Saving St. Germ (3 page)

“Whopper,” chanted Ollie, “whopper whopper Lucy Lucy foolish.”

“Please. Just let us
in
.”

“Whopper, diamonds, whopper ...”

“I’m not myself,” said the guard, running a hand across his eyes. “I been playing a
skinhead
in a waiver production and I’m not
myself
.”

Just then, miraculously, I saw a friend of Jay’s, an assistant director, whose name I’d forgotten. He answered my wave and came loping over, figuring things out on the way.

“Sherman!” He threw his arm around the guard’s shoulders. “This is our technical director’s wife—you know, Jay Tallich? On
Drastic Measures?
It’s OK to let her in.” He pointed to his headset, wired to a walkie-talkie on his belt. “If you want, I’ll get a special OK from the office.” Sherman scowled and the director smiled dazzlingly. “Hey, we’ll bend the rules just this once. It’ll be all right.” At last Sherman nodded, glaring at me, and two minutes later I was parking the car near a cement bank of terraced flowers. I got out with Ollie lagging after. We slipped into the maze of outbuildings and barnlike studios, passing the West Seventy-second Street subway stop in New York City, a Hopper-like 1930s gas station, a block of Western saloons near a hospital, its
EMERGENCY
sign neon red.

I thought, chastened, about the exchange at the gate as we walked. OK, I’d known as soon as we’d driven on the lot that Sherman was (in my husband Jay’s terminology) an “actomorph,” a would-be actor. I should have known better than to act
at
him. Acting “at” an actomorph receptionist could bring out the “Tara” speech from
Gone With the Wind,
could encourage the dental hygienist to abruptly crack stand-up jokes and palm an invisible mike while you sat, the inner lining of your mouth being sucked dry by the drool vacuum. It could elicit a Tom Selleck wink and heavy breath on your neck from the garage mechanic and an Ice-T rap as you tried to pay the baby-sitter or the reaction
I’d
elicited—fury. Nobody got madder than a would-be actor at being
upstaged.

Ollie and I stared at a large flat of pure blue sky set on rollers, like a rebuke to the yellowish original above, then turned to the peeling posters on the prefab soundstage walls; L.A.’s Watteau-esque light flickered across the lovely peach-shaped breasts, biceps, tremulous lips. The faces dreamed, set in emblematic grooming: expressions quickened by the desire to express, not the self, but the self as
somebody else.

Around a corner we found Soundstage 32, pushed open the frameless door, like a flap sheared from the particleboard wall. It was cavernous inside, hangarlike, with huge lights on tracks above.

Four- or five-tiered bleachers were pushed against one wall, and the bleachers were filled with people: visitors, fans, taping junkies. This audience was loud and restless, mostly young people in Madonna garb and soccer jackets. A hapless comic, the warm-up act, ran frantically up and down the bleachers, cracking jokes, soliciting hometown information and insults.

Ollie shrank away from the bleachers and, murmuring under her breath, turned her attention to the center of the floor, where human beings rode by on long-necked camera cranes, like chimps on the backs of giraffes. There were rolling boom platforms carrying sound equipment, each projecting a long boom arm with a dangling mike and an attendant who followed humbly behind the boom platform, making sure no cables got stuck. There were other people in earphones wandering about, whispering into mouthpieces. Thick black cables crisscrossed the floor like snakes. Ollie tripped over one and looked up at me, embarrassed.

“Whopper, whopper, whopper ...”

Opposite the bleacher were brightly lit rooms, three-sided, missing the front wall, lit from above: a barroom, a drugstore, and a kitchen. The center room, the kitchen, was brightest lit. At the edge of a long radiance, a large sign printed in reflecting letters said
DRASTIC MEASURES.

In the center “room” were the actors, dressed as Hell’s Angels and their girlfriends. They wore leather jackets and boots, rainbow spiked hair, heavy metal crosses and skulls; their jeans were studded with gemlike brads. One of them had a huge fake wound on his forehead, dripping red gore. Ollie stared at the fake blood. Makeup people milled about, touching up the actors’ faces; the actors ignored them, sipping coffee, talking over their heads or around them.

I looked about, intimidated, for a familiar face. I had been on this set only once before, on blocking day, when the actors memorized their final positions for the three cameras and their angles. There were far more people on the set now.

I hurried forward, towing Ollie, stepping gingerly over cables and props. A painfully thin woman in earphones, with very black frizzy hair and heavy theaterish makeup, hurried by.

“Paloma!”

The woman blinked, then focused on my face.

“Is Jay in the booth, Paloma? We’d like to join him.”

Paloma looked annoyed, then saw Ollie and smiled. Her wolflike face relaxed.

“Hi cookie, hi sweetie. How old are
you
?”

“Whopper!”

Together Paloma and I watched Ollie collapse on the floor and hunch over, struggling to put her mouth on her shoelace. Paloma looked bewildered.

“Can we go to the booth?” I repeated. My headache was worse. I should have known better than to indulge Ollie. Out at the gate, I’d remembered Paloma’s name and face only by chance. She had worked with Jay before, I’d met her on another set, some months earlier, but my memory for “industry-related” people (as Jay put it) was generally very bad. Through some chance synapse stimulation the exotic name had popped back into my head. I smiled gratefully at her, but she wasn’t looking at me.

Paloma glanced at Ollie, a little worried frown on her face. She tapped reflectively at her headset with her long red nails.

“You’re Jay’s wife, right?”

“Right.”

“Um, I don’t know what to say ...”

“Whopper, whopper, whopper!”

“I’m sure it’ll be all right.”

I watched in horror as Paloma’s fire-engine-red lipstick broke down before my eyes into its chemical ingredients: dye sucked from the glittering bloodred irises of rabbits, sluggish castor oil, fats, sheep piss, wax, and lanolin, that mixture of high-molecular-weight esters and alkanes dredged from petroleum. As the woman’s lips moved, I saw the coating twist alive, deconstructing again, as if I’d turned up a microscope’s power, into the color-producing atoms—chromophores and auxochromes—teeming like a nest of insects under Paloma’s nose. Dizzy, I stepped back, almost colliding with a boom platform.

She began another conversation with her earphones. “I’m sure it’s OK,” I heard myself say again. Paloma, still looking annoyed, motioned for us to follow her.

The director’s booth was located in a trailer right next to the soundstage. In this very cramped space, a wall of TV monitors rose, and before this wall three people sat: the director seated in the middle with the assistant director and the technical director on either side of her.

Ollie and I followed Paloma, who pointed toward a row of plastic chairs against the opposite wall. It was air-conditioned in the booth, but the atmosphere was heated, kinetic: the director, a woman with shaggy blond hair, spoke to the floor crew through her headphones, turning script pages and snapping her fingers each time she wanted a camera angle changed. Jay recorded the change, counting out loud, and the picture on the monitors jumped, altered. Jay had told me that this finger pop was directors’ shorthand: she snapped, the story got told.

I stole a glance at Jay, sweating beneath his headphones even though it was cold in the booth. He hadn’t noticed us. He kept counting as the snaps came: “One ninety-five, one ninety-six ...” I saw the producer suddenly—how could I have missed him? The producer was a tall rangy Kris Kristofferson type in faded leather and denim; despite his relaxed garb, he emanated discontent, a petulant expression on his broad face. “Let’s
go
...” he kept repeating, sotto voce. “What’s holding us up here? My actress is losing
energy
.”

I watched Ollie watching the monitors—the same scene, two actors about to embrace, viewed from three different angles on nine screens. One screen displayed, close-up, a young woman with a desperate expression frozen on her face. The other revealed a handsome longhaired man in a leather biker outfit, holding a gun to the young woman’s temple, grimacing cruelly; the last showed these two people locked together in a death embrace, which quickly dissolved as the director called out, “Cut.” The two moved swiftly away from each other, their expressions growing identical: twin raptors, starved. The young woman rubbed her eyes and bleated, “Cherry Diet Coke? OK, Roz? With ice? OK? Two more minutes under these lights and I’m beef fuckin’
jerky
!”

I laughed and Ollie stared up at me, then laughed too, silently. The producer glanced in our direction, but did not laugh.

Jay turned around and saw us. He looked surprised, then slightly irritated.

“What are you doing here? I th-thought you were at that school interview thing over in the Valley.”

“We were. It’s all over.”

Jay stood up. He was a tall man, but appeared slight. He had shaggy brown hair and an earring and his eyes were sad. He had a very slight speech impediment, a glimmer of a stutter.

“Ollie,” he said softly. “C-come here and meet Lee.”

Ollie held both hands up in front of her face and counted her fingers aloud. “One, two, three ...”

Jay glanced, embarrassed, at the director, who was pulling off her earphones and turning toward them, smiling.

“
Ollie,
” repeated Jay. He looked at me, expecting me to do something, to make Ollie respond. I shrugged. Ollie slid to the floor and hugged her knees, still counting.

I stood up and put out my hand to the director, who had a pretty, freckled, Huck Finn face. Her name was Lee Shallat.

“Hello,” I said, my voice cracking. “Sorry to interrupt you but we were driving right by on our way back from the Valley.” I paused. “This is my—our—little girl, Ollie.”

Ollie was completely silent now, rocking.

“She’s sh-shy,” said Jay to the room. “Really a shy kid.”

The director smiled down at Ollie, reaching into her shirt pocket, pulling out a stick of gum. She knelt down, unwrapping it, and offered it to Ollie. Ollie, miraculously, peeked out at her, then reached for the gum.

“Nothing like a little bribery to overcome shyness,” the director said, winking at me, then turning, distracted, as three people approached her at once, asking questions.

Jay touched my shoulder and I smiled at him, but he did not smile back. He coughed and looked away. Then he smiled downward, into his shirt collar. A voguish black woman in a sarong and a Batman sweatshirt brought him a plastic cup of coffee and he seized it and took a gulp, coughed, and set it down.

“Break’s over,” a voice called. “Places.”

“What’s the matter with Ollie now?” he murmured, his mouth still in his collar.

“She’s tired. She doesn’t feel well actually.”

“Then what the ... h-hell are you doing here?”

I picked up the coffee cup and took a sip. “We came to see
you.
We thought you’d be delighted.”

“Jesus, Ez, gimme a break. I’m trying to work here. You know this is no place for her. Especially when sh-she’s ...”

“So
weird
?”

“Did I say that?”

“No, of course not. You didn’t have to.”

Jay grimaced, then bent down and lifted Ollie’s face in his hands.

“B-bye-bye, Olls. Daddy’s got to go back to work now. I’ll see you later, OK?”

Ollie put her hands back over her face.

“Thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five ...”

Jay stood up. He looked at me, an unfathomably sad look.

“See ya later.”

I took Ollie’s hand and pulled her gently up and walked her over to the monitors. I put my hand on the director’s shoulder. She turned away from her mike, grinned, shot us a thumbs-up.

Jay walked us to the door, waved, then sprinted back to his chair. Someone was calling him.

Outside, Ollie crumpled into a small heap on the gravel.

“Come on, Ollie,” I croaked, exhausted. “Get up. We have to get you home.”

Then I looked more closely at what she was doing. “Fifty-one, fifty-two ...” Ollie proudly held up her fingers for me to see, then snapped them, once, twice, just like the director.

“Fifty-three,” Ollie added, and snapped again. She paused, her thin little face upturned, spattered with light. Her grey eyes were very clear.

“This is count and count TV pictures, Mom,” she said. “They snap—and then a number. The picture jumps. It moves ahead. Do you see?”

O
N THURSDAY I
explained the molecular effects of equilibrium to my Organic class at UGC, working at the blackboard. I wrote: “1. Changes tend to occur in the direction of lower potential energy with the evolution of heat energy. 2. Changes tend to occur in the direction of greater molecular disorder.”

Next I considered, in chalk, the acids, strong and weak, swerving suddenly to a discussion of the environment. Lately I had been trying to make my lectures as topical as possible, since my students seemed so innocent of any political thought. These days I was feeling more and more like a famous professor I’d had at Harvard: trying to inject notions of morality into chemistry. It wasn’t really my style, but I felt a need to
startle
them.

“You know what’s wrong with the world?” I cried out suddenly, turning from the blackboard. “And please note that the world I’m talking about is roughly synonymous with the scientific community—I’m talking about the absence of any connection between chemical research and the end products of research—like industrial chemical waste—and questions of social consciousness. In the case of gene manipulation or proliferation of combustible hydrocarbons, we have entered controversy without any program of ethical inquiry.”

I paused. “Do you agree? Disagree?”

The faces in front of me were affectless. They had all stopped taking notes. I shook my head at them, but went on, undefeated, searching for a concrete example.