Another Thing to Fall (10 page)

He stopped at an ATM, making sure it was affiliated with his own bank to save the two-dollar user fee. Even before his money worries had become chronic, he had kept track of such fees, calling the bank each month to argue over ATM charges and point-of-service fees. The bank always backed down, too, refunding him the ten or twenty dollars on his statement. More things could be negotiated than people realized. The key was to have the stamina, the willingness to fight, and that was one thing he did have.

The drawback to using his own bank was that it always showed him the balance in his account, a number he preferred not to see, much less think about. He took out twenty dollars. How much time did he have to resolve things? Six months? Nine? It was the COBRA that was killing him, an apt bureaucratic acronym if ever there was one. He was being poisoned, oh so slowly, by that monthly nut for medical insurance, a breathtaking two thousand dollars, as much as all their other bills combined, even the mortgage, which was five years from being paid off. But the only thing worse than making COBRA payments for eighteen months would be
not
making them, because no other medical plan would touch them if they had to go through an underwriting period. If they exhausted COBRA, then someone would have to take them. That was the law, the very rules and policies he had explained to so many others, over the years, with patience and, in his opinion, compassion. Yet people had yelled at him, and cursed, as if he were the arbitrary power denying them what they needed. In hindsight, he had to admit that he was a bad fit for human resources. He was a scientist by nature. He never should have left the classroom for a job in administration.

Was there any way he could save money? He could pack a bag lunch, but Marie would find that odd. When he started working at North Avenue, he had always maintained that eating lunch out was the one reward in his dull gray day. Perhaps he could say he was putting himself on a diet? But she would find that strange, too, possibly suspicious. Sometimes, when her moods sunk to their lowest, Marie would accuse him of having an affair. No,
accuse
wasn’t the right word. It was more like an invitation, a concession. She would enumerate all her inadequacies and issues, making the case for him to find another woman, and he would be forced to argue the other side — death till do us part, for better for worse, in sickness and in health. Secretly, he had wondered over the last few months whether he was still obligated to stay with her. Whose enmity would he risk if he left? Who would care now?

He had hated that glimpse into himself, however. He hadn’t married Marie because she was his best friend’s sister, and he wasn’t staying with her for that reason, either. He remained because he loved her, strange and surprising as that fact might be to everyone, including Marie. Marie needed him. He wouldn’t let her down. He was going to make sure they were set for life.

Let’s see — according to his source, they were on the set today. Of course, that didn’t mean
she
would be on the set. She wasn’t, not every day. Still, he decided to drive over there, take his position, as he thought of it. He never parked in the part of the lot directly in front of the soundstage. That might be noticed. Instead, he chose the far end, near a run-down Chinese takeout. The people who owned the restaurant were wonderfully incurious, indifferent to his on-again, off-again presence. Only once, when he had been writing in his notebook, had anyone approached him. The owner, Mr. Chen, had questioned him nervously, and he realized that he had been mistaken for some sort of official, probably from immigration. He had shown Mr. Chen his legal pad, and said the first thing that came into his mind: “Poetry. I’m a poet and I find this a peaceful place to write.”

Mr. Chen had been happy to accept the idea that the parking lot of a derelict strip center on Eastern Avenue was a suitable place to write poetry. But then, people often were quick to hear what they wanted to hear. Wasn’t he the same way himself?

He glanced toward the far end of the parking lot. He wished he could buy some expensive surveillance equipment, but he was stuck with the old camcorder, which he didn’t dare bring up to his eye here. From this distance, it wasn’t really possible to make out the people coming and going. Of course, she was somewhat distinctive, and he knew her vehicle, too, but she had a way of slipping in and out that made her easy to miss. Not that he could always stay until the end — the later they started, the later they went — which was frustrating. It was very hard for him to come up with plausible cover stories for any late-night shenanigans, although he sometimes found a way to sneak out after Marie was asleep, especially if she had been hitting the Xanax a little harder than usual. But there was almost no way he could justify being out regularly between the hours of eight and twelve, not without sending her into shrill lamentations about how she would wander, too, if placed in his situation.

He saw a car pull in, not the usual one, and he wondered if they were onto him, trying to trip him up. He watched the driver help her out of the car, as if she were fragile. Ah, she was anything but, he was sure of that. If only he could get to her, talk to her. Then she would be on his side, he was sure of it. Once they met, face-to-face, she would be his.

Places in Baltimore often have many lives. Tess recognized the soundstage on Eastern Avenue as a former department store, one of the better ones — Hochschild Kohn, she thought, but maybe Hecht’s — that had then been demoted to bargain chain status before settling into life as a members-only big lots store. It anchored the end of a sad and lonely strip mall, where at least half the stores were vacant. A small band of protesters — ah, the disgruntled steelworkers — marched along a grassy strip, earning a few halfhearted honks of support for their cause, but they looked pretty harmless to Tess. She parked and walked the perimeter of the freestanding building, noting the entrances. There was a fire door in the rear, but otherwise no way in and out of the building. That was good.

The front, however, had no security — no lock on the door, no one sitting at the front desk just inside the doors. A worker tried to wave her in the direction of a sign that said EXTRAS HOLDING, even as Tess insisted she was here to meet with Greer. The young woman arrived just in time to save Tess from being shunted off to a wardrobe fitting.

“Isn’t that a little slipshod?” Tess asked. “Anyone could get in, under the guise of being an extra.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t get far,” Greer said. “Strangers are noticed pretty quickly.”

“Still, it’s a risk, and I’m here to assess weaknesses. Remember, I’m watching Selene only during her nonwork hours. It’s up to the production to make the workplace as secure as possible. And most of the problems have happened at work, right?”

Greer was turning out to be one of those people who simply didn’t answer questions not to her liking. “I suppose you want a tour of the set,” she said. “Flip said I should take you around, if that’s what you want.”

Tess didn’t really care about a tour, but Greer sounded grudging, as if she resented being given this task, and her attitude made Tess perverse.

“Love to.”

The former store had been more or less stripped down to its concrete floors, with a labyrinth of plywood now taking up half of the space. Vast and high ceilinged, the building held the morning’s chill and then some.

“I’ll take you to the sets we’re
not
using, first.” Greer headed toward the maze, and Tess had one brief paranoid fear that Greer was planning to lose her in it, that Tess would end up wandering for days among artificial rooms.

“This is the Mann rowhouse,” Greer said, stopping in front of a living room that played to every stereotype of how blue-collar workers lived, replete with shag carpeting, velvet paintings, and a plaid La-Z-Boy. “We’re not using it in the current episode, because that’s set almost entirely in the nineteenth century.”

“It looks a little wide,” Tess murmured. “But then, that’s the problem, isn’t it? Film isn’t very good at conveying narrow spaces like eleven-foot rowhouses.”

“What do you mean?” Greer appeared to be offended by the mere suggestion that a film could fail to emulate real life.

“My boyfriend and I went to New York this summer, and we toured this amazing museum in a former tenement, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the kind of place you saw in
The Godfather, Part II,
or
Once Upon a Time in America
.” Tess didn’t bother to add that she had been motivated to visit the museum because of memories of books like
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
or the
All-of-a-Kind Family
series. Film was the only language spoken here, the only cultural reference that anyone seemed to get. “And the thing is, the real tenements were so tiny, so claustrophobic and dark. Even in the best films, the tenement sets are too big, too filled with light. I’m guessing it’s going to be the same for this rowhouse.”

“We have a very good DP,” Greer said, still haughty.

“DP?”

“Director of photography.”

“Oh.” Tess decided not to suggest that Francis Ford Coppola and Sergio Leone might have had good directors of photography as well.
DPs
. She was a quick study. She would learn to talk the talk, if that’s what it took.

The next set was a run-down meeting room. “The union hall.” Tess stepped into the room, marveling at the level of detail — the newspaper splayed across the Formica-topped table, the mismatched chairs, the faded memos tacked to the bulletin board, the coffee cups. There was even a fake coffee stain on one table. Tess couldn’t help but approve of such conscientiousness.

She was taken aback, however, by the view through the “window” — an extremely realistic photographic backdrop of the waterfront, with cranes rising in the distance, the blue smear of the harbor just beyond.

“So the things we see through the windows in a movie or television show — they’re not real?”

Greer looked amused, superior — Tess’s intent. People tend to reveal more to those they consider ignorant.

“Of course not. Think about the lighting and continuity issues created by a real window.”

“But it looks so
real
. I mean, on film. Here, it looks like a photograph, but on a screen, you can’t tell.”

“The camera has no depth perception,” Greer said. “And, of course, sometimes they cut in a shot of the real view — say a character had to look out the window and see something in particular. You edit that shot in, and it heightens the illusion. But look up and you can see the lights hanging from the ceiling, which allows us to light the view for day or night.”

It was an intriguing insight, but Tess wasn’t sure she
liked
this behind-the-scenes view of things. While movies weren’t as magical to her as they had been, back in her late teens and twenties, she still wanted to be able to suspend belief, not think about all the ways she was being fooled. She didn’t share these thoughts with Greer, however. Instead, she continued to inspect the set with pretended awe, as she assumed most people did.

“You said they were filming today?”

“They are, but it’s way off in another corner of the set, where we’ve created Betsy’s world.” We, we, we. To hear Greer tell it, she was part of everything that happened on
Mann of Steel
. “I’ll take you there.”

Tess had not necessarily wanted to watch filming, but she figured she should. Observing Selene at work might give her a sense of what her charge would be like at rest. Restless, she supposed.

They wound their way through the maze, stepping over endless rivers of coiled cords and cables, until they finally found themselves in a thriving hive of activity, where young men and women — and they were overwhelmingly young, Tess noticed — rushed around with ferocious certainty. She was shocked at how many people there were working — twenty, thirty, maybe even forty. It was hard to keep track, given how they kept moving. Maybe
Mann of Steel
could be a good little economic engine for Baltimore, assuming these technical folks were locals, not imports.

“Last looks,” someone called out, and Tess watched as makeup and hair people swarmed Selene and a puffy middle-aged man — oh dear, it was Johnny Tampa, seriously gone to seed. “Last looks” turned out to be a flurry of pampering — makeup was tweaked, hair smoothed and coaxed into position. One woman produced a camera and shot Polaroids of both actors, instructing them to hold up their hands.

“Continuity, again,” Greer said, as if sensing what Tess was about to ask. “We have to keep careful records, so if there are reshoots, or other scenes in this time frame, everything matches up. If Selene’s wearing a ring, we can’t have it disappear later.”

A round-shouldered man lumbered over to Selene and Johnny, mumbled something inaudible to them. Selene, stroking her much-amplified mane of hair, nodded absently while Johnny Tampa looked confused, not unlike an animal that had just been poleaxed. The round-shouldered man shuffled away. Whoever he was, his posture made him quite the saddest sack that Tess had ever seen.

“The director,” Greer said. “Wes Stark. Flip calls him Willie Stark, but I’m not sure why.” Tess thought about explaining
All the King’s Men
to Greer but knew she would be depressed if Greer’s only point of reference was Broderick Crawford. Or even worse, Sean Penn.

“But I thought the woman, the one who’s been running the crew, calling out some of the orders—”

“First AD. Assistant director, Nicole. She’s really good, and Stark’s smart enough to cede a lot of power to her. Smart or lazy — he doesn’t like to leave the video village if he can help it. At any rate, she’s pulling his bacon out of the fire on this ep.”

Something in the phrase, the bit about pulling Stark’s bacon, didn’t ring true to Tess. She didn’t doubt its veracity, having no basis to judge his performance. But she didn’t believe it was Greer’s unique opinion. Someone must have told her that, or Greer had overheard that scrap of phrase and decided to appropriate it.