“Cut!”
Bo Dhillon launched from his seat behind the monitors like he’d been pushed by a spring. He yanked his headphones down to hang around his neck. “Goddamnit! It’s still there. I thought we fixed this. Isn’t that what we were just doing for an hour?”
Various crew members crowded around him, including the AD, who shook his head at the images on the screens. They took turns looking into a camera, back at the monitor, into a camera, back at the monitor, and grumbling to one another, trading shrugs and shaking their heads when Bo had his face buried in a viewfinder.
Merritt watched all of this from an honest-to-God canvas-and-wood director’s chair with The Happenings at Brookhants and her name across its back. She pushed her own headphones down to better hear whatever Bo might say next. Her laptop was open and resting on her knees. She read over the paragraph she’d just written, fiddled with one sentence, deleted another.
She did not hate it, what was there on her screen. And that was something.
She put her hands on the keyboard, thought a moment, and then wrote:
The tendons in the director’s neck were the yanked strings to the furious red kite of his face.
Well that was too much, clearly. But she’d work on it. She’d enjoy working on it.
“Audrey, can you come here a minute?” Bo called. At this mention of Audrey, Merritt looked up again. The troubles they’d been having on set this morning—and there had been several—were primarily technical, but Bo seemed out of sorts with Audrey today, too. Or with her performance, anyway.
“Uh-oh, Daddy’s not happy,” Harper’s friend Eric singsonged from the chair next to Merritt. He was visiting the set and had also watched Audrey get called over.
“Don’t you think this set is paternalistic enough without you actually calling him Daddy?” Merritt said.
“He can be my daddy,” Eric said, sliding off the chair to his feet and stretching into a yawn.
“I feel like you’re saying that without meaning it,” she said. “Which is my specialty.”
“Oh I mean it,” he said. “I’m getting tea and Swedish Fish, you want?”
“No thank you.”
Merritt studied Bo. She wrote:
The tendons in the director’s neck were now the taut fuse to the red dynamite of his face.
Very bad. Very dumb. She deleted it. No more necks.
Merritt looked up again to see where the Audrey-Bo conversation was going. It wasn’t. Audrey had joined him, but now she was waiting as he attended to whatever this camera problem was. She noticed Merritt looking at her and smiled.
Merritt smiled back and side-eyed Bo on her behalf. So there, Readers. So there. People can change. And after the stalking convenience store trio and pizza picnic in Spite Tower and Elaine being Elaine, after a night like that together and more days on set in between, Merritt had softened her once-hard feelings about Audrey.
This particular set was in the school’s dormitory, which they’d partially reconstructed for filming, taking down walls and shoring up others until it was the Brookhants equivalent of a soundstage. Production had found the section of the building with the best bones and went to work. They laid flooring, replaced smashed windows with new-to-look-old stock, and added all the dressing besides: rugs and nightstands, bookcases, beds and bedding, lamps and desks and bric-a-brac.
Presto chango: a dorm room from 1902, only don’t pan to the side, or you’ll see it’s missing a wall.
The areas of the building that didn’t get the movie magic treatment were still a mess: plaster crumbling into piles like crushed butter mints and ivy slithering through window gaps like the searching heads of snakes. The floors were warped and bloated from the leaking roof, the boards soft underfoot when you walked upon them. Untrustworthy. Plus, the whole place stank of mold and damp.
In the scene they were trying, and thus far failing, to shoot today: Harper and Audrey—pardon me, Flo and Clara—convened a meeting of the Plain Bad Heroine Society. This was not typically an event best suited to their dorm. The PBHS preferred the cover of the woods, but haste was the order of the hour as one of the members had just received a letter from a girl whose relative lived near to Fannie Corbin’s apartment in Boston, and—or so the letter writer claimed—had seen Miss Mary MacLane and Miss Fannie Corbin walking together in the Public Garden. Walking arm in arm in Public Garden.* Mary MacLane and the very anemone lady of her heart (and her pages) together again. And in Boston no less, right up the coast from where these girls in their nightclothes now twittered.
It was a scene that explored the romantic delight of it all—the pining, the nascent desire—this while the Plain Bad Heroines tried to keep their nonmember roommates unaware of these developments and their excitement over them. Tried unsuccessfully, of course. That was the scene’s principal tension.
As such, this scene, and therefore this set, had many actors: eleven Brookhants students and an interrupting adult faculty member as well. Plus all the crew besides, and Eric and Merritt as onlookers. So there were lots of people milling around, waiting out this delay. Or trying to resolve the reason for it.
This meant there were also lots of people around to witness the next exchange between Audrey and Bo, who had finished whatever he was doing and was now in a huddle with her and Heather.
“It’s not what you’ve been doing,” Bo said to Audrey. “I’ll play it back for you from yesterday, from three days ago. This is much more mannered and sounds it.”
“Right now, it’s sounding almost more, it’s—I don’t mean to overstate it—but it’s almost like you’re doing a kind of transatlantic accent à la Katharine Hepburn,” this from Heather. “Half British meets all snob.”
“That’s right, that’s it,” Bo said, pointing at her in agreement. He did his own bad Katharine Hepburn impression to emphasize the point: “The loons, Norman, the loons. We don’t need the loons, OK? The loons are hokey. And it’s not the right era.”
“I mean, I have been doing, like, a light transatlantic,” Audrey said. “Since we started. It’s what I worked on with Rachel. She called it pretransatlantic. They taught them to talk that way in some of the private schools so—”
“I’m sure there are shades of subtlety to this,” Bo said, “but whatever you’ve been doing today’s not working. It’s over the top. You sound like you’re doing an old-timey radio announcer.”
“That’s really embarrassing,” Audrey said, though her face seemed to still not quite believe him. She paused, then said, “Can I hear what you’re hearing? I don’t feel like I was speaking any differently than I have been.”
“I can get Rachel on the phone, if it’ll help,” Heather said.
“No, let’s just let her hear how it sounds today first,” Bo said. “We have the fucking time. Obviously.” He leaned back toward the crew members doing complicated things with various cables and computer equipment. “Unless you have news for me? Have we fixed this? Have we even diagnosed it?”
They shook their heads no.
“See, we have all the time in the world to fix your suddenly wrong accent,” he said with his hands in the air. “Jesus Christ.”
When he was angry, as he was now, the director held his mouth like he’d just eaten a wedge of lemon, the bitter meat of it still threaded in his teeth.
Merritt liked this one better. She’d keep it for now.
One of the sound techs brought Audrey headphones and she and Bo and Heather listened together to her dialect. Merritt hadn’t found it any more or less mannered than she’d found it over the last several days. It certainly didn’t sound to her like Bunny Bixby starring in a Hal Roach production. But then, Merritt wasn’t the person on set being paid to notice things like this, either.
“You hear it?” Bo was saying. He repeated his bad Hepburn impression, but this time using a few of Audrey’s—Clara’s—lines. “We could go ourselves, if you really do have the address? Wouldn’t it be like a dream to show up at her door, all of us together with our books?” It sounded ridiculous when he did it, but that was the point: he wanted it to.
Only now Audrey was nodding and, Merritt could see, processing the direction she’d been given. Oh how Merritt knew that look, the look of someone thinking and thinking, working hard to hold back the contents of those thoughts from others. Merritt wished that she could right then see, scrolling across one of the faulty monitors, those thoughts of Audrey’s. Did she agree with him? Did it matter? How would she reset when the next take came and push Bo and his Hepburn caricature out of her mind?
Audrey kept listening to herself Clara wrong, but Bo had again pulled off his headphones and was over at a camera on the other side of the room. Merritt couldn’t hear what he was unhappily saying to the AD, but she could hear the crew at the monitors in front of her.
“It’s almost like there’s water in there.”
“Water’s not black, though. That would fog it, anyway. This looks like ink.”
“Or mold. Fuck if I know. It is wicked damp in here, but I don’t get how it would form instantly between takes.”
“It’s not mold. There’s not suddenly gonna be mold in every camera in the room.”
Bo was now removing the lens from one of the cameras while the DP hovered and worked through a collection of fidgets: putting his hands on his hips, taking them off, scratching underneath his baseball cap, returning his hands to his hips, crossing his arms over his chest.
Merritt wrote:
The DP looked like he’d been asked to mind someone’s precocious toddler without being given any authority to restrain him, this as the child attempted something spectacularly unwise, like climbing atop a kitchen counter to cut open a melon with a butcher knife.
“Godfuckingdamnit,” Bo said to the lens in his hand. “Goddamnit! What is this?” Now he was showing it to the DP.
Merritt hadn’t yet settled on fictional Bo’s name, but she was playing around with the idea of a single-syllable first name, like Joe or Mo, paired with a two-syllable New England town like Newport or Salem.
A hand wagging a phone with an image of a white flower on its screen dropped in front of Merritt’s laptop. She knew without looking up who that hand was attached to: Harper Harper. Last Merritt had noticed, Harper had been talking with some of the actors playing her fellow Brookhants students.
Now she was here, saying, “Eric wants me to ask you for a recipe.”
“Why does he think I’m Rachael Ray?”
“More like Walter White.” Harper took Eric’s chair. “Did you know the angel’s trumpet tree they have in The Orangerie is the real deal? Eric just confirmed it with somebody working down there.”
“I thought he was at crafty,” Merritt said. “He told me he was getting tea.”
“That’s what he wants the recipe for.” Harper held up the phone again and this time Merritt saw that the flower on the screen was, in fact, an angel’s trumpet.
“Oh come on,” Merritt said. “Did you really read my book? Did he?”
“I think he did, actually,” Harper said, her thumbs flying over a text. “He told me he was.”
“It’s not something I made up,” Merritt said. “Eleanor Faderman is a person who in real life died right here, from eating angel’s trumpet flowers. She died. Every part of that plant is poisonous.”
“No, I know. I know. I told him. But Eric’s gonna do Eric. He’s been on a bunch of homeopathic forums reading about them. He’s only focused on the shroomy effects.”
Merritt blinked at her.
“Trippy hallucinations,” Harper said.
“Violent, unpleasant hallucinations,” Merritt said. “Delirium. Asthma-like symptoms. Loss of willpower. Loss of speech.”
“Will you tell him all of this?” Harper asked.
“Yes, but so should you.”
“No, I will,” Harper said. “I have and I will.”
“It’s a terrible, dumb idea,” Merritt said. “D-u-m-b: dumb.”
“I know,” Harper said. “I’ll talk to him.”
Outside, in the hallway, someone—Bo, it sounded most like—shouted something angry. It echoed down that long, empty space and spilled back onto set. The cast and crew still there made embarrassed or pleased-at-the-drama WTF faces at each other. Another shout. Then it was quiet.
A few moments later, both Heather and the DP returned to the set and the DP went to the camera equipment while Heather started working her way around the room’s edges, talking to the waiting cast and crew. Audrey was in one of those first clusters and she now walked over to Merritt and Harper, pulling pins out of her hair as she said, “To your list of unexplained Brookhants phenomena please add black fungus in the camera equipment.”
“Fuck yes I will,” Harper said. “Is it bad?”
“Bad enough we just wrapped,” Audrey said, three pins in hand and another on its way. “For the day. Heather said they can’t fix this without help they don’t have. I don’t think they even know what they’re fixing.”
“It’s not even noon,” Merritt said. “For the rest of the day? You’re sure.”
Audrey nodded.
“Shit,” Harper said. “No wonder Bo lost it.”
“Yeah,” Audrey said, shaking out her hair and stretching her neck. “So what were you telling me about the beach below our houses?”
“Oh, I like you so much,” Harper said. “I really do.”
Merritt wanted to make a note then, about the particular joy Harper’s face held in that moment, but knew it was more important that she was with them for whatever happened next than it was for her to be here alone writing about what had already taken place.