In her movie script, she had read the description of her character: secretary. She had read the setting: Phoenix. At a leisurely lunch, the Director had told her how he’d already sent a set crew to Arizona to find young women working as secretaries, interviewing them to see how much they made a year, how they dressed, what they ate for lunch, where they ate it, if they had husbands or lived alone or with girlfriends, what their apartments looked like, how they furnished them.
For what? she had asked, because the scenes that took place in the office and the woman’s apartment were brief.
To get it right, the Director had told her, taking a long sip of wine. I want it to look like a girl’s apartment, you see. Right down to the cheap dresser.
It was a pity, she had thought as she looked over her salad, that she hadn’t been invited along, if only to witness how the set decorators found these young women and how they engaged them in conversations that, frankly, could slip into the nakedly personal without much effort. She didn’t let on to the Director that she’d been disappointed about missing such a trip. That wasn’t the purpose, she knew. Listening to him explain the purpose of a set — the information conveyed by the atmosphere of the walls, the correct wallpaper, the furniture just so — made her feel that her own concerns about who a secretary might really be had no place at their lunch table.
The Actress knew the answer even now, staring at the clock in her hotel room, five minutes to ten. Smoothing her dress and looking at herself one more time in the mirror, she saw her own incomparable face, the size of her head, her eyes set apart, her breasts, her hair. A singularity. There was no one else like her, for better or worse, and she had been picked for the part for the sum of these attributes, and maybe nothing more. The Actress gathered her pocketbook and headed down to the lobby. She knew the answer, and it would take only a hotel maid to appear in the hallway to confirm it, two women passing silently by each other without knowing a single bit of the other’s history: it was a costume, she realized, not a complexity, a job for the character to have, not a way to explore how she’d come to that point, a single woman in Arizona, of all places.
Down at the lobby, the Director was still not there. “Has there been a call?” she asked the clerk. “We were expecting another party from Los Angeles.”
The clerk shook his head. “Early morning traffic from Los Angeles can be very heavy some days,” he said in a voice that was meant, she thought, to allay some concern. She turned to sit on one of the love seats and looked out through the plain glass doors at the street’s light traffic. She waited as patiently as she could for twenty minutes, at which point she rose and walked to the glass doors, not exiting but peering out of them as if the Director were only moments down the sidewalk.
Inside the sedan, her driver sat engrossed in a newspaper, its pages folded compact and neat so that he could hold it in one hand, flipping it when the column ran out of text. With no traffic and not enough people on the sidewalks to disturb his reading, he carried on without once glancing at her. The paper was thick, probably the Los Angeles Times and not the local, and she wondered what he might be reading — an article about the troubling political changes in Cuba, the sports section, the satellites being sent up into space one after the other. She didn’t want to interrupt him, but there was nothing else to do, and across the way was a café with large plate-glass windows through which she could see if a car that looked like it belonged in Los Angeles came along the avenue.
As soon as she opened the hotel door, the driver glimpsed the bit of motion, set his paper down, and rushed to her side of the car. “Oh, I’ve got nowhere to go,” she told him. “I was just going to go across the street for a bite to eat.”
“I suppose you don’t need to be driven there,” he said, laughing. “I’ll be here if you need me.”
“Actually,” she said, this time looking away from him and over at the café, “why not come along and keep me company?”
He hesitated, as if contemplating what it might look like if he left his post, but the Actress waited through his caution, letting her face go blank, no anticipation, no hint of persuasion, though she knew it wouldn’t be a prudent thing for him to do, the way the studio frowned upon anything beyond the call of obligation and service. But it was her invitation, her decision to bring him along, and she wanted to open her mouth and assure him, It’s okay, but instead she stood and waited for his inevitable yes, wondering how she looked to him, her face impossible to read.
They did not enter arm in arm, but the two men seated at the front counter didn’t seem to notice. The hostess locked eyes with them for just enough time that the Actress wondered if she’d been recognized, but the driver quickly snapped the hostess to attention, asking to be seated. The hostess gave them a booth, the Actress with her back to the sidewalk because she knew the driver would be more attentive to the car they were expecting. The café smelled thick of disinfectant, a moist, greasy feel to the air, but not unpleasant once she recognized it — it was the smell of any diner in Los Angeles, and soon enough, she knew, would come the smell of coffee and eggs and frying bacon and their masking familiarity. She studied the menu, feeling eyes on her. She should have worn dark glasses, but she’d long dismissed the idea, a pair of shades feeling, to her, like a prop inviting attention. Perhaps the eyes were taking in the driver, in his crisp white shirt and slacks unlike any of the other men in the place, with their scuffed boots and jeans.
When the hostess took their order, the Actress tensed at her scrutiny and did her best to divert the attention to the driver, the man at the table, as if she deferred to him in everything. He may not have understood the role she had imposed on him, but the way he cheerfully ordered a full breakfast plate did the trick. The driver looked over at her sheepishly when he placed his order. She’d had an orange juice and a croissant to tide her over, but she realized that he had had nothing, and even after arriving at the hotel, he was still at the call of duty, waiting in case she came out to be driven somewhere. A break was some time off, perhaps when he knew the Director would be taking up a good chunk of her afternoon.
“I should have realized you hadn’t any time for a decent breakfast,” she told him. “We should have come down here as soon as I’d checked into the room.”
“Ma’am, my responsibility isn’t over until your Director takes you away. And even then, it would be the professional thing to stay around in case you need something. A bite to eat if you don’t like what’s on set. Or some aspirin from the drugstore.” He spoke with a light, cheerful clip in his voice, but it was still deep and masculine, his face lined here and there on the forehead, someone who raised his eyes a lot and smiled handsomely.