the other isn't the tragedy you're innocently interpreting it to be. You've heard about the Oscar that found its way into Alan's pocket."
She sat stiffly. "That's some kind of tribute, isn't it?"
"Yes. Some kind of tribute." Even though his words were slurred, the dryness of his tone came through clearly.
"Dash showed me the movie."
"To gently clue you in, I imagine. It was an important picture for its time. Hot young director. A couple of aging stars. Floundering studio. A lot of people needed the film. Alan's old man needed it too. He'd run into debt getting Alan the right kind of exposure. They started fuming. He'd already done five pictures, s
o it wasn't anything new for him. Alan .was fabulous. The script was fabulous. Word of mouth on the rushes was sensational. Alan was totally unlike' any child anyone had ever worked with. He had incredible personal charm, immense poise, creative maturity beyond his years. Did everything he was told the first time he was told to do it. Never showed he was tired. Never complained. He was nine and the tutors were giving him college-level work. Great expectations were building around this kid. He was going to sell the film that would make Empire Studios solvent. All right. You look mystified. Where did I lose you?"
"How old did you say he was?"
"Nine years old."
"He was only a little boy!"
"He wasn't a little boy. He was the little boy. Physically arresting, and he could act. Then comes the big scene. Alan is supposed to find Dash dying, then breaks down. But he can't. The kid has probably never cried in his life. He's too self-contained. They try everything to get the kid to cry. He can't do it. They experiment with rewrites where Alan doesn't have to cry. The film falls flat. They need this scene. Okay, says the director. He doesn't cry— he's off the picture. He'll cry, says Alan's father. He hauls Alan off alone, and when they come back, Alan has no color in his face. He'll give you what you want, his dad says. And damn, does he ever. Then the rumors start. A year later there was another picture, another scene with emotion, another rumor. He'd had this pet, some kind of a pet Dash had given him. Then he didn't have it anymore. One version has it that his parents destroyed it. The other story is that there were only threats, and that when he made a charity appearance at an orphanage a couple of days later, he gave it away. Too dangerous to keep living things around his parents. There were other episodes."
She was silent so long that he reclined onto the couch and lapsed into a dreamlike state that was not sleep, making sporadic aimless movements.
"Was there no one to intervene?" she asked.