The gate was locked. She pulled the cord on the hanging bell out front and waited.
“Monica!” she called.
There was no answer.
She went to the house next door and leaned into the open Dutch door of the gate.
“Anybody home?” she yelled.
A man in a brief yellow-nylon bathing suit was sunning himself on the slatted wooden terrace. He lifted a pair of sun protectors from his eyes, blinked, barely turned his head toward the gate and said, “She’s down on the beach, Gilly. Want to hop over the fence?”
“Thanks, Lou,” she said. She reached over the bottom half of the door, unlatched it, walked past him to the fence separating his house from Monica’s, climbed onto the bench resting against it, and boosted herself up, legs flashing.
Lou sat up and said, “How’d it go?”
“They tested me.”
“Yeah?”
“Mmm,” she said, and dropped to the terrace on the other side of the fence. The door of the house was open, thank God for that. She went in, walked clear through the house to the ocean side, walked out onto the deck, and scanned the beach for her sister. She was nowhere in sight. Annoyed, she came back into the house and threw her jacket onto the couch, hating the California modern and the Japanese look of everything in the house, hating the way the house shook each time a new wave crashed in against the pilings, rushing across the beach and striking the wooden logs with force and power, washing up clear under the terrace on the highway side of the house. She went into the bedroom. A fly buzzed against the windowpane. She threw open the window, and the fly escaped. The bedroom was very hot and sticky. She could hear the sound of the surf booming under the house, and far off down the beach, where the expanse was wider and the tide had not yet completely engulfed the sand, the sound of people laughing. She took off her sweater and her bra and cupped her breasts, massaging them for a moment, and then throwing herself full length on the bed, kicking off her shoes, rolling onto her side, and staring at the wall. She could see the small card tacked over the dresser, telling when the grunion were running. She had been on a grunion run only once in all the time she’d been in California. She had been tested for a picture only once in all the time she’d been in California.
I’m thirty-four years old, she thought.
David, I’m thirty-four years old.
She sat up suddenly.
She supposed she should go down for a swim. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, took off her skirt and her slip, and was reaching into the dresser drawer for her bathing suit when the telephone rang. She lifted it from the cradle.
Naked, sobbing, she listened while her agent told her she had got the part in Floren’s movie.
Christmas never came to Hollywood. They could have their parades down Hollywood Boulevard, with Santa Claus sitting on one float and a big movie star sitting on another, Charlton Heston this year, and clowns turning cartwheels in the street, they could do all that but it never felt like Christmas to Gillian, who was used to biting cold and the promise or reality of snow. There was something wilted and pathetic about the Christmas trees inside the Hollywood houses, something that made Christmas a fake. Back East it was perfectly all right to cut down a spruce and drag it into the house and trim it with tinsel and balls, that was perfectly all right, and not at all unnatural. But to do the same thing out here, where the sun was shining and the temperature was in the seventies, this somehow seemed anachronistic, and a little sacrilegious as well.
Nor could she adapt to the concept of January first arriving in a burst of sunshine, the year beginning in the middle of a seeming summer rather than in the dead of winter. She had put on the protective coloration of the natives, but Christmas and the New Year were simply unacceptable to her chemistry, and she always went through the charade of buying gifts and presenting them as if she were an impostor from another planet who went through the ritual artificially and without real feeling.
This year it was worse because she worked on the picture all during the week before Christmas and then through to January fourth, with barely time to do any real shopping — she could never accept the Lord & Taylor in Beverly Hills as the real Lord & Taylor, everyone knew the real Lord & Taylor was on Thirty-eighth Street and Fifth Avenue — rising at six each morning and rushing to the studio and then working until five each afternoon. The director was a meticulous man who insisted on shooting and reshooting each scene until he was certain he had it the way he wanted it. Invariably, when he saw the rushes the next day, he decided that the way he’d wanted it had been wrong. So he shot and reshot the same scenes over and over again. They were using a new fast color film that enabled them to work later each day, a boon since much of the work was being done outdoors, on location. But by the time Gillian crawled into bed each night after a full day of trying to re-create a freshness she had felt only at the start of production, she was thoroughly exhausted.
When Floren asked that she join him at the studio one afternoon at the end of a day’s shooting, her first reaction was to beg off. But she could not forget his kindness to her, and so she accompanied him reluctantly and wearily. He introduced her to the cutter on the picture, a man in his late forties, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, sporting a thick mustache over his lip. In the corridor outside, Floren said, “He’s important to you, Gillian. You’ve got only one scene in this picture, and you want to look good in it. Get to know him, and maybe he’ll let you help pick the shots.”
She was allowed to watch the rushes all that week. In the peculiar structure of the Hollywood hierarchy, Floren, who was producing the film, had to get permission from the director, whom he had hired, for Gillian to sit in when the rushes were shown. The director didn’t like the idea at all. He wasn’t even allowing the picture’s stars to see the daily rushes. But perhaps he remembered that he was fourteen days behind his shooting schedule, and that Herbert Floren was picking up the tab, and so he graciously permitted the intrusion. She sat in the screening room all that week and watched herself play the scene over and over again from more angles than she thought imaginable, juggling the shots in her mind, arranging the scene as she thought it would finally be put together. When they showed the first rough cut, though, she finally understood Floren’s advice, and was glad she’d shared so many cups of coffee with the cutter in the studio commissary. They had assembled the sequence so that most of it was played on the face of the male star, who sat on a bench behind her. The shots they had chosen illustrated every nuance of emotion that crossed his features as he reacted to her speech and her bitter tears. She hovered on the edge of the scene and the screen; and for almost two of the five minutes, her job amounted to nothing more than voice over. The best shot of her, in fact, was a close-up of the back of her head. She immediately cornered the cutter.
“What did you do to me, Hank?” she said.
“I didn’t do anything, Gilly,” he said. “This is the way he wanted it. Look, it’s his picture, not mine.”
“Hank, we shot that scene from a hundred angles. You saw the rushes. You know what we—”
“I know,” Hank said, “but this is the way he wants it.”
“Couldn’t we just try it some other way?”