Robert Stone - Children of Light

“So, Christ, I thought,” Carnahan was telling her in his broad Pawtucket accent, “jeez, Spanish moss, it’s a goddamn tree disease. They’ll never let me get away with it. I thought we’d have to fake it …”

Lowndes kept watching her. He had opened his shirt to the sun, thrust out his pale chest and assumed a somewhat fascistoid stance. This, Lu Anne thought, might be a modified variation of the Country Come-on, which she had seen performed quite often enough. Cocaine, est conditioning, childhood trauma — who could tell what such a posture reflected? In any case, there was no chance of asking him for drugs. He was the enemy.

“So I sez,” Carnahan said, “don’t shit me, I sez. I seen this shit growing on trees at Rosarita Beach. Of course,” he said with a burst of emphysemic laughter, “I ain’t never even been to Rosarita Beach.”

She came right in on the laugh. “That’s too much, Frank,” she giggled. “Hey, is it true that Gordon Walker is coming down?” She squared her shoulders, straightened up and leaned her fists on her hips, having a short shot at Lowndes’s stance to see what it would feel like on her.

“I dunno,” Carnahan said. “Who is he?”

“The writer.”

“Aw,” Carnahan said, “I dunno. He didn’t fly in with Charlie and the dailies.”

She felt relief. Ever since the call she had been waiting for him with combined joy and anxiety. Better that I rest, she thought. That evening, she decided, she would take a little of her medicine as prescribed and sleep. That was the purpose of the operation after all. That her scenes be played with clarity and the right moves and the right timing.

Things were under control. The landscape was a bit overbright, that was all. She was not saying inappropriate things, and the only voices she heard were concealed under the wind or in the sound of the sea and she knew them for illusion and paid them no mind.

Vera Ricutti, the wardrobe mistress, overtook her on the way to the trailer.

“I just been looking at these seals,” she said excitedly. “There must have been dozens. These darling little seals,” she exclaimed, “with their little faces sticking up out of the water.”

“Oh, I would love to see them,” Lu Anne enthused. “I hope they come back.”

“So cute!” Vera said as they went into Lu Anne’s trailer. “You gotta see them.”

The assistant director’s voice sounded across the laager. “Joy, please? Driver? Everybody ready? I want quiet, the director wants to hear the sound on this. Right,” Hueffer shouted. His voice was turning hoarse. “Quiet! Roll! Action!”

Vera closed the door of Lu Anne’s air-conditioned trailer. Lu Anne herself sat down before her mirror, wiping her brow with Kleenex. Everything in the mirror was shipshape. She felt ready to work.

As she undressed, Vera held up a light-colored corset for her inspection.

“See what we got for you? This goes on first.”

“My God,” Lu Anne said, lifting her arms for the fit, “is this thing wool?”

“It’s a synthetic. This is the same one you had on at the fittings except we made it out of lighter stuff and put a zipper on it. But the real ones, the ones they wore then — they were real wool. This one was for tennis and jumping around in.”

“I can’t believe they went around in wool corsets in Louisiana in summer.”

“So they shouldn’t see your bod sweat, that was why they had it. No underarm stain and your dress couldn’t stick. We tried this number out on Joy and it photographs O.K. Anyway, we got another dozen white dresses if you do sweat it up.”

“I’m a sweater,” Lu Anne said when she was zipped in. “But I mean, how could they play tennis in woolen corsets?”

“India,” Vera said. “Africa. The white ladies wore woolen corsets. The locals, I guess they got to let their jugs dangle.”

The door opened and Josette Darré, the hairdresser, came in. There was a thin film of frost between Lu Anne and Josette; they never spoke except about the business at hand. Josette was a sullen Parisian hippie. She had rebuffed Lu Anne’s French with a pout and an uncomprehending shrug and that, for Lu Anne, had been that.

Josette stood by while Lu Anne got into her dress and stood before the mirror, letting Vera tie her loops behind and straighten her hem. Then she sat down to let Josette work on her hair, making faces at herself in the glass.

“Lucky locals,” she said, wiping her forehead again.

There was a knock at the door and Joe Ricutti, who was the makeup man, came into the trailer. He was laughing.

“That McIntyre kid is a barrel of laughs,” he rasped. “She’s in her own musical.”

“I don’t know,” Vera said in a weary tone. Vera was Joe’s wife; they worked together most of the time. “Where do they find them?”

Josette stepped aside; Joe Ricutti stepped in behind Lu Anne’s chair. Lu Anne raised an upturned hand and the makeup man squeezed it. They made small talk and gossiped while Joe gently held her chin and turned her face from side to side, examining her profile in the mirror. His fingertips delicately probed beneath her bones; in his free hand he held a makeup brush. Lu Anne sat, a prisoner, listening to the trolley outside and watching as Joe found the soft spots around her jaw, the lines to be disguised. She examined the stringiness at the base of her throat and it made her think of a dry creek bottom — cracks, dry sticks, desiccation where it had been serene, smooth and cool and pleasing.

There was a Friend in the room. I don’t like her, it said, the way she look. Lu Anne hushed it silently.

“I think,” she told Ricutti, “I think the kid’s a little long in the tooth for this one.”

Joe sang a few bars of protest. “Whaddaya talkin’ about? You look good! Look at yourself!”

He turned her head to reflect her profile and ran his finger from her forehead to the tip of her chin. “I mean look at that! That’s terrific.”

Gazing sidewise, she saw in the mirror Josette’s expressionless eyes.

Made-up, she sat for Josette’s last applications. Vera Ricutti brought forth a straw boater from one of several identical boxes and ceremoniously placed it on Lu Anne’s head. The Ricuttis drew back in admiration. Josette stood to one side, arms folded. Lu Anne caught a scent of lavender sachet. She saw the inhabited mask of Edna Pontellier before her.

The Drogues were watching Joy McIntyre ride her trolley on their tape monitor. Now, instead of standing and clinging to the pole, she sat on the car’s wooden bench. Her back was ramrod straight, her chin raised so that the weird light, refracted through overhanging tree boughs, played dramatically on her face, which was partly shadowed by her straw hat.

“The speed is perfect,” old Drogue said. “Make sure they keep it.”

“That kid,” young Drogue said of Joy McIntyre, “everything you put her in looks overdone.”

“Use her,” the old man said.

“Use her for what? She can’t act. Her diction’s a joke. She’s so flamboyant you can’t tell what your scene is gonna look like if you use her to light.”

“If you throw away that face,” old Drogue said, “… a face like that, a body like that — you have no business in the industry.”

After a moment, the younger Drogue smiled. “You want to fuck her, Dad?”

“That’s my business.”

“Say the word.”

“I’ll manage my own sex life, thanks a whole lot.”

“Patty will flip. I can’t wait to tell her.”

“I told you,” the old man said, raising his voice, “mind your fucking business.”

In a humorous mood, young Drogue opened the trailer door to find Hueffer and Toby Blakely awaiting him.

“So,” he asked them, “is it gonna rain or what?”