Invisible(42)

Lara gazed at her sorrowfully. “I’m so sorry, Antonia. You’re right in what you said. He’s still angry at your mother, and he takes it out on you. He can’t blame you. And Hamish Quist is right, you do look like Audrey Hepburn. You’re very beautiful.” Antonia smiled sadly at her. She knew now that her father was never going to forgive her for who her mother was, and he was never going to love her. He never had, or not in a very long time since she was a young child, or a baby. Fabienne had escaped him, so he had punished Antonia all her life instead.

    She got up from the table, kissed Lara, and left a few minutes later. This wasn’t her home anymore.

Lara found Brandon in their bedroom after Antonia left, and looked at him angrily.

“It was terrible of you to take it out on her because Fabienne hurt you. Antonia is a wonderful girl and I hate what you do and say to her. It’s so wrong and it’s not fair. She doesn’t deserve it.”

“I didn’t deserve what Fabienne did to me either.” There were tears in his eyes.

“That’s between you and Fabienne, not you and your daughter. It’s not her fault. You have to stop punishing her. I can’t stay with you if you don’t. It makes me feel sick to see it.”

“Are you leaving me?” he asked her, shocked.

“I might. I can’t stand it anymore.” He didn’t answer his wife. He lay on the bed thinking about what she’d said, and about Antonia. He hated Fabienne more than ever because she had made him hate his own daughter, and he knew that Lara was right. But he couldn’t turn the tides. For him, it was too late. He couldn’t find his way back to Antonia. He hated her mother too much, and he couldn’t tell them apart. They were one person in his mind.





Chapter 11


Jennifer Stratton, the drama coach Hamish had hired to work with Antonia, had perfect diction. She had an aristocratic accent that wasn’t exaggerated, but identified her instantly as upper class. But she wasn’t there to teach Antonia diction. She was an excellent drama coach, and she was there only to help Antonia learn her lines impeccably and deliver them flawlessly in her one scene.

“Think of it as one exquisite little painting,” she told her, “a tiny Degas or Renoir. Every stroke, every mark of the pen, every color must be perfect. It will be the smallest scene in the movie, but it must be beautiful, because of the way you deliver those lines, and your expression must be in harmony with those words.”

Jennifer made Antonia repeat the scene endlessly until she could have said it in her sleep. They tried it different ways with different inflections, until they found the one they liked best. Jennifer recorded Antonia speaking the lines so she could hear herself and decide which nuances she preferred.

    Antonia spent two intense weeks learning the scene until it felt totally natural to her, like part of her. Hamish stayed away while she was working with the drama coach. It was a scene between a man and a woman. She tells him she loves him, and it changes the rest of his life. She is in an accident and dies minutes later and the words she says to him will haunt him forever. She is an innocent in the movie, and he never knew until then that she loved him. He has only minutes to savor it, to understand what she means to him, and then she is gone. It was a short but powerful scene, about the profound effect people have on one another, even in a short time. Each moment is precious. It was the crux of the movie, deep in the soul of it.

When they finally shot the scene, Antonia looked incredibly beautiful, in a soft, natural way, and the words came out of her mouth as though she had waited her entire lifetime to say them. She made each one a gift. There were tears in people’s eyes on the set when they shot the scene. She was so gentle and so loving. The entire scene was like a caress. She had learned her lessons well. Hamish had tears sliding down his cheeks when the scene ended, and they only shot it twice. Both times were perfect, and even Jennifer was smiling when they were finished.

“You’re an excellent pupil, my dear. If you ever want to become an actress, you would be an immense success.”

Hamish told her precisely the same thing. “You could be a great actress if you wanted to be. You should think about it. It’s a crime to waste a talent like that.”

“I want to put it in writing for others to say, not say it myself,” she explained to him again.

    “You could be a very big star,” he said quietly. He knew true stardom when he saw it. He had worked with the best.

He took her to dinner that night to celebrate and thank her. They had an elegant dinner at Harry’s Bar.

“Now explain to me about why you want to be invisible,” he said as they ate dinner. “What’s that about?”

She told him about her mother and her father, her father’s bitterness, and how unwelcome she had felt in her own home all her life, and how terrified she had been, and terrorized by her mother before she left.

“I was always afraid that they would get mad at me, and they usually did. It got to be much easier to disappear, and become invisible. It worked for me, and it still does. I was always the intruder in their home, the unwelcome guest. My life went much more smoothly when they didn’t even remember that I was there.”

“How sad,” he said, and she could see that he meant it. He took her hand and kissed it.

“I told my father about the scene I was going to do in the movie, and he called me a tramp and a slut. He hated my mother with a passion by the time she left. I do remember that, and she hated him. They fought constantly. I lived in a war zone, so I used every kind of camouflage to hide from them. Being invisible was the best one.”