Love Always

22

NICOLE was sitting in the living room of Lucy’s house, discussing the future. Work was important to her. Work kept her centered. That was what she was telling Andrew Steinborn.

“What do you think?” Steinborn asked, moving the conversation away from her to Stephanie Sykes. “Does Stephanie feel a victim — does she realize that she’s living in that house because she’s useful? That in alleviating her suffering, Dr. Cora Cranston has mitigated her own, as well?”

“What does mitigated mean?” Nicole said.

“When something is made less,” Andrew said.

“I don’t really see it that way,” Nicole said. “She got picked up by the doctor, sure, but what does it matter that the doctor ends up happier and she ends up about the same? I guess it depends on whether you think doctors are more important people than the rest of the world, and saving one doctor is more important than saving an alcoholic.”

“But Stephanie Sykes has depth,” Andrew said. “You think her salvation is important, don’t you?”

“I guess so,” Nicole said, “but look — not everybody’s going to be saved.”

Andrew cocked his head.

“I haven’t read anything except the first two scripts,” she said. “I don’t really know how it’ll go this season.”

St. Francis ran down the stairs and stopped at the front door, whining. Nicole got up and took the sock out of his mouth and opened the door. He ran out onto the lawn and turned and barked. When he was sure that he had lost both the sock and Nicole’s attention, he stopped and walked over to his gully by the rhododendrons.

“Chain the dog,” Lucy called from upstairs.

“Excuse me,” Nicole said.

Andrew followed her outside. The day was bright and breezy. The dog raised his snout and sniffed the air. Lillian had decided to sleep late. Andrew sat on the lawn and bumped onto one hip, pulling a piece of grass and chewing it. Nicole came over to where he sat on the lawn and sat down beside him. He thought that he must have challenged her too much with his questions. It was important to let her know that he cared what she thought and that he was not particularly interested in what was scheduled to happen on the program.

“How do you get inside your character?” he said, starting over.

“Oh, that’s not hard,” Nicole said. “She’s young, so she’s pretty easy to figure out.”

“But you’re both fourteen, aren’t you?” Andrew said.

“Yeah, but I mean, she’s young. She hasn’t really hardened into being who she’s going to be, so I sort of approach her thinking that nothing I do can really be wrong, because she’s changeable, right?”

“Can you give me an example?” Andrew said.

“Well, like in the scene where she’s in the bathroom, and Cora Cranston discovers the lump on her breast? I mean, there’s only one way to react if you find a lump, but somebody like Stephanie, just watching, can really do any number of things. So I thought that at that point she’d really harden herself. I’d try to show her getting hard, because she has enough of her own pain, right?”

“So you see her as very self-protective?”

“Yeah. I guess so.”

“Well, how do you get into that? I mean, as an actress, what thoughts go through your mind?”

“That there can’t be two people hogging the camera at the same time. I mean, if I had had more of a reaction than Pauline, I mean Dr. Cranston, that would have scooped her scene, and I didn’t really have the right to have the camera go to me, you know?”

“But leaving aside the technicalities of how the show is filmed: it was a conscious decision to have your character freeze just then?”

“If I hadn’t decided it, Pauline would just have made a scene.”

“Is that what you think about?”

“That’s just manners. I mean, when I’m stumbling blindly around the bathroom, Pauline lets me have that. If she threw herself against the door because she suspected what was going on, that wouldn’t be appropriate, you know? She’d be trying to get the camera during my scene.”

“I see. But leaving aside what seems to be a question of … manners … I mean, leaving aside whose scene it is and all that, what does Stephanie Sykes feel at such a moment?”

“What moment?” Nicole said.

“When you looked out and saw Dr. Cranston open her mouth in horror when she found the lump in her breast.”

“I felt that it was Dr. Cranston’s moment.”

Andrew looked past Nicole, at the heavy clouds blending into each other. He was not communicating well with Nicole.

“I understand that,” he said, “but I’m interested not in the way the scene should be filmed but in what you felt at that moment.”

“You mean what Stephanie Sykes felt?”

A bee buzzed past. Andrew jumped back. The sun disappeared behind the clouds.

“You lose yourself when you’re acting, don’t you?” Andrew said, a little annoyed that she had called his error to his attention.

“What Stephanie Sykes would do doesn’t have a lot to do with the way I’d act,” Nicole said.

“Aha! But as you understand her character …”

“She’s half sloshed all the time. She’s not all there. You know?”

“Yes. Right. But she’s been an abused child, torn between loyalty to her mother and the relief of being taken out of that situation, and suddenly she sees that her new life is threatened. Does this make her feel alone? Sad? Angry?”

“I guess she’s all of those things,” Nicole said.

“And so, in a split second, you decide that she’ll look a particular way, or make a particular gesture.”

“Right.”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out: how you intuit what she’s feeling and translate it.”

“You know,” Nicole said, “I don’t get that many CU’s.”

They seemed deadlocked. Andrew was sure that he was phrasing these questions wrong. Or perhaps she was just being modest, or even unwilling to share with him her deepest feelings. He opened his notebook. “Let me read you something,” he said. “I was talking to Pauline. Dr. Cranston. And she said, for instance, ‘When I touched the lump it was as though all time stopped, all life stopped: my own hand, my own life, was whirling around, the way protons and electrons whirl around the atom. I knew that I had but a second to communicate that sense of a human being relinquishing herself to the ultimate motion of infinity.’ ”

Nicole didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said, “Did she know in advance what question you were going to ask her?”

“No,” he said.

“Well, this is strictly off the record, but Pauline gets a little hyper about things, you know?”

“Yes, yes, but that’s all right. I want to hear about what the people on the show understand that their characters are feeling. That’s the way you can best help me. I’m not interested in the sort of technical dimensions of the scene, but in what you know and how you channel it into action.”

“The other thing is,” Nicole said, “we aren’t just up there doing what we want. There’s a director and a producer, plus the script.”

“At that moment, then, did you feel so restricted that you didn’t introspect about your character, just because it was Pauline’s — Dr. Cranston’s — moment?”

“It’s hard to remember,” Nicole said. “I can’t even remember exactly what I did.”

“Well,” Andrew said, leafing through the notebook again, “for example, Pauline said about that scene that you were perfect; that when Stephanie Sykes, seeing her stepmother’s fingers freeze, realizes that time itself is freezing, and she is being frozen with it, she expresses her resistance by drinking and sliding slowly down against the bathroom door, much the way top-heavy snow slides and spills. It was as natural a gesture as that.”

Nicole shifted on the grass. “I was supposed to get out of camera range so the screen would go black at that point,” Nicole said.

“But that wasn’t what you were reacting to,” Andrew said. “You could have, uh … smashed your fist into the medicine cabinet mirror, or something, and the camera could have focused through that into blackness—”

“The show’s not that arty,” Nicole said. “That’s a good idea, though.”

“And, uh, that’s what you did, with your consciousness. For what reason did you see Stephanie Sykes doing it?”

“Well, I mean, she drinks because she’s not happy. She knows the shit’s hitting the fan again, excuse me, and that’s a drag, so she sinks down in despair.”

“You see her as being in a state of despair.”

“She’s got a lot of problems and she’s an alcoholic, so she just folds up a lot of the time. That’s what she’s supposed to do. I, with my own consciousness, feel that that is what she’d do.”

Andrew was sweating. With the sun behind the clouds, his skin felt itchy as the air cooled. The cassette player clicked off. He reached for it, then thought that he might be intimidating her, even though she had had no objection to being taped. He didn’t turn the tape over. He leaned back on both elbows. She was really just a child, after all; no doubt she felt that people in his position were quizzing her like a teacher, and she would be resistant to that.

“Just tell me some things you’d like me to know about Stephanie Sykes,” he said. “Let’s forget my questions now.”

“I don’t know,” Nicole said. “She’s pretty much the way she’s explained in the press kit.”

“Is it hard to play such a troubled person?” Andrew said.

“No,” Nicole said.

Andrew was looking at her expectantly. She remembered something Piggy had said. “She’s Everyman,” Nicole said. It was her own thought to add that she didn’t mean it as a sexist comment.

“Then, you don’t see her as greatly exaggerated?”

Nicole remembered something else. She wasn’t sure it would apply, but she decided to take a chance. “I see her as Jonah swallowed by the whale,” she said.

Andrew immediately rose to a sitting position. He opened the tape recorder, flipped the tape over, and said, “You see her as Jonah in the whale? What do you see the whale representing?”

“Society,” she said.

“So, uh, you see her as cut off, buried, in effect, a microcosm within the macrocosm, fighting for survival.”

“Right,” Nicole said.

“That’s a very powerful image. Is it hard to play the role of someone you sympathize with so strongly?”

“I couldn’t help her,” Nicole said.

Andrew looked at her.

“I mean me. Nicole. In real life. You can’t go around helping everybody you sympathize with. You can’t help it that you’re on top and the other guy isn’t.”

“You don’t think of her just as a victim of fate, do you?”

What else? Nicole thought. She realized that she wasn’t very good at imagining what people might be, or even what they might be doing, other than what they were and how they were acting at the present moment. She also realized that she was getting into deep water with Andrew Steinborn, and that it was better to try to end this discussion. What she wanted to say to him was that she didn’t look down on anyone, real or imaginary, who kept her from sitting in a chair in school all day long, nine months a year.

“Oh, no,” she said.

Steinborn let the tape run for another few seconds, then reached down and clicked it off.

“Thank you for your time,” he said. “I find it important not to guess about the world, not to transfer my own assumptions, but to remain open enough to ask questions. My novel will be published shortly, and I’ll send you a copy. I very much appreciate your having taken the time to discuss your role with me.”

“Sure,” Nicole said.

As they were walking back toward the house, Nicole looked up at the sky. “It’s not unheard of to have a tornado,” she said. “I wonder if we’re in for a tornado.” She was studying the sky, her face absolutely blank.

“Do they have tornadoes in Vermont?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “The one that comes to my mind is the Worcester tornado of 1953. It took ninety lives.”

“Did your family know people who died then?” Andrew said.

“No,” she said.

He nodded slowly. He looked at the sky. “You’re not one of those intuitive people who are prophetic, are you?” he said, smiling nervously.

She was tired of answering questions, and she didn’t want to ask again what another word meant. The ringing phone would save her. She held out her hand, but instead of shaking hands and letting her get the phone, he clasped her hand and looked at her soulfully. Even as he drove away, he was thinking that the writer’s life was not an easy one, but he gave himself credit for searching for truth, instead of making assumptions. He looked at the sky through the front windshield, and then at the sky behind him, in the rearview mirror. Sometimes important information came at you in the most unexpected ways. He pushed harder on the accelerator, hurrying back to Lillian, and the inn.

By the time Nicole went inside, the phone had stopped ringing.