Page 77 of Playworld
Several run-throughs later and we were ready to shoot. In the scene, Lane and I have just finished our tutoring session. I am walking her out, through the living room, and when she stops to briefly check in with Clayburgh, Konig, introduced to her for the first time, can’t help but make chitchat. His interest is obvious; he is gobsmacked by her beauty; he is like a father talking too long to a gorgeous babysitter he’s already paid for the night. In the midst of our third take, Hornbeam broke character and said, “Cut, please.” He pulled me aside.
“When Diane and I are talking,” he said, “I want everything here”—he aimed two fingers at his eyes—“like a tennis match: Diane, me, Diane, me. Until we’re finished. And then give a quick glance at your mother. To gauge her reaction. And then react tothat.” He added, “You were with us on the last take, but then Jill read her line and your attention went kablooey. Are we clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just maestro will do,” he said.
Hornbeam, amid all of this—between directing and acting and everything else going on—had noticed exactly where I was and where I wasn’t.
Lane raised an eyebrow as if to say,Told you.
—
That afternoon, when Nightingale dismissal paused the shoot, I looked up from my script and scanned the auditorium’s terrace for Amanda, and each time the blue doors opened, I watched hoping she would be the next one through. It had been three days since we’d met, and based on Dad’s advice, I decided to phone her that evening. And later, when I took the same bus home that we’d ridden crosstown, I gave our first encounter an imaginary do-over, mustering my courage and taking the seat next to her, where I sat now, in reality, in order that we might chat during the entire ride. And being in the mood for pretend, having not bothered to get my makeup removed, in the hope that I’d run into her again, and noticing several straphangers notice my too-vivid features on my already too-large head—an oversight, it was not lost on me, that was not only meant to call attention to myself but was straight out of Dad’s playbook—I took another imaginative mulligan and, in this version, did the even bolder thing: I hopped aboard the northbound Broadway bus with Amanda, saying something clever as we took our seats and began our journey uptown, something Hornbeam would say, or Konig, a line straight out of a movie, like “Take two.”
I made the call to Amanda that night from my closet study, since it was here that I had the most privacy. I took a break from reading through the script and, finally mustering my courage, dialed Amanda’s number. But the line was busy. I tried again a few minutes later. Same. I passed the time looking at Dad’s photographs, which he stored in boxes stackedbeneath my floating desk. There were hundreds of eight-by-ten and five-by-seven prints, along with contact sheets from when he was in the navy. There was a smaller box that contained pictures from my parents’ honeymoon: of Anthony Quinn, his arms draped over my mother’s shoulders; on the deck of the SSCristoforo Colombo,which they’d sailed to Europe. Of Mom on a chaise longue on the ship’s deck, bundled in a coat and blanket and reading. Of Mom, beaming, as she stood beneath the Eiffel Tower. It was not lost on me that their happiness of late—that is, since Dad had secured this role—most closely resembled these photographs from their earliest years. And smitten as I was, I too believed I understood the desire to sail off into the future with someone. I would tuck in Amanda’s topside blanket so that she was comfortably cocooned and later we’d dance the night away after loads of champagne. Except I would leave the movie star stateside. UnlessIwas the movie star. Which, it occurred to me, was entirely possible and would not, when I thought about it, be the worst thing that could happen to me.
I dialed Amanda’s number again and this time it rang, just as my father opened the door to the closet and gave me a slip of paper.While You Were Out, it read.
“This woman left a message for you,” he said, and handed me the note.For:Griffin,it read.Urgent. Mrs. Metcalf. Please call.I didn’t recognize the name or number.
I cupped the speaker. “I’m on the phone.”
“She said it was important.”
I held up the movie script, which had warding-off powers over Dad like a cross does a vampire. “I’mbusy,” I said.
He winced an apology and softly pulled the door closed.
I crumpled up the note and threw it away.
Then a woman answered.
When I asked to speak to Amanda, she said,“Wer ist das?”
When I told her I didn’t understand, she said,“Qui est-ce?”
When I asked if this was the West residence, she replied,“West-san no otaku deshouka?”
When I apologized for having the wrong number, she said, “Listen, kid, Amanda’s babysitting. She’ll be home around seven.”
Then she hung up.
When I called back at the appointed time, Amanda answered. “Oh,” she said when I asked, and lowered her voice. “That was my mom.”
“She speaks a lot of languages,” I said.
“She mostly just knows phrases. But her accents are good.”
“My dad’s good at accents too,” I said. “Or I guess dialects.”
“What’s the difference?” Amanda asked.
“He says it’s how you pronounce things.”
“I think that’s accents. Dialects have to do with the region.”
Someone on my line picked up and began dialing. Long notes on the touch tone, as if they were playing an organ.