And then she’d as much as told him he was at fault for paying her way out of the joint. Not to mention all the other women who’d been arrested with her.
It was true that Martin didn’t fully approve of the way the motion picture studios had begun giving payoffs to the coppers in order to let some of their actors’ antics slide. Still and all, Christina would be languishing in that wretched place yet if he hadn’t bailed her out. And she might have had to go back to it if someone from Peerless hadn’t greased the wheels of the law with a considerable amount of money. In many ways, Martin was glad he didn’t usually have to have anything to do with that aspect of the business. All he wanted to do was make pictures.
But Christina was out of the clink and safe now. She and her damned, pigheaded grandmother. And she’d never have to go back to the awful place again.
He wished he could drive her and her grandmother back to Indio—or drive Christina back and leave Mrs. Mayhew in Los Angeles—but Christina had her own automobile, and she aimed to drive them herself. It was a trifle daunting to be in love with a female who didn’t need him. He wasn’t sure he could ever quite adjust to the situation, in fact.
Yet he really didn’t have too many qualms over Christina’s position on women’s suffrage. He believed the primary holdouts on that issue were old-fashioned fuddy-duddies who didn’t want to admit that women had brains.
The nonsense about wanting to be a doctor was another matter, though, and his mind wrestled with it all the way back to the set. He couldn’t reconcile a beautiful woman physically examining naked men. Especially if the beautiful woman was the one he loved.
Frowning, he tried to consider the situation logically and without letting his emotions get in the way. “Can’t be done,” he muttered gloomily. Every single thought he entertained about Christina Mayhew contained emotions in abundance.
Hell’s bells, he wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that he was more emotional than she—and she was a woman! It didn’t seem right to him. Why couldn’t he have fallen head over heels in love with a conventional female? Why had he decided on an obstinate, intransigent feminist?
Because she didn’t bore him.
The answer was so obvious, he laughed. It was a wry laugh and it contained only a marginal amount of humor, but it was a laugh.
They arrived in Indio too late to resume filming on Monday. It took a long time to drive from Los Angeles to San Bernardino County. The roads were rough, the tires were fragile, and Christina experienced three blown-out tires and trouble with an overheated engine twice along the way.
Needless to say, Martin, who drove behind her the whole way, helped her overcome her mechanical problems each time. She felt stupid and inadequate. After all, she was a Mayhew, and a Mayhew of either sex ought to be able to take care of life’s little difficulties when they presented themselves. Especially if one were dealing with something as simple and mechanized as an automobile. She’d awakened that morning feeling low and depressed, and the feeling only intensified as the day progressed.
When she’d mentioned her distress at not being able to attend to her automobile’s mechanical difficulties without his help, Martin had looked at her in surprise. “But no one expects you to be able to fix cars, Christina. You might be brilliant, but you’re still a woman.
And he’d laughed. It hadn’t been an unkind laugh, but it was a laugh, and it meant to Christina that he expected women to be helpless when faced with tasks most often assumed by men.
All of which, of course, only made her feel worse. Being a woman didn’t excuse her from assuming the responsibilities inherent to the operation of an automobile, blast it. If she could own one, she ought to be able to take care of one.
She didn’t know how to tell Martin so without deepening the gaping wound that had been gouged open between them yesterday.
She supposed it had been foolish of her to believe she could establish and maintain a close personal relationship with Martin Tafft. She was, after all, a Mayhew, and Mayhews were special. Or maybe they were just weird. Christina had to admit to feeling more weird than special most of the time.
Her grandmother’s smug attitude didn’t go far toward improving Christina’s mood. Gran sat beside her in the Runabout, her hands propped on her cane, a supercilious smirk on her face. Gran enjoyed being disliked. Gran liked being arrested. She wore her arrest record like a badge of honor, as if it proved she was doing her part for the advancement of women’s causes.
And she was, the poisonous old thing. With a deep, heartfelt sigh, Christina entertained the craven wish that she belonged to another family. A normal one. One whose members assumed roles the world considered natural. One that didn’t expect its female members to be different from ninety-nine percent of their sisters on this green earth.
Blast it all, every once in a while Christina got tired of waving banners and setting examples for others. Being the center of negative attention could become downright exhausting, even when one believed wholeheartedly in the causes one espoused.
Sometimes she just wanted to relax and have fun. She even admitted to herself—glancing at her grandmother as she did so in order to make sure her innermost secret didn’t express itself on her face—she wouldn’t mind having a man around who enjoyed pampering her. Heck, it must be sort of nice to be treated like something fragile and soft and valuable.
Not, of course, that women weren’t valuable in and of themselves. And if she were to be perfectly frank with herself, she knew good and well that most women weren’t pampered at all, but were forced to work too hard for too little recompense, and half the time they died before their time from sheer weariness. She’d read Jacob Riis’s heart-wrenching book, How the Other Half Lives. She knew the appalling conditions millions of her female fellows endured. Why, women were no better than chattel most of the time and to most of the world.
Christina knew full well, too, that she and her family were among the privileged. Not only were they an established family with roots here in the United States, but they were solidly middle class and, as a family, more than moderately intelligent. Any one of those attributes gave people an advantage in this unkind world. When she added them all together, she ought to be perfectly satisfied with her lot in life. She ought to embrace her family’s heritage as rabble-rousing reformers with joy and contentment and be satisfied with the occasional suffrage march or letter-writing campaign.
But did she?
Heavens, no. That was too simple.
She had to aspire to complete equality. She had to want to be a doctor. She had to fall in love with a man who, while more tolerant and intelligent than most other men on earth, possessed conventional ideals. What’s worse, she had to consider those conventional ideals as being more important than all of Martin’s good qualities and a serious impediment to their continued relationship.
If she wasn’t driving, she might just whack herself on the forehead in an effort to slam some sense into her brain.
“Whatever is the matter with you, girl?”
Christina jerked to attention behind the wheel and darted a glance at her grandmother, who was frowning at her, full-force. One of Mrs. Mayhew’s full-force frowns was enough to make anyone sit up and pay attention, and Christina did so at once.
“Nothing’s the matter,” she said, feeling defensive and hating herself for it. “I was just thinking about . . . things.” She’d die before she admitted her thoughts to Gran. She could hear Gran’s ridiculing laughter ringing in her ears already
“Well, pay attention to the road. I don’t want to be splattered against a tree because your mind’s on your young man.” Gran’s voice was tart and more than usually snappish.
“I’m not thinking about Martin,” Christina snapped back.
Gran sniffed in obvious disbelief. “Sheer foolishness,” she muttered. “Idiocy.”
Unfortunately, Christina thought so, too. Neither one spoke again until they reached Indio several hours later.
Thirteen
Martin didn’t want to have anything to do with the next scene being filmed. It was the infamous bathing scene, and he didn’t want to see Christina rise, naked, from her bath in the full view of cameras, crew, onlookers, himself, and Pablo Orozco. The mere thought of Orozco ogling Christina made his blood run cold.
“Are you sure we have to do the scene this way?”
Phineas Lovejoy, who hadn’t driven back to Pasadena after all, believing correctly that Martin needed his moral support, rubbed his eyes and sighed.. “Martin, we’ve been over this at least a hundred times. This scene is crucial to the whole picture.”
“I still don’t see why she has to be naked.” Martin tried hard not to sound as though he were whining.
“She’s not going to be naked,” Lovejoy explained patiently, as he’d done several times before, ever since Martin had insisted on Christina not being totally naked.. “She’s got that filmy thing covering her.”
“Which is going to be soaking wet and plastered to her—” Martin couldn’t make himself say the word breasts aloud. As far as he was concerned, Christina’s breasts were his to look at, caress, and fondle. The rest of the world could just go and look at some other female’s breasts, damn it all.
“You’re the one who insisted on her wearing it,” Lovejoy pointed out.
“I know, I know.” And what’s more, he didn’t like it any more now than he had when he’d suggested it. That sheer thing was only slightly better than having her bare flesh exposed to the world.
“Besides, she’ll be covered from neck to ankles, Lovejoy said wearily. “And not only that, but we’ve roped off the set so that people can’t get close enough to see anything.”
“Ha. The only reason the scene’s in the picture is so that people will be able to see things. Everything.”
“Martin, will you try to be sensible about this? You know good and well that the cameras will be far enough away that they’ll only hint at her nakedness.”
“Ha!”
“Besides that, they have to be far enough away from the two of you so that nobody will recognize the change in actors from Orozco to you.”
Martin knew Lovejoy was tired of arguing about this scene. He even understood his best friend’s frustration with Martin’s sudden recalcitrance—after all, until he’d fallen madly in love with Christina, Martin hadn’t had any qualms whatever about her parading stark naked in front of the entire universe. He couldn’t help it, though. He loved her now, and he wanted to keep her to himself.
“I’m beginning to think it would be less provocative if she were naked than to have that filmy thing pasted to her body, blast it, Phin.”
Lovejoy sighed heavily. “I don’t know what you’re in such a dither for, Martin. We’ve gone over this a million times. The scene was settled before the crew came to Indio. We’ve even moved the cameras back several feet because of Orozco’s broken arm.”
Despising himself for being irrational, Martin muttered his final, desperate argument. “I’m afraid we’re going too far, Phin. People are getting fed up with the pictures and have started calling all of us immoral swine and saying we’re ruining the nation’s morals. Look at the headlines. Every day, there’s another story about some drugged-up actor or boozy actress getting into trouble. The Purity League is calling for a ban on nudity in the pictures, and they’re getting more and more vocal.”
“To hell with the Purity League.” Lovejoy was losing his temper.
Martin didn’t really blame him, but he grabbed on to his latest and last argument because it was his only hope. “But Phin, if we don’t start regulating the industry ourselves, some censorship body is going to step in and do it for us. It would be much better to behave responsibly before they tell us how to produce our own pictures.”
Lovejoy was tugging madly at his lower lip. Martin was tugging madly at the lock of hair he pulled on when upset. Martin knew the two of them were at their collective wits’ ends. What’s more, he feared it was all his fault for making this fuss. The time to have done that was before they began production on Egyptian Idyll. Even he knew it was too late to try to change anything now. Nevertheless, he persisted.
“And look at what the temperance people are saying about the industry.” He waved a Los Angeles Herald Examiner in his partner’s face. “There’s another story on the first page about wild parties and drunken revels and sex orgies. I think it’s the sex that’s really got the Purity people and the D.A.R. riled up. That, and the drunkenness. We’re going to get it if we don’t watch out, and you know it as well as I do.”
“Marty,” Lovejoy said, sounding as tired and frustrated as he looked, “this whole thing has been settled for months. Christina’s ready. The cameras are ready. The crew’s ready.” He gestured at Martin’s faux Egyptian costume. “Hell, even you’re ready. Let’s get the damned scene shot and over with, and then we can all relax.”
Martin gave up at last. He knew he couldn’t win. Dash it, he knew he was being unreasonable and irrational about it, even. Still, he hated it.
He felt more than usually glum when he walked onto the set. Christina had been soaking in her bath for forty-five minutes, while he and Lovejoy had argued about the scene, and she was probably wrinkled up like a prune by this time. Martin knew he’d been foolish to prolong her agony. If he hadn’t caused such a furor, the scene would be in the can by this time, and Christina would be all covered up again. At least the weather was so warm, her water didn’t have a chance to get cold.
Damn it, he hated this.
He did, however, look pretty darned good in his Egyptian sandals, robe, and headpiece, even if he did say so to himself. He looked a darned sight better than Orozco had, mainly because Martin’s legs were firm, hairy, and muscular—probably because he rode his horse and played polo on his extremely rare off hours—and Pablo’s legs were skinny. He hoped Christina appreciated the difference. At least she wouldn’t have Pablo leering at her from up close. He’d be on the sidelines, leering with the rest of the crew.
Damn it to hell and back, he wished he hadn’t thought about that. Cranky and gruff, he called out, “Places.”
Spying an Indio resident standing behind the roped-off set with a pair of opera glasses in his hands, he shut his eyes and told himself not to blow up. This would be over soon, and it wouldn’t do Peerless any good if the director of Egyptian Idyll beat the tar out of an innocent bystander. Even if said bystander was a disgusting, lecherous, evil-minded voyeur.
He assumed his own place outside the door of the bathing room. With a last glance around to make sure all was in readiness, and trying his damnedest not to see the man with the opera glasses lift them to his eyes, he barked, “Action!”
The cameras cranked, sprockets chunked, and Christina began a languid soaping of her spectacular limbs. Martin’s jaw tightened when he saw her lift her leg, point her toe, and lather her calf. He wanted to rush over to the tub and throw a blanket over her.
Fortunately, he remembered to unclench his teeth before he walked through the archway into the bathing room. He always tried to get a scene in the can in one take. This time it was more than typically important to him that they not have to endure this agony more than once.
The set was magnificent. It looked for all the world as though it had been constructed of marble and gold. In truth, this set was another masterpiece of George Peters’s imagination, and had been constructed out of cardboard, papier-maché, and plaster. George was a true genius, and Martin generally appreciated him for it. At the moment he only wanted this damned scene to be over with.
On cue, Christina lowered her leg, let out a theatrical gasp, pressed a hand to her bosom and, dammit, the entire world was going to be able to see that glorious bosom, even if it was covered with wet, filmy cloth and being photographed from a distance—and dripped onto the apparently marble floor.
“Don’t expose yourself too much,” Martin snapped. “For God’s sake, Christina.”
“I didn�
��t write the stupid script,” she reminded him Amazingly enough, although she sounded as cold and angry as anything, she still managed to look frightened.
It was all acting, Martin reminded himself. “Well, cover yourself better,” he growled. “You’re supposed to be a modest slave girl.”
“Blast you, Martin Tafft, I was modest until Peerless got hold of me!”
“Right “ he said, pushing the word past his gritted teeth with difficulty. As called for in the script, he stomped over to the tub and stared down at her. She pretended to shrink away from him “Okay, I’m going to grab the towel and hold it for you. Try not to display yourself when you get out of the tub.”
“For heaven’s sake, Martin! You’re being wildly unfair. None of this is my fault.”
Martin could tell how exasperated she was. And, if he were to be honest, he couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault they’d begged her to do a nude scene for Egyptian Idyll. The decision to put such a scene in the picture had been a purely mercenary one. The Peerless accountants knew that a nude scene would bring folks thronging to picture palaces all over the world, thereby making everyone connected with the picture a ton of money.
Because he was furious—with Peerless, with Christina, with himself; and with everyone else just for the hell of it—he grabbed the towel that had been draped artistically over a bench beside the tub with unnecessary force. Flapping it fiercely, he held it out to her.
With every appearance of apprehension, some of which probably wasn’t faked, Christina slowly rose from the tub. The cameras grinding away in the background grated on Martin’s nerves like a swarm of wasps. He hated this. For the first time since he started working in the picture industry, he wished he’d never heard of motion pictures.
The lights were fierce overhead, and water crystals dripped from Christina’s bare limbs like diamond droplets. They caught the light and reflected it like fire. Martin’s mouth went dry. She was looking at him with her eyes huge and wide and filled with fear. She acting, he reminded himself. She wasn’t afraid of him. Not really.
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