by Zoe Wildau
As the light came on, Madcap darted out of the room.
“Are there more in there?” Jake asked cautiously, startled by the black and white streak of lightening.
“No, just Madcap. She’s not much on people. Well, other than me people.”
Lilly suddenly pirouetted in the doorframe, blocking his entrance into the room. Earnestly searching his face, she said, “There’s an evolution of ideas in here. I’m not sure how to present them to you, so I’ll just start from the beginning. Please don’t make any judgments until we get to the final product.”
When he didn’t answer right away, she made him promise.
“Okay, okay,” he finally said, holding up his hands.
She swung her small frame out of the way and Jake stepped into the brightly lit room. There were four full-sized busts of Jake and the walls were papered with pencil and color drawings of him in various incantations of her imagination.
Before he could light on one, she directed him to the bust on the farthest left. “This was when I first started, just playing around to see what worked on your face.”
Her muse, Grezza, had gentle, fantasy features. Jake saw his own eyes, brow, cheekbones and chin, reshaped to be whimsical and elfin.
“I like this one a lot, but there’s no malice in him.” This Jake she would love to meet in her dreams instead of the demonic creature that haunted her nightmares.
She pointed to several drawings taped to the wall. “Even though I knew this concept wasn’t going to work, I had fun with the skin tones. This blue-gray skin tone here,” she touched a colored pencil drawing of a slant-eyed Jake peering over a mountain cliff, “made the final cut.”
Gesturing to the second bust, she said, “You know this one.” The second bust was a three dimensional version of the hulking Allegrezza she’d been prepared to present at the Culver City preproduction meeting. “Not much of it was carried over.”
When he’d finished taking it in, he nodded and turned to the next one, waiting expectantly for her to explain. It was covered in a sheet.
She tried to steer him to the next one, saying, “That one has nothing to do with Feast. It was just something my mind’s eye wanted to do with you.” Jake resisted her attempt to nudge him along. He reached out and pulled the sheet off of her nightmare Jake. The shoulders were angular and almost spiked. The cheekbones were so severe that the face became insect-like. The nose was elongated with exaggerated nostrils. Although distorted, it was clearly Jake’s face. It wasn’t pretty. There were quite a few pencil sketches that went with the bust. They were bold and dark with extreme, demonic angles and strange body projections. In several of them, there was a suggestion of wings and a tail. It was… unsettling by anyone’s measure.
“It’s not for production,” she said, taking the sheet from Jake and throwing it back over her nightmare.
Hurriedly directing his attention to the last bust, she said, rather over-brightly, “This is the final design I’m presenting. It’s a real departure from Culver City, although as I mentioned it has some of the elements of the first one.” It had more than a few of the elements of her nightmare Jake, too, although they were much more subtle. The similarities lay in the angular features, which perfected and exaggerated Jake’s own precisely cut face.
Lilly decided not to give it any more introduction, other than to point to several of the colored pencil drawings and say, “Here’s the final color palette I’m envisioning, most of it done with makeup, but in certain scenes, highlighted using computer graphics.” She stopped talking and let Jake look.
He could have been at a high stakes poker game. She tried to steady her own expression, although she could feel her nervousness threatening to make her bottom lip tremble. When Jake’s gaze had cycled several times between the final bust and drawings, Lilly opened a desk drawer and pulled out a handful more sheets.
“I’m not in charge of costumes, but I thought I might find a way to propose these, too. They fit with my vision, anyway. The clothing will influence the audience’s reception of the character as much as the makeup.”
When he wasn’t stripped to the waist, which was often how he appeared in the screenplay, Lilly had dressed him in haute couture. Allegrezza had lived a long time. The drawings spanned centuries of men’s fashion.
Jake was silent as he leafed through the papers she handed him. His expression was so serene that Lilly, who had so little experience with this man, had no way to interpret what he was thinking. After what seemed like twenty minutes, he said, “Can I take these with me?”
She didn’t want to admit that she had three, maybe four more drawers full of similar drawings, although these were her best.
“Sure,” she said.
“Can we try some of this on?”
Lilly had nothing to do the next day but work on this, but she suspected that someone like Jake had a full Monday schedule.
“It will take me a few minutes to mix the materials. Are you sure you have the time?”
“I’ve got nothing better to do,” he said casually.
She had been looking forward to an opportunity to try the appliances on Jake to make sure he was going to look as good as she thought he would. She’d planned to ask him for an appointment at next week’s meeting, but this was even better. If there were any problems making the final transition from concept to reality, she’d still have a week to work them out.
Remembering her manners, she asked, “Would you like a drink? All I’ve got is beer,” she quickly added.
“Yes,” was his distracted reply. He’d turned back to the third statue, uncovering it again. Her nightmare Jake.
It was a disconcerting sight, seeing them face off like that. She headed to the fridge, thinking she could use a beer herself. Luckily, she’d treated herself to some Southern Tier Euro Trash Pils in anticipation of the night’s outing. There were still five beers left in the pack. Jake didn’t blink an eye at the pink label as he sat down in the chair recently vacated by Madcap. Lilly thought to warn him about the cat hair, but it was too late.
Making several trips between the kitchen, the studio and the spare bedroom, where she kept a stockpile of paints and compounds that probably violated the state fire code, she prepared a glycerin gelatin mixture to make the facial appliances for Jake’s character.
She set a timer for ten minutes to let the gelatin cure and went to her spare bedroom, where she grabbed a tube of skin prep, a small bottle of medical grade adhesive, some applicators and a clean, white plastic tray. Setting them on the kitchen counter, she touched the curing appliances to make sure they were setting up properly.
She still had a few minutes left on the timer. She grabbed her beer and headed back into the studio where she perched on the desk. She felt the epoxy that kept her dress from gaping open in the back beginning to give up the ghost after all the bending and stretching to get materials out of boxes, drawers and cabinets. Sitting as still as possible, she hoped it would hold until Jake left.
Jake quietly gazed over the various drawings of him plastered over the walls. Lilly started to see them through his eyes. Surely he must realize how much time she had spent fixated on him to come up with these. In truth, he and the vampire Allegrezza had consumed her every waking moment for the past month. So much so that they’d invaded her subconscious, causing her troubled, torrid sleep.
“You’ve been working hard,” he said. His tone was sympathetic, one hard-working person to another. “You should get out more.”
She laughed. “That’s what I thought tonight, before that dreadful crush at Spago’s.”
“This isn’t so bad, though,” he said, taking a pull on his beer. He seemed to enjoy being here with her, in the tiny bungalow so different from his mansion on Calle Vista. Lilly lifted her own beer bottle to clink his, thinking it was fun having him here, too, now that her initial nervousness over showing him her work was wearing off.
She jumped when the buzzer went off. Telling Jake to stay seated, she hea
ded back to the kitchen. She popped the three appliances she was going to use on Jake’s face out of their molds, careful not to tear them, and laid them on the tray with the other items.
Returning to Jake, she set the tray on the desk and squirted a blob of the oily skin prep into her palm. Pausing just before touching him, she asked, “You don’t have plans from here, do you? This needs a good hot shower to rinse off. Otherwise you’re going to look like you just finished a double shift at Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles.”
Jake smiled, “No, do as you will, Pixie. I’ve no other plans.”
That name again. The idea that he had a pet name for her might have been pleasing if it wasn’t such a diminutive character. She chose to ignore it.
Standing before him, she smoothed the emulsion over Jake’s brow, down the length of his nose and around his chin. Jake adopted the cool, aloof expression he always did when she worked on him. It irked her a bit, although she knew she should be glad about his professionalism. The more she was around him, the harder it was to ignore her physical attraction to him.
Finished with the skin prep and forcing herself not to linger to prolong the skin to skin contact, she picked up an applicator and applied a small amount of the medical grade adhesive down the length of his nose. She then picked up a fine gel appliance and pressed it along the bridge of his nose. It filled in the bump of his broken nose and refined the bridge to make it more sharply cut. She repeated the adhesive process on his brow and chin. All of the appliances were ultra-thin. The minimal brow appliance was almost undetectable, but nevertheless it changed the overall shape of Jake’s brow, making it subtlety less human, arching toward a scowl. When acting the part, if he did scowl for real, the brow appliance was so delicate that it would move with him. The effect would be to exaggerate the expression, making him appear murderous. The chin application filled in Jake’s dimple. Covering the dimple was a bit of a shame, because it was handsome, but it was much too all-American for Allegrezza.
Next, the fangs. She’d made a similar dental appliance for Tyler’s fox character, Gustav, who had little pointy incisors. The completed appliance was a retainer that would easily pop in and out. The fangs were made of a dental urethane composite and were attached to the retainer. The backsides of the fangs were concave to fit over Jake’s own incisors for a seamless fit. She had sculpted the fangs using the plaster cast of Jake’s mouth made from the alginate molds. The retainer itself she had contracted out to a local orthodontist. Jake would be wearing it often over the next few months. She didn’t want to inadvertently shift his bite.
Thwarted by the fact that she couldn’t try them out on the closed-mouthed plaster Jake statues, she’d had a terrible time choosing the perfect shape, size and length of the fangs. Ultimately, she had narrowed it down to two different styles. She’d had both made in anticipation of trying them out on Jake before making a final selection.
Lilly held up the two fang retainers for Jake’s inspection. On one, the fangs were wolf-like, thick at the base, and triangular, made for tearing flesh. The other fangs were more like a venomous snake’s, long and cruelly curved like a sickle, to slice through the skin.
“Which ones do you like?” she asked. Jake selected the longer, thinner fangs. They were the same fangs she would have chosen herself, she decided.
After handing the retainer to Jake, who fitted it into in his mouth, she stood back to examine him, and frowned.
“You need color to get the real feel. If you’d like to see what this is going to look like, we’ll have to get out the paint and makeup,” she said.
“Let’s do it,” Jake said without hesitation.
“It’ll stain just about everything you have on, so don’t touch your clothes. In fact, if that jacket is as expensive as I think it is, let me have it,” she said.
Jake shrugged out of the dark jacket. Lilly took it to the living room, brushing off the cat hair, intending to drape it over a chair out of harm’s way. Fingering the luxurious fabric, and thinking about the way it precisely fit Jake’s form, she knew it was definitely not ready-to-wear. She couldn’t help peeking inside for a label, trying not to look like she was searching his pockets. She finally found the small, signature label identifying the jacket as bespoke tailoring from London tailor, Gieves & Hawkes. Deciding better than just draping it over a chair, she hung it in her hall closet.
In the spare bedroom, she opened several tightly sealed rubber drawers in a free-standing industrial strength storage unit, selecting tubes, powders, pencils, brushes, an unopened package of sponge makeup applicators and a curved empty makeup palette. On the way back to the studio, she pulled her bathrobe from its hook on the back of her bedroom door to drape over Jake’s undoubtedly hand-tailored shirt.
“I haven’t tried to replicate the colors using actual makeup, yet, so this may not be exactly right, but it will be close enough.” She said, blending the colors on the palette and occasionally glancing at her Allegrezza drawings.
Finishing the palette, she dabbed one of the sponges on the palette and made a few strokes across Jake’s brow and cheeks. She adjusted the colors, adding a bit more white to lighten them. Satisfied, she applied makeup all over his face, concentrating on the areas where the edges of the appliances met his skin.
When she put down the palette, Jake started to get up, searching for a mirror.
“Hold your horses, big guy. Let me get you just right, then you can look.” She left the room and Jake heard the back door open. She came back a few minutes later, banging into the studio with a small portable air compressor. It was startlingly loud when she plugged it in.
“Sorry, it’s just a minute,” she said. It was a mercifully small air compressor and filled quickly. She unplugged it so it wouldn’t go off again as she depleted some of the air and attached the airbrush.
Taking two small glass jars, she quickly and expertly mixed black, blue and white to create lighter and darker shades of the skin color on the palette. Adjusting the robe to cover Jake’s expensive shirt, she directed him to close his eyes and hold his breath, which he did with only a slight hesitation.
A few quick passes with the airbrush was all she needed to give his skin perfect tone and to achieve the subtle highlights and shadows that suggested death, the hint of a skull.
Picking up the brushes again, she softened the skull effect. Give him a black hooded robe and scythe, and Jake could have passed for an artistic incantation of Death. With his bland expression, this Death offered a luminescent oblivion. No promise of heaven or hell, only a quiet, chilling void.
Shaking off the morbid thought, Lilly peered into his eyes, “I don’t have any contacts here. As blue as your eyes are, we could stick with your natural color in most of the close up scenes. In the night scenes, I think I’d like to have you wear a clear, slightly reflective lens. Or, we could just add that effect with CG, which would eliminate any unintended glare. This skin color I’ve made will probably be enhanced with CG too, but this is the basic effect.”
Lilly stood back, nodding in approval, until Jake said, “Can I look now?”
“Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Here, follow me.”
Taking the fluffy robe off him, she gestured him into her hall bathroom and switched on the light. Wanting to see his reaction, she slipped in front of him and let him look in the mirror over her shoulder. She couldn’t hide a small, smug smile when his eyes widened in astonishment.
He looked just like her last Jake bust, only… better. The color, shadows and highlights and his flexible, expressive, living face, added a whole new level of complexity, and sexy, to the demonic character.
He was awe-inspiring and… yummy. The more she looked, the broader her smile became.
Jake started experimenting with facial expressions. First, he frowned, and the sexy demon suddenly didn’t look so sexy, but a bit more like a nightmare. He opened his mouth and bared his teeth. The red of his inner lips and tongue was garish and frightening, the fangs razor-sharp. He loo
ked like he might be able to extend his maw to swallow the whole room.
Jake shut his mouth and Lilly recognized his characteristic bland expression. In a testament to his acting skill, she watched, fascinated, as he ever so subtly adjusted the expression, moving from detached to ruthless, pausing at shades in between. Then his expression morphed into a sneer, and while he was sneering, his gaze drifted to meet her eyes, then dropped to her neck and her exposed back.
He looked like he was seriously considering biting her. When Jake lowered his head toward her shoulder, she let out an eek and skidded out of the bathroom, nearly busting an ankle in her Duccio Venturi shoes to get away from him. Out of the corner of her eye she caught Jake snapping at her. Then he started to stalk her down the hallway, his image reflected and multiplied into infinity by the opposing mirrored doors of the bathroom and hall closet.
She had spent the past month imagining Jake in all sorts of bloodsucking wrong. He was really freaking her out.
“Cut it out,” she breathed, choking back the panicky scream that threatened to gurgle out of her throat. She was just about to make a run for the kitchen to find something with which to defend herself, when Jake suddenly came out of character.
Very excited, he said, “Let’s work on my walk. What are you doing about feet?”
It took her a minute to catch her breath and catch up with him mentally. When she did, she ushered him away from the mirrored hallway and back into the Jake room.
She showed him the casts she’d made of his feet and explained the bone structure and how she had a few applications to highlight the tendons. Allegrezza was an ancient vampire. She’d considered giving him pointy, overgrown yellowed toenails, but decided that was too gross. Instead, she’d opted for an acrylic nail color of swirling, silvered obsidian – like the inside of an abalone shell. She’d mixed the nail colors herself. Opening a small glass bottle, she painted one of her own thumbs so that he could see what she was talking about.
