Aurora 07 - Last Scene Alive (6 page)

Cleaning houses is not for everyone. It’s not high-paying, at least in Lawrenceton, and some people seem to feel it’s degrading. So I was grateful for Catherine’s consistency, and I tried hard to be a good employer.

“I’m fixing to leave,” she said, after I’d introduced her to Robin. “You need to get some more Clorox and some more Bounce sheets. I put it on the list on the refrigerator.”

“Thanks, Catherine,” I said.

“See you next time.”

“Okay.”

We were never going to be best friends, but at least our exchanges were always civil. After she’d left, I poured some iced tea for Robin and we went into the study, den, downstairs room—I’d called it all three. There was a red leather couch with its back to the window. Robin settled on that, so he’d have plenty of room for his long legs. I had a low, comfortable armchair that allowed my feet to sit firmly on the floor. We looked at each other a little anxiously, not knowing what to say next.

“Are you very unhappy about the movie?” he asked abruptly.

“I was. I’m still not exactly thrilled.” I took a deep breath, exhaled. I was making an effort to be honest, with a little tact thrown in. “But the town is very excited, and the money will be good for its economy.”

Robin nodded, and seemed to want to change the subject. He started playing “How is?” and we went down a list of names rapidly. It was an unpleasant surprise to me to find how long it had been since I’d seen some of the people Robin asked about. There seemed no excuse for it in a town the size of Lawrenceton.

“Tell me about your husband,” Robin said out of the blue.

I sat and stared at my hands for a minute. “Martin was ... a senior executive at Pan-Am Agra,” I said carefully. “He was older than me by almost fifteen years. He was a Vietnam vet.

He was very. . . dynamic. He had done some shady things in his life. He was always looking for that to come back at him.” He loved me deeply. He was fantastic in bed. He was extremely competitive with other men. He was domineering even when he didn’t think he was being so.

He really listened to me. He broke my heart. I loved him very much, though our marriage had loose edges and rough patches. All this.

“I know you must have some hard times,” Robin said quietly. “My mother lost my dad earlier this year, and she’s been struggling.”

I nodded. Hard times, indeed. “I’m sorry about your dad,” I told him, and for a minute we sat in silence.

“Are you going to marry the actress?” I asked brightly, trying to get us back on a less dangerous track. “I saw you-all’s picture in the magazine.”

“You can’t believe the stories about me and Celia,” he said. “At one time they had some truth to them, but not any more. We’re just barely friends, now.”

I raised my eyebrows at him, making a skeptical face.

He grinned. “No, really. She’s full of ambition, she’s really young, and she’s got different priorities. Since she won the Emmy, in fact. . . well, the only reason she’s doing this project is because she’d signed on for it prior to her win.” He looked like a different man when he said this, older and harder.

I gave his disenchantment a moment of respectful silence. Then I asked, “So, what did you want from this visit to me?” He must want something, I was sure.

He paid me the compliment of not protesting he’d just wanted to see me again. “I want you to come to the set, at least once. I want you to see this being filmed, read the script.”

“Why? Why on earth would you want that?”

“Because I want you ... to approve. At least, not to hate it so much.”

“Does it really matter to you?”

“Yes.” Robin was dead serious.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why my approval made any difference at all. But what did I have to lose? I wasn’t scheduled to work tomorrow until late afternoon.

“Okay, Robin. I’ll come tomorrow to observe for a little while.”

“Great,” he said, brightening. “I’ll set it up.”

You would’ve thought the circus had come to town.

It was the biggest mess I’d ever seen, but I was pretty sure that was because I didn’t understand what was happening. There were people everywhere, standing in clusters talking seriously or buzzing busily around the area that had been delineated with sawhorses. A sizeable number of the cast and crew found time to stop by a table laden with bagels and fruit and coffee, a table supervised by a stout, auburn-haired young woman in a white uniform with

“Molly’s Moveable Feasts” embroidered on the chest.

It appeared that Robin himself was barely tolerated on the set, which surprised me. No one seemed pleased to see him or gave him more than a nod. Writing fame was no guarantee of special treatment here.

“How come they’re not happy to have you on the spot?” I asked.

“Writers are just a pain on the set,” he explained. He didn’t seem at all ruffled or surprised by the indifference shown him. I couldn’t believe that Robin was being herded into a corner and practically treated as if he were invisible. To me, writers were the most important people around. I noticed that I was invisible by extension, and that was fine with me.

I only dared talk to Robin in whispers. I tried to figure out what I was seeing, and after a while I asked him to interpret the scene for me.

“That’s the director,” he said in a low voice, nodding toward a tall, gawky man with five earrings on one ear, a shaved head, and an irritating black goatee. He was wearing an absolutely conventional oxford-cloth shirt and khakis, not only clean and pressed, but also starched. Somehow, with the shaved head and goatee, the shirt and khakis looked odder than a Limp Bizkit tee shirt and cutoffs would have. “His name is Joel Park Brooks, and he’s smart as hell. That’s his assistant, Mark Chesney, to his right.” Mark Chesney was as sunny as Joel Park Brooks was grim, and he was wearing exactly the same kind of clothes. It just didn’t look like a costume on Mark Chesney.

“Who’s that?” I indicated the graying, rough-looking man I’d seen with Starlets One and Two yesterday.

“That’s the head cameraman, Will Weir. He’s worked everywhere,” Robin said admiringly.

“He’s easy to work with, they say, and very good.”

“Is that Celia?” Starlet One had come out of a trailer and was striding toward the churchyard. She was recognizable only by her walk, as far as I was concerned. Her hair was tame, her makeup looked very moderate, her clothes were definitely more modest than yesterday’s outfit. As I watched, she stumbled on something on the sidewalk, and righted herself with a little jerk. Joel Park Brooks didn’t seem to notice, but the cameraman—Will Weir, I reminded myself—frowned as he observed the misstep.

“Yes,” Robin said, and he didn’t sound glad, or unhappy—any reaction I would have expected from someone seeing the woman he’d dated until fairly recently. He sounded . . .

worried, concerned. Odd. After all, anyone can stumble. I am no graceful swan myself.

Celia hadn’t closed the door to her trailer, which was a sort of queenlike omission. I saw the wind blow in and ruffle the pile of papers on the floor, so I stepped closer to take care of the door; and, also, just to satisfy my curiosity. I saw a couch inside the tiny room, a little table sitting by that, and on top of a pile of what seemed to be a manuscript and some library books was an Emmy . . . the real, bonafide statue. I wondered if Celia would let me hold it, because surely I’d never in my life set eyes on one again. But Robin was looking at me strangely, so I swung the door closed.

Robin pointed out the producer, a wild-haired burly man dressed all in black. “Jessie Bruckner. He’s going to be catching an afternoon plane back to L.A.,” Robin told me. I had heard of Jessie Bruckner, so I was properly impressed. People seemed to be moving around more purposefully now, and Joel Park Brooks was shouting directions at top speed, so apparently something was about to happen. I was so engrossed in the scene around me that I didn’t register my stepson’s presence for a while, but then I noticed him waiting by the door of the church, dressed in a conservative suit and tie. He was wearing faux glasses and carrying a Bible. In character, I assumed.

“Who’s Barrett playing?”

“Bankston.” Robin looked down at me to see if I thought that was funny, and I managed a smile. Of course, the real Bankston Waites had never worn glasses, or carried a Bible, as far as I could remember. He had gone to church, but not this one. Oh well, I guessed accuracy mattered only so much.

Fleetingly, I thought of how much Martin would have relished his son working in Lawrenceton. Then I thought of how happy it would make me if I never had to speak to Barrett again.

When I turned my attention back to what was happening around me, I could see that the actual area the cameras were trained on held no one but actors. Everyone seemed to be at his or her workstation. An amazing amount of food had vanished from the service table, and the stout young woman in white was cleaning away the remnants. She smiled and waved at Robin as he glanced her way.

Silence reigned. As two well-dressed extras took their places on the sidewalk facing away from the church door, I glanced up at Robin to see him absorbed in the scene before me. He draped a long arm around my shoulders as if that were automatic. I stood stiff and frozen, my own arms crossed across my ribs, trying not to be ridiculously self-conscious about a casual gesture.

At the director’s signal, the scene began. It appeared this was supposed to be a Sunday morning, right after church was over. A silver-haired man in priest’s robes was standing to the right of the open door, shaking hands as “parishioners” came out. So warm and caring did he look, so saintly was his bearing, that he practically reeked of goodness. The couple already in the churchyard stepped briskly past the cameras. One or two other people came down the church steps. Then one of the “churchgoers” swatted at a wasp, and Joel Park Brooks called the action to a halt.

“Again, without the swatting!” he called, and the actors obediently went back into the church. The couple resumed their place on the sidewalk. The priest’s aura of Godliness wavered and then snapped back into place as the action began again.

This time, Celia Shaw (the “me” composite) and Chip Brodnax (I gathered he was the Robin character) made it out of the church. They were positioned in the foreground, while the church emptied behind them.

“I hope you enjoy your stay in our little town,” Celia told Chip. Her accent was generically southern. I rolled my eyes, all to myself. Why can’t Hollywood comprehend that there are regional accents in the south, besides Cajun? “Lawrenceton’s always been so quiet, so safe,”

she drawled.

“This is a fantastic town,” Chip said enthusiastically, staring down at Celia with transparent admiration. “And I know I’m gonna love living here. What do you do for excitement?”

“Why don’t you come to a meeting of our club tonight?” Celia said, smiling with delight at her own inspiration. Then she added naughtily, “I’m the guest speaker tonight, and you’d better bone up on ... murder!” Then she marched off, head triumphantly in the air, as Chip stared after her, cute bafflement written across his handsome features.

“Cut!” cried a hoarse male voice, and immediately Joel Park Brooks launched himself toward the waiting Chip and Celia.

“You wrote that?” I asked, trying not to sound too horrified.

“No. They hired a script doctor after I turned my version in.” Robin’s cheeks were red with embarrassment. Or maybe it was just the heat.

The day was definitely getting warm. In October, our night temperatures drop down into the forties pretty often, but the day temperatures can march right back up into the eighties. People were discarding jackets all over the set. I was wearing a short-sleeved dark blue silk tee shirt and khakis, having decided to be cold for an hour rather than tote a sweater the rest of the day.

I felt smug. Robin was equally practical in jeans and green golfing shirt. The jeans made his butt look very nice.

“Interested?” Robin asked, and for an unnerving moment I misunderstood him. I looked up at him with wide eyes until I realized he was just asking if I was enjoying the controlled chaos around me. I nodded. Looking past Robin’s shoulder, I saw someone waving in his direction.

“Hey, that gal wants to talk to you,” I said. It was the stout young woman who’d been overseeing the Molly’s Moveable Feasts table.

Robin looked uncomfortable. “What now?” he said, and strode off. I was left standing in the middle of a sea of busy people and mysterious cables. I was afraid to move for fear I’d go where I wasn’t supposed to, or trip over something vital. It was hard to look nonchalant, under the circumstances, and I was relieved when the chief cameraman stopped to chat.

Though he might be on the unpolished side—his hair was rough and poorly cut, his face almost obscured by a huge graying mustache—he was really polite. “Will Weir,” he said, extending a hand. I shook it and introduced myself.

“Oh, yeah, Robin said he was bringing you to the set,” Weir said. “Celia’s character is based on you, you know.”

“I’d heard,” I said dryly.

“Robin is a nice guy,” Weir said. “I don’t know how much of the script is autobiographical, but according to the book, you two dated for a while?”

It seemed a strange thing for this cameraman to ask. Why would he care? Our relationship was really none of his business. But there wasn’t any reason for me to be touchy, either.

“We dated for a couple of months,” I said levelly. “Then he went off to Los Angeles to seek his fame and fortune.”