Siren Queen(62)

Muttering apologies, I pushed my way to the end of the row. I dashed to the front of the theater only to find the lobby empty of everything except the smell of popcorn and a hint of smoky cologne.



* * *



I got the call to be back on set the third Monday after the fire, and when I arrived, I could tell that no one knew what was going on any more than I did. We milled around, waiting for someone to come and give us direction, and when Jacko Dewalt appeared, I felt something freeze over.

It had been three years since I had seen him, and at first, he looked just the same. It took me a few minutes to notice the way his hair thinned at the temples, how much rounder his shoulders were, and how he lumbered when he walked. As if he could feel my eyes on him, he turned to me. He must have been expecting it because he was utterly expressionless. There was something dire at the back of that gaze, but then someone else needed his attention and he looked away.

A door had opened in the center of me, and now everything was threatening to fall out through it. I was drawing back again, watching myself and the other people on the set as if we were puppets on a stage. Then I saw Tara striding up in her brown suit, and the sight was so strange that I had to return, my fingers and my eyes and my lips and my tongue suddenly my own again.

I watched as she walked up to Jacko, a thick sheaf of papers in one hand and a black marker in the other. They talked briefly, checked something on the papers, talked more, and then Tara nodded, walking away. I lost sight of her to the crowd, and I was so startled to see her at all that I was completely myself when Jacko called everyone together.

He was blunt and to the point. Whalen Mannheim was out, he was in, and Oberlin Wolfe wanted the picture done inside of three weeks. With both lead actor and screenwriter out of the equation, there had been hefty rewrites from some new studio talent. It was to be business as usual, and on the set, at least, Harry and Whalen weren’t to be mentioned, let alone mourned. Jacko would be in meetings with tech this morning, the script would be out in a matter of hours, and we would be getting ready to shoot at one sharp.

There were some grumbles, but overall, people were relieved. Business as usual, but I was falling, hands looking for something, anything that would slow me.

Harry gone, Greta in Sweden, and Emmaline untouchable in her house in the Palisades, there was no one left to talk with me. I was alone, but as I stood in the eye of my own private hurricane, untouched by any of the people around me, I wondered if I had ever been anything but.

I wanted badly to leave, to go at least to the café so that some assistant would be sent to find me when I was needed, but that was how stars acted. Instead, I found a hard folding chair set back from the crowd, and I sat there instead. Not for the first time, I wished that I had taken better to smoking, but I could never tolerate the taste or the smell of it so close. Instead I cultivated the stillness that so many said made the siren such a fearsome and alien presence. The reviews were full of awe for my menace and my reptilian silence. I could have told them that it wasn’t menace but fear, and that instead of fighting or fleeing, some things simply froze. Of course no one asked me, and so I waited.

“Ms. Wei, the director wants to see you now.”

Of course he did, and it was the opposite of a request. I nodded and rose easily to my feet. The entire way to Jacko’s trailer at the back of the lot, my tall heels clacked a military beat. They still pained me, but I had learned years ago that there were things more important than pain.

I learned, I reminded myself. I don’t have a patron, but I’m not helpless. I never was.

Jacko sat behind a desk piled high with paper, and even from where I stood, I could see red slashes through the text, edits and revisions that would likely be made even as we filmed. He would pull it together though. That had always been his reputation, that and a terrible eye for young women. He turned that eye towards me, and I simply looked at him. I could wait longer than he could when I was a child, and that hadn’t changed.

Finally, Jacko chuckled as if he had won some sort of bet with himself, shaking his head.

“Same dull old CK,” he said. “Still as cold as the Atlantic, aren’t you?”

He came around the desk towards me, but he didn’t advance, only looking me over with a kind of detached interest.

“Well, well. I knew I saw something in you. Didn’t expect it to be a monster, but hell, can’t always call ’em, can I?”

I bristled at the idea that he had made me anything.

“No maids, no funny talking, no fainting flowers,” I said. “That’s the deal I struck with Wolfe, and so I guess monster was what was left.”

He shrugged, rolling those shoulders like barrels.

“You’d be a star sooner if you were willing to bat those damn eyes and swoon a little. You think you’re better than Su Tong Lin? Now you got a rubber tail glued to your ass, and Harry Long killing you in six features.”

If he thought that would rile me, he was mistaken. All I cared about was that he came no closer and that he didn’t kick me off the picture. It should have been ridiculous, but directors had done more foolish things for pride and spite, even ones as competent as Jacko. He looked me over again before shaking his head and snorting with disgust.

“Goddamn you, you’re just the same, ain’t you? I would have made you a queen.”

“I don’t care.” I wasn’t Greta, who turned her lack of care into a bludgeon, but that was the truth. Whatever happened to me, it happened in spite of Jacko, never because of him.