cease and desist

by stephen david hurley

  Stay calm, Cease. It’s easy to see what Francis wants tomorrow. Rex is a great seducer. I’m a virgin. They want to see me crack. Francis wants to see me melt in that hunk’s arms and when I do I’ll be left in the dust like all his other conquests. He’ll make a pass. I’ll resist. This will be drama enough as he’s gonna be pretty hard to resist. If he tries anything I’ll show him a few moves he’ll never forget…

  “My character would never allow herself to be taken in by just a handsome boy. Jeanne wants more than that. I need to show him that falling in love is easy. But the kind of love that will save the world goes a lot deeper.”

  Nina scoffs. “This is Hollywood, not history, Cease. First they want you to act like a boy. Then they want to watch you grow a dick.”

  I laugh at her rare irreverence. I hold up the scapular and then carefully place it back under my T-shirt. Nina’s my rock, but she’s not the safe harbor she once was. Over on her roll-top desk sit all those biographies of this strange character I still don’t really understand.

  What will the lovemaking do to me? It’s not that I’m afraid of having sex. But how the hell am I going to convince a million girls—who probably have mothers a lot like my Nina—that a virgin saint can fall in love?

  Nina looks across the scattered papers and says, “Your character isn’t a star-crossed lover and she’s not some little tart you just sink your teeth into.” She says it in a totally mean-spirited way that puts me on the defensive. I can feel the beat as if we’re back on stage. I can almost see the line reappear between us.

  “Why don’t you just admit it, Nina? You always wanted a leading man. You wish I were dead and he was here.” I wish I hadn’t said this. It feels like no matter how hard I try to help us both heal, there will always be a part of me picking at the scab. My Nina has beautiful cheekbones that I tell people I inherited because I refuse to admit I inherited anything from my real mother, but as she presses her fist into one of those half-domes I know she’s trying to stifle tears. I can’t stand to see my Nina cry. I know how much my saying those words must hurt her, because she never got a chance to reflect on them. She was too busy taking care of me. I want to hug her now. I want to tell her how she saved my life and helped me survive the first rounds, but all I can think of is being the last girl standing. I know that sounds selfish. Fame feels like a gorgeously wrapped present that I still hope holds all the love I can’t show in real life. I follow her gaze to the strange genealogies my Romeo collected, locked up in the armoire. I raise my hand to my mouth as if I could put the words back in because she gave me such a look of hurt…I rise and run down the shotgun hall to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and press my thumbs gently into my eyelids. I count back from ten, slowly, and curse that stupid prayer that’s been running in my head.

  “Cease, my little gem. I’m sorry. Open the door. We can have brownies then run your lines.”

  “I just need to rest my head.”

  “It’s been twenty minutes.”

  I gasp. I must’ve fallen asleep. I go back down the hall and she makes a place for me on the couch. I run to the kitchen for a sponge and wipe the brown turd I made in her beautiful rug. She takes it from my hand and puts it on the coffee table. She again makes room for me on the couch. Nina pulls the afghan over my legs and takes off my Uggs. I feel her arms around me, those spongy breasts; the worn laugh-lines of that stately face press against my cheek. She puts my head in her lap and I listen to her talk in soothing tones about my character. I can see the girl my Nina still wants me to become.

  “Before she became a saint she’d been a girl, and that’s the part of her life I want you to see as your own.”

  I look up to her proud jaw as she speaks, and I close my eyes and see a girl on the banks of Domremy, a hamlet in the Loire Valley, picking flowers with her friends. Her father teaches her how to tend the sheep, her mother teachers her how to sew. France has been torn apart by war for almost a hundred years. The English occupy towns and swear their allegiance to another crown while the deposed king of France is rumored to be a bastard. This crazy, little girl is never taught to read, ride a horse, wield a sword, yet one morning in her twelfth year the archangel Michael appears to her as she tends her father’s flock and tells her she’s been chosen to restore Dauphin Charles VII to the throne. She patiently informs her parents that she’d been chosen by God to save France. Her father thinks she’s crazy and calls the town priest. She’s captured in battle, tortured, maybe even raped by her captors. Then she’s put on trial for being a witch. She became tough as a boy to survive. Hell, tough as most of the men she fought beside, but she never lost her sense of love.

  I look up to those beautiful cheekbones as Nina goes on about my character. I can see the face of that girl on the banks of a river. But there’s another face I see. A face I dread…

  “Your Romeo loved you with all his heart. He did everything he could to help you see…to help you get this part…” Nina’s voice trails off here, as it usually does, and I’m forced to fill in the blanks. I look at the scattered pages on the coffee table. What used to be an oracle now looks like some wild animal that has invaded our home. Then I picture the scene with Rex tomorrow as I remember the line—only one of them progresses to the next round. We both turn to each other. Nina has a knack for reading my mind.

  “Your mother loved you,” Nina says as she studies the confusing shadows that make their way up the living room wall. In the silence we both know better than to inquire further. Charisma—that magic my mother wanted so badly, passed over her like a recessive gene.

  If I told you the “car accident” in Santa Monica that killed my mother and nearly me had been no accident, would you believe me? Of course not. You’d say I was just some desperate loser who wants you to vote for me, so I could be the last girl standing. And if I told you what she said before she turned the wheel…that it came right out of one of those Greek tragedies you were supposed to read in high school…you’d think I was a crazy, desperate loser…so why go there.

  The truth is a lot stranger than fiction in the House of de Menich.

  I close my eyes and try to see my mother’s face the way Nina wants me to see it; those angelic eyes—that beautiful hair and heart-shaped face. But the only face I see is the one I always see—the face of the beautiful boy she destroyed. And then, as if she really is inside my head, Nina says, “There’s no such thing as ancient bloodlines protected by God. The only curse in our family was mental illness.”

  Nina walks me down the hall and tucks me in. After I take off my pants I do a total face-plant on the pillow. I can feel sleep hit me like a blow from behind.

  “Nina? Can saints really talk to people?”

  “Of course. We rely on their intercession.” Her strong hands massage my shoulders. “Do you think Jeanne’s trying to talk to you?”

  “No.” My muscles put up their last bit of feeble resistance. “I’m not the kind of actress who gets voices in her head. But, as I was walking home, I had a moment looking up at the light when I felt I could see the whole city in her eyes.”

  “Well, there you go. Goodnight, my princess. Goodnight, my humble maid.”

  I stifle a yawn and gaze over the brownstone steps of Murray Hill bathed in a pink dawn light as we speed uptown. Yousef pulls in beside the trailers—double-parking on Park Avenue. Dreams come true. I’m actually holding up traffic on one of the most glamorous streets in the world, and no one is shouting or threatening to give me a ticket.

  Rex, the Aussie hunk, stands beside his trailer, his tree-trunk legs athwart a sea of cables, his big head hung down as if he were some action hero whose battery had died. I study the grips as they lug a monitor and video screen. The assistant director stands with Connie, the continuity lady, as they chalk up the sidewalk.

  “Rex?”

  “My fair maiden,” he says.

  “Jeanne’s not a maiden.” I shrug. “The maid—she was called the maid.”

  The humble maid from O
rleans. Not the maiden, you imbecile.

  I nod and hug him. As he lifts me off my feet, I feel I can trust him. The lovesick girls have spread rumors about him online. They’ve fallen in love with his body, his accent, the way he runs his fingers through his long, blond hair whenever he rises from another bloody victory.

  “Looks like I’m the chosen one,” he says with that weird lilt he uses whenever we leap into the past. It reminds me of all those bad Shakespeare actors who think you could only play the Bard with an affected voice. Luckily, today we’re leaping into the near future—a modern city, writhing with henchmen and spies that seem to thrive on youth in the movies. I give Rex a tight-lipped smile. He’s rugged. He’s handsome. I could fall in love with him. But it wasn’t the kind of love my character had lived.

  “Jeanne,” Francis calls from the steps of his trailer, without even looking up from his clipboard. Francis has a knack for making actors feel like pieces of meat; like I’m a nice cut of prime rib he discovered, marked down. Don’t take it personally, my agent warned. Francis doesn’t think his actors are really cattle. He just treats them like cattle.

  Francis studies Rex as he walks toward us. The hunk walks like there’s always a red carpet under his feet.

  “Jeanne. It’s time you take off your gloves,” he says.

  My gloves or my clothes?

  “Yes. I feel this scene will take me to the next level,” I say, dutifully. Francis turns to me and winks.

  A hopeful sign. Maybe he’s on my side. After all, the hunk may be beautiful but he has no stage experience. The only great review Rex ever got was from a critic who adored his chin.

  The continuity lady approaches with her clipboard and gives me the final direction for the scene. I open the secret packet. And the winner is…

  My heart trembles as I read.

  I look over Rex’s broad shoulders to the sign in the window of a truffle shop still festooned with holiday decorations. I search the caravansary of trucks that snake alongside Park Avenue’s center divide. Francis’ strict orders bar writers from the set, but I search the men and women huddled together in the cold outside the caterer’s truck.

  I see Francis talking to the sound man and wonder why he would stoop to this reality project after making a big, important film. I feel calm as I gently test each word, envisioning how Rex would probably react and how I’d counter to stay ahead of him.

  “So? Are we gonna nail this, or what?” he says.

  And then I look in Rex’s eyes and know exactly what I have to do to win. He places his hand on my shoulder and I can feel it; to him I’m not really a girl anymore, certainly not some ingénue like Juliet—but I’m not a woman, either. Just some undiscovered country he’ll be sticking his pole into like a brawny explorer. I could practically smell it on him—that killer instinct that makes some girls swoon. They call his name from wardrobe and he leaves.

  “Jeanne d’Arc to makeup… Jeanne d’Arc to makeup…” blasts over the loudspeakers. It always cracks me up to hear it, as if one of the toughest girls in history needs makeup. Three lights above the trailers flicker from red to yellow, telling all the actors they have only five minutes to prepare and find their marks.

  A good hard cry would help relieve the growing pressure in my chest, those icy fingers—that bolt of grief—but there isn’t time for that as the lights begin to flicker. I look out my trailer window and wince as a blast of light blinds me—an assistant is directing a huge mirror on top of the truck that holds the main camera.

  I feel it again. The way I felt when I looked up to the U.N. building. I glance over to the stack of books and papers; all the research I’d done—the transcripts Nina had helped me collect; the biographies and anecdotes people I never met had sent—that reassured me after years of playing make-believe roles to escape my real life that I’d found someone—a strong girl with a big heart—who I could become.

  Someone out there might be trying to help me…

  I feel my chest grow warm, the way it felt when I got one of my brother’s hall-of-fame hugs—a gentle wave rolling out to my hands and feet and returning to my heart. For Rex to win he’ll need to seduce me, get my secret, then dump me.

  Not gonna happen, Mister Stud.

  I look out the window at two grips holding up a giant reflector as Rex raises his arms and does a victory dance.

  I’ve got a few tricks of my own.

  All the words about love Rex would probably gloss over as those perfect almond-shaped eyes bore down on me and those lips closed in.

  It’s simple, really. Rex wants that secret passion we girls keep locked away, that secret we all want to lose some day with the right boy. Jeanne protected her virginity. It was the source of all her power.

  The kind of love we’d lost the words for…I need to find the words before it slipped away. The kind of love that doesn’t run on pickup lines. The kind of love that doesn’t crave bigger breasts or a smaller nose…the kind of love that can be set in motion with a single kiss.

  My jaw tightens. I close my eyes. I’m not the type of actress who gets voices in her head. But I could hear it.

  Soft, not seductive—almost a whisper, as if the voice was too weak to speak louder.

  I open the door of my trailer and call Rex in with a wink I know he’ll understand. “Rex, have you ever considered all the time we’ve been nursing each other’s wounds on the battlefield that someday we’d have to do more than stanch the bleeding and round second base. Falling in love with any girl is easy. Staying in love—now, that’s hard.”

  “I should probably take a breath mint.” I glance over the layers of clothes on my cot, the mirror above my little desk that holds a picture of my Nina and my brother.

  “Rex. All these battlefields that we must visit in the past and the future are just metaphors too, metaphors for our bodies and the horrible things we do to them in the name of love.”

  I give an exasperated sigh and decide talking about metaphors is too much for Rex. But if I come off as a prude the scene would die. I’d be called boring or worse by the girls and boys at home. I remember Nina’s advice. It’s not about the lovemaking. It’s about what the lovemaking would do to me…I’ll have to give Rex what he wants. At least, up to a point. Up to that point where everyone could see we just weren’t right for each other.

  “Rex, we need to practice.” I can tell by his lovesick nod that he’ll be playing the scene in that same brutish way he played most of the other girls in previous rounds.

  I take him by the hand over to my cot.

  “Take your sweater off.”

  We kiss. Rex has the hardest abs I’ve ever felt in my life. I wonder what he imagines to endure all those crunches or squats or whatever the hell boys do to get this hard—D-cups probably, jiggling wildly—not the flimsy C’s I was pressing into him. I reach under his shirt with my thumb.

  Just one of those cobblestones in the right place…

  I feel myself falling back into the groans of pleasure and release, all the emotions I knew well from when I was told to sink my teeth into a boy’s neck. The love of conquest, of blood and bulging veins, the kind of love that turned boys like Rex into studs. But I need to see how he’s going to react when I begin to back off. His lips are soft, and pressing against his chest makes me feel as if I really could let go, but when I steal a glance I see the bravura that tells me he couldn’t care less about my secrets.

  Rex is doing what all heartthrobs do. Smoldering. I wonder if maybe there’s a school for smoldering that Rex attended down under in Melbourne where the boys go to flex their pecs and preen.

  He pops a breath mint and offers me one.

  “It’s time to put on my armor,” he says. He gives me a mean smirk that says he won’t be taking no for an answer when it comes time for me to put out.

  “I’m not going to let you conquer me like a peak,” I tell him. I can feel my feet flex as if they’re being drilled into the trailer floor. I can feel myself slipping into charact
er, putting on my armor.

  “I got it. Just be sure not to block me when Francis moves in for a close-up.”

  He gropes my breasts and gives me a defiant look. I can feel the anger rise in my chest like a clenched fist.

  You picked the wrong girl, mister stud.

  A knock on the door. It’s Connie the continuity lady, with a watch and a pair of motorcycle boots I’d worn in the previous scene.

  The yellow lights flicker on an electronic billboard that announces each scene—meaning all the actors are in place and the action is about to begin when Rex places his hands on my hips and gives me a bump with his crotch that forces me backward.

  “Relax, honey. You’re about to lose it with a boy who really knows how to make a girl feel good.” That mean smirk, again; it gives me the creeps—but, also a weird déjà vu. (Nina, standing over me with the transcript from a witness who heard a man taunt the real Jeanne about her virginity. An hour later he’d fallen into the Viene River and drowned.) It feels as if the real Jeanne is standing next to me, warning me to be careful.

  “I guess you really want to win,” I say thinly.

  “Of course. Coming in second is like kissing your sister.”

  Did he really just say that? I study his face for a clue that he’s in on some sick secret. But the hunk looks clueless. I look at the faces of the crew. Were they all in on some sick joke? I take a long, slow, deep breath just as the lights go green. Francis has his head buried behind the lens, but the assistant director is giving me a telling smirk. I feel my fists ball into furious knots. I wonder what they’ll say when I break the hunk’s nose.

  “Action.”

  I fall in line behind Rex as we move through a crowd of people, one of whom is a spy following us. We hit our marks in front of a truffle shop. After a slow glance in the window I turn and look up to Rex.

  “I wish this war were over. I wish we could just walk off into the sunset.” He kisses me. It’s slow and then I feel the turn coming, that slow orbit that I make around him before I dip in for another kiss. His thumb gently caresses my breast, those expert fingers moving over me like the hands of a safecracker.