Sleeping Beauty (12 page)

I get out of the car and shut the door. “Brendan, did you want to, uh, come over?” I’m ninety-five percent hoping for a yes so I can follow up on that jaw nuzzling fantasy. I’m also ninety-five percent sure that I’m crazy inviting a virtual stranger (especially one who’s just declared his love for me) back to my place.
What are you doing?
I think. Next to me, Davin looks like he’s thinking the same thing.

He sighs. “I don’t think so, Claire.”

“You sure, Doc?” says Davin, his words resembling something like a threat. “Don’t let me scare you off.”

I wonder what the hell happened between the two of them in the last seven weeks. Still, Davin’s being awfully rude. I bend my leg and kick backwards, trying to drill his knee. Davin lets out a shout of
hey!
before dancing out of field goal range.

I don’t know what it is…Davin’s rudeness, or maybe just because it feels absolutely wrong to leave everything like this, even if I can’t remember anything about “everything .” I bend down closer to the window. “You, uh, sure?”

He stares through the windshield at nothing. “Claire, I wouldn’t trade the last seven weeks for anything, but I can’t start from the beginning. And it’s not what you think.” A few seconds of silence go by, and then he bangs the back of his head against the headrest–
thump, thump, thump
. “There are things you share with someone that are hard enough to say the first time.” He stops, his eyes unfocused. “And I think you share those things with someone you care about so you never have to say them again.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about; even so, a terrible feeling of sadness settles on me. I nod. “Okay.”

“You’ll be okay?”

“Sure.” Total lie. I plan to cry my mascara off as soon as I get into my apartment. The hard part will be figuring out why I’m doing it. “Thanks for your help with Andy and the script and everything.”

He looks in the rearview mirror. “I was happy to do it. It was no trouble.”

“Well, thanks anyway.”

“Sure. Break a leg, okay?”

He puts the car in reverse and eases it backwards. Before he can pull away I step off the curb and lean my forearms on the door. “Just so you know, I didn’t think you were back on ‘Go.’”

He looks at me, his expression unreadable.

“More like Marvin Gardens.” I shrug. “Or maybe Pacific Place.”

I wait for an answer. As the seconds tick by I realize that the silence
is
the answer. Davin grabs my arm, pulling me. I turn away before Brendan sees my regret.

Chapter Ten

August 11
^th
(four weeks later)

“You eating okay, Claire?”

Alex always does this: asks me questions while she’s shellacking my lips with gloss or lipstick, and then gets miffed when I don’t answer right away. I duck my head out of the range of her lip brush.

“I’m on set fifteen hours a day,” I say. “There are only twenty-four hours in the day.” I eye myself in the mirror and rub my lips together. “You do the math.”

She smacks me lightly on the shoulder, the movement making her spring-tight brown curls bounce. “Stop doing that! You’re going to take off the lip liner.” She starts putting brushes back in her case. “Well, you look terrible, like you’ve lost some more weight. Ivanna’s complaining again.”

Ivanna Ivanova is the Costume Standby, the omnipresent costume monitor during filming. “No hem is beneath me,” she’s fond of saying in her thick Russian accent whenever actors complain about her overbearing, man-handling ways on set. I consider her the bane of my existence. She’s usually the first sour face I see at five o’clock in the morning, and the last grumpy attitude I have to deal with at night when I go home. She hounds me before and after every take, as if each wrinkle in my costume is a targeted personal attack by me on her entire profession.

I hop off the chair and lightly run my fingers over my wig’s intricate, braided loops of auburn hair. “God, I love this color. You think I should do this to my hair?”

Alex folds her arms across her chest. “Yes, I think you should part your hair down the middle and braid it into a pine cone shape on top of your head.”

I roll my eyes. “Not the style, the
color
!”

“Did you hear anything I said?”

“I’ll hit the craft services table after wardrobe. They have the best bagels.”

“Ivanna’s telling Andy that your weight is going to create a continuity problem when they edit, that your weight loss will be noticed from one scene to the next.”

Another eye roll. “I’m wearing fifty pounds of clothes in every scene,” I say. “I hardly think anyone will notice a missing pound here or there. It’ll be fine.” I retie my robe and head for the door.

“One of the grips said she heard you vomit again.”

I stop in my tracks. “Shit,” I mutter under my breath. When I turn around I’m all smiles. “It’s just a nervous stomach, Alex.”

“You’ve been on the set for a month! How can you still be nervous?”

I frown. “Laurence Olivier had to be pushed on stage every night. Bob Hope vomited before every live performance he did. It’s just classic stage fright. It’s not like I’m puking all day long.” I shrug. “I get here, barf, go on with my day.”

Alex eyes me skeptically.

I nod towards the door. “Gotta go. I have to be on the set in thirty minutes.”

“Is today your big scene?”

“Alex! I’m already nervous enough. You make me want to go throw up right now.”

“Sorry, sorry. I’ll see you at lunch.” She wags her finger at me. “And I’m going to make sure you eat!”

“See you at lunch.”

I ignore Ivanna’s scowl as she
tut-tuts
her way through helping me dress, starting with the corset. Normally she yanks on the stays hard enough to cut me in half. Not today. “Leave it untied,” she sniffs to an assistant. “She’s too thin already.”

“I thought the whole point of eighteen-thirties fashion was to create a tiny waist,” I say.

“A tiny
waist
,” she huffs like a gulag overseer. “Not skinny, skinny, skinny all over.”

Ivanna’s inability to use English intensifiers drives me crazy. Instead of “very skinny” she’ll just repeat the adjective multiple times. I plan to anonymously gift her with the box set of
School House Rock: Grammar Rock
at the wrap party.

Once she’s done trussing me up in the corset and layering me in petticoats, Ivanna directs two set costumers to lower a white gown over my head. I hold my arms out straight to the sides while one of them cinches the waist with a gold-buckled embroidered belt. The other one starts fussing with the enormous gigot sleeves–puffed up masses of fabric encircling the arm big enough to house a family of four–that were all the rage at the time.

“The hair, the hair,” I caution as a third costumer comes at me with the fabric steamer. The last time they used it to de-wrinkle the sleeves, my wig turned into a frizzy hair pile that left me looking like Rowlf the Dog from the Muppet Show. It took an hour for Alex to restyle it and, more critically, delayed filming.

Ivanna stands six feet in front of me, watching as her underlings work. “Coat,” she orders, snapping her fingers. One of them springs into action, fetching a lush, pale pink satin wrap with black fur cuffs and collar. She holds it behind me while Ivanna eases my “leg of mutton” sleeves into it.

Next: shoes. Women of the period wore delicate, flat satin shoes tied with ribbons or lace, the tips peeping out from beneath the hems of their skirts. The director determined that I looked too short next to my male co-star, Jonathan Varner, so he ordered Ivanna to put me in heels. A period costume purist (and two-time Oscar winner for costumes), Ivanna’s head almost blew off at this cordwainery sacrilege. At one point, she threatened to leave the movie.

Eventually they compromised, Ivanna lowering the hem of all the gowns to hide my shoes. If the historically offensive shoes should be seen in any of the shots, Andy told her, he would have them digitally removed in post-production.

Ivanna circles me one final time. “Rebecca is ready,” she announces. She does this, calling me “Claire” until all the costume pieces are on and in place. Now she’ll refer to me as “Rebecca”—the name of my character–for the rest of the day unless I do something stupid like take off a shoe to rub my foot between takes. Woe to the talent who hears their real name from her lips before shooting wraps for the day.

“Claire?”

I turn slowly–abrupt movements in period costumes can end tragically–and follow one of the assistant directors out of the costume trailer. “Does Andy want to do another run-through?” I say.

He shakes his head. “He wants to start shooting as soon as everyone’s in place. The set’s open…do you need to prep?”

My Big Scene involves crying on-cue–an ability I was never able to master in acting classes. I’m hoping that having ten or fifteen minutes alone on the set will allow me to get into character and think about all the reasons why Rebecca should be bawling her eyes out.

“That would be great.”

“Will ten minutes notice be enough?” The AD–assistant director–holds my hand and guides me over the thick cables winding across the floor in every direction.

“Perfect.”

One moment we’re inching along on concrete in murky lighting, the next I’m standing on hardwood floors in a brightly lit, nineteenth century Bostonian ballroom. The AD hurries back the way he came. I turn three hundred and sixty degrees, marveling at the talent of the set designers.

When I hear the high-pitched voices of children, I don’t think much of it; set passes are often distributed to various groups, charities, individuals. Pass holders are given a quick tour of the set before being whisked away right before the cameras roll. I carefully lower my corseted and skirted bulk into one of the ballroom chairs on the far side of a false wall, close my eyes, and push the sounds of footsteps and the harried shouts of the crew as far as I can into the background..

My character, Rebecca Reed, was a Bostonian of obscure birth. Her writings, based on her six months in a Boston convent, fueled the anti-Catholic sentiment that led directly to the Ursuline Convent Riots in the mid-eighteen hundreds. A bestseller once fêted by Boston high society, her fortune turned as people began to suspect that her account and her origins were less than truthful. She died of tuberculosis soon after, twenty-two and heartbroken.

My Big Scene involves Rebecca being publically scorned by a society gentleman she loved. Eyes still closed, it’s not hard to feel a little teary about what’s coming.
Here she is getting all dressed up for this ball, thinking how far she’s come from her dad’s Boston farm
, I think.
The most important people in the city will be here, the guy she’s crazy about will be here. People will tell her she’s beautiful, she’s talented, how her exposé is the most important piece of writing in the nineteenth century. Life can only get better and better, right?

“I want to twirl! I want to get down and twirl!”

“We can’t, Analis, remember? The man said so. We can just look.”

Oh there’s no way are you kidding me this isn’t happening
. My eyes snap open, searching for an escape, but it’s too late. He sees me at the exact moment I see him, and we both freeze in horror.

Dressed in jeans and a t-shirt with the hospital’s teddy bear logo, sleeves rolled up enough to expose his biceps, and looking as blow-me-away gorgeous as ever, Dr. Brendan Charmant stands in front of me in mute shock. He’s holding a little girl in his arms who is perfectly normal-looking except for whatever’s on her head. It looks like a cross between a pink bicycle helmet and a gauze turban. Behind him, a group of adults and older kids wanders the set.

I carefully roll forward in my chair and rise to my feet. Trying not to trip on my gown, I take baby-steps towards him.
Not a big deal
, I tell myself.
Just say ‘Hi, good to see you, well, gotta go make a movie.’ It’s over in two minutes.

“Hi.”

“Hi, Claire.” His voice, kind when he spoke to the little girl just moments before, is cold, his expression stony.

Just like the first day I met you
. “What are you doing here?”

“I told you, Andy Gordon gives me set passes so the kids at the hospital can visit. We do it a few times a year.”

“Oh, right.” I look at the girl. “Hi, my name’s Claire. What’s your name?”

Instead of answering she says in a chirpy voice, “Is that your dress?”

I smile. “For now it is.” I spread the skirt with my hands. “Isn’t it pretty? I have to give it back after the movie though.”

“This is Analis Garrison,” says Brendan. “You saw her in the hospital.”

I don’t know whose eyes are wider, mine or hers. “You came to see me in the hospital?” she says. She points at my skirts. “Did you wear that dress?”

I can’t believe this is the same girl, the one who looked like she was on post-operative life support. “You’re–you’re Analis?” I look from her to Brendan in disbelief.

“Can I get down and twirl?” she says, wriggling wildly.

“She can twirl, it’s okay.” Then I panic, thinking maybe she can’t walk. “I mean, if she’s able to,” I add.

Brendan lets her slide to the floor. “No running though, right?” He barely gets the words out before she’s spinning away from him, arms outstretched.

I stand there, desperate for something to say. “Did you–did you ever get her skull out of the freezer?”

His eyes crinkle at the corners. “I did. Washed the cigarette ash off and everything.”

“That’s amazing,” I say, shaking my head. “Her parents must think you’re a miracle worker.”

He shrugs. “Kids’ brains are pretty resilient.”

“I see she’s wearing a protective helmet,” I say with heavy sarcasm.

“I gave her yours since you wouldn’t wear it.” He looks down at my nearly-bare shoulders and runs his finger along the fur trim of the coat collar. “This costume is incredible.”