Chapter 16 #2
Wall shrugs while Becker produces his phone and documents Wall’s head from two angles. "That's going on the corkboard."
"Get a hobby."
"You are the hobby."
The big one's problems, as advertised.
And I stand ten feet away holding my clipboard, one of three people in this building who know exactly why that hair is red, being so, so normal about it. Someone should give me an award.
The schedule says the co-chairs confer before the first setup, and the schedule is the boss now, so I walk over, clipboard first, like a shield.
"Wallace."
"Grze?kowiak," he apparently thinks he says. What actually comes out of him though, is the usual noise in the shape of my name. But he tries.
And then we stand there, two co-chairs, conferring. In view of two rosters, a content crew, and a parrot, with everything we're not saying stacked in the four feet between us.
Theo, who is incapable of letting a silence reach adulthood, joins us and makes it worse.
"Wallace. Good weather for a calendar."
"We’re indoors."
"Great lighting, then."
Wall looks around to where none of the studio lamps are on yet. "Fluorescent."
"The best of the -escents."
Somewhere out there exists a version of this where three grown men exchange a normal hello. We are not those men.
I invoke the chair's privilege and end the meeting.
"First setup's in ten," I inform a point directly between their heads, and walk away.
I get six steps before I glance back. Wall's already looking. Half a second, maybe less, and then we're both deeply invested in opposite walls.
Six steps. Next time I'll get ten.
The shoot starts on time, which is the last thing that happens on time.
Petrov is up first, March, paired with a senior beagle. He walks onto the set, hands the leash to an assistant like it's a coat, and turns to address the room instead of the camera.
"Today my word is smolder." He reads off his phone. "To burn slow, with no flame. Also: a look." He turns to the lens and rearranges his face into something…weird.
"Are you in pain?" the photographer asks.
"It is smolder."
She lowers her camera. "Can you look at the dog, maybe?"
"The dog cannot handle the smolder."
The beagle is asleep on his shoe, handling it fine.
I check the clipboard. Six minutes overtime already.
That's when Hendrix decides the calendar needs him. He drops off the light stand, completes one full lap of the set, and lands on Petrov's shoulder, where he faces down the lens like a model.
The photographer looks at me for a ruling. I consult the clipboard. The clipboard has no parrot policy.
"He stays," Petrov says. "He understands smolder."
Somewhere in the finished calendar, March will feature a Russian, a sleeping beagle, and a parrot, all smoldering.
Lindqvist draws the chihuahua, and the hatred is immediate and total. It vibrates in his hands like a phone on a glass table, ears pinned, while the calmest man I know gazes serenely into the lens above it.
"You look conflicted," the photographer says, taking a few shots in quick succession.
"I am not conflicted," Lindqvist says. "The dog has made its position clear. I respect it."
I unlock my phone and take a photo of my own and set it as his contact picture.
The blind dog goes next—Candy, chaperoned by Ace and Devon, who introduces Candy to me mid-setup, right before pointing at my clipboard and saying, "Love that for you." She sits where she's placed, aims her face at nothing in particular, and outperforms two hockey rosters without doing a thing.
"Can she look at the lens?" the photographer asks.
"She's blind," Devon says. "The lens can look at her."
The lens looks at her. She wins.
And then it's July.
They've set up a tin tub, a hose, and a golden retriever who has clearly never had a bad day. Theo steps onto the set, rolls his shoulders like it's warmups, and surveys the light stands.
"Okay. Where's my light coming from?"
The photographer blinks. "Your light?"
"Which direction?" He's completely serious. This man cannot reliably exit a roundabout, but he has prepared blocking.
She points, wordless. He nods like they've agreed on something artistic, and gets to work.
Within five minutes the retriever is soaped, rinsed, and gleaming. Within ten, the situation has redistributed itself. The dog is somehow the dry one, Theo is soaked through, and his shirt comes off mid-flash and lands on a light case. I don't think he decided it. July decided.
"Maybe slightly more clothed?" the photographer says.
Theo looks down at himself, then up at her, betrayed. "It's July."
"It's a charity calendar."
"That hangs in people’s homes. They’ve waited eleven months and you want to deprive them? In July?"
"I want July in a shirt."
The negotiation proceeds. I supervise. That's what I'm doing over here at the edge of the set—supervising, in an official co-chair capacity, consulting my schedule at a frequency that has nothing to do with how the wet situation across the room is developing.
The schedule says nothing new. I consult it again anyway.
Hendrix arrives mid-take, lands on the rim of the tub, and screams, "What the puuuuck!"
"Right?" Theo says. "Thank you!"
"The bird is in frame again," the photographer says.
"He's committed. Which is more than I can say for my co-star." The retriever is currently busy drinking from the hose.
She looks at me. I don't know when I became the appeals court, but the clock is the clock. "The bird stays. We're twenty minutes behind."
They reach a consensus two takes later: the shirt goes back on, wet, which as far as I can tell is a compromise that helps no one, and me least of all.
It's during the final setup, while Theo is narrating his own highlight reel to a dog, that I glance across the set and catch Wall, water bottle halfway to his mouth, achieving the exact same quality of not-watching I've been producing for ten minutes.
He catches me catching him. The bottle completes its journey. I return to my clipboard.
The photographer scrolls her previews and goes quiet. "The wet shirt actually works," she admits, mostly to herself.
We’re almost an hour behind when Becker approaches the set carrying a crate, and the crate is wiggling.
"Twelve puppies," he announces. "Twelve months. I'm the frame narrative."
"No," the photographer says.
"Puppies sell calendars," Wanda says from behind her. "Load him up."
There are moments a man knows he should intervene. I look at the crate, then at my clipboard, and I choose to be a historian.
For one shining second, it works. Becker on one knee, arms full, puppies stacked up his chest in a warm pyramid, one balanced on his shoulder, and the photographer gets off maybe two frames before the pyramid collapses.