Chapter 18 1989
One thirty in the afternoon, get it on—quickly!
Before the school bus comes back and the streets are full again with the ricochet of children, before your boss opens the door to the break room and says, bit late for lunch.
Try not to fumble with the remote (whichever one it is these days), or get caught by the dark reflection of yourself in the dead screen.
Hurry, the world is springing to life, the familiar synthesizer: This is Life and Times!
Dissolve; feel your own problems grow trivial against the melodrama, against the height of what a human can feel.
Here they come, just as you knew they would, those known and beautiful faces of Cedardale.
That bartender, in particular, has really become one to watch, ever since the love triangle and now his strange moody drives out of town that he claims not to remember.
He’s filled out, too, turned into quite the dish.
Even now as he is pouring a drink for Margie Ludlow, there is a new potential about him, as though he might hit someone.
You wonder whether something might happen between the two of them, and didn’t you read about it last week in Soap Opera Digest?
Yes, make no mistake, something is going on.
MARGIE
You really haven’t been yourself lately, Joe.
JOE
How do you mean?
MARGIE
I don’t know. You seem like something’s on your mind.
JOE
Nothing’s on my mind, all right? Stop fishing. Nothing’s going to come of it, Margie.
“Cut!”
“Tell them I dropped an earring,” Susie whispers, and ducks behind the bar to vomit into a small trash can.
“Can you see it?” Orson says, for anyone who might be listening. “Did it maybe go under?”
Most people are disappearing into the labyrinth of sets, setting up for the next tape, but Marion from makeup is watching, pursing her lips.
Below him, Susie is wiping her mouth with a roll of paper towel, clearing her throat, and saying “Got it!” Marion hums and waves slightly to Orson before floating off as well.
Susan groans, pulls herself up on the counter, Orson passes her a bottle of water.
“It’s worse in the afternoons,” she says.
“At least you’re done for today.”
“I might have to do that pickup.”
“They won’t get to it.”
“They might.”
He takes in her pale face, the sour smell on her breath. “I’ll get rid of that,” he says, pointing to the bag full of sick.
“No, I can. My mess.”
“My bar,” he says, looking around the set that has hardly changed since he started filming almost three years ago.
And hasn’t he made it his own? Outside the thick stained-glass door, a neon sign reading “Joe’s.
” Inside, the chairs stacked up on the tables where he left them at the end of the scene.
How many times has he stacked those chairs, has he swept these floors?
In this corner he broke up a fight, in that one, consoled the matriarch after her third divorce.
The wisdom of youth, Rip used to say, winking at him, but Orson is hardly so young as he was then.
He takes the bin out of Susie’s hand, ties up the bag, and strides through the tangle of equipment rolling to its next destination and people calling for a bit of tape or powder, pushes out through the exit, and chucks it into one of the industrial waste bins in the back lot.
He has time for a quick smoke before his next take and thinks, as he often does, how like life this all is, how you only get one shot at things.
All the work he’s done behind the scenes is starting to pay off.
Just think: three years of putting it in with Flowers, of listening to him talk about his ex-girlfriend and the guy who backed into his car and looking with him through the headshots of blond, barely-of-age extras.
Even for all that, the idea for the secret admirer was all Susie, who sweet-talked Rip into trying it out.
Fans want to see more of him, she said, and it turns out she was right.
Finally, Orson has his own storyline. Finally, he’s been offered an actual contract, promoted from a recurring day player.
He’s been told more than once he’s part of the family, which makes him feel grateful as well as neglectful, because isn’t he missing his niece and nephew growing up, and the cold Highland winters?
When he comes back in, he catches Susie on the way back to her dressing room, looking like she is going to collapse. “Suze,” he whispers. “Sooner or later.”
Susie looks at him with her eyes full of something he has never felt, something he has hardly had to perform and isn’t sure he could. “They’ll fire me.”
“They won’t.”
“Mark will fire me out of spite.”
A new assistant director hurries by with a clipboard, asks them where to find one of the sets. “By the train station,” they answer in unison. Everyone knows how to find the train station.
It had shocked him when Susie told him last week, her eyes shining.
She was making him dinner, their Thursday ritual.
I have to tell you something, she said, and he felt the bottom drop out of the universe.
Not that he had thought it impossible. He knew about pregnant women, twice watched his sister transform into a supernatural creature and back into a mortal.
But this is different. Susie is a friend—perhaps his best friend.
He relies on her. He’d felt almost betrayed, as though she’d begun a journey she could not take him on, and embarrassed. He should be happy for her.
“What do you think is going to happen if you wait?” he says.
“I don’t know. Maybe they won’t notice?” she pauses, expecting him to laugh. He doesn’t. “I just need time to think.”
“Well, time isn’t on your side.”
“I can’t lose this,” she says, and he’s not sure whether she’s referring to the job or the thing inside her. She is looking at him, pleading, and he knows this much; she hates having to ask for help.
“Okay,” he says, a plan coming together in his mind. “Let’s see what we can do.”
Marion is the first person he tells. The first thing he learned on set is you should never underestimate Makeup and Costumes.
If you want to be liked, let them have their way with you; they know how to whisper a quiet word where it counts.
It’s obvious Marion knows something is up.
She’s been both lingering and avoiding him, insisting on small, unnecessary touch-ups between takes but not saying much.
Maybe she believes what the magazines are saying about me and Susie, he thinks. Or maybe she likes me.
“Hiya, Marion,” he says, popping into the makeup room. Twenty people are buzzing in and out, but Marion looks only at him.
She runs her fingers through her auburn fringe. “Hi.”
“Can I talk to you for a sec?”
She moves to him like he is the most important person in the universe, steps out into the corridor, and half closes the door.
“I like your nails,” he starts.
“Oh,” she says shyly, wiggling her fingers. “Thanks.”
“They’re like disco balls.”
“I chipped one,” she says, grimacing as though he would give a fuck. Focus, be polite.
“Shoot,” he says. “Listen.” Her eyes grow wide as he describes the situation, asks for her help, her discretion.
“It’s not—”
“Marion, obviously it’s not mine.” He rolls his eyes, socks her lightly on the upper arm.
“I’ll talk to the girls,” she says, adding almost gleefully. “We’ll make sure she’s not in anything too tight.”
Rip is next. “Give her an illness,” Orson suggests. “Bed rest or something. Or just put me in scenes with her, I’ll help her cover it.”
Rip sighs heavily. “Buddy, why are you getting involved?”
“She says she needs time.”
“Flowers is going to be so pissed.”
“Flowers doesn’t need to find out.”
“Are you in love with her?”
“No!” Of course he loves her, but he isn’t in love with her. “Jesus, Rip. It’s just. She brings everyone up, you know?”
Rip nods. He knows. “We could always send her into a coma.”
For several weeks, it seems to be working.
Winter comes and with it, baggy coats. The costume department makes the most of her bloating breasts, cleverly adapts a seam here and there.
As more accommodations need to be made, Orson delicately slips the word around set: an AD, a cameraman.
Close-ups, large props in front of her. Rip gives Margie some shift work at the bar—that keeps her hidden.
But when even the child actor who plays the matriarch’s coddled daughter approaches Orson to say “Guess what…?” he knows her time is running short. Everyone knows except Flowers.
It’s late and Susan’s feet are pounding.
For months she has kept her mouth shut, and the army of hidden helpers is enough to overwhelm her.
Rip promised to send Margie on some kind of vacation.
Somewhere warm, she requested. Rehab can be warm, he winked.
It’s nice to think they’ll both come back transformed.
It will be easy enough to let it all flow from her, all of the sadness of saying goodbye.
You’re going to start smoking, Orson joked.
Everyone does at rehab. With all of them behind her, masking her belly and rewriting her plotlines, it feels almost possible it will work out.
She’ll be back. She will give birth and keep her job and Al will see the light and they will live happily ever after in Hollywood.
As if on cue, the phone rings. “Hi, Susie Q,” her husband says.
“Hi, Doc.”
On the dressing table is the latest bouquet: roses and lilacs, lavender and eucalyptus.
Al sends them weekly, bursting with pride and wonder and maybe also fear.
To avoid flying, Susan is subletting a small studio apartment in Sun Valley, and they are both aching.
This is the longest she’s ever been away from him.
“How was today?”
“I threw up again.”
“Suze, it’s been twenty weeks.”
“I know.”