Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“Lord, but this is chopping tall cotton,” I said, looking around me at the limo’s interior. It had a bar and more electronic gadgetry, including a tiny television set, than I had ever seen, and there were fresh flowers in a bud vase. Peruvian lilies, I thought. Telephones sprouted all over.

Caleb Pringle laughed.

“The studio hired it,” he said, and pressed a button. The privacy shield rose noiselessly. “I’d much rather drive my old Woody, but Margolies is in love with these things. They must cost Vega as much as Ishtar did. I’ve always thought these things were like riding in a coffin on wheels. Jesus here, however, is a jewel. He thinks I’m working for Ryan O’Neill, who seems to be his idol. I think it’s because I once told him I was working for Orion, because now every time he drops me off he says, ‘Tell Orion O’Neill Jesus say ’allo.’ Oh, well. The first time I shot in Mexico, my Spanish was so bad I told everyone I was making a gorilla. I was a sensation there for a while.”

We burst into laughter and Caleb Pringle popped open a bottle of champagne that rested in a silver bucket and poured it, and passed it around. We all took a glass.

“To Arc ,” he said. “Because this is where it starts.”

He raised his glass and looked at Laura, and she smiled dazzlingly and raised hers.

“To Arc ,” she said. “And everything else.”

We drank. “Mmmm,” Glynn said, her nose buried in foam. “It’s like drinking perfume.”

“The old monk who invented it said it was like drinking stars,” Caleb said, smiling at her, and she said, “Oh, it is! That’s much better!”

He told us a little about Arc as we ghosted through the spangled night toward the restaurant. The people and cars on the street looked as unreal, as phantasmagorical, as images in a fever dream. The limo’s glass was tinted, but I thought that they would have seemed ephemeral, anyway. I had the notion that legions of Los Angeles’s homeless were watching our rococo progression and felt myself redden in the sheltering dimness, even as I knew it was an absurd thought. There were no homeless in Beverly Hills. At least, I did not think so.

Arc , Caleb said, would be a story about power and passion and innocence and the loss of it, and would proceed on the thesis that Saint Joan had not, after all, been burned at the stake in 1431, but had recanted and lived, and had a passionate affair with the French monarch who was supposed to have abandoned her to her fate, and had, as he said, “changed history another way entirely. I’m not going to tell you just how, because that’s the kernel of the movie and Laura will tell you that I never talk about that, but it’s delicious just the same, and powerful. I want that delicate and battering sense of passion corrupted, of innocence transmuted into power of another sort, of obsession, of purity given over to the service of…the world, I guess you could say. Can’t you just imagine all that religious frenzy, that virginal rapture, put to the use of the body? It could blow a world apart. It will, in Arc . The focus will be on the mature Joan, the lover of the monarch; the young Joan will be only a prelude, for contrast. Joan the woman will carry the load. And what a woman: tormented, passionate, guilty, hungry, sated, rapturous, humble, exalted—it will be an unforgettable role.”

“Who will play the Dauphin?” I said. The concept made me recoil, but it undeniably had power as well as perversity. I could see why Laura was so enraptured by the prospect of playing the adult Joan. It would have everything for an actress.

“I don’t know. I haven’t cast that yet, either,” Caleb Pringle said. “And it won’t be the Dauphin. It’ll be the Dauphine.”

“Oh, my God,” breathed Laura into the silence. “Of course. How perfect. Saint Joan would never have been seduced by a man, but a woman? A woman with sleekness and subtlety and a great worldliness—”

“A woman like that would be a monster if she did that to a young saint,” I said.

“Ah, but Joan was not a saint,” Caleb Pringle said. “Not until after her death was she canonized, and of course in Arc she will not die, but you’re right. The Dauphine will be a monster. The exact opposite of what the French call a monstre sacre , a sacred monster. My Dauphine will be a profane monster. A profane, monstrous, enchanting ghoul, stronger than Medea or Lilith. All evil. Totally depraved. An eater of flesh. Irresistible. It will play wonderfully off all that vast, untouchable innocence.”

“It will be a masterpiece,” Laura said. Her voice was hushed.

“It sounds like the worst of Roman Polanski,” I said sourly. The whole Arc thing made me unreasonably angry and disgusted. Just like, I told myself, somebody’s relative in an aqua polyester pantsuit.

“Well, I’ve heard that before,” he said mildly. “Glynn? What do you think?”

“I think,” Glynn said, “that I see what you mean. All that… untouchedness …spoiled with hands. Like snow when feet have trampled it. It’s still snow, only is it, really?”

He clapped his hands lightly.

“Exactly. Exactly . Innocence corrupted is still innocence, only soiled. Or is it? The conundrum at the heart of the matter. Are you sure you don’t write screenplays on the side?”

She laughed, embarrassed, and dropped her eyes. I stared from one of them to the other. Where had she gotten that? What could there possibly have been in her short experience to enable her to grasp it?

Then she said, “Will Rocky, you know, MacPherson? Will he be at the restaurant, do you know?” and she sounded so much like the teenager I knew that I smiled in the dark in sheer relief.

“I believe Rocky is in the slammer in Carmel as we speak,” Caleb said. “He seems to have taken a dislike to his room at the Pebble Beach Lodge and trashed it. This time I’m not going to bail him. Let him sit there and miss the screening and all the petting and the ink. I’ll send somebody down there to get him out tomorrow. Maybe. Or maybe I won’t. He’s been told what would happen if he did it again.”

“Oh, nuts,” Glynn said, and then buried her face in her hands.

“Don’t be upset,” Caleb said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I’ll get him out in the morning if it will please you.”

“I’m not upset,” she said from between her fingers. “I’m embarrassed. Nobody says nuts, absolutely nobody .”

He laughed for a long time, a young, free sound, and she laughed too, behind her long fingers; her old, froggy belly laugh. Then we had some more champagne, and Laura fixed her makeup, and Caleb thumbed the dial and soft rock poured into the car, and we were there.

At first glance Spago looks like a diner made of double-wide trailers set side by side. At second glance it doesn’t matter what it looks like. One glance at the army of shoving, shouting, sweating photographers mobbing the entrance and you know you are in one of those rare places on the earth where powerful forces converge.

“Who are they waiting for?” Glynn whispered in awe.

“Anybody famous who happens to come in,” Caleb said. “And anyone who looks like they ought to be famous. You. Your mother. Your Aunt Laura.”

“Yeah, right,” Glynn said, but when Jesus helped us from the car the paparazzi did indeed rush at us, frantically, shooting rapidly into our faces, mine and Glynn’s as well as Laura’s and Caleb’s. The little Hispanic darted at them making fierce shooing sounds, and they parted just enough for us to run into the restaurant.

“Wow,” Glynn said, lifting a luminous face to mine. “Did you see that, Mom? Did you?”