Another Thing to Fall (11 page)

“You need to watch from the village,” Greer said. “Where the director is.”

“Oh, I’m fine here,” Tess said.

“You may be fine, but Johnny’s not. You’re in his eye line, and he freaks out when there are strangers watching him.”

Tess decided not to point out that someone who freaked out when strangers were watching was a bad fit for the acting profession.

Greer led her to an encampment of director’s chairs, some of which did have names on their backs. Here was Flip, along with the tiniest adult woman that Tess had ever seen, her chair fitted with a wooden footrest higher than the others, so her legs didn’t swing free. The back of her chair identified her as Charlotte MacKenzie. So that was the bean counter who had cut her fee and reduced Lloyd to an intern. Ben wasn’t in his chair. He was several feet away, standing next to a cart piled high with food. Flip glanced up, caught Tess’s eye, greeted her with a curt, professional nod. Ah, she had segued into the category of “help,” alongside Greer. She no longer qualified for the thick charm Flip had piled on when trying to hire her. As long as his checks cleared, she didn’t give a damn.

“Here you go,” Greer said. “If you want to watch, you can take Ben’s chair and I’ll get you a headset.”

“Oh, I—” But Greer was off, catching a man by the sleeve and bringing Tess back what looked like a small battery pack with headphones.

“Just remember to give it back to me, okay? Don’t walk off with it, whatever you do.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“Do you want sides?”

“You mean like french fries?”

Greer gave an exaggerated sigh and thrust some pages into Tess’s hand — not a script, proper, but just a few pages, including the scene in question — then rushed away again, returning to her natural orbit at Flip’s elbow. She considered Tess a waste of time, and Greer clearly didn’t value people unless she felt they could do something for her. She wanted to be around those with power, and Flip was the power source here.

“Rolling… action…
fuck
.” The camera, a two-headed behemoth set on a wheeled cart, had snagged on its track. Workers rushed to it, not even waiting for instruction, already aware of what they had to do to fix the problem.

Ben wandered over to Tess, having snagged a handful of miniature candy bars, but waved Tess back into his seat when she tried to surrender it to him.

“Exciting, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” Tess said.

“I was being sarcastic. The most exciting thing on a movie set is craft services. The food,” he added helpfully, brandishing a Snickers. “Movie sets are lousy with free food.”

“Isn’t that hard on the actors?”

“Harder on those of us who have no incentive to maintain our boyish figures.” More sarcasm, she figured, as Ben still had the bean-pole skinniness of an adolescent who had grown six inches in the past year. Tess’s greyhound had more body fat. “Although some actors aren’t as disciplined, and it gets to be a problem.”

“Really?”

“Let’s just say that our Mann of Steel is at risk of becoming Man of Flab.” He flapped a candy wrapper at the two actors on the set, Selene and Johnny Tampa. Oh, how the mighty had fallen. He was a shadow of his former heartthrob self. Well, not a shadow. Something considerably more substantial than a shadow.

“He doesn’t look so bad,” Tess said, out of loyalty to her teenage crush.

“He split two pairs of pants yesterday and we lost almost an hour finding a third. Okay, they’re getting ready to film again, so you know to be—”

“Quiet on the set. Sound speed. Rolling.
Action
.”

Ben cocked an eyebrow at Tess and held a finger to his lips. He joined Flip and Lottie at the monitors, but she didn’t feel entitled to jockey for the best view. Besides, she sensed that Greer might tackle her if she tried to get too close to Flip. She stayed in Ben’s chair, catching only a glimpse of the actors through the equipment and personnel circling around the set, but able to hear every word they said over the headset. It was a short scene, nonsensical without the context of the larger story. Mann seemed to be trying to pass himself off as a sailor, but Betsy Patterson, who had dated a sailor or two in her time, kept catching him in lies and misstatements. “Are you wellborn?” she asked at last, and the scene ended, apparently on a hilarious close-up of Johnny Tampa, considering the question. All in all, it was no more than two minutes, but they filmed it again and again from different angles, while the director, the stoop-shouldered man, kept pulling Tampa aside to chat. No one had anything to say to Selene, and Tess had to admit that she was convincing as Betsy Patterson, perhaps even more captivating than the real-life coquette, managing the trick of being innocent and knowing at the same time. But Johnny seemed tentative, off in a way that even a civilian could discern.

“Someone put Nair in Johnny’s face cream yesterday,” Ben whispered to Tess during one of the breaks. “He smelled it before he put it on, but it freaked him out. He could have ended up losing his eyebrows if he had used it.”

“Where was this?”

“In his banger. Trailer. We have a bank of trailers on the parking lot, which the actors and day players use as dressing rooms.”

Tess made a mental note that the trailers were something else she would have to be concerned about. Meanwhile, she was able to piece together much of what was happening on her own — two cameras, for example, took simultaneous “A” and “B” shots, which reduced the amount of time spent on coverage. The director never told either actor how to say a line but spoke more generally about the emotion he was looking for, the tone. They were on the ninth take, and even Tess could tell that they were finally getting what they wanted from Tampa when three bars of an Iguanas’ song trumped the tender scene.
Para donde vas?
Her cell phone. Oops.

“Whose fucking cell phone was that?” Lottie leapt from her chair — a not inconsiderable feat for her, given the distance to the ground. Her voice was soft but vicious. “I was serious about the fine, I will fucking fine you, I will have your fucking head, what kind of idiot doesn’t turn his phone off—” When she realized that the culprit was Tess, she softened her approach, but only slightly. “Oh, you must be the… security detail. Monaghan. Well, I guess no one told you, but there are signs posted all over the fucking place. You can read, can’t you? Greer—”

She motioned to the young woman and leaned toward her, giving her what Tess could only suspect was a whispery scolding.

“I’m sorry,” Tess said. “It was all my fault. Greer
did
tell me.” She thought that might win her a look of gratitude from Greer, but the young woman had a panicky, stay-away-from-me expression. Flip looked sheepish, knowing he had arranged for Greer to bring her here, while Ben’s usual smirk was in place. Tampa was clearly frustrated, having been interrupted just as he was beginning to calm down. Only Selene seemed oblivious to everything going on around her, playing with her hair even as a woman kept poking at the elaborate upsweep with a long comb.

“Thanks,” Tess said, waving as she stepped backward. “I’m going to run over to my office, but I’ll be back when Selene’s finished for the day. Give me a thirty-minute heads-up, so I can be here when she’s ready to go.”

Still moving backward, she gave what she hoped was a nonchalant wave, only to trip over a mass of cables. Righting herself, she fought the urge to run from the soundstage, settling for a brisk walk. It was only when she was in her car that she realized she had, in fact, fled with the headset that Greer had explicitly told her to leave behind. Poor Greer, she’d probably be blamed for that as well.

“Great hire,” Ben said to Flip a little later as they were preparing the setup for another scene, a dinner party. It was going to be an absolute ballbuster — three full pages of dialogue, half of it Tampa’s. He was so good in his other scenes, but he seemed to fall apart whenever he had to act opposite Selene. A problem, given that the network kept pounding on them to write more for her. Their chemistry had been good initially but had deteriorated as Selene’s part expanded.

Flip nodded absently, not catching the tone — a habit of Flip’s, not catching the tone of things in real life. Then, on a double take: “Hey, don’t be an asshole. She’s okay.”

“You really think this is going to solve anything, assigning her to Selene?”

Flip gave him a measuring kind of look. Ben wondered if his old friend guessed that Ben’s real concern was how he could continue seeing Selene if she was watched every minute she was off set. But how could Flip know? How could anyone know? Selene was as intent on keeping their secret as he was. Or so she had said.

But all Flip said was: “I think it’s going to solve a lot of our problems. You’ll see.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

Flip shook his head, as if refusing to acknowledge this possibility. Greer — nearby, always nearby, always hovering, always spying, God, how Ben hated her — looked defensive, as if
her
work, her decision, had been challenged. Ever since she had started working for Flip, she seemed increasingly confused about her role in things, apparently believing that the orders she carried out were her orders. Ben wished that she would make a fatal mistake — insult Flip’s wife, or confess to a profound admiration for Flip Senior. She was an operator, this one, although not as smooth as she thought she was, not nearly as smooth.

“She’s kind of attractive,” Flip said. “If I were single, I’d ask her out.”

Ah, good old Flip, always looking for a matrimonial noose to slip around Ben’s neck, so they both could be monogamous and miserable.

“She has a boyfriend,” Greer said quickly. Flip, perhaps startled by the shrill tone in her voice, gave her a look, and she mumbled: “I remember from when the newspaper wrote about her. They live together.”

Flip had a finite amount of attention for nonwork matters, and it was now exhausted. “I’m going back to the writers’ office, so you’ll have to cover set for the rest of the day, Ben.” It was an order. To the world at large, Flip pretended they were two equals, two longtime friends who never quarreled. But someone had to be in charge, as Flip often said, and that person happened to be, well, Flip.

“You’re the boss,” Ben told his oldest friend.

Tess had a secret recipe for cooling the flush brought on by humiliation — she went to the nearest Baskin-Robbins and got a double scoop, chocolate chip and orange sherbet. It was a homeopathic cure of sorts, for it reminded her of a night when she was eight, when she had taken a lick of this admittedly odd pairing only to see both scoops fall and go rolling across the floor. But the clerk had been kind, giving her a new cone for free, and it was this kindness, the acknowledgment that everyone made mistakes, that the flavors brought back to her. She drove one-handed to her office, where she spent an hour on bills, paying and sending. In the end, she was dead even — assuming her clients weren’t deadbeats.

Her nerves soothed, Tess raced home to walk the dogs. Her new assignment would be hardest on them, for they were used to tagging along to the office and even to some of her jobs. They were, in fact, great decoys on surveillance. A woman walking an unruly greyhound and a placid Doberman was so conspicuous as to be inconspicuous, Tess had discovered. If she struggled with her cell phone as leashes twisted around her like a maypole, no one would ever suspect she was actually snapping photographs. She should structure one of her classes around that concept, how to hide in plain sight.

Stony Run, the park that bordered her backyard, was empty at this time of day, and she enjoyed having it to herself. She scuffed her feet through the leaves, wistful for a time when people had made huge piles of them and started bonfires, environmentally unfriendly as she now knew that practice to be. Now, in upscale neighborhoods such as hers, leaves were piled along the curbs and sucked up by a huge city machine on an appointed date. She scuffed harder, enjoying the rustling sound. She stopped. The rustle didn’t, not quite.

Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw what appeared to be an enormous mound of camouflage, tiptoeing from tree to tree. It was like something out of a cartoon, one where Wile E. Coyote dressed up as a cactus and attempted to blend into the landscape while stalking the Road Runner.

“Mrs. Blossom?”

The woman’s considerable girth was visible from both sides of the tree she was using for cover, but she didn’t acknowledge Tess, just stayed where she was.

“Mrs. Blossom, I
see
you.”

The woman peered around the tree. “Does that mean I failed?”

Now that Tess had a chance to inspect the full, head-to-toe effect of Mrs. Blossom’s surveillance costume — no other word would do — she was impressed almost in spite of herself. It was camouflage, yes, but not the usual browns, grays, and greens. This was purple camouflage, popularized a few years ago by fans of the Ravens, and Mrs. Blossom had found oversize men’s cargo pants that actually bagged on her. To finish off her look, she had chosen low-heeled brown pumps and — this detail was utterly endearing to Tess — a moss green hat. She had thought about her costume, perhaps even opened up her pocketbook to complete it.

“We don’t have grades. And you were on the honor system, right? You were to write up a report on how it went, good or bad. So how do you think you did?”

Mrs. Blossom stubbed her toe in the dirt. “Not very well. You saw me.”

“Yes, but — not until we got to the park. Were you waiting here, or near my house? Did you follow me?”

“From your office,” Mrs. Blossom said. “I parked there the whole day and — I was so worried, I had to go to the bathroom, which I know isn’t allowed, but I went to this bar, which looked a little scary from the outside, although the bathrooms were really clean. Nice, even.”

Tess knew the bar, an unofficial lesbian hangout, and its bathrooms were, in fact, impeccable.

“I was getting ready to go home — Oprah is on at four, and I like to make a little snack first — but then you finally showed up. So I waited to see where you would go.”