“It’s too bad there isn’t a window in this room,” she said. “A little natural light would’ve been nice.”
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “I’m grateful the hotel had such a room available. It would’ve been most intrusive to go out unannounced to a restaurant and have a gawking public watching us eat.”
“Oh, they’d recognize you, but not me necessarily.”
“I don’t believe that for one minute. They surely would. Did no one do a double take in the café when you had lunch?”
She smiled. “Perhaps.”
“I would think so. Small towns are filled with people who notice every little detail. They make the best kind of audience in some ways, limited as their viewpoints might be.”
“I’m a big-city girl now.”
“Sophisticated,” the Director agreed. He served himself a little more wine, and even though the Actress had not touched hers, he moved to pour the rest of her glass. She did not stop him, not wanting even her small gesture to appear disagreeable to him in any way.
“Yes, indeed, sophisticated,” he said. “You know, it pleases me quite a bit to hear you talk about light.”
“Light?”
“The quality of the sunlight. Explaining to your driver why we absolutely need to shoot in the morning to keep to the script.”
“I think you may have mentioned that to me at one point. Something about the angle of the sun in the sky and the shadows.”
“Precisely. Some people are quite discerning when it comes to natural light. They have an eye for it. They seek continuity. If a scene takes place in the morning, the eye wants morning light. The best critics especially. They look for any reason to dismiss a project outright. That’s why I’m so meticulous about setting and being proper about it.” He looked at her. “That doesn’t make you nervous, does it? Does it make me sound demanding?”
“Not at all,” she said. “It’s to be applauded, I would say.”
“I’m guilty of judging a picture harshly myself. I can’t bring myself to forgive even television. One evening, I was watching an episode of I Love Lucy with my wife. Very harmless and comical. Do you like her?”
“Oh, very much so.”
“She’s a genius really, though I have to tell you that, as a director, I wouldn’t know what to do with someone who is so gifted physically. It’s a whole other element to bring to an already complicated task. In any case, the episode had Lucy and her friend planning to steal John Wayne’s footprints from Grauman’s Theatre in Hollywood—”
“I remember that episode. She was quite funny!”
The Director laughed. She felt relieved to hear him let loose, a good, wholesome chortle, easygoing, and it made him lose the sharp edge he had, the silent, watchful scrutiny that she had already observed from him in their previous meetings. She ate a little more freely and took some of the wine.
“Very funny indeed. Yet as I was watching, I was appalled that such a marvelous sketch had such terribly shoddy sets. When the two girls get ready to steal the footprints, they hear someone coming, so they hide in a set of bushes tucked to the side. Pure convenience! I know Grauman’s. They have no such landscaping. And that got me thinking about the time of day. They were stealing the chunk of sidewalk in the evening, yet the lighting was incorrect, and there was hardly an effort to disguise the fact. Inexcusable, even if it is television.”
“It didn’t ruin your pleasure, though, did it? You still found it funny, no?”
“I enjoy a good slapstick, so, yes — my wife and I enjoyed the episode very much. But my point is the respect you must give to the discerning eye, to people who know how to look rather than just see.” He eyed the room, studying the walls and the simple decor, not a shabby dining area by any measure. “Service able, don’t you think? For a city this size?”
“Absolutely.” She looked at the walls, painted deep blue, and the white wainscoting ringing the room. She watched in surprise as the Director lifted an edge of the tablecloth and knocked at the table, as if listening.
“That’s good solid oak for a modest room.”
“They don’t skimp around here apparently. It’s a lovely meal, isn’t it?”
“Suitable,” he said, and they ate silently for a moment, enjoying the food. “I’m very glad,” he said, “that you made the comment about not having a window in this room. I like your attentiveness.”
“A little light would’ve been nice. I always like to know what time it is.”
The Director glanced at his watch. “Say, we have a little bit of daylight left. Would you like to do some scouting with me, out on the west side of town?”
“The west side?”
“The motels. We can compare our findings with the photographer’s work from this afternoon.”
She agreed, and while they didn’t rush the rest of the meal, she begged off another glass of wine, eager to get on with the Director’s invitation. When the wardrobe mistress had spoken to her about the brassieres involved in the first scene, she’d told the Actress that she’d been asked to go around Los Angeles and think carefully about the undergarments that a secretary’s pay could afford. So here was a chance to be, strangely, just like the set decorators, to engage in the level of scrutiny they’d been asked to apply in their study of young women’s apartments in Phoenix. The details might even take the burden away from the difficulty of her performance.
They thanked the clerk at the front desk and stepped out front, where Carter, the driver, was smoking a cigarette. He stamped it out quickly and opened the car door for them, and the Director instructed him to drive out to the highway access road, where the motels were strung along in a neon line. The day was giving itself over to dusk, but the light was strong enough to allow solid views of the passing storefronts, and the Actress watched as the shops of downtown Bakersfield went by. The windows appeared small and meager to her, not like the showcases of Los Angeles, but the shops made the most of their space. In a record store window, she spotted the shiny discs hanging from the ceiling like black stars. An appliance store lined up a whole row of television sets all tuned to the same station, and the sedan drove by just as the owner began turning them off, one by one, for the night. A shoe store racked as many pairs as possible on the floor of its window display, leaving the windows open to scrutiny from the outside: a fat man stood at the front counter, chin in his hand, watching two young women scurry with stacks of thin boxes.
Gradually, the businesses turned over to gas stations and animal feed shops, small lumber stores and farm equipment repair barns, all of the various places that made up, as the Actress recalled from her own youth, the everyday landscape of small-town life. As Carter drove them out toward the access road, she got to thinking about her secretary character making a run for such a town, the desire stirring within her to seek love with a man who ran a hardware store, a business that could turn hardscrabble in a drought year, given a town like this. She pursed her lips at her own imagination, the extension she was granting to the story’s parameters. “If setting is so complicated,” she said to the Director, “I can imagine why you don’t want your players to overthink their roles.”
“Actors can interfere to a degree if they overplay. I don’t like actors placing too many emotions that aren’t there. It’s the audience that should feel sad or frightened or angry, don’t you agree? I think I’ve done my job well if the audience responds in that way.”