Chapter 5
Chapter Five
In a miraculous turn of events, they recorded fifteen whole pages of a three hundred and fifty-page manuscript before the ancient god of constant irritation appeared to punch Vivian right in the throat. She smashed the trackpad on her laptop to stop the recording. To stop Bryn mid line delivery.
“What are you doing?” Vivian asked without screaming, a valiant effort when her pulse was pumping in her retinas like a subwoofer was blaring bass right behind her eyeballs.
Bryn had the audacity to look confused. “Recording?”
Vivian clenched her teeth to keep her immediate response locked between her molars. “Why have you given Duck a Texan accent?”
Bryn shifted her weight between her feet. “Well, he’s got that old country biker vibe, and I thought he’d kinda sound like—”
“Thought?” Vivian cocked her head to the side. “You don’t have to think. We get his backstory in the second half. He’s a native Floridian. He does not sound like Yosemite Sam.”
The colors on Bryn’s face were a kaleidoscope of embarrassment. Pink washed into red before an alarming maroon darkened her forehead. “I only prepare one act at a time.”
“What?” Vivian pulled off her headphones. She took the best cleansing breath she could manage. “You haven’t prepped the entire manuscript?”
“Well, I figured the best way to stay in the moment…to convey authentically what Maggie feels as she feels it—” She tried to laugh, but it was more of a snared gurgle. “I didn’t want my performance to be influenced by things I know, but Maggie doesn’t… You know?”
“And what voice acting coach gave you that terrible bit of advice?”
Bryn’s skin flushed so hard it hit a new and indescribable hue. “I’ve never had coaching.”
Vivian blinked. She remembered a trip to Sedona a lifetime ago when she believed in karma and crystals and celestial balance.
Remembered lying naked on a towel in a wooden shed while sweating under crushing steam while a woman played a homemade harp.
An eight-hour steam bath in the middle of nowhere hadn’t brought her mental clarity, but it had taught her to endure the most uncomfortable environments.
Right then, she’d rather be back in the wilderness eating nothing but fucking berries she foraged than staring at an unprepared amateur.
She took another breath and looked at the time on her laptop screen.
Close enough. Vivian grabbed her phone and texted Iris to let her know they were breaking early for lunch.
Vivian stepped out of the booth and into the fresh air. She went to the fridge and took out a glass bottle of water. Moments later, Bryn popped her head out the open door.
“Are we taking a break?”
Leaning against the counter, Vivian thought of a hundred different responses. None of them polite. She focused on the relief of cold rehydration and waited for Bryn to answer her own question.
It only took a moment for Bryn to take off her headphones and join her. She unscrewed the top of her enormous water bottle covered in stickers and gulped. Vivian stared at her until Iris knocked on the door before opening it.
“Lunch is served,” Iris announced.
“Oh, do I get to see the inside of your house?” Bryn asked with an exuberance Vivian wasn’t sure she’d ever felt once in her forty-eight years.
“No,” she replied before sitting at the head of the long table under the covered patio, fans on at max speed. A valiant but weak defense against the August afternoon.
Bryn sat to Vivian’s right, facing the pool.
“What are you hiding in there?” She picked up her fork and speared a poached pear slice off the spinach salad.
“Are you harboring a fugitive from justice?” She chewed.
“Oh, do you have a wild animal?” She leaned back, arms crossed and eyes on Vivian.
“I can see you with one of those exotic cats. Maybe not a white tiger. Too obvious.” Bryn gave it so much thought, the summer afternoon leeched Vivian’s irritation.
“An ocelot. You own an ocelot and you don’t want me to see it. ”
Vivian paused, fork hovering when she muttered, “Who has time to clean up all that viscera?”
Flexing her jaw to avoid smiling, Vivian kept her attention on her salad. When Bryn laughed, the sound unexpectedly rich and contagious, Vivian filled her mouth with spinach.
“How do you resist jumping in the pool when it’s so hot?” Bryn asked when they’d finished eating. Head tilted back to bask in the fan’s manufactured breeze, the flush on her skin was an attractive smattering of pink rather than the red of embarrassment.
Vivian wanted to say that she hadn’t willingly lingered under direct sunlight since her early twenties. A tan wasn’t a sufficient reason to accelerate the evidence of aging. But that would bring attention to her age. A topic she would rather not consider.
“So you’ve already read the entire book?” Bryn asked, a hand running through her choppy shoulder-length hair. “How do you stay in the moment?” She adjusted her curtain bangs before propping her elbows on the table.
Vivian couldn’t distill a lifetime of acting training and experience into a pithy response. She picked up her water glass, the outside damp and the ice melted. She did her best to answer Bryn’s question.
“It is not my job to stay in the moment.” She corrected the faulty premise first. “It is my job to know Jo, not to guess at her. To know her history, her choices, and ultimately, her fate. To know her so completely that when I’m in the booth, I’m seeing through her eyes and feeling through her skin and tasting with her lips.
” She set down her glass and tried an analogy.
“Imagine a concert pianist learning a symphony one movement at a time so the crescendo can surprise them.” She shook her head.
“They learn the entire piece. Master every note, every rest, every shift. They internalize the composer’s full story until it bleeds from their fingertips. And then, they play.”
Bryn looked at her like she’d forgotten how to swallow or blink or breathe. Vivian couldn’t help herself. She’d accidentally monologued and had to go in for the kill. Viscera be damned.
“What you’re chasing… that moment of genuine reaction… doesn’t come from your surprise. It comes from Maggie’s. And you can’t hope to convey her emotions without deep study and uncompromising discipline.” She stood. “Read the music. There is no other way to play the song.”
Vivian didn’t wait for Bryn to sputter a response.
She walked across the deck and toward the guesthouse.
Posture impeccable and hips swaying with her measured stride, Vivian didn’t have to look back to know Bryn was watching her.
She felt the familiar and tangible weight of a rapt audience’s gaze dripping over her skin.
Vivian didn’t smile when she reached for the doorknob, but her chest tingled with satisfaction. A reaction to being perceived she hadn’t enjoyed in years.
* * *
More tired than usual after such little progress in the booth, Vivian took an extra-long shower before dinner.
The chromed jets aimed directly at her tense shoulders weren’t nearly as good as a real massage, but her masseuse couldn’t squeeze her in until Friday.
A just reward for having hopefully completed the book by then.
She was pulling on a pair of navy silk pajama shorts and a matching button-up top when her phone rang. Vivian sauntered to the writing desk by the window overlooking the pool, annoyed with herself that she’d forgotten to leave it on do not disturb.
Harvey was calling, and Vivian was sure she didn’t want to know what he had to say. Instead of leaving a message, Harvey called again. Good news never followed back-to-back calls.
When she picked up, she braced herself, but not hard enough.
“Stilted performance?” Vivian repeated Harvey’s feedback on the first three chapters. No, not Harvey’s feedback—Yenni Montoya’s.
“The chemistry is lurking under the surface. It just has to come through—”
“It was perfectly fine, Harvey.”
Harvey sighed. “She doesn’t want perfectly fine. She wants to”—a pause, a shuffling of paper—“feel it in her bones.”
Harvey giving her performance notes was bad enough, but that he was acting as a mouthpiece was infuriating.
She wanted to point out that they’d paired her with an untrained recording partner, but she focused on the more immediately obvious irritant.
“Why is she even listening at this stage? I don’t tell Yenni Montoya how to write her damn books.
Why is she telling me how the hell to do my job, Harvey?
Did you tell her to stay in her fucking lane? ”
“Listen, I understand your frustration,” he replied rather than addressing her concerns. “Why don’t you get to know Bryn? I bet you can muster some common ground? Connect—”
“Is everyone losing their minds?” she asked half to herself.
“It can’t hurt, V.”
“You know I hate nicknames.”
Harvey chuckled. “Why don’t you want to get to know her?”
Many reasons came to mind. The only relevant one was how unnecessary it was to their job.
“She pretends to be so… earnest.”
“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” Harvey sounded more relaxed, like he already knew he’d get his way.
“People pretend to be innocent. Doesn’t make them little cherubs,” Vivian grumbled.
“Does that mean they pretend to be tough, too?”
Vivian rolled her eyes. She wanted to tell Harvey to pass along a message to Montoya.
To tell everyone exactly how to go fuck themselves.
Tell them she didn’t accept performance notes from people who had no idea what the hell they were talking about.
If they wanted something else, they could record it themselves.
The words were hot on her tongue, a satisfyingly venomous tirade desperate for deployment.
But it caught in her throat, extinguished by a cold dread that churned too readily in her belly.
It was the same icy paralysis from when her acting work hadn’t just dried up, but vanished, leaving her empty after Hollywood had taken every drop.
There had been no family to call when she sold her Hollywood Hills home for a pittance rather than lose it in foreclosure.
No friends to catch her. She had to devise her own way to survive the failure freefall.
And after one last check written by the public’s obsession with her appearance, she’d avoided disaster.
Audiobooks became her unlikely salvation. Vivian del Castillo, not Vivian Taylor, bought the home that would become her sanctuary. She rebuilt her career on the foundation of her skill alone. A career she painstakingly resurrected from the ashes of obscurity.
Vivian couldn’t help but know that ruin was always around the corner waiting for her to make a misstep. The fight drained out of her, leaving only the reality of survival. Her ego wanted to burn the whole project to the ground. Her fear knew she couldn’t pay her bills with ashes.
“Fine,” she said, holding her breath to swallow the bitter reality.
Harvey had at least never been one to gloat.
“Just try taking a step back and finding a fresh approach. This is an important project. I know what this kind of work means to you,” he added, and Vivian regretted confessing that after decades in the closet, performing stories that celebrated women falling in love with each other was cathartic, healing in ways she’d never expected.
Vivian hung up without saying goodbye. She stared at her reflection in the dark window. A woman standing alone. Always afraid of losing. Always weary.