by Zoe Wildau
She laughed at the effect. He looked so wise, benevolent. Not at all what was needed for Allegrezza. Moving to the next Jake, she began building out his brow, exaggerating the slight frown he must have had under the alginate. The effect was immediate. Lilly deepened the expression. Oooo. Scary. Now she was getting somewhere. Rolling her office chair to sit in front of the scowling Jake, she pulled out a pad of artists’ paper and a new pack of soft, colored pencils and began drawing. By one a.m., she had papered half of a wall with scowling and benevolent Jakes and some drawings that melded the two together. Yawning, satisfied that she had at least started to get some inspiration, she headed for bed.
That night, Lilly dreamed of Jake. The dream started innocently enough. She stood on the edge of her father’s cornfield. It was a hot summer day and the corn was getting tall. As she looked out over the field into the western afternoon sun, she shaded her eyes and searched for her father’s tractor. Not seeing the telltale plume of dirt and dust that usually followed the tractor, she turned toward the house. Everything seemed deserted. Shutters flapped on the second story of the farmhouse, although she felt no breeze.
As she surveyed the house and yard, the sun was suddenly eclipsed as a great shadow fell over her. Ducking instinctively, like a rabbit hunted by a hawk, Lilly covered her head and neck, not daring to look up. The ground shook around her as something massive landed right behind her. It was so large that its shadow blocked the sun and spread out and around her, darkening the barnyard.
Although the sun’s rays were shielded, the heat was not. The heat continued to grow, emanating from the thing. Sweltering in the heat, she slowly lifted her head and turned to peer at the monster behind her. At first, all she could see was blackness blotting out the sun. Then she registered the color and vibrancy of it – like a burning lava flow – shifting, undulating colors of blackest coal, brick red, gashes of fiery orange, flashes flaming yellow.
The sun’s rays outlined the contours of its shape. There were massive shoulders and wings not fully unfurled yet spanning ten fence posts – eighty feet. Thick legs straddled her as it towered above her. A tail, sharp and whipping, agitated the ground and air, slicing through the corn behind it and kicking up shredded vegetation and dirt.
Lilly looked up into the face, harsh, cruel – uncaring – and recognized those features. She felt the skin on her face and hands begin to blister and boil from its, his, proximity. The heat swiftly became too much, and her clothes and hair burst into flame.
She woke from the dream with a start and a muffled scream. The blankets were twisted around her and her face was buried under her pillow, smothering her. She gasped for air, choking on her scream. Shoving the pillow off of her head, she scrambled to get out of the bed and fell to the floor in the twisted blankets. She frantically patted her face, her hair and her chest. Although drenched with sweat, she was unharmed. Not on fire. Not on fire.
On her second cup of tea, Lilly finally screwed up enough courage to go into the studio to stare down the face of her nightmare. With trembling fingers she reached out and touched the furrowed brow, the straight nose and the full lips. Tracing her hand down his torso, she thought of the tough as nails, scaly skin of the Jake of her dream with his razor sharp features. Lilly picked up a pad of artists’ paper and sketched him several times, scattering the nightmare drawings on the floor as she worked. She drew him in the barnyard. She drew him hovering over her father’s cornfield. She drew him blasting his surroundings with flames. It was a technique she had learned in her teenage years. The more familiar she could make her waking mind with her nightmare, the quicker she could recognize what was happening in her sleep and make herself wake up.
By mid-morning, Lilly was ankle deep in paper. Uncovering her block of clay, she began sculpting the third Jake statue. By dinnertime, dragon Jake stared out at her, placidly immobile. No threat now. Little of what she had done would work for Allegrezza, but she felt better. When she dreamed of him again that night, she was prepared. It was the same dream as the night before. But this time, before she turned to look at him, before he could set her on fire, she willed herself awake.
The following day, she began again on the second bust, going in a much different direction than either the Jake of her nightmares or the first, whimsical, elfin Jake statue. She continued to work with the same statue for the next week. When she wasn’t working on the design, she watched all of Jake’s movies.
He never played a good guy. Two of his early gangster movies were so disturbing that she was forced to turn them off and couldn’t turn them back on until Becky came over, promising to watch them with her in the light of day. They had still scared her half to death.
As she constructed Allegrezza’s features, she could see Jake’s brutal movie characters in the furrowed brow and aggressive chin. She saw promise in the design, but struggled to connect with Allegrezza the brute villain, feeling an odd discordance with it. Three times she found herself recreating the much more angularly vicious dragon Jake features and had to take them off and start over. After the third time, she threw a sheet over the dragon Jake so she wouldn’t be influenced by it while she worked, although he still came to her nearly every night to interrupt her sleep, intent on setting her on fire.
On Wednesday, she was a week and a half into the project and feeling desperate. When her doorbell rang, she was happy for the reprieve. It was Jake’s driver, Wil, bearing two tickets to Tyler’s guest performance at the Geffen Playhouse on Saturday night.
“Tyler was at the house for dinner last night, and asked that I bring these to you, Ms. Rose,” Wil said. “He suggested you might like to bring your niece, Anna.” Lilly had brought Anna to meet Tyler several times during her work on Fox and Cats.
Lilly picked up the phone to call her brother as soon as Wil left to arrange the date, offering that Anna come over in the afternoon and spend the night. Lionel and Julie were thrilled to have a rare whole night alone.
Saturday afternoon, Lilly shut the door on the disturbing figures in her studio before Anna arrived. The girls spent two hours getting ready, complete with home pedicures. It was a refreshing break having Anna take her mind off of the work on Feast. She hadn’t realized how dark her spirits had become.
Lilly and Anna arrived at the playhouse early and found their seats, which were right up front in the orchestra section. As the production began, it was clear that the director knew what he had in Tyler and had dramatically increased Kurt Von Trapp’s role in the production. Ty eclipsed the other players. His rendition of “The Lonely Goatherd” had them rolling with laughter. When Kurt stepped up to finish “Edelweiss” after Captain Georg Von Trapp faltered singing and the sweet ode to the Austrian homeland, there was not a dry eye in the house.
At the show’s end, the audience roared in approval, hooting and clapping through three curtain calls. On the last one, Ty scooped up a red rose from the stage and tossed it to Anna. Some lucky girl was going to have this boy, Lilly thought, and she was going to be the happiest girl alive. She hoped it would be Anna.
When it was clear the actors were not coming back, Lilly turned to look toward the exits and was startled to see that Jake Durant had been sitting two rows behind them with the rest of Tyler’s family. He had already turned and was headed out to the aisle. He was not alone. Sierra Nighly, looking drop dead gorgeous in a slinky green silk dress that hugged every curve, was his date. As she stepped out into the aisle, Jake put his hand on the small of her back to guide her out of the theatre.
Lilly was shocked by the twisting sick feeling that overcame her at the sight of Jake’s hand on Sierra Nighly. When had she come to feel so proprietary about Jake, a man she’d met only twice?
She was frowning at his tall, retreating figure, when he suddenly turned to look straight at her. He gave her a small salute and continued out of the theatre.
“Let’s just wait here a bit and let the crowd clear,” she said to Anna, confused and appalled at her visceral reaction to seein
g him with Sierra. Her dark mood returned suddenly, dimming the bright light Anna had brought to her afternoon and the joy of Ty’s outstanding performance.
Lilly stroked Anna’s hair as she fell asleep. Normally when Anna slept over, they both crowded into Lilly’s queen-sized bed. Tonight though, Lilly was worried that she’d frighten Anna by waking up thrashing and screaming with her recurrent nightmare. As she listened to Anna’s soft breathing, she questioned the wisdom of continuing to work on Feast. She had another four or five months of this horror flick. If she couldn’t get her stress level under control, she was going to turn into a basket case. She fell asleep sitting up in the chair beside the bed, still with no good answer for her dilemma.
The following morning, Lionel loaded Anna in the back seat of his car, shut the door and turned to her.
“What’s going on with you, Lilly? You look exhausted. I’d ask if it was Anna, but you looked like this yesterday, too.” Concern etched his features.
“I’m okay. Just stressed. It’s this movie. It’s gruesome. Not my cup of tea.”
“Are you sure you want to do this?” her brother asked.
“No, I’m not sure. I’m really struggling, but I don’t intend to quit.” Lionel recognized the stubborn, determined look on Lilly’s face, and knew from long years of experience that she wouldn’t give up.
Not bothering to talk her out of it, instead he admonished, “Don’t go driving around in traffic on your Vespa without getting some sleep.”
“I won’t,” she promised.
True to her word, Lilly barely left her bungalow over the next couple of weeks. Continuing in the vein she started, she built on the Allegrezza she had begun after speaking with Kyle. It was the Jake statue that she began to think of as her production Allegrezza. On days that she awoke in a sweat, running from her fiery nightmare, she would uncover dragon Jake’s draped figure just long enough to stare him down and calm her heart, then blanket him again until the next time. Elven Jake she left uncovered and often consulted as she worked.
“What do you think, Grezza?” she’d ask him, stepping back to survey her design.
“You think it’s too much? Yes, yes, of course you’re right. Let’s start that brow over again….”
When she had a productive day, she’d slightly change elven Jake’s features to a kindly smile. If she was stymied, she’d pinch his brow in concern.
A week before the preproduction meeting deadline, production Allegrezza had become a hulking barbarian force in her studio. Lilly had developed an uneasy truce with him. Unlike her work on Gustav for Fox Hollow, she simply didn’t identify with the character. But she knew it was good: scary, strong and bruising. He would be virtually unstoppable in real life, if he existed.
Lilly knew when she was good at something and when she wasn’t. Looking at Allegrezza, she reluctantly acknowledged that she was extraordinarily good at making monsters.
Chapter 6
The Sunday before Thursday’s preproduction meeting, almost a month into her work on Feast of Saints, Lilly punched the speed dial for Greg’s cell number to ask a favor. Greg picked up on the second ring, which she knew to be a Talking Heads Psycho Killer ringtone.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est, Peanut?”
“Hey, can I bum a ride off you Thursday afternoon?” she asked.
Her only motorized transportation was the Vespa, whereas Greg conveniently drove a customized mid-90s Chevy Astro van. Lilly heard Greg groan over the phone.
“No food, I promise,” she said quickly.
Greg’s “Peanut” nickname for her didn’t come so much from her size as from the fact that she’d had the ill manners once, after a night of bar hopping, to eat a bag of peanuts in the van. The peanut dust drove Greg, a bit of a neat freak, into a frenzy of midnight vacuuming.
“I swear. Just me and my portfolio.”
If she could hitch a ride with Greg, she could make some foam core boards of her designs and take them with her to her first official preproduction meeting with Jake and the director, Monty Davidson.
“Alright, but only if you keep your promise. No food in the van,” Greg said sternly.
“I promise. How about you and Becky come over the night before and I’ll cook for you. And, if you don’t mind, I can run through my presentation for you guys. I need to practice in front of an audience, or I’m going to be too nervous.”
“Sure, sure,” Greg agreed. Then, foreseeing a promotional opportunity for his business, asked, “Do you think you could slip some of my cards to your new friends?”
Greg, like most of her LA friends, also worked in the film industry as the owner of “Get-A-Grip”, a rental outlet that catered to LA’s abundant new and struggling independent filmmakers. His shop rented everything from cameras and lighting to wardrobes and props. If he didn’t have it, he could get it. He was a secret treasure and an extremely useful person to know in this industry, although Lilly would have hung out with him regardless of his resources because he was one of the kindest people she’d ever met.
“Um… I don’t know about the cards. I’m not sure I can fit a plug into my presentation.” Inspiration striking, she said, “Instead, how about I wear one of your ball caps with the embroidered logo and accidently leave it at the meeting?”
“Seriously? You’d do that? That would be schweet.”
“It’s the least I can do,” she said, meaning it. She was putting Greg out. It was not the first time, nor was it likely to be the last.
On Wednesday night, Becky was forced to cancel, having been called in to work at her catering job. Greg still came by to listen to Lilly’s presentation. Becky had already seen her production Allegrezza a week earlier and had pronounced him “sexy creepy.”
When Lilly unveiled for Greg what she had been working on holed up in her bungalow for the last month, he seemed surprised.
“I’m blown away,” he said. “This is tight. Really tight.” Those were words of high praise in Greg’s lexicon. Lilly could tell she’d gone up a notch in his estimation and it pleased her enormously.
“I am pretty proud of it,” she said demurely. “Although I wish I had more time to flesh out my ideas.”
She still didn’t feel completely satisfied with the final design for Allegrezza. She had finally decided that her inability to connect with Jake’s character might be a self-defense mechanism. As good as she was at imagining horrible characters and bringing them to life, she didn’t like them, and she certainly did not like the sleepless nights she spent running away from her nightmare Jake.
As she walked Greg to the door, he said he would pick up her and her portfolio at two-thirty the following afternoon. The meeting was to take place at the Culver Hotel, a fifteen-minute drive from her bungalow.
On the porch, Greg turned to her and hugged her tightly.
“Lilly, it’s good. And scary.” Holding her at arm’s length, he said, “You’re going to knock ’em dead.”
“Thanks.” She suddenly choked up, overcome by gratitude at having such a wonderful friend.
Half-joking to cover her emotion, she started to say, “Don’t forget to bring a hat,” but Greg was no longer looking at her. His head had nearly twisted off to get a better look at the silver sports car that zoomed down her street.
“Wow, that’s a McLaren!”
Lilly turned to see what had so forcefully grabbed his attention.
“A McWhat?”
“It’s the fastest road car in the world. And it costs a million bucks,” Greg enthused.
She stared after the fast retreating car. It looked an awful lot like the car Jake had parked in front of his house when she’d gone there for the lifecasting session. But that couldn’t be, could it? Still, how many million-dollar sports cars are there in this town? Maybe quite a few. It was LA after all.
When Greg showed up the following afternoon to give her a ride to Culver City, Lilly was ready, waiting and nervous as hell. She had not yet met Monty but had met his chief Assistant
Director, or “AD”, Alison Chervik. Lilly had participated in two crew meetings at the studio run by Alison, who talked a mile a minute. Blunt, crude and quick with a bruising putdown, Alison reminded her of a female Ari Gold from the hit HBO drama, Entourage. Trendy LA action phrases and industry acronyms spewed out from her mouth.
Halfway through the first meeting with Alison, Lilly’s head was spinning. Turning to Bryce, who she was delighted to find at the start of the meeting had been hired on to the film, she asked, “What’s she saying? Is she speaking English?”
Just then, Alison’s laser gaze zeroed in on Lilly.
“And finally, for you newbies,” Alison blasted, “if you’re not already registered with your union, sign up at one of the tables in the lobby before you leave here today. I don’t care if you’re SAG, PGA or ADG, read the bylines and follow them. If I get a whiff of guild discord on this pic, I’ll push you right back up your mommas.”
Lilly fervently hoped Alison was not going to be at the Culver City meeting.
Greg, ever the gentleman, met her at the door and took the oversized black portfolio case from her and carried it out to the Astro.
Sitting at a stoplight halfway to Culver City, Greg looked over at her appraisingly.
“You look really pretty. Kinda hot, too, Peanut,” he said.
Lilly had bought a new dress for the meeting and she thought she’d struck the right note between professional and artsy in the muted gray silk, square-necked shift dress, with a wide belt of the same fabric. The red-trimmed five inch snakeskin Suecomma Bonnie’s that had arrived on her doorstep from Busan two days ago added a spice of style to the otherwise austere dress.
