Scruples (63 page)

Before the shoot started the locations in Mendocino had all been chosen, the necessary rents agreed upon, the legal contracts signed, the licenses obtained, and a number of Mendocino residents, picturesque as a band of young gypsies, had been recruited as extras. Vito had rented a small house for himself and another for Fifi Hill, the director. The cinematographer, Svenberg, was staying in the Mendocino Hotel, along with the principal actors; other actors with smaller parts would arrive when they were needed by small plane from San Francisco, landing at the tiny Mendocino airport. The crew members were installed in motels in Fort Bragg, an exceedingly ordinary city a few miles up the coast.

Billy had never been to Mendocino. Although it is only some hundred miles or so northwest from the inland Napa Valley, it is impossible to go from the valley to the coast except by two narrow little country roads with many hairpin turns. She had heard about the picturesque village for years, and she was in a state of high excitement as she prepared to spend the midsummer weeks there while the filming of
Mirrors
took place.

Billy now assumed that she knew a fair amount about movie making, having spent almost all of the last two months listening to Vito’s end of the details of the preproduction activity, details she supposed were the necessarily dull and irritating prologue to the actual creative excitement that would take place once the cameras started rolling. She packed the simplest wardrobe possible. She didn’t want to look ostentatious, she thought, as she picked her plainest linen pants, her oldest silk and cotton shirts, her most classic sweaters. For evening, she assumed, she and Vito would dine together at any one of the several excellent restaurants in the country inns around Mendocino; she added a few long skirts and several understated, yet elegant tops, and a few heavy jackets against the cool evening temperatures. Shoes—God, how many shoes a woman needed! Billy’s passion for clothes had never overcome her annoyance at the necessity of having the right shoe for each outfit. Damnation, her largest shoe bag, which she had hoped not to have to take, was already full. She could manage with four handbags, she calculated, and only the simplest gold earrings and chains. Nothing really. She filled another bag with lingerie and dressing gowns. At least she’d be able to look glamorous when she and Vito were at home together. True, he’d warned her that their house, one of the few available at the height of the tourist season, was simple, on the verge of falling apart. But Billy was sure that it couldn’t be all that bad, and anyway, what did it matter? The important thing was that she and Vito would be together in this adventure—a summer on location in Mendocino—just those words themselves had a thrilling ring.

Vito had been concerned that she might not find enough to do during the week. He’d even suggested that she fly up just for weekends, but Billy had been outraged by the idea. Did he think that she had so little interest in his work? Quite the contrary, she could barely wait to become a part of the film-making process.

Mirrors
had started shooting on Tuesday, the 5th of July. By lunchtime on Thursday they were still working on an outcropping meadow across a bridge from Mendocino from which they could view the entire town. The camera crew and lighting technicians were setting up on the edge of a perfectly round lily pond, surrounded by tall, wild grasses, which lay in the rough, scrubby field like a hidden miracle. If someone didn’t know exactly where it was, he could blunder right into it.

Billy already had. Exploring the terrain on the first day of shooting, when the lily pond had not yet been used, she had slid down its steep, muddy sides and landed in mucky water up to her armpits. Her white linen slacks and her favorite Hermès bag, white canvas and leather, had been a total loss, but the major damage had been to her pride. She screamed and two grips had had to be sent to pull her out of the deceptively deep pool, and one of them had been detailed to drive her, dripping, in humiliation, like a miscast Ophelia, back to the rented house where she changed into dry clothes.

And yet, looking back, that note of low burlesque had, at least momentarily, made her a member of the group. Her few minutes in the spotlight had been the first and last time that Billy had felt the cast and crew had been aware of her as more than an unnecessary bystander. Because that was exactly what she was, a useless onlooker. Everyone in Mendocino who was connected with the production of
Mirrors
had a job to do, except Billy. She was the most unproductive of all items, The Producer’s Wife. She had never felt so invisible and, paradoxically, so visible, in the wrong way. The tailored pants and plain shirts she had brought with her looked as out of place as an Edwardian Ascot dress. Billy couldn’t help the fact that her oldest sports clothes were no older than last year, fit perfectly, were made to order from the finest fabrics, in the most melting of summer colors. She couldn’t help the fact that she was incapable of wearing them without her stupendous built-in chic, which was only emphasized by their simplicity. She couldn’t help the fact that her personal style, her height, her very bone structure, all made it impossible for her to fade into the working group, dressed in the scruffy, well-seasoned, obviously
right
uniform of denim jackets and jeans, which were worn by everyone from Vito to the lowliest grip. She realized that she looked as eccentric as an Englishman having dinner in a black tie and a boiled shirt in the middle of Darkest Africa. But even that odd formality had been accepted years ago. Billy merely felt obsolete.

However, she reflected, as she searched the shops of Mendocino and Frot Bragg, in vain, for jeans that would be long enough and slim enough to fit her, the problem was not really how she looked. That was minor compared to the old enemy she was battling, that betrayed misery of an outsider, the sunless climate of her youth, when whatever group she was in never included her in their busy activities and complicated arrangements. Even when surrounded by blood relatives she had felt as if she were staring while she pressed her nose against the restaurant window and watched the people inside happily and obliviously eating their dinners. Whoever the fuck it was who said “Time heals all wounds” didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about, she thought savagely.
Nothing
heals old wounds. They were waiting there, inside, ready to incapacitate her, each and every time a situation came up that thrust her back into the emotional atmosphere of the past. Then everything—all the glamour, all the money, all the power—that had come after those first eighteen years suddenly seemed to be no more than window dressing. Was she stuck with her old wounds for life? Somehow she had to climb out of that dark corner, she decided, with an expression on her face so determined that she looked even taller and more self-confident than ever.

On location, Billy put up a good front. Someone had found a spare folding canvas chair for her and put it next to Vito’s. In theory she had her appointed place to sit and be near him. In practice, Vito almost never used his chair except as a drop for his jacket, his sweater, and, as the day grew hotter, his shirt. As he came by to shed each garment, he ruffled her hair absently, asked if she was all right, if the book she was reading was good, and dashed off before she could answer any of his questions. She felt, flushed with fury, like a dog without an owner.

During the shooting he was here, there, and everywhere, an Italian-American Scarlet Pimpernel, checking and double-checking to make sure that everyone was performing his job at 100 percent efficiency. While the cameras were rolling, he made notes so that Fifi could have the additional observations of a pair of fresh eyes.

Once a picture is being shot, the set or location is under the director’s supervision, but if Fifi Hill had now become a general, Vito had been transformed into an entire army of top sergeants, as well as always remaining, in the final analysis, commander in chief. During the lunch break, Vito and Fifi were invariably huddled out of earshort, busily conferring, often sending for Svenberg or some other member of the production staff to discuss new ways of approaching the material.

Hill’s greatest strength was in his flexibility, his willingness to use the script as a jumping-off place rather than as a bible. Like Vito, he never forgot that what they were all doing there was essentially playing; he never forgot that playing meant having fun. He wasn’t a self-indulgent director of the sacred agony variety, the oh-sweet-Jesus-what-happened-to-my-dream school. He made the dream come true, and it was that quality Vito had seen in him when he gave him his first directing job. Fifi was able to create an atmosphere in which the actors and actresses all felt that they were a little in love with him and he was a little in love with them. Meanwhile, it suited him perfectly if everybody who needed it had somebody to hate. With Vito protecting his flanks, ready to kick ass if anybody was fucking up Fifi’s picture, as he now thought of it, he was in the best of all possible worlds.

After her misadventure in the lily pond, Billy felt all but nailed to her canvas chair. Electric cables, of an unknown but unquestionably sinister nature, were lying in wait almost everywhere. If she walked around she knew she risked getting in the way of one set of technicians or another, and she had sworn to herself not to cause one more second’s worth of trouble. But even from her fixed viewpoint, Billy was able, after several days of shooting, to come to the accurate perception that making a movie was 98 percent waiting and 2 percent action. No events in her life, certainly nothing she had ever read about films, had led her to expect the unrelenting tedium of the experience. At first she thought that things were going slowly because the shooting was just starting, but soon she perceived that the tedium was the natural rhythm of the process. It would have been more interesting to watch a doddering old man build a boat out of balsa inside a bottle, she decided balefully.

Could she be the only person in the world who found that spending half a day waiting for a setup, only to find it had to be relit, was not inspired living theater? There was no one she dared ask. She’d rather rot on her chair than say anything to Vito, and, in any case, the only time they had alone together was late at night, after the dailies. Sitting there in her director’s chair, Billy smiled to herself and sucked down hard on her lower lip. No matter how thin Vito spread himself all day long, busy with other people, she could hardly fault him at night. He kept her so blazingly and so thoroughly fucked that she generally made her observations of the tiresomeness of movie making through a haze of sensual anticipation. She caught sight of him a hundred feet away, naked to the waist, gesticulating with his dazzling energy like the leader of a great troupe of followers, and thought that she wanted him again,
now
, damn it, not ten hours from now. She felt an almost irresistible, quite unbearable tug throughout her whole body as she imagined walking off the field with him and into the Winnebago, which was parked there for his use, locking the door and peeling off her clothes. She would just stand there, her legs wide apart, absolutely still, while she watched his prick rise and stiffen, his face assume that blunted, half-blind expression that came over it when he saw her naked body, like a sacred bull, like a forest god in a Jean Cocteau drawing. Thinking about it, imagining how he would smell, already sweating in the sun, Billy closed her smoky eyes and rubbed her thighs together imperceptibly.

“Lunch, Mrs. Ikehorn!” someone boomed in her ear. She started up, almost overturning the chair, but whoever had spoken to her was gone.

Lunch, she thought, blushing and furious. How did they dare to call that revolting meal lunch? It was supplied on the set every day by a company that specialized in catering to movie locations. By tradition the food was abundant: huge trays of fried pork chops, platters of fried chicken, casseroles of spaghetti and meatballs, vats of potato salad, mounds of barbecued beef ribs gleaming with fat, and crocks of hot dogs and baked beans encrusted with brown sugar, each dish as heavy and indigestible as the next.

Confronted with this spread, fit for teamsters, Billy had finally unearthed some Jell-O and, miraculously, a plate of cottage cheese decorated with grated carrots, a dish she had hated since her school days. But at least it wasn’t fried. Since Vito spent his lunch hours in conference, she ate alone, self-consciously, for two days, before she decided to take her tray into the Winnebago.

Billy sat in the trailer, her world reduced to a mound of cottage cheese, and knew she was too angry to eat. She felt her anger like a hard rubber ball that filled all of her belly and realized that only a minor part of it came from her rage at her own hard-core shyness and her own sharp vision of how alien she must appear to the company of
Mirrors
. Alien or not, she knew that most people don’t really pay that much attention to others, not nearly as much as every individual tends to think, and that she could probably appear in a trailing, flowered garden-party dress and a parasol and no one would give a damn.

The biggest part of her rage came from another source. She was angry at Vito who was neglecting her, as he had to in order to do his work. She was angry at his work, which, necessarily, made her an outsider. She was angry at her own wanting to be with him that had stuck her up here in Mendocino, useless and self-pitying. She was angry because if she went back to Los Angeles now, she would have failed the challenge she had imposed on herself. If she left she would be proving that she couldn’t take it when life wasn’t going the way she wanted it to go. She was angry because she couldn’t have what she wanted when she wanted it and how she wanted it. She was about to detonate with rage because she’d made her bed and now she fucking well had to lie in it.