Chapter 5 Maren
There were a few weeks of pickup shooting left on Vanishing Acts, and the scene on the call sheet that morning was the one I had been bracing for since the read-through.
Six pages. A woman trapped in a small room by a man who has decided he loves her.
The set was a half-built apartment on the soundstage, two walls and a buzzing fluorescent light and a door built so it wouldn't open from the inside.
I have shot harder scenes in my life. I had never shot a harder scene in the same month I found an orchid on my car seat from a man who had been reading a dead colleague's emails.
Thomas drove me in. The conversation came easy, the way it only does between two people who haven't admitted yet that they want to know each other.
"How do you get ready for something like that?" he asked. "A scene like the one today."
"I don't," I said. "Not the way people think. I don't sit in the dark and summon it."
"What do you do?"
"I walk in, and I trust the script, and I let it happen to me." I shrugged. "If you build the fear in advance, the audience can smell it. It looks like acting. The trick is to be surprised by it in real time, same as she is."
On set he took the chair the director offered him, off to the side by the bank of monitors, and he didn't move from it. I could feel him there in the corner of my eye the whole morning, steady, like a wall you don't look at but know is holding up the roof.
"And action," the director said.
I disappeared.
I let the woman in the script flinch the way I had been training myself not to flinch in my own front hallway.
I let her plead the way I would never let myself plead.
I let her understand, in real time, that a man believing he loves you is not love at all, it is a thing being done to you. Six pages. I didn't drop a single one.
"Cut," the director said, and his voice was strange.
The boom operator wiped his eye with the back of his hand. The script supervisor, a woman who’s been doing this for thirty-six years and has seen everything, set her pen down on her lap and just looked at me.
"Again?" the director asked, soft.
"Yeah," I said. "One more for the edit."
I always trusted the second take a little more than the first.
"Cut," the director said again. And the crew, who never applaud, applauded.
He came over to me. His eyes were wet in the specific way directors get wet-eyed when they realize an actress has just handed them their whole movie.
"Maren," he said. "Thank you. I mean it."
"Of course," I said.
I didn't look at the monitor. I didn't need to see it. I looked across the set at Thomas instead.
He was still in his chair. He had not moved through either take. He wasn't looking at the monitor where I had just done the best work I'd done in years. He was looking at me teary-eyed.
I turned and walked toward my trailer before either of us had to pretend we hadn't seen it.
He drove me home when we wrapped, late, the city lights coming on.
He was quiet for a long time. I could tell he was carrying a question.
"How do you do it?" he asked finally. "Not the technique. I heard the technique this morning. I mean how do you actually do it. That scene, today…"
"Well, the scene is closer to my life than the script knows.
A woman in a room she can't get out of. A man who decided he loves her and calls that a reason.
I didn't have to summon anything today, Thomas.
I've been living in that scene for months.
The man who's been writing me those letters has been writing me that exact scene the whole time.
In real time. I just walked onto a set and finally got to say the lines out loud. "
He didn't speak. The truck ate up a mile of road.
"I'm not going to say something stupid," he said at last. "I'm not going to tell you it's going to be fine, because you'd know I was guessing, and you'd stop trusting everything I say after it."
"Okay."
"So I'll tell you the one thing I actually know." He kept both hands on the wheel. His voice was careful. "You are never going to have to play that scene off-camera again. Not while I'm in that house. That part, I can promise you. The rest of it I'll figure out as I go. But that part is done."
I don't know why I believed him so completely, a man I'd known for less than a month, but I did, all the way down.