Children of Light (13 page)

Blakely took off his baseball cap, a half-servile gesture.

“If we’re gonna use this light we’d best be doing it, boss. It’ll be hell to match and I’m afraid there’s a storm coming.”

“That’s not possible,” Drogue said. “I’m assured it’s not possible.”

“Well,” Blakely drawled cautiously, “they do have these out-of-season storms, Walter. They’re called
chubascos.
”

“Well, fuck that,” Drogue said. “ ’Cause I gotta match that light. And I’m gonna personally piss on the Virgin of Guadalupe if it rains on my picture.”

“That’s not helping, Walter,” Lu Anne said. Lowndes had put his glasses on; he was watching them from beside the truck.

“Now listen,” Walter said to her. He walked in step with her and they performed a wide paseo around the sweating figure of Toby Blakely. “We’re going to do great things with this trolley ride to the beach. We have a wonderful spooky light and we know how to use it. Then if the light holds—if we have any kind of sunset at all—she gets to walk on water.”

Lu Anne said nothing. She had been hoping to save Edna’s walk down the beach for a special day, even perhaps for the last day of location. But they were shooting out of sequence for reasons of economy. There were at least ten days of filming on the Grand Isle set.

“Do you mind doing both those scenes today?”

“I can do them both,” Lu Anne said. “They go together.”

Drogue stopped, facing the trolley, arresting Lu Anne in mid-stride, clutching her arm.

“Look at that light, kid.”

“Yeah,” Lu Anne said. The light frightened her.

“So tell me—if you were taking your last trolley ride, how would you do it? I mean, would you do it standing up holding the bar like Joy or would you sit?”

Lu Anne thought about it.

“Maybe I should try it both ways. I sort of think sitting. You know, a little stunned. Standing, it’s like
Queen Christina.
”

Drogue smiled. “What’s wrong with that?”

“I think what you want is an anti–Judy Garland, right, Walter? I’ll take care of that for you.”

“The question is sitting or standing and for me it’s a question of
composition,” Drogue said. “I’ll get another tape of Joy on the trolley while you sit up here. I’ll watch the tapes, you think about it.”

“When the time comes,” Lu Anne said, “we’ll know.”

“Hey, I like the way you think, kid.”

Lu Anne watched him walk off in his crouched, bent-backed scurry. His movements were always startling. He was given to sudden violent gestures that continually caught her off guard and made her feel like cringing.

As she watched, he pivoted without warning, as though he were dodging the swoop of a predatory bird.

“Tell Frank you love it,” he said. With a limp outstretched arm he indicated the faked trees and the trolley, the whole artificial world they had made there. Frank Carnahan was the production designer. “Tell him you feel like you’re back in the bayou.” She nodded. On the way to her trailer she saw Carnahan headed toward the beach that would be their next location.

“Frank!” Going up to him, she tried a little variation on Walter’s walk. “Hey, I love it,” she told the designer. “I feel like I’m back in the bayou.”

Carnahan looked pleased. His breath smelled strongly of rum. All designers were alcoholic Irishmen; it seemed to be traditional. The smell of liquor made her want a drink. Or something. Carnahan smiled with pleasure.

“Don’t think there isn’t a story behind it, Lee.”

As Carnahan unfolded the story behind it Lu Anne’s eye roamed the location in search of people from whom she might score. She had already solicited Joy and Jack Glenn, the young actor who played Robert Lebrun; both had disclaimed possession. Bill Bly, who stood stroking one of the trolley horses, was always a prospect. But Bly and Lu Anne had a past which she did not care at that moment to reexamine; and she knew he had been appointed to oversee her secretly. George Buchanan, a middle-aged actor who played Alcée Robin, was not in sight. A few years earlier George had been able to produce anything conceivable at an hour’s notice but he had become a family man and joined A.A.

“So, Christ, I thought,” Carnahan was telling her in his broad Pawtucket accent, “jeez, Spanish moss, it’s a goddamn tree disease. They’ll never let me get away with it. I thought we’d have to fake it …”

Lowndes kept watching her. He had opened his shirt to the sun, thrust out his pale chest and assumed a somewhat fascistoid stance. This, Lu Anne thought, might be a modified variation of the Country Come-on, which she had seen performed quite often enough. Cocaine, est conditioning, childhood trauma—who could tell what such a posture reflected? In any case, there was no chance of asking him for drugs. He was the enemy.

“So I sez,” Carnahan said, “don’t shit me, I sez. I seen this shit growing on trees at Rosarita Beach. Of course,” he said with a burst of emphysemic laughter, “I ain’t never even been to Rosarita Beach.”

She came right in on the laugh. “That’s too much, Frank,” she giggled. “Hey, is it true that Gordon Walker is coming down?” She squared her shoulders, straightened up and leaned her fists on her hips, having a short shot at Lowndes’s stance to see what it would feel like on her.

“I dunno,” Carnahan said. “Who is he?”

“The writer.”

“Aw,” Carnahan said, “I dunno. He didn’t fly in with Charlie and the dailies.”

She felt relief. Ever since the call she had been waiting for him with combined joy and anxiety. Better that I rest, she thought. That evening, she decided, she would take a little of her medicine as prescribed and sleep. That was the purpose of the operation after all. That her scenes be played with clarity and the right moves and the right timing.

Things were under control. The landscape was a bit overbright, that was all. She was not saying inappropriate things, and the only voices she heard were concealed under the wind or in the sound of the sea and she knew them for illusion and paid them no mind.

Vera Ricutti, the wardrobe mistress, overtook her on the way to the trailer.

“I just been looking at these seals,” she said excitedly. “There must have been dozens. These darling little seals,” she exclaimed, “with their little faces sticking up out of the water.”

“Oh, I would love to see them,” Lu Anne enthused. “I hope they come back.”

“So cute!” Vera said as they went into Lu Anne’s trailer. “You gotta see them.”

The assistant director’s voice sounded across the laager. “Joy, please? Driver? Everybody ready? I want quiet, the director wants to hear the sound on this. Right,” Hueffer shouted. His voice was turning hoarse. “Quiet! Roll! Action!”

Vera closed the door of Lu Anne’s air-conditioned trailer. Lu Anne herself sat down before her mirror, wiping her brow with Kleenex. Everything in the mirror was shipshape. She felt ready to work.

As she undressed, Vera held up a light-colored corset for her inspection.

“See what we got for you? This goes on first.”

“My God,” Lu Anne said, lifting her arms for the fit, “is this thing wool?”

“It’s a synthetic. This is the same one you had on at the fittings except we made it out of lighter stuff and put a zipper on it. But the real ones, the ones they wore then—they were real wool. This one was for tennis and jumping around in.”

“I can’t believe they went around in wool corsets in Louisiana in summer.”

“So they shouldn’t see your bod sweat, that was why they had it. No underarm stain and your dress couldn’t stick. We tried this number out on Joy and it photographs O.K. Anyway, we got another dozen white dresses if you do sweat it up.”

“I’m a sweater,” Lu Anne said when she was zipped in. “But I mean, how could they play tennis in woolen corsets?”

“India,” Vera said. “Africa. The white ladies wore woolen corsets. The locals, I guess they got to let their jugs dangle.”

The door opened and Josette Darré, the hairdresser, came in. There was a thin film of frost between Lu Anne and Josette; they never
spoke except about the business at hand. Josette was a sullen Parisian hippie. She had rebuffed Lu Anne’s French with a pout and an uncomprehending shrug and that, for Lu Anne, had been that.

Josette stood by while Lu Anne got into her dress and stood before the mirror, letting Vera tie her loops behind and straighten her hem. Then she sat down to let Josette work on her hair, making faces at herself in the glass.

“Lucky locals,” she said, wiping her forehead again.

There was a knock at the door and Joe Ricutti, who was the makeup man, came into the trailer. He was laughing.

“That McIntyre kid is a barrel of laughs,” he rasped. “She’s in her own musical.”

“I don’t know,” Vera said in a weary tone. Vera was Joe’s wife; they worked together most of the time. “Where do they find them?”

Josette stepped aside; Joe Ricutti stepped in behind Lu Anne’s chair. Lu Anne raised an upturned hand and the makeup man squeezed it. They made small talk and gossiped while Joe gently held her chin and turned her face from side to side, examining her profile in the mirror. His fingertips delicately probed beneath her bones; in his free hand he held a makeup brush. Lu Anne sat, a prisoner, listening to the trolley outside and watching as Joe found the soft spots around her jaw, the lines to be disguised. She examined the stringiness at the base of her throat and it made her think of a dry creek bottom—cracks, dry sticks, desiccation where it had been serene, smooth and cool and pleasing.

There was a Friend in the room. I don’t like her, it said, the way she look. Lu Anne hushed it silently.

“I think,” she told Ricutti, “I think the kid’s a little long in the tooth for this one.”

Joe sang a few bars of protest. “Whaddaya talkin’ about? You look good! Look at yourself!”

He turned her head to reflect her profile and ran his finger from her forehead to the tip of her chin. “I mean look at that! That’s terrific.”

Gazing sidewise, she saw in the mirror Josette’s expressionless eyes.

Made-up, she sat for Josette’s last applications. Vera Ricutti brought forth a straw boater from one of several identical boxes and ceremoniously placed it on Lu Anne’s head. The Ricuttis drew back in admiration. Josette stood to one side, arms folded. Lu Anne caught a scent of lavender sachet. She saw the inhabited mask of Edna Pontellier before her.

T
he Drogues were watching Joy McIntyre ride her trolley on their tape monitor. Now, instead of standing and clinging to the pole, she sat on the car’s wooden bench. Her back was ramrod straight, her chin raised so that the weird light, refracted through overhanging tree boughs, played dramatically on her face, which was partly shadowed by her straw hat.

“The speed is perfect,” old Drogue said. “Make sure they keep it.”

“That kid,” young Drogue said of Joy McIntyre, “everything you put her in looks overdone.”

“Use her,” the old man said.

“Use her for what? She can’t act. Her diction’s a joke. She’s so flamboyant you can’t tell what your scene is gonna look like if you use her to light.”

“If you throw away that face,” old Drogue said, “… a face like that, a body like that—you have no business in the industry.”

After a moment, the younger Drogue smiled. “You want to fuck her, Dad?”

“That’s my business.”

“Say the word.”

“I’ll manage my own sex life, thanks a whole lot.”

“Patty will flip. I can’t wait to tell her.”

“I told you,” the old man said, raising his voice, “mind your fucking business.”

In a humorous mood, young Drogue opened the trailer door to find Hueffer and Toby Blakely awaiting him.

“So,” he asked them, “is it gonna rain or what?”

“I honestly don’t think so,” Hueffer said.

Drogue studied his assistant for a long moment. “Hey,” he said to all present, “how about this guy?”

Hueffer blushed.

“Well,” Toby Blakely said, “obviously we can’t intercut with the trolley footage if it rains.”

“We’ll keep shooting if it rains,” young Drogue told them. “If it stops we’ll make rain to match.”

“Yessir,” Blakely said. “That’d be the thing to do. These
chubascos
can last an hour or they can last for three days.”

“The next scene is all that concerns me,” Drogue said. “I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to shoot the last scene of the picture in rain. If it rains for a week we’ll wait for a week.”

Hueffer and Blakely nodded soberly.

Young Drogue charged toward the setup in his loping stride. Hueffer and Blakely accompanied him. His father ambled along behind.

“So we’re home free, right? Rain or not.”

“Unless it rains tomorrow and not today,” Blakely said delicately. “And we still have the last scene to shoot.”

“Go away, Toby,” young Drogue said.

Hueffer and Blakely went back to the camera setup. Drogue had caught sight of the producer, Charlie Freitag, who was standing with his production manager in the eucalyptus grove beside the trolley tracks.

“He has to show up now,” young Drogue said bitterly. “Freak weather, there’s no cover set—Charlie arrives. You can show him four hours of magnificent dailies and he’ll give you five hours of handwringing because an extra stepped on a nail.”

“Well,” old Drogue said, “that’s his function.”

Lu Anne, sitting outside on her folding chair for Ricutti’s last ministrations, became aware of young Drogue’s spidery approach. She looked up at him and he offered his arm, parodying antique chivalry.
When she rose to take it, she saw that the writer named Lowndes had not moved from the spot where they had left him. Charlie Freitag was speaking to him but he was watching her.

“Is that guy bothering you?” Walter Drogue asked. “That Lowndes?”

She told him that it was all right. But although it was her business to be watched, the concentrated scrutiny oppressed her. There were too many eyes.

“My ride?” she asked.

Drogue nodded. “I think you’re right about her sitting. It looks good. Would you like a rehearsal? I was thinking we might steal a jump on time if we shot it. If you were ready.”

“Yes,” she said, “let’s do it.”

Drogue looked her up and down. “Can you walk in the skirt? Are the shoes O.K. on this ground?”