Siren Queen(78)
I had missed a full day of shooting, and after all of the driving, I was as stiff as if I had slept strapped to a wooden board. I found someone who gave me both a painkiller and something that would give me at least a bit of energy before I went in to see Jacko. He was waiting for me in his office, and Harvey Rose stood by the door, silent and always watching. To talk to Jacko, I had to put my back to Harvey Rose, and his eyes measured me, seeing some esoteric list of numbers and values that suggested what might be done to me, what could be gotten away with, and what should be recommended.
Jacko slammed a stack of receipts down in front of me so quickly that I assumed he had had them banded together for the purpose.
“That’s how much money your damn fool stunt cost us,” he hissed, “and you better believe it when I tell you it’s coming out of your pay.”
“Fine,” I said with a shrug, and he snorted.
“Fine, fine,” he mimicked. “You think you’re so goddamn irreplaceable? We could have walked over to a noodle joint on Ord Street to find another girl to put on the damn rubber tail.”
“So why didn’t you?” I asked. I could feel myself drifting, wanting to step back from everything, but I refused to let it happen. I wanted to be here for this, as ridiculous or unpleasant as it might be.
Jacko’s jaw dropped and the toothpick clenched between his teeth wavered tremulously on his lip before he bit down on it again.
“What the hell did you say?” It almost sounded like a favor, as if he was letting me take back the words I had just uttered.
“Why didn’t you?” I repeated obediently. “I’ve been nothing but trouble to you since the day we met, right? To Oberlin Wolfe too, especially after that Halloween. So … why not? There are a dozen girls prettier than me walking down Ord Street every day.”
In the back of my head, Hezibah Wiley cackled with delight.
Jacko raised his hand, palm up, but then like Emmaline, he thought the better of it. Words like reconstructive surgery, scandal, and more money lost ran in front of his eyes, and he settled for slamming his hand down on the desk instead.
“Get to wardrobe,” he snapped. “This isn’t over.”
I left, and as I did, Harvey Rose stepped forward, and I heard him say in his high, soft voice, “You must consider…” before the door closed.
There are dozens of ways that a director can make things hell for an actress, especially one who is strung up on wires and only able to reliably move the top half of her body. I made sure I was never alone with him. However, he was more afraid of Oberlin Wolfe than he was angry at me, and that helped. Siren Queen was meant to be one of the big moneymakers of the year, and Jacko couldn’t go too far. He didn’t force me to piss myself in the tail, he didn’t work me until I fainted, and I decided that short of those things, I was just going to keep my head down. I would keep moving forward, even if Harvey Rose haunted the set, even if Jacko muttered about my contract being up soon.
“What are you going to do after this is all over?” Tara asked, sitting on the edge of my tub. No one had figured out that she had disappeared with me. Well, Emmaline did, but she had retreated inside herself, a pale and beautiful shell left to play her part so she could hide. If things were difficult for her or easy, I couldn’t tell.
Like the siren itself, I had started to crave water when I wasn’t shooting. I soaked in baths scented with Egyptian musk and rose oil, draining out the cool and replacing it with hot whenever it got the least bit uncomfortable.
“When this is all over … then I’ll decide what I’m going to do next,” I told her, sinking into the water.
* * *
In the final days of shooting Siren Queen, I felt as if my thoughts had turned to the fine white sand they used on the lot, running through my fingers whenever I tried to take a tight grasp on them. My dreams were haunted by the smell of Jacko’s cigar, by the musty smell of the warehouses where nearly anything could be stored until it became useful and obedient again.
I went to see Mrs. Wiley, and she only watched me over her bouquet of pink roses, shaking her head.
“You want too many things, Miss Ambitious,” she said. “You want the fame, and you want to be safe. You can’t have both. You never can.”
She wouldn’t even take five years off the end of my life for more, and that told me how bad my trouble was.
Harvey Rose popped up at odd places, at the deli where I liked to get my sandwiches, lurking around the door after I had creamed the makeup off my face. Once he showed up in the parking lot of the Pipeline, just as I was arriving. He drove off with a cordial nod, and I was left with clenched fists and shaking in the moonlight.
Tara had suggested we go home, but I shook my head. We danced instead, because if I couldn’t do that, then what the hell was all of this for?
“You should let me write down your life story,” Tara said in the dark one night.
“Why would you do that?” I asked, amused. “Unless you want to tell all the world that the Star of All the East knows how to get blood and shit out of cotton.”
“No, not for anyone to read. But … so this is something I learned from this pulp writer back in Chicago. He wrote out his life, and he hid it in a lock box that he dropped into the river. He said that after that, there were no ghosts that could haunt him, and no one who could take his life away.”