Love Always (27 page)

“Is that what you think about?”

“That’s just manners. I mean, when I’m stumbling blindly around the bathroom, Pauline lets me have that. If she threw herself against the door because she suspected what was going on, that wouldn’t be appropriate, you know? She’d be trying to get the camera during my scene.”

“I see. But leaving aside what seems to be a question of … manners … I mean, leaving aside whose scene it is and all that, what does Stephanie Sykes feel at such a moment?”

“What moment?” Nicole said.

“When you looked out and saw Dr. Cranston open her mouth in horror when she found the lump in her breast.”

“I felt that it was Dr. Cranston’s moment.”

Andrew looked past Nicole, at the heavy clouds blending into each other. He was not communicating well with Nicole.

“I understand that,” he said, “but I’m interested not in the way the scene should be filmed but in what you felt at that moment.”

“You mean what Stephanie Sykes felt?”

A bee buzzed past. Andrew jumped back. The sun disappeared behind the clouds.

“You lose yourself when you’re acting, don’t you?” Andrew said, a little annoyed that she had called his error to his attention.

“What Stephanie Sykes would do doesn’t have a lot to do with the way I’d act,” Nicole said.

“Aha! But as you understand her character …”

“She’s half sloshed all the time. She’s not all there. You know?”

“Yes. Right. But she’s been an abused child, torn between loyalty to her mother and the relief of being taken out of that situation, and suddenly she sees that her new life is threatened. Does this make her feel alone? Sad? Angry?”

“I guess she’s all of those things,” Nicole said.

“And so, in a split second, you decide that she’ll look a particular way, or make a particular gesture.”

“Right.”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out: how you intuit what she’s feeling and translate it.”

“You know,” Nicole said, “I don’t get that many CU’s.”

They seemed deadlocked. Andrew was sure that he was phrasing these questions wrong. Or perhaps she was just being modest, or even unwilling to share with him her deepest feelings. He opened his notebook. “Let me read you something,” he said. “I was talking to Pauline. Dr. Cranston. And she said, for instance, ‘When I touched the lump it was as though all time stopped, all life stopped: my own hand, my own life, was whirling around, the way protons and electrons whirl around the atom. I knew that I had but a second to communicate that sense of a human being relinquishing herself to the ultimate motion of infinity.’ ”

Nicole didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said, “Did she know in advance what question you were going to ask her?”

“No,” he said.

“Well, this is strictly off the record, but Pauline gets a little hyper about things, you know?”

“Yes, yes, but that’s all right. I want to hear about what the people on the show understand that their characters are feeling. That’s the way you can best help me. I’m not interested in the sort of technical dimensions of the scene, but in what you know and how you channel it into action.”

“The other thing is,” Nicole said, “we aren’t just up there doing what we want. There’s a director and a producer, plus the script.”

“At that moment, then, did you feel so restricted that you didn’t introspect about your character, just because it was Pauline’s—Dr. Cranston’s—moment?”

“It’s hard to remember,” Nicole said. “I can’t even remember exactly what I did.”

“Well,” Andrew said, leafing through the notebook again, “for example, Pauline said about that scene that you were perfect;
that when Stephanie Sykes, seeing her stepmother’s fingers freeze, realizes that time itself is freezing, and she is being frozen with it, she expresses her resistance by drinking and sliding slowly down against the bathroom door, much the way top-heavy snow slides and spills. It was as natural a gesture as that.”

Nicole shifted on the grass. “I was supposed to get out of camera range so the screen would go black at that point,” Nicole said.

“But that wasn’t what you were reacting to,” Andrew said. “You could have, uh … smashed your fist into the medicine cabinet mirror, or something, and the camera could have focused through that into blackness—”

“The show’s not that arty,” Nicole said. “That’s a good idea, though.”

“And, uh, that’s what
you
did, with your consciousness. For what reason did you see Stephanie Sykes doing it?”

“Well, I mean, she drinks because she’s not happy. She knows the shit’s hitting the fan again, excuse me, and that’s a drag, so she sinks down in despair.”

“You see her as being in a state of despair.”

“She’s got a lot of problems and she’s an alcoholic, so she just folds up a lot of the time. That’s what she’s supposed to do. I, with my own consciousness, feel that that is what she’d do.”

Andrew was sweating. With the sun behind the clouds, his skin felt itchy as the air cooled. The cassette player clicked off. He reached for it, then thought that he might be intimidating her, even though she had had no objection to being taped. He didn’t turn the tape over. He leaned back on both elbows. She was really just a child, after all; no doubt she felt that people in his position were quizzing her like a teacher, and she would be resistant to that.

“Just tell me some things you’d like me to know about Stephanie Sykes,” he said. “Let’s forget my questions now.”

“I don’t know,” Nicole said. “She’s pretty much the way she’s explained in the press kit.”

“Is it hard to play such a troubled person?” Andrew said.

“No,” Nicole said.

Andrew was looking at her expectantly. She remembered something Piggy had said. “She’s Everyman,” Nicole said. It was her own thought to add that she didn’t mean it as a sexist comment.

“Then, you don’t see her as greatly exaggerated?”

Nicole remembered something else. She wasn’t sure it would apply, but she decided to take a chance. “I see her as Jonah swallowed by the whale,” she said.

Andrew immediately rose to a sitting position. He opened the tape recorder, flipped the tape over, and said, “You see her as Jonah in the whale? What do you see the whale representing?”

“Society,” she said.

“So, uh, you see her as cut off, buried, in effect, a microcosm within the macrocosm, fighting for survival.”

“Right,” Nicole said.

“That’s a very powerful image. Is it hard to play the role of someone you sympathize with so strongly?”

“I couldn’t help her,” Nicole said.

Andrew looked at her.

“I mean me. Nicole. In real life. You can’t go around helping everybody you sympathize with. You can’t help it that you’re on top and the other guy isn’t.”

“You don’t think of her just as a victim of fate, do you?”

What else? Nicole thought. She realized that she wasn’t very good at imagining what people might be, or even what they might be doing, other than what they were and how they were acting at the present moment. She also realized that she was getting into deep water with Andrew Steinborn, and that it was better to try to end this discussion. What she wanted to say to him was that she didn’t look down on anyone, real or imaginary, who kept her from sitting in a chair in school all day long, nine months a year.

“Oh, no,” she said.

Steinborn let the tape run for another few seconds, then reached down and clicked it off.

“Thank you for your time,” he said. “I find it important not to guess about the world, not to transfer my own assumptions,
but to remain open enough to ask questions. My novel will be published shortly, and I’ll send you a copy. I very much appreciate your having taken the time to discuss your role with me.”

“Sure,” Nicole said.

As they were walking back toward the house, Nicole looked up at the sky. “It’s not unheard of to have a tornado,” she said. “I wonder if we’re in for a tornado.” She was studying the sky, her face absolutely blank.

“Do they have tornadoes in Vermont?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “The one that comes to my mind is the Worcester tornado of 1953. It took ninety lives.”

“Did your family know people who died then?” Andrew said.

“No,” she said.

He nodded slowly. He looked at the sky. “You’re not one of those intuitive people who are prophetic, are you?” he said, smiling nervously.

She was tired of answering questions, and she didn’t want to ask again what another word meant. The ringing phone would save her. She held out her hand, but instead of shaking hands and letting her get the phone, he clasped her hand and looked at her soulfully. Even as he drove away, he was thinking that the writer’s life was not an easy one, but he gave himself credit for searching for truth, instead of making assumptions. He looked at the sky through the front windshield, and then at the sky behind him, in the rearview mirror. Sometimes important information came at you in the most unexpected ways. He pushed harder on the accelerator, hurrying back to Lillian, and the inn.

By the time Nicole went inside, the phone had stopped ringing.

W
HEN
Andrew got back to the inn, Lillian was out. When she did return from shopping, though, she had quite a story to tell him. She had been browsing through Sweet Sincerity, a shop that carried cotton nightgowns and bed jackets from the 1920s, fans, and other pretty, old-fashioned ephemera. Lillian and one other woman were the only customers. They were both flipping through the racks of clothes when two women came into the store, asked the woman behind the cash register whether she was the owner, then suggested that she stock useful things for the contemporary woman, such as thermal underwear, body-building devices, hiking boots, and Mace.

“Women must provide for women,” one of the women said. “The day of the damsel is gone. We should not nourish ourselves with refined sugar,” she said, pointing to the gold boxes of Godiva chocolates stacked by the cash register, “but with healthy proteins and carbohydrates that will be transformed into healthy body power.”

“Give me a break,” the woman behind the cash register said. She was in her twenties, with a pink streak painted in her short, curly hair and cheeks heavily rouged a deeper pink than her hair.

“The enlightenment of women can allow for a new radiance in our society. Pectoral power, not penis envy,” the woman said, hitting the counter. “I would suggest that in place of those Debbie Harry and Annie Lennox stills, you hang pictures of women such as Margaret Bourke-White and Dr. Helen Caldicott.”

“Oh, shit,” the saleswoman said. “I left the Upper West Side to hear this hysterical shit?”

The woman who stood beside the woman lecturing the store owner stepped forward. “Maybe you could put up a picture of Margaret Mead,” she said.

“Listen,” the owner said, a pink curl falling over her forehead, “I busted my ass to get the kind of store that I want, and suggestions about how I decorate it are really out of line.”

“It is never too late to change your thinking,” the first woman said. “Inner power will provide outer beauty. Consider Helen Hooven Santmyer.” She turned toward the woman who stood beside her and raised her eyebrows.

“Sophia Loren,” the woman said.

“Sophia Loren,” the older woman said. “How would she be an example?”

“She’s a businesswoman. She sells Sophia perfume.”

“That’s ridiculous,” the older woman said. “She’s a pawn of the media. She’s a terrible example.”

“I don’t believe this,” the owner said. “In New York they just come in and tie you up and take the money and then shoot you or not. Here, I’ve got to die of boredom.”

A woman who had been flipping through the rows of nightgowns and who had averted her eyes through the confrontation started to move toward the front of the store. “My name is Davina Cole,” the older woman said, reaching out to stop her. “I notice that you are pregnant. I hope that if the child you are carrying is female, that it will be all-powerful. You may communicate more power to the child by wearing Extra Large camouflage shirts as nightgowns, rather than purchasing any of this silly frippery.”

“I’m calling the cops,” the owner said. Her nails were so long that she dialed the phone with the back of a pencil.

Police Officer Brown’s wife, as she walked out of the store, knew just what she was escaping. The shop owner would live to regret calling for help; she could hardy wait to hear
his
version of what happened when he got home.

There were only a few seconds in which Lillian was the only other customer in the shop. When the owner began talking to
the police about the women who were causing a disturbance in her store, Lillian moved toward the front of the store to leave. Myra DeVane walked in just then, hoping to find something suitable to wear to her rendezvous with Edward at the Plaza. Almost at once she realized that there was a problem—but it was also a problem that interested her: the woman who was stacking pamphlets on the counter had to be Davina Cole.

“Masculine tumescence has caused mind-boggling tragedy,” Davina Cole said to the owner.

Lillian began to wonder about her notions of easygoing, small-town life.