Cease to Blush

by Billie Livingston

  I stared at her, up to my chin with trunk.

  “That stuff—” she nodded at my arms “—it’s a betrayal. I’ve betrayed her, but … I, I think that trunk could save your life and I think she’d want you to have it.”

  “Save my life? What am I, the walking dead? Just because I’m not some fucked-up knee-jerk feminist dyke?”

  She wrapped both hands around her coffee cup and didn’t answer.

  “Fuck you both.” I grabbed a tighter hold on the trunk and stormed down the hall to the front door. Fighting with the knob, I refused to put the trunk down. Sally followed, moved around me trying to get the door. “Don’t help me,” I yelled at her. I kicked my way outside.

  Four

  THE PHONE RANG AS I OPENED THE DOOR OF MY APARTMENT. I thumped the trunk down and dashed to answer it.

  It was my agent. My film-extras agent, who, as usual, sounded as though the office were burning down around her. “Oh hi, Vivian, it’s Maude calling. Could book you for a photo session tomorrow on Kiss of Death. These would just be crime scene photographs of a dead body. Pays principal-actor rate with no buyout and a minimum four-hour call. So that would be about two-fifty and then sixty-five an hour after that. Can you do it?”

  I sat down and blinked. “A dead body?” How apropos. “Okay. How do they cast for something like this anyway?”

  “It’s a show about serial killers. And you’d be photographed as one of his victims. You know how there’s usually an MO with their victims, like they all have red hair or something. This guy is killing prostitutes. You played a prostitute on something recently, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” I picked at the seam of my jeans. Usually I wouldn’t hear my start time and location till later in the evening but she had all the details on hand and I scribbled them down.

  Hanging up, I flashed to my mother in the gloom of her bedroom that last time. They asked me to work all the next week, I told her. Go, she said. Work. No point sitting here in the dark. So I did. I sat in that goddamn tent in a tight white dress with the rest of the spandexed blondes for a week, reading magazines and adding another twenty bucks to my tally as each hour passed, rainwater gathering underfoot, refusing to think about her.

  The corner of her trunk poked out at me now from the hall. The red light on my phone flashed and I dialed in for messages. Just one from Frank: “Hey, baby, I got a call from Brian, the guy with the Internet hookup. We’re gonna head out tonight and bang out the details over a couple beers. I’m working early again tomorrow, so I’ll probably just crash at my place.”

  “Figures,” I muttered and poured myself some wine.

  Staring the trunk down, I clutched my glass as if something might jump out and take me by the throat.

  The next morning, I straggled into the studio building late, rain pelting the streets behind me. An assistant director sent me upstairs to a small room jammed with a boardroom-style table and a dozen chairs.

  Three others booked to die this morning glanced up as I came through the door, collectively giving me the once-over. Together they looked like a small pocket of high-rent suburbia: salon highlights of chestnut and gold layered their dark sensible bobs in three variations on pixie-cut goodness. Their lips were coloured with muted-rose tones, their eyes lined in understated earths. Their torsos could have fit easily on any Banana Republic display of new spring arrivals.

  An AD followed on my heels. “Hi, girls,” he said, touching at the headset he wore. “Hang on.” He raised a finger, turned slightly as he listened to the voice in his ear and barked, “Copy that” into his mouthpiece. “Okay, ladies, I’m Tom, the second AD. I’ll be keeping you posted on what’s going on. We haven’t got the details worked out but it’s almost ten-thirty and we gotta shoot by noon. The director’s figuring out what he wants as it comes to mind—everyone’s gotta be photographed by water somehow—so we’re just winging it. One of you might be by the river or by a big puddle or maybe a bathtub … but we don’t actually have a bathtub.” His eyes snapped ceilingward. “Go for Tom,” he suddenly said in answer to an incoming voice from his headset and wandered out of the room.

  The girl with the six o’clock–news version of the pixie cut glanced at me. “You must be for a different episode. They’re probably doing pickups for more than one.”

  “How do you figure?” I asked.

  She straightened her cardigan over its matching shell. “You’re a different look than us.”

  I could feel my eyes narrowing to lizard slits. “I guess it’s all the same when you’re dead.” I took a swipe at the mascara likely sliding off under my eyes.

  The pixies smirked. “True enough,” the talkative one said. They all seemed to know each other. I wondered if they’d worked together on other sets, shows that featured slain gamines. As I filled out my pay voucher they went back to their conversation. “You guys going to go up for the weather-girl thing at BCTV?” Cardigan asked and suddenly her news hair made sense.

  The one with deep-set brown eyes and wisps of hair that layered forward into her face hugged herself through her fitted dark denim jacket. “My agent never said anything. I don’t think I’d be much good at that.” She paused with a couple rapid blinks. Her eyes set deep in the wisps of hair gave her a fawn-in-the-ferns quality. “I mean, you have to exude a kind of confidence to be a weather girl. But still seem friendly? And approachable. And I just get so nervous at auditions.”

  “Totally,” said the third pixie, whose bob was a little tousled and devil-may-care. “They like blondes for weather girls anyway. They look more fuckable, I guess.” She laughed and cast a glance at me. “No offence.”

  I glanced up from the magazine I’d hauled from my bag and paused to carefully tuck a lock behind my ear. “Quite all right. I am a very fuckable girl,” I said.

  They all chuckled as though the real joke was beyond my grasp.

  “Hair colour’s not the issue,” announced the newsy one, running her thumbs over the French-manicured acrylics that tipped each of her fingers. “Ultimately yes, to do the weather, you have to look approachable and still confident, but that’s something that comes with practise. If I seem confident it’s because I practise in the mirror. No, seriously—I totally do. It might sound silly but, ultimately, I want to become an anchor-woman, not just a weather girl. And you really have to look the part, like you know what you’re talking about. But still approachable. You should try it: deliver into the mirror, get to know the angles of your face. If you can’t look yourself in the eye, who’s eye can you look into?”

  Tom the AD came back, and called for Kelly to come with him. The nervous pixie in the denim jacket rose and followed him down to the makeup trailer.

  Devil-may-care Hair chewed at the stumpy nail on her baby finger as she continued to mull over the newsy one’s last point, then nodded reluctantly.

  “That’s the beauty of being an anchor, you’re set for life,” Newsy One stated, patting the back of her mushroomed bob. “I mean, there isn’t an age limit. Look at Barbara Walters. Or Jane Pauley.”

  A snort from Devil-may-care Hair. “Pauley? She got fired off The Today Show for being too old. They toss you for crow’s feet just the same. Marrying rich is still the only secure game in town.”

  “Rich guys can leave you,” Newsy pointed out.

  “Can’t leave their alimony payments.”

  Fifteen or twenty minutes of vaguely tense silence passed before nervous Kelly returned in a pantsuit and trench coat from the wardrobe department. Newsy left to take her place in the makeup chair. Kelly’s hair was no longer the soft fernlike wisps, but stringy and soiled. Her face was bleak with a grisly white foundation and deliberately running mascara. Her rosewood lips had been paled to lifelessness and blood smattered the corner of her mouth. A handprint of purple bruising encircled her throat. “God, I’ll be twenty-eight next month,” she said, slumping in her chair. “Keep thinking about what Margaret said about getting in the ring before you’re too old.”

&nb
sp; “Let me see your neck,” Devil said. Kelly tilted her head and flicked her tongue over her paled lips. “Wow. Creepy. Anyway, big deal, Margaret wants to be a weather girl. Maybe she’ll read a TelePrompter on the six o’clock–news chair.” She glanced in my direction. “Either way—” she lowered her voice “—I just said to her, If you wanna be a spokesmodel—”

  “You did not!” Kelly’s eyes flew wide. I dropped mine back into my magazine. “Oh my god, you’re so mean.”

  “It’s not mean. It’s true. The news is all pretty little girls sitting beside ugly old men.”

  Tom scooted back in, talking into his headset and waving at me to follow him.

  As I stepped into the trailer, the wardrobe woman looked up from the rubber pants and T-shirt she was readying for me to wear so the rainwater wouldn’t soak through to my skin. I stood behind the clothes rack and wiggled out of my jeans, gratefully replacing them with the fleece-lined rubber.

  I had fully expected that I would end up shuddering in wet sludge, soothing myself with the knowledge that I was making sixty-five dollars an hour. I slipped their secretary clothes on over top and headed to the next trailer.

  The makeup artist threw a used sponge in the garbage. “Have a seat.” She looked at me in the mirror and jammed her fists onto her hips, exasperated. “Is this what you’re wearing? How are we killing you?”

  “I don’t know nothin’, I just work here,” I answered, attempting levity.

  She threw a smock across the front of me, took my chin in her fingers, grabbed a fresh sponge and set to work briskly dabbing and blending the grey-white into my face and down my throat, into the neckline of the olive-drab shirt. As I watched her mix the bruise colours onto her palette, I tried some idle conversation. “So, which do you prefer: the pretty stuff or this special-effects makeup?”

  “I prefer—tilt your head, please—” she patted purple grease into fingerprints on my neck “—having enough time to do the job right. Not this slapdash …” Her words trailed and she pursed her lips as she squinted into the mirror at the four-finger imprint she’d created. She added a thumbprint under my jaw, on the other side, about where a doctor would take a pulse. Pulling my sleeves up, she deadened my hands then dismissed me.

  The four of us who were about to die were led out back of the studio. Another AD, a tall strapping babe in the mould of a horse-wrangling farm girl, brought us to the photographer, who stood under a double-size umbrella and blinked through his rain-dappled spectacles at the camera in his hands. The farm-girl AD held an oversized umbrella in each of her hands, trying to keep us dry, at least until we had to get down in the muck. A hairstylist joined the group along with the makeup artist. The photographer muttered down at his digital camera and reluctantly said hello.

  “There’s a stream,” he mumbled. “Should work for one of you. Has he said anything else?” The AD hadn’t heard anything and queried the hair and makeup women.

  “Fat chance we’d hear anything first,” said Makeup. “Director couldn’t hold a thought if it was chained to him.”

  We tromped around rain-filled potholes.

  “So,” the farm-girl AD asked, making conversation, “are you girls all aspiring actresses?”

  “Yes,” said Nervous Kelly. “But I teach yoga as well. I think I might start doing it full-time. Maybe open my own Bikram centre. Or Pilates.”

  Margaret the impending weather girl was stonefaced, her anchorwoman facade replaced with a wet-cat one. She looked as if something were pinching under her fleece-lined rubber pants.

  Soon, we stood by the edge of gurgling water. The photographer muttered inaudibly at the sky and down at the muddy streamside.

  “Whoever goes first,” the AD offered, “gets to go back and warm up first.”

  I stepped up. Steeled by rubber pants, I was impervious.

  A foam pad was set down on the muck and I lay on it. I closed my eyes as Hair and Makeup swooped in. “I’m just dabbing some mud in your hair and some leaves and twiggy stuff,” Hair said. I could feel her fingers working it a little too vigorously into my scalp. “We’ll wash it out for you when you’re done … now some on your face.” Cold fingers smeared and dabbed my jaw, my neck. Another voice announced a bit of blood. Wet grass slithered up through my fingers as someone daubed grit into one slack palm.

  Rain splatted my clothes and skin and the line of scalp they had bared. The stream trickled a few inches from my head. I could smell the rotting leaves, feel the frigid mud through my layers. I sensed them stepping back from me.

  The photographer’s mutter came close again. “That’s nice. That’s perfect.”

  I stopped hearing. I was drifting off someplace just outside my corpse.

  A dollop of rain hit my ear.

  I was sinking into the earth. The sense of my heels sinking in as my mother’s coffin lowered.

  Rain on my ear trickled inside like a cool worm.

  In a couple of months, strangers would laze in front of the television and stare at photographs of my dead self while they ate dinner. Me and the pixies. One of these things just doesn’t belong here, they’d think. I wondered if those proper-looking girls would strike them as more or less deserving of murder.

  The photographer tapped my elbow. “Thank you. Nice job. Really good.” I opened my eyes. He reached out a hand.

  The AD helped pull me up. “You okay?” she asked suspiciously as I got to my feet. I smiled the way Lazarus must have and accepted one of her umbrellas. She stared into space. “That’s the blonde one?” she asked the air. She was listening to her headset. Then, turning to me, said, “You’re Vivian, right? You can head back but don’t go anywhere, ’kay?”

  Back in the trailer, warm soapy water felt like soothing affection. A new stylist cradled my head with one hand while her other kneaded mud from my scalp. My eyes watered. Normally I was only treated this well when I was on set as an actor and I hadn’t gotten a real part in close to a year. As an extra, generally speaking, one was hardly regarded as human.

  Towel around my head, I heard a microwave oven ding in the corner. An assistant makeup artist pulled out a hot wet towel and came grinning toward me with it. She shook out the steam.

  “Oh god,” I groaned happily “Do I get sushi with this?” I plastered the towel to my face. She handed me shaving cream to help get the greasepaint off my neck.

  In the bathroom off extras holding, I changed out of the mucky wardrobe then settled down to wait with People magazine. In front of me was a feature on an eighteen-year-old pop star. Her hair was bleached the colour of mine. She wore an ass-high, schoolgirl’s plaid skirt and a white blouse unbuttoned to her black push-up bra. Heavy blue lined her eyes; a blackened mole sat above her glossy red lips. “WHY SHE’S STILL A VIRGIN,” the headline bellowed in block letters.

  Tom came back. “Vivian, we gotta rekill you for a different episode.” He stuck a finger in his free ear as he listened to his headset and backed out of the room. “Copy that,” he barked and poked his head back in. “I don’t know what’s going on. I’ll be back.”

  An hour later the wardrobe woman strolled in with Farm-Girl AD. “So, here’s the scoop so far,” Farm Girl said. “The director wants to have you lying on the floor with a shower curtain wrapped around you. But the problem is, we don’t really have a tiled floor that would work as a shower. So we’re workin’ on that.”

  “And the other problem,” Wardrobe said, “perhaps more importantly, as far as you’re concerned, is he wants the shower curtain to be transparent.”

  I cocked my head. “Transparent-transparent?”

  “Yeah,” Farm Girl said. “How do you feel about this shower-curtain stuff anyway?”

  “I think I’d like to wear a body stocking underneath. I mean, they can’t show me naked anyway, it’s network TV.”

  “Exactly,” Wardrobe said. “I don’t know what’s he’s thinking.”

  Another young woman of unknown job description came flying up the stairs and said, “So, y
eah, he just wants the transparent one. I think he means opaque but he keeps saying transparent. How’s that by you?” She looked to me.

  A shudder made its way through my belly and down. “I want a body stocking.”

  The interloper sighed. “Then we gotta go to the store and buy a bunch more shower curtains so he can approve one.” She turned to Wardrobe and muttered something I didn’t catch. Laughing, she glanced back to me and offered, “No offence. It just gets so complicated.”

  “That’s that,” said Farm Girl to the interloper. “Guess we’ll see you when you get back.” She turned to me again. “Are you sure you’re okay with this? Just say if you’re uncomfortable and it’s off.”

  My chest ached a little that this stranger was worried about me. I counted my hours. Another three would pay my rent for the month. “I’m fine. She’ll get the other curtain. I’ll wear the body stocking. It’ll be okay.”

  It was four in the afternoon when we broke for lunch. I went to the catering truck and stood in line, the rain still pelting down around me. The catering is often the high point of any day on set. Where else can you get a free steak when you’re short on cash, where else do they serve you crab, blackened Cajun shark, curried tofu, five kinds of salad, deep-fried avocado, grilled peppers, and chocolate cheesecake for dessert. I loaded up a tray and headed back to holding.

  After I ate, I checked my watch and tossed People aside, rummaged in my bag for the book I’d brought: Selected Short Stories of the Marquis de Sade. It had been a offering from my mother, yet another book taken from her shelves upon shelves of feminist theory and literature, one of the many books and articles with which she began pummelling me as soon as I hit puberty. Sally stayed in New York and Mum came to crave female company in her place: big-legged, loud-mouthed warrior women. My mother had always seemed pissed off to me, but when she found these women and their books, she found the words to express just how much.