The Continuity Girl (8 page)

Meredith felt her guts constrict. There was a pounding in her ears. It was not impossible she would die. People died all the
time. Cells exploded in their brains or their throats just swelled shut. She reached deep into her pack and found the inner
pocket containing a small bottle that held a dozen or so dissolvable half-doses of Ativan from a prescription she had filled
four years before after a particularly bad breakup. She wrapped her hand around the bottle and the imminent-death feeling
gradually faded.

She’d spent enough time in therapy to know her anxiety was likely brought on by the sudden close proximity to her mother.
But Irma was trying her best. She had somehow arranged this job, hadn’t she? And she was supportive of the donor quest—devoting
herself to the task of setting up Meredith with a suitable specimen using every connection available to her.

And Irma’s connections were considerable. In spite (or perhaps because of) her immutable eccentricity, she had compiled a
network of friends and ex-lovers who ranged across London society. She belonged to half the clubs in the city and was well
known in the others. There were dinners and book launches and pub quizzes to attend several times a week. Irma sat on a number
of boards and governing committees of art galleries, a library and a major literary prize. While she never contributed anything
in the way of actual work in these postings, she amused her fellow artocrats by telling animated stories of the old days of
Notting Hill—hanging out with the arty crowd, dropping liquid acid and sipping Campari on the rooftops. She was, and always
had been, a hit wherever she went. And now, for the first time ever, Irma finally had something to offer her daughter: a rich
and varied social life.

On Wednesday, Meredith was to attend a dinner at the Chelsea Arts Club with her mother. Perhaps the father of her child would
be there.

Meredith pushed these thoughts from her mind and forced herself to concentrate on the job at hand. Richard was striding across
the set, right hand pitchforked deep into his bale of brown hair. He obviously needed something big from her, and Meredith
resolved to make herself useful.

“Meredith. Heavenly to see you. Turns out you’re
just
the person I was looking for.” Richard covered his heart with ten long
white fingers and bowed like a courtier. There was a slightly sarcastic inflection to everything he said or did, as if his
entire life were one elaborate adolescent boarding-school prank. Meredith felt very slow and cement-witted whenever he was
around. She stood up.

“Sir?”

“Listen.” He lowered his voice to a clamp-toothed whisper. “We have a rather serious crisis on our hands—one that I think
you could help to diffuse by employing your...” He searched.
“Womanly charms.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m afraid it’s Miss Swain.” He winced and looked around to make sure none of the crew members were in earshot. “She’s—how
to put this delicately?—having a bit of a hissy fit at the moment. A sort of a does-my-ass-look-fat-in-this-dress tantrum.
In her trailer. Won’t come out. It’s all quite ridiculous, but she’s utterly inconsolable—by
me
at any rate. She’s already
scared the wardrobe stylist off set, and if she doesn’t calm down shortly I’m afraid Dan could be next in line.” He glanced
across the warehouse to where Dan Button sat dejectedly polishing the carved ivory knob on his walking stick with a shammy.

“That’s awful,” said Meredith, feeling confused. Swain’s diva antics were hardly surprising, but Richard’s confidence in her
was. Continuity supervisors had little contact with the actors, apart from annoying them by taking Polaroids of their costumes
or reminding them to back-match their lines to their actions. Meredith preferred it this way. Actors were unpredictable, self-obsessed
and invariably unstable. No good could come of befriending them. She worked around them like a stable hand sweeping out a
thoroughbred’s stall.

“You see, Meredith, what I was wondering was—and no pressure, by the way, although to be perfectly honest, at this point the
entire balance of the show does depend upon it—if you wouldn’t mind
talking
to her, American woman to American woman.”

“But I’m Canadian.”

Richard corrected his stoop and looked over Meredith’s shoulder toward a team of grips assembling weights on the back of a
crane. “Ms. Swain’s trailer is the third on the left. The first setup should be complete in half an hour.” The conversation
was over.

As she made her way to the line of trailers (affectionately referred to as “the circus”) Meredith marveled at how archaic
the average film set was. In an era when computers could be chess champions and compose original symphonies, cinema was clunky
up close. The makeup artist applied blue lipstick to the mouth of the girl playing the corpse; and fake blood—a mixture of
gelatin, water and purple food coloring—was splattered at the scene by a propsmaster wielding a child’s plastic squirt gun.
Cameras were still laboriously rigged on the outside of cars, fastened to the top of cranes or mounted Snugli-style on the
chest of the Steadicam operator.

Meredith felt more of an affinity with the camera than with any of her breathing colleagues on set. She and the lens had certain
things in common. They were both dispassionate observers valued for their ability to meticulously record details without judgment
or embellishment. Immovable in their pedantry, both were utterly indispensable to the process.

The door of Kathleen Swain’s trailer was slightly ajar. Meredith tapped twice and stood frozen on the floating stainless steel
stoop, listening for signs of life. After a half minute or so, she knocked again.

“Oh,
what
now?” That unmistakable sandpaper drawl.

The words sounded scripted to Meredith.
What now, is right,
she thought. Her hands were trembling. Maybe she should have taken
that Ativan.

Meredith spoke—but did not look—into the crack in the aluminum door frame. “Ms. Swain, my name is Meredith Moore. I supervise
continuity on the set and I was just wondering if I could maybe help you with anything.”

A stocking-clad toe appeared around the edge of the door and tugged it open. Inside, the trailer smelled mysteriously of baby
powder and Chardonnay (or was it cat pee?). In a far corner a makeup girl was crumpled on a stool, sniffling into the industrial-size
cosmetic kit on her lap. Swain lay on the daybed beside the door, wrapped like a California roll in what appeared to be a
velvet curtain, complete with rod. Her face was covered with what Meredith thought were bandages, but on closer inspection
turned out to be a pair of white cotton gloves.

“Continuity, huh?” she said, peering out from between her fingers. “Courtney, you’re free to go.”

The makeup girl clamped her kit shut and shuffled out, giving Meredith a miserable glance as she passed.

Only when the door was shut tight did the actress take her hands away from her face. Meredith saw what she had already known:
that in spite of age, stress, a slightly overzealous collagen injection artist and a layer of troweled-on camera makeup, Swain
was still very beautiful.

“You’re not English,” Swain said. “But you’re not American either. That makes you Canadian.”

“How’d you know?”

“I’ve been to Toronto a bunch of times.” She stretched her arms above her head and yawned like a bored housecat. “In 1982
for
The Taste of Honey,
then in ’87 for
The Sorceress,
then ’91 for
Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones.
I got a Golden Globe nom for
that one, you know. A complete surprise. And then I was there in 1998 for the opening of
Blue Orchid.
Oh God, Valentino sent
me this dress the night before and it didn’t fit so I had to get it pinned. Terrible picture. Anyway, Toronto’s not such a
bad town. Do you ever go to Bistro 990?”

“Sometimes,” Meredith lied.

“Well, good. You’re practically American, then. I just get sick of all these English people all the time. They’re so...shifty.
You can never tell if they’re joking. And the men all smell funny. Sort of sad and sweet—”

“It’s the detergent.”

“What?” Swain had removed one cotton glove and was peeling a coating of pink paraffin wax from her previously concealed hand.

“It’s the cheap laundry detergent they use. I forget the brand name. It smells like a dead marriage.”

“Yes, exactly! It’s awful. Oh
God,
I’m so glad you noticed it too. I honestly thought I was going crazy.” Swain laughed long
and hard, and after a little while Meredith joined in.

“Have a seat.” Swain motioned to the kitchenette table across the room, a whole two feet away. “Welcome to my movie star trailer,”
she said, pronouncing the term “moovee schtaa” in her best mid-Atlantic lockjaw.

Meredith wasn’t sure if she was joking.

“You see, Meredith, the thing about acting, the truly rotten, vicious thing about it, is not the scrutiny, the superficiality,
the endless rounds of boring interviews. Most of my colleagues have got it all wrong. They’re complaining about the
good
things.
The really
rotten
thing is the people. The people are awful. I mean, most people are. But show people? The
worst.
And the
higher up the food chain you go, the worse it gets. Me?
I
am a Hollywood movie star. In other words, a monster. As bad as
it gets. You know what they say?”

Meredith shook her head.

“People in drama like drama.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“You know I made Courtney cry.”

“I assumed.”

“Do you know why?”

“No.”

“I said some very nasty things to her because a moment before, I’d looked down at my cleavage and noticed that it was wrinkly.
My famous tits, wizening into a couple of floppy papayas. There’s no operation for that, you know.”

“No?”

“Not that there’d be much point even if there was. I mean, you can only put off the inevitable for so long.”

Swain threw off her curtain in one swoop. Underneath she was wearing Victorian ladies’ underwear—a pair of bloomers, wool
stockings and a corset. Her body was, it had to be said, not what it used to be. She was still slim, but her skin was loose
under her upper arms and on her chest. Meredith correctly judged her to be about forty-five. Draped over the kitchenette table
to the right was Swain’s costume, a heavy blue velvet dress with thousands of complicated-looking lacings and hooks and eyes.
It would take at least twenty minutes to get her into it, and given the situation with wardrobe, Meredith realized the job
would probably fall to her.

“Listen,” Meredith began, “I know this isn’t a great time, and that you seem preoccupied with other things. But they’re out
there setting up for the first shot, and you’re in it. So it might be a good idea to get dressed. You know, to save time.”

Swain laughed. “Time is of no concern to me. The cliché is true—in the movies, time is money. And the money, in this case,
belongs to Osmond Crouch. And guess what? Osmond Crouch owes me—not money, but something far more precious. He owes me my
youth.”

A knock at the door and the second AD’s voice announced Swain’s call time.

“FUCK OFF!” she roared.

“I hope you don’t mind listening to me for a bit. It’s just that I get so lonely for female company, and these English women,
they don’t really count. They’re all so cold. They don’t really have the same body image anxiety we do. It’s hard to relate.”
Swain looked directly at Meredith for the first time.

“No children,” she pronounced.

Meredith shook her head, unsure where this was going. She suddenly wanted to leave. Just when she was about to gather her
binder, Swain stood up, stepped into the layers of velvet and began pulling up her dress. She did not talk about this, just
did it. Meredith began the painstaking work of slipping each little hook into its intended eye.

Swain sighed. “I was married three times, but no babies. I even miscarried twice, like Marilyn Monroe. That was during my
second marriage, to Peter, the entertainment lawyer. The normal one. I didn’t realize it in my twenties and thirties, but
husbands are really not the issue at all. They’re basically disposable. You can always find a better one at some point.” She
giggled cruelly. “But babies...you only get one chance for those.”

Meredith continued hooking and eyeing.

“People tell me I should adopt. A little girl from China or a foundling from Guatemala or wherever. But I’ve never been one
for rescuing people. I haven’t got much of a martyr complex. I don’t think that’s what parenthood is about. For me it’s about
the flesh. My own flesh. Flesh of my flesh, to love and care for, for the rest of my life, you know? That’s what I long for.
But you know, on the bright side, there are operations for that.”

“For what?”

“For having babies later in life. At my age. Not operations, I mean, but procedures. New technologies, drugs and that sort
of thing. So sad old hags like me can have a hope—”

Meredith felt Swain’s rib cage release beneath the layers of velvet. She hoped that Swain was not about to cry, because if
she did, she would have to have her makeup redone. The actress straightened her back and looked in the mirror. She was, Meredith
saw now, very controlled. Swain breathed out with a
whoosh
and patted her face, then grimaced, remembering something.

“Good Lord, what am I going to do?”

“About what?”

“About the wardrobe stylist. I can’t get into these horrendous things on my own, and I don’t suppose we can convince her to
come back after I burned her with my curling iron, can we?”

Meredith hid her smile in the folds of Swain’s bustle. She stood up and smoothed down the back of her dress.

Swain was moaning, “Oh God, oh God, what am I going to do?”

Meredith had an idea. She felt her face brighten. “Actually, Ms. Swain, I may have just the woman for the job.”

The actress raised one eyebrow, intrigued. “Is she American?”