Chapter Thirty-Three

HOLLYWOOD, 1956

ELEVEN TAKES LATER and Stan yells, “Cut!” He focuses on Jack Lyons’s watery eyes and my trembling mouth. There is enough emotion to go around. Our final kiss is deeply passionate, the chemistry more than believable. Everybody is happy. Stan apologizes profusely for doubting me and has a vase sent over from Tiffany’s to my trailer. I give it to Connie, my assistant. Jack has dinner plans tonight. I will see him later, maybe. It was a long day on set. Right now, I need a tall drink, and most likely, as it goes, more than one.

There’s a choice of two bars in this ghost town. I don’t want to go downstairs to my hotel bar, where I may run into Mick the bartender. Instead, I finish off a mini bottle of tequila that I stashed in my hotel room, put on a dark wig, glasses, and comfortable slacks, and head over to the closest dive bar a few blocks away.

I walk in and the place is barely breathing. A few rickety pool tables, a jukebox, and a sorry-looking excuse for a bar. I sit on a stool and then spot several of the camera crew hanging out at a table in the far corner of the pub, and wave. They signal me over. Why not.

“How’s it going, boys?” I offer my best Lena smile, knowing, as every actress does, that the cameramen are the only ones on set who truly matter. Michael Somebody with the glacial stare is with them. I’m going to find out exactly who he is.

The guys pull up a chair for me and order another round of drinks. They tease me about the brunette wig and glasses for a few minutes. I laugh with them. I know them well, having worked with two of the cameramen on Stan’s other films. We share a few more laughs at Stan’s expense, but my mind is on Michael, who is busy nursing his drink and not even looking at me. Up close, I notice that he has a long, skinny faded scar down the right side of his face. I wonder how he got that. I order a pitcher for the table and lean toward him.

“You’re from London,” I say, trying to engage him. “You came with Jack.”

“Didn’t come with Jack. Not from London.” He speaks as though forced to conserve his words, with just a hint of an odd inflection in his voice that I can’t quite place. I’m sensitive to accents. Mine still comes out when I’m tired. I wait for him to say something else. Instead, he gets up abruptly, mumbles a lame excuse, and leaves the bar. What the hell was that?

THE NEXT MORNING,the Lena Browning frenzy begins again with the usual coffee, cold cucumber slices on my eyes, followed by anything else I want. When I arrive on set, the cameraman doesn’t even glance up at me or greet me like the other cameramen do. It’s as if I’m some throwaway he slept with the night before. Who does he think he is?

I subtly asked around and learn from the makeup artist that his name is Michael Mills and that nobody has ever heard of him before this movie. Something is way off. I admit, he is beginning to make me a little crazy. It’s not just the ignoring—it’s the way he does it, as though I’m not worthy of his time.

After another grueling day of shooting, a quick dinner, and an even quicker romp with Jack, I find myself walking aimlessly outside. It just rained, and the tree-lined empty streets glisten like a Monet painting. I see my warped reflection in a puddle and step on it. I pass by a bank, a post office, a barbershop, and when I reach the street-side window of an all-night diner, I stop in my tracks. Inside, the cameraman is drinking coffee alone and writing something. A letter perhaps? This late? He sees me, nods, and looks back down. Dismissive. Damn him. This, whatever it is, ends now. I march into the diner and walk straight to his table.

“Hello, Michael.”

He looks up, nods his hello.

“It’s late,” I say. Not my finest opener.

He glances at his watch. “Or early.”

“Can I sit?”

“I don’t know, can you?”

I glare at him. No one treats me as though I am an interruption. No one. I sit across from him anyway, order coffee, determined to get to the bottom of this. “So.”

“So,” he repeats, making me do all the work. I take out a cigarette, wait a few seconds, but he doesn’t even bother to light it, even though there are diner matches and an ashtray right next to his elbow.

I reach across him just as rudely, pick up the matches, and light up. “You don’t like me, do you?”

He leans forward with those spectral eyes. “You mean you don’t like you.”

That’s it. I slam my fists against the white Formica. I could have him fired before he takes another sip of that coffee. “You haven’t been in Hollywood long enough to talk to me like that. In fact, no one has even heard of you before this movie. Who the hell do you think you are?”

He snaps his fingers mockingly. “I recognize that line. Lovers and Leavers, right?” He leans back against the candy-apple-red cushion, smirking. Up close, there are creases indenting his cheeks, the hereditary kind that must have formed unnaturally early. And beneath the diner’s neon lights, that wormlike scar snaking down his face seems to take on a life of its own.

“I’m really impressed that you follow my movies so closely,” I counter.

“Don’t be.” He taps the saltshaker against the table.

I slide out of the booth and stand. I will talk to Stan first thing and get rid of him. “I’m leaving.”

“Don’t let me keep you from Jack Lyons’s bed.”

“Don’t worry, I was already there.” Two points, buddy, and you’re so done. And yet, as I turn toward the door, I feel no semblance of victory. Something about him...

“How ’bout a tear for the road?” he shouts over the jukebox belting out “Heartbreak Hotel.”

I stop, turn, and march right back to the table as he grips the shaker with both hands, as if it’s a microphone, imitating Stan Moss begging for a tear on set. “Can anyone get me a tear? The shot needs just one fucking tear. Somebody!” he pleads with a drawn-out whine like a child begging to stay up past his bedtime.

Heat prickles at my eyes. “Someone must have really done a number on you.”

“Perhaps.”

I lean in, my voice a purr, my signature. “You know nothing about me.”

“Wouldn’t say that.” His lips curl and his features seem to rearrange themselves from bland into something bordering on dangerous.

I want to smack him, slap his stupid, cracked face with that reptilian scar, but I’m too afraid he’s seen that move in another one of my films, so I remain perfectly still, my shoes anchored to the sticky linoleum floor, a part of me needing to see this through.

“I know your game,” he continues with a finger point, as though he has a right to talk down to me. “Leading man, tabloid shots, bank the money. Every girl in America wants to be just like you. Every guy fantasizes about you. Everyone thinks you’re so goddamn alive. But you’re dead. See, it’s the lighting. It tells me the whole story. Your eyes don’t sparkle—they deflect light. Funny, isn’t it, how all your admirers praise your beauty, your eyes,” he chortles. “Am I the only one who sees what’s behind them? Dead, swallowing up light like a winter lake. You don’t cry, not because it’s in your contract, but because”—he wags that finger again, and I want to slice it off with a butter knife—“you don’t have any tears left to shed.”

I feel the color drain from my face as if there were a hole in the back of my head. And then I bolt out of the restaurant. I have never run out of anywhere since the day I arrived in America. Since my stratospheric ascent in Hollywood, I have never not had the last word, the last line. I peer back quickly—I can’t help it—and see the cameraman still sitting there in the window, a curved silhouette, his head bent to his writing, as though I were nothing more than a disruption, a take five. Go to hell, Michael Mills. I’m not waiting until morning. I am heading straight to Stan Moss’s hotel room right now and getting rid of you. I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night.

Breaking into a sprint, I tear past a run-down movie theater, a nail salon, and a convenience store. One of my own movie posters stares back at me from the sepia-tinted window. Billowy blond hair, pronounced cheekbones like a high priestess, lying dry eyes. Fuck him. I keep running, past my hotel, until I find myself standing under the sign of the cheaper hotel a few blocks down, where the crew is staying. Not Stan. He’s at my hotel. My feet are stuck to the parking lot concrete, and I can’t move. Michael Mills is clearly someone from my past, I just don’t remember where or when, and I can’t move forward until I know.

For a good fifteen minutes, I watch the flickering rusty-edged neon OTEL sign, until I see him approaching, hands deep in his pockets, his gaze direct and callous. He walks past me, nods in the direction of his room. Not even a flicker of surprise to see me. Worse, it’s as if he expected me to be here. I notice the tiny curling at the corners of his mouth and realize that I am following his script.