Scar Flowers (12 page)

This is what it’s like not
to be numb.

A
nother body lay beside him on the crash pads. Leah. She sat up, and everything came rushing back. Who he was, where they were. The film. His mistake with Karen.
Christ—the film. Karen. Forgot about them, didn’t you?

His side twinged. He had landed on the digital camera clipped to his belt. Somehow it was unscathed.

“This is your chance to ask me anything,” said Leah. “While we’re alone.”

A rope ladder hit the railing to his right, followed by the swinging clank of a harness and safety cable. There was Gunnar, looking down at them, shouting. Leah rose, put her finger to Simon’s chest where a bandage covered the cuts under his shirt.

“Don’t you want to know,” she asked, “what’s happening to you?”

Don’t you want to know
. . .?

Paul’s head and shoulders appeared next to Gunnar’s.

“What the hell are you doing?” he called down. “You could’ve been killed!”

“I know you’re not a fight choreographer—
Leah. I know what you really are.” Simon pushed the safety harness aside and gripped the rope ladder. His hands shook. Why should he tremble now, after he had just proved he was not afraid? Knees about to buckle, adrenaline coursing. “Maybe you think you have the right to mess with my film and my crew like you own them.”

Like I should own them.
And understand them.

Leah did not move as he climbed back to the top of the cliff. Fran, in a
yellow suede suit, stood near her Mercedes and talked into her cell phone. With her hand over her eyes, she massaged her temples.

“Fran’s spent the morning trying to get Karen back on board, and you almost gave her a heart attack. Do you know how much that little stunt just cost? And the liability? Are you out of your mind?” Paul stepped into his path. He drew breath to start another harangue,
but instead hurried to the cliff’s edge to help Leah up.

Simon walked past without answering, to Brian’s camera.

“I almost wasn’t ready for you.” The DP ran playback of the shot on his monitor: two figures locked together, clothes flapping as they plummeted. Brian scratched his cheek. “Next time, tell me when you have an inspiration. I didn’t realize it would be a two-shot, but we got the whole thing. It’s supposed to be Blake with Julia? That fixes the character arc disparity you were talking about. It works.”

It did work. Simon rubbed the back of his neck.

Fran picked her way across the gravel toward them in her high heels, cursing the damage to her pedicure. Though she was white and in her early fifties, her skin was the bronzed color of toffee, and her face showed no lines. She wore her chin-length, caramel hair lacquered into thick shingles that turned up at the ends. When she reached Simon, she took her sunglasses off and polished the lenses on the silk scarf draped around her shoulders, patterned with flowers and gold chains. Leah stood nearby, watching.

“I don’t like having conversations like this, Simon
, but no one jeopardizes crew or breaks union rules on my production. Period.” A tiny pop-eyed dog stuck its head out of Fran’s oversized purse, ears laid back against its skull as it shivered and licked its lips. “At the very least I want that woman gone. Paul tells me she was hired as a fight choreographer, not a stuntwoman.”

“It was a misunderstanding,” said Simon. “But
Nadia has agreed to leave the production. Gunnar can escort her back to the hotel.”

Without waiting for a reply, Simon returned to the Jeep. He did not look at Paul or Leah as he passed, though they must have heard every word. At least he had ensured Leah a more dignified exit than what StarBorn would have devised.

No, he was only placating Fran, trying to get out of the hole he had dug.

His Teamster, a bowlegged white man in a cowboy hat, drove him back to the studio lot with a bluegrass station blaring. Back at his trailer, Simon retrieved the tape from the hidden video camera
. No one else was going to tell him what was happening to him. He would find out himself.

Wednesday, June 7, 6:15 p.m. Day 13 of shooting.

Simon raked his fingers through his hair, dislodging his baseball cap, which fell to the floor. He paced. Maybe if he played the footage again.

He sat on his bed and pressed the button. There it was in grainy darkness, the video from his camera trap. The first two hours flew by in fast-forward, showing what he expected: himself, asleep under the covers, his slight movements rendered as tics, twitchy as jump cuts. There—at 2:17:04, the screen darkened briefly. He rewound. Played at normal speed, the ghostly cloud of movement resolved into the back of Leah’s head looming into the frame as she approached his bed. From the direction of the door—no succubus, she had simply walked in. She glanced over her shoulder and the camera caught her features.

“Cat’s out of the bag,” he muttered, a strange glee glowing in his chest. It had not been his imagination. Someone
had
come in, made those cuts.

She sat on the
bed, smoothed the hair back from the face of the man on-screen. His face, though he could not believe it. Eyes open now, that other Simon moved his arms up over his head, wrists together. No hesitation, no time for thought or decision, as if in response to an order. Leah’s words were too soft to be distinct if indeed she had spoken, her hair obscuring her face as she leaned over him to tie his wrists. His finger hovered over the Stop button.

Leah lifted her long skirt to her knees as she swung a leg over him.
Soft.
The word forced its way up behind his eyes like a weed between paving stones.
Naked under her dress
. No, he could not know that. It was not possible to tell from the recording. But the words scrolled past, an eyewitness stream of thought. The fold where her thighs rested on her calves pressed against him. A tickle of coarse hair at his solar plexus. Breathing the weight of her, her perfume blinding him. Actors on a screen. This Simon behaved as if he were willing, no gag, no struggle as she ripped open a white packet, swabbed his chest. She reached into her pocket for some-thing. A ring. One with a blade on it, scalpel-shaped. Both their mouths moved. He turned up the sound, rewound it, their whispers shimmering into nonsense syllables, lost in tape hiss. It had to be a prank, joke footage from the special-effects unit, but Simon flinched in sympathy as the blade bit into his twin self, those other man’s hands clenching into fists. The figures paused, suspended in an inaccessible moment. Was she speaking, with her head bent close to her ear? Was he? It could be a kiss, a secret shared, but the meaning of the image remained opaque. From the angle he could not tell.
Her mouth was on you, drinking your blood
, a voice said. He ignored it. For almost a minute she hovered over him, then raised something to her face and aimed it at him with two blinding flashes before she stood and left. A camera. She’d taken pictures of him. He got up a moment later and shuffled off-screen.
Seconds later, he returned and lay back down. A trip to the john? Sleep-walking? The figure in bed lay still as a stone. Time elapsed: twelve minutes, thirty-seven seconds.

“Cat’s out of the bag. Out of the bag.” He punched the stop button and stood.
Ready for something. No more thinking, no more wondering why. He had acted, had found out who she was and fired her, to save his film.

But
it did not make sense that anyone would want to do that him. Unless it was her crazy version of counting coup—to touch an armed enemy in battle and get away clean, to show that he was powerless to prevent it.

Did she have a key? Impossible. How had she gotten in?

You didn’t go to the bathroom afterward, you went to the door to lock it behind her. Who left the door unlocked for her every night, so she could walk right in? You.

No
. He had locked it before he went to bed. He was sure.

What was she going to do with the pictures? Sell them to the press? Blackmail him?

No time for questions now. Simon pocketed the tape and left the trailer. He had a movie to salvage.

8:05 p.m.

Karen would not let him in. Simon stood outside her suite for fifteen minutes
, talking to her through the door, then called her on her cell phone. She hung up on him twice. A hotel maid sorting shampoo bottles and toilet paper rolls looked up from her cleaning cart at the bunch of roses tucked under his arm. A sixtyish couple holding hands smiled knowingly as they passed him. Besides the roses, pruned of their thorns and smelling spicy and green, he had a white rabbit-fur teddy bear with a diamond tennis bracelet around its neck. The prop man had rush-ordered it for him from a jewel-er’s, on the advice of the script girl. If he failed to patch things up, if he lost any more shooting days, the studio would replace him.

When she cracked the door open, Karen’s eyes were puffy, her
hair stiff as straw on one side. The quilt from her bed lay bunched on the floor in front of the couch, and a pile of balled-up Kleenex littered the cushions. Celia, her makeup woman, smoked and glared at him from the balcony until he convinced Karen to send her out for a pint of ice cream.

“Have you been here all day?” he asked.

She tucked her feet up on the couch and picked at the knees of her gray sweats. He set the white bear on the sofa amid the drifts of crumpled tissues and sat down. The wrapper on the bouquet of roses crinkled: wet paper, the grassy smell of stems.

As she spoke, Simon rested his hands on his knees and stared into the bear
’s black plastic eyes. Karen had not taken its diamond collar off.

“I feel like such a fool,” she said. Every few minutes she would lift up her gold
locket and catch its chain between her lips, her eyelashes wet with tears.

He said he was sorry. He said he didn’t have an excuse. He talked about the pressure he was under, as if he were some cheating husband in a badly written play, and
promised that things would be different. It was 9:30 when he left her room, saying that he had to work, but he would go to a bar or walk the dozen miles back to the studio. Anything to avoid replaying in his mind the things he had just said. Now that he had fixed everything, he felt worse. What did he think he was going back to? A production that fired the people most dedicated to the story—or one that had rid itself of a stalker?

Simon took the elevator down to the lobby but remained inside it when the doors opened. He could call a cab and return to the studio lot. His cell phone
showed messages from Fran and Brian. Laughter spilled out of the hotel bar, and footsteps headed his way. Before they could reach him, he pushed the button for the fourth floor, where the crew had their rooms, and let the elevator doors close him from sight. As he ascended, he reached in his pocket, where the surveillance video of Leah rested. If she was still here, he owed her a screening—and she owed him an explanation. Simon switched on the camera at his belt and tucked the fiber optic cable more firmly behind his ear.

Back upstairs, the hallway stood quiet except for the muted chimes of the elevators, the buzzing of a hall light.
A tray piled with plates and ketchup bottles sat on the geometrically patterned carpet. A row of closed doors stretched in either direction. Somewhere nearby Leah might be in Room 417, curled up on the couch reading a magazine, or painting her toenails, knee tucked under her chin. More likely, she had packed and left; he had fired her hours ago.

When she opened the door, Leah’s features were smooth, her voice calm, as though she were not surprised to see him.

So this is a dominatrix.

In contrast to the
fluorescent hallway, a weak lamp and a few candles illuminated her room. She was barefoot, silhouetted against the television screen, and dressed like she had been the night of the film festival, in a close-fitting skirt and silky long-sleeved blouse, no bra. She seemed smaller than he remembered from this afternoon on the cliff.

“You don’t want to talk out in the hall, do you?” Leah went back inside and left the door open behind her.

He should leave. He was not going to offer her her job back. The lights above the row of elevators blinked, counting off the floors. Someone pushed a tray draped with lipstick-stained napkins into the hall, then let the door jerk shut with a pneumatic hiss.

He should go home now that things were good with Karen, but
Simon followed Leah inside. It was like looking over the edge of a bridge: the right choice was to keep walking, but the void beckons:
Do it. Jump
.
Enter me.

She wants to destroy you. Why else would she take photos, as if you were a zoo animal?

Leah sat in an overstuffed chair and picked up a glass of wine, pointed the remote at the television to mute the sound.
On-screen, shots of grazing antelopes were intercut with those of a leopard lying in the brush, its white throat pulsing as it panted in the heat.

“Are you here to get an apology?” she asked.

His hand closed on the videotape in his pocket. He could grab her, drag her to her feet. Or push her to her knees. Either way, she wouldn’t be so cool anymore.

“You seem to know everything. Why don’t you tell me.”

“But you’re the one who knows me.
What I am
.” As she repeated his words from that afternoon, she inclined her head in a sort of mocking bow. “I’ll tell you why you’re here. Anger. Curiosity. Desire.”

“Is that all?”

“Is it lonely, being surrounded by ass-kissers?” As he turned toward the door, she added, “Maybe I can help you find out why you came.”

“All right, then. What do
you
want? With your spying and lies.”

“Is that curiosity?” she asked, lips curved in a smile.

He glanced out the window, where the distant sound of traffic hovered. His camera would record that, of course—his looking away from her. But wasn’t that what he had become, all he had been for the last few weeks? An observer, uninvolved. Not honest enough to know what he wanted. Somewhere in his thoughts a voice whispered, an accusation, or a warning. He could not quite hear what it said.

“I want that curiosity, anger, desire,” she said. “Your energy, your reactions.”

He said nothing, still trying to decipher that whispered inner message. Probably what it was saying was
Ruin it, go on, you could be safe but why not free yourself and throw it all away?
The meager lamplight made her appear remote, like a spotlighted statue in a darkened temple. A candle flame on the desk behind her jumped and shuddered, filling the corner with shadows.

“You’re here,” said Leah, “because you let me into your room in the middle of the night to do whatever I wanted with you, and you don’t want it to stop.”

No. He was here to confront her.
It’s all over the Internet that you can’t find her.
Who had said that to him?

“You agreed to it the first time you let me hypnotize you,” she said. “
I admit, you surprised me by breaking trance when I suggested that you forget my visits.”

“Sounds like your fantasy, not mine.”

She raised one eyebrow. “No one made you come. You’re free to go right now. Or stay, and I’ll tell you everything. Better yet, I’ll show you.”

He opened his mouth but said nothing, the hidden-camera video fresh in his mind.

“There’s no trick to hypnosis,” she said. “It involves states of consciousness we all pass into and out of every day. The subject agrees to be led. But the moment he’s given a suggestion he opposes strongly, he breaks out of the trance.” She smiled. “I don’t need it anymore with you, so have no concerns on that score tonight.”

Simon’s pulse beat in his temples. The nature documentary showed a stalking cat. Herd animals flicked their ears as they surveyed the tall grass.

“Please, sit.” She nodded at the wine bottle on the coffee table. “Help yourself.”

Standing, Simon filled a tumbler and drank. A childish response, as if he could avoid admitting his motivations as long as he did not follow her requests exactly. He did want the excuse of a drink, and did not want to go just as the show
was about to begin.

A new light came into Leah’s gaze, a glint just shy of a smile.

Two suitcases stood by the bathroom door, a folded coat draped over them. Her high-heeled boots were lined up neatly alongside. It was a hotel room like thousands of others, with framed watercolors, artificial flower arrangements, a hardbound book of ads on the desk. There were no personal items in the room except the candles, votives with lurid images of saints.

Did it matter if he cooperated? No one knew he was here.

“Sit down.”

She had not raised her voice
, not changed her posture, not done anything unusual at all, but he had no desire to refuse. He sat on the sofa across from her chair.

“Take off your shoes
and socks.”

Simon slid one foot out of its boot. A tickle of current ran across
his skin, a thrill of response in answer to his brain’s demand of
Why are you doing this, listening to her?
The digital camera would capture his hands as they moved into the frame to remove the other boot and sock and drop them on the carpet. The room smelled of cleaning products, candle wax, a hint of incense. When he looked up, her face floated before him. Behind her, the window framed a slice of the city, with its bank of lights that flashed as cars drove past on threads of highway. A butterfly-shaped shadow clung to Leah’s brows, as if she were a queen at a masked ball.