by Zoe Wildau
On top of the weirdness of the maybe/maybe not hitting on her, she found exchanging pleasantries with Sergei, for whom English was a second language, a bit tiring. With his strong Bulgarian accent, Sergei’s speech pattern was so moose and squirrel that she at first thought it was a put-on. Even his close-cropped black hair and tiny mustache was strongly reminiscent of Boris Badenov of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
“Lilly, it has been my enormous pleasure working with you this week.” Sergei said, finally reaching her. He pronounced her name, “Lee-lee,” and “working” was “vorking.”
“Thanks, Sergei. This has been fun. I’m glad I came.” Half-truths, if that. Just in case he was thinking of asking her out, she added, “Whew, I’m beat. I’m just going to pack it in here and hit the hay. Thanks for the day off tomorrow. I’ll be well-rested and ready by Monday.”
In fact, she had no intention of spending Sunday resting. She was already mentally going over the map of the Otago Region she’d perused on the flight to New Zealand. Queenstown was a stone’s throw from a mountain range called The Remarkables. She didn’t have to go far to find the peace of mind that hiking in the mountains gave her.
Glancing at her watch, she thought she just had enough time to make it to the guide service in town before they closed. She could get a trail map and some advice on the best day hikes. Looking up, she registered a flash of irritation on Sergei’s face at her checking her watch while he was speaking to her.
“I hope we have not been working you too hard.” His tone confirmed his irritation.
Lilly bit the inside of her cheek. It was never a good idea for a below liner like herself to complain. Changing her tune, she stopped packing and straightened up to smile broadly at him. “No, no, this has been great. Everyone’s been great,” she said, smiling and waving around her, including him in her sweeping gesture.
Mollified, Sergei met her smile and stepped forward, much too close. Uh oh. This time, there was no mistaking his male interest.
Licking his lips, he said, “We are taking out the yacht tomorrow.” She had seen the luxurious boat at the dock this morning. It would be used for filming the shores from the water. “Perhaps you would like to come and be my, how do you say, first mate?”
Uggh. Nothing subtle about that. Lilly cast around for a plausible excuse.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. I’m not going to be able to take the time. I’ve got a ton of supplies to sort tomorrow,” she lied. She and her team were ready for Monday. They’d packed everything they needed for each zombie in individual boxed kits labeled with the performer’s name, including a photo snapped at the day’s prep session. But Sergei didn’t know how ready they were. Her excuse struck him as highly believable.
“Another time, then?” he said, sucking his teeth regretfully.
Lilly, striving to cover her aggravation, said with false cheer, “Enjoy the beauty of Lake Wakatipu – before we fill your head with images of dead bodies floating in it!” Grabbing up the last box, she skittered away toward the New Zealand version of her Lab.
It was after nine before Lilly finally settled down in her room. Unfolding her crisp new trail map, she used a red marker to put stars on the scenic spots the guide had told her about. She also packed the small pack she’d bought at the shop with some snacks, water bottles and a basic first aid kit.
Her pack ready and her day off planned, she popped open her laptop. She opened an email from Park asking her to sign off on the final BTSV and clicked on the link to the secure website.
Davina had finally hit the mark. The smoky beat of Ringside filled the room. It was perfect. A lot of the shots were of Jake working out, running and explaining his routine. The theme of the BTSV was how hard it was to prepare for a role like Allegrezza: the diet, the workout, the makeup. They had needed this sexy, driving male beat.
As she watched and listened, Lilly was able to adopt a clinical view of the piece. She’d seen all of the clips many times. Her feelings and frustration over Jake were boxed up tight. Maybe after New Zealand she’d go somewhere where she could let them out, curl up in a ball around them and cry for a week. Or a month. Right now, there was too much to do and too many people depending on her. She needed to keep it together.
Jake behind the scenes was much different than Jake playing Allegrezza in the film. In the motion picture, except when he was trying to charm Sofia and in the short dream sequence, Jake’s character was cold and unapproachable. Allegrezza’s rare smiles were sinister. With the exception of Hawaii, he was usually shot in shadow.
There were no such constraints in the BTSV, which featured a much lighter Jake, literally and figuratively. The workouts and interviews produced by Park were simultaneously grueling, funny and inspiring. But the real draw was the abundant candid shots of Jake at every location, often half naked, in the full light of day.
Davina had painstakingly sorted through hours and hours of outtakes and overruns. In these candid shots, out of the shadows, his tall, slim beauty and natural fluidity of movement were magnetic and white-hot.
He was captured laughing at Alison’s more outrageous comments, listening intently to Monty’s direction, silently repeating his lines in concentration. There were bloopers, too. Jake flubbing lines or laughing as his fellow actors did. In one hilarious outtake, Alan kept cracking Jake up in what was supposed to be a chilling prelude to a vicious and bloody fight.
And, of course, there were clips with Lilly in them. On their last morning in Hawaii, Park had filmed her transforming Jake into Allegrezza. He’d edited the clip into a slick, stop action segment. When the transformation was complete, Park caught Jake as he growled and snapped at her behind her back, then immediately morphed to wide-eyed innocence when she turned back toward him.
In one strikingly gorgeous shot, Jake was standing in the oasis in Maui with his arms held up loosely in the air like a recalcitrant arrestee. Lilly, who was kneeling, nearly out of view of the camera, was touching up Jake’s torso with the airbrush. The early morning Maui sun caught the paint mist particles, illuminating each one so that it looked like Jake was standing in a shower of tiny sparks. Park had slow-mo’d the shot to a three second segment. It was simply mesmerizing. When she had first seen it, she had played it over and over, knowing millions of women, and men, would do the same.
Closing the program, Lilly composed an email sending her heartfelt thanks to Park and Davina and telling them that they just needed Phillip and Jake’s final approvals to go live. The studio had already signed off. The final cut lasted just under ten minutes and was riveting. Anyone who wasn’t already a fan of Jake’s would be after watching.
She sent a silent prayer of thanks to Greg for recommending Park to her when she’d called him, desperate, from Hawaii. She sent an email to Greg saying simply: “I owe you a lot, and love you even more.” It included the Mjicon weblink and password to access the BTSV of Jake.
She was just about to shut down and get some sleep when she received a response from Park. The other two recipients were Phillip and Jake.
Park wrote: “All have approved. We launch tomorrow. I think people are going to want to see more of Lilly. There’s a link below to another video for the studio to consider. Let me know what you think.” At the end of the message was a second weblink with a different password.
Lilly clicked with trepidation on the link and entered the password for the video to start playing. The piece started with a clip of her and Janice, Maya’s stylist. The husky timber of Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody overlay the video. Lilly was instructing Janice how to blend in the appliance she’d stayed up all night making for burning Sofia. The clip was followed by several more of her working with different people. Some were performers, including Jake, but the focus was always on her.
She was pleasantly surprised that she looked professional and that the crew appeared attentive to her, deferential even, when she gave a tip here or made an adjustment there. As she watched the first half of the video roll, she couldn
’t get her mind around how so many shots had been filmed of her, or by whom. They had been taken at every location.
The work clips were interspersed with other short videos that Park must have requested from her friends, taken by cell phones. Park had applied a grainy and flickered affect to the amateur videos, creating the feel of old home movies. The contrast between the amateur shots interspersed with the slick, professionally filmed segments was engaging. She marveled again at Park’s talent for manipulating light.
One amateur video she recognized as having been taken by Greg the night before she had agreed to work on Feast. Lilly was all dolled up for clubbing in teetering heels and a sequined mini dress. Her twenty-fifth birthday celebration. Her memory was somewhat fuzzy about events later that night, but at the beginning of the evening, she had been all smiles, excited and blowing kisses at Greg.
Another amateur shot was at a saloon on a night off filming in Wyoming. Lilly was wearing a cowboy hat and laughing with Bryce and some of the other crew.
In between the flickering club dress and cowboy hat was a professionally filmed clip from Brooklyn at the recreated Infiorata di Spello, the flower festival. Lilly had invited the crew to run through the flower carpets, scattering the petals everywhere. Joining in, she had lain down on a petal angel so that the angel’s outspread wings fanned out behind her. She remembered Cully filming her from the catwalk as she tried her best to look angelic for the camera. Then, in a fit of laughter inspired by the screeching of her crewmates, she suddenly scattered the petals with her arms and legs flapping furiously as if she were making a snow angel. In the video created by Park, multi-colored petals swirled in slow motion around her as she lay laughing on the ground, while Lightbody crooned, “I want to bathe you in the light of day.…”
As the video continued, Jake’s presence in the clips multiplied.
Lilly’s breathing hitched, and then she simply stopped breathing altogether as, one-by-one, Park unpacked and lay out before her moments that she’d buried inside, not intending to bring them out yet. Not yet.
Her folding the warming blanket around Jake between takes in snowy Wyoming.
Jake subtly touching her hip, brushing her stomach, as she worked on him in Hawaii.
Her screeching and hopping back, wagging a finger at Jake/Allegrezza as he lunged at her, fangs bared.
Jake walking next to her on a sunset beach in Maui, laughing at something she said and tucking her under his arm.
Some moments Lilly had never seen. Jake watching her across the piazza in Assisi. And the last scene. Jake, his finger to his lips, kneeled next to her catnapping form in a sunny corner of the LA studio, slipped off his tailored jacket and laid it over her.
Fighting sobs, she watched it again. And again.
A half hour later, sodden and bleary, she finally turned away from the screen. It’s late afternoon in Vancouver. Had Jake seen this? Would he approve? Did she? Trying to think about it objectively, she didn’t think the sexuality of their relationship was telegraphed in the piece. They looked… close. Affectionate. Like family. A wave of loss washed over her.
Not yet, she thought again, firmly trying to push thoughts of Jake out of her head. She looked at her watch. She needed to catch up on sleep so she could take on the strenuous hike she had planned, but she was afraid that if she laid down in the dark, she wouldn’t be able to stop wallowing and would never get up again.
She was just thinking she could go to town and find some of her crew when there was a knock on her door. She looked up surprised. The bed and breakfast where she was staying was nowhere close to the hotel where most of the crew was housed.
“Lee-lee,” she heard Sergei’s unmistakable voice, calling her through the door. Uggh and double uggh. This could not be happening to her.
Sergei knocked again. “I have a present for you.”
Thank goodness she was still wearing her street clothes. Not bothering to try to improve her puffy face, she opened the door. Sergei stood on her doorstep, a bottle of vodka in hand, grinning at her expectantly.
“You cannot be working so hard without a reward,” he announced.
Although Lilly tried to block his way, he swept past her into the little room. Only after he was in did he register her appearance. Her nose and eyes were red and puffy. Kleenexes were scattered all over the bed.
“What has happened? Why are you crying?” These questions came out as “vat” and “vye”.
When Sergei would have moved closer to console her, she quickly sidestepped him. At her quick movement, she noted him stagger. Oh crap, he’s drunk.
Her trouble meter surged into the red. She needed to get him out of her room, or leave herself, before this got out of control. She opened the door wide and partially stepped out into the hallway so as not to get trapped.
“Sergei, I’m sorry you went to so much trouble on my account, but I’m not a big drinker, and I’m not feeling well. I’ll see you on Monday, okay?”
Sergei ignored her and started searching around her little room for drinking glasses. The proprietor had set out a tea service on a cart for Lilly, complete with a handmade doily. Sergei scooped up the delicate cups, staggered over and sat on her bed, trying to unwrap the foil top around the vodka bottle.
“One nightcap, Lee-lee.” Von. He patted the bed next to him.
Lilly’s self-preservation instinct was much too strong to allow her to reenter the room with him in it.
“Sergei, you need to leave,” she said firmly from her position in the doorway.
Sergei set the bottle down deliberately on the bedside table and laid back on her bed, allowing the clinking porcelain cups to fall out of his hands and bounce on the braided rug beneath the bed.
Enough. She’d had enough. Grabbing up her pack by the door, she just left him there. Screw him. It wasn’t like she was going to get any sleep tonight, anyway.
She took off on foot, deciding to make her way to the lakefront bar district to catch up with her crew. They’d invited her earlier to meet up at the Minus Five Ice Bar. They’d all wanted to try the bar, which had a room carved completely of ice. Even the cocktails were served in ice glasses.
Apparently one drink in the ice room was enough to satisfy curiosity. Lilly found her crew sitting in the “boiler room,” a warm and cozy area of the bar, having already tried the icy experience. Her team was well into their cups, laughing heartily, when she joined them. Billy was acting out a pretend scenario of Sergei directing Joe Pesci in the famous scene from Goodfellas in which Pesci shoots another actor in the foot. A wonder at impersonations, Billy had Sergei’s and Pesci’s voices and mannerisms down to perfection. She would have laughed harder, had it not been for the fact that every time he launched into Sergei’s eastern European accent, she pictured him sprawled across the bed back in her room.
As the evening wore on, she began to wonder where she was going to spend the night. But her problem solved itself as no one indicated a desire to go back to their hotel rooms. The bar didn’t close until four in the morning, only an hour before she had intended to set out on her hike anyway. Saying her goodnights, or good mornings, outside the bar, she headed toward the center of town.
The day hike she’d planned started in the town center at the Skyline Gondola, which ferried tourists up the side of a mountain to a restaurant and other alpine activities on the Ben Lomond Reserve. Lilly nodded on the bench waiting for the lift to open for the day. She and the baker for the mountainside restaurant were the first and only passengers on the cable car at five. She set off on the Ben Lomond Summit trail as soon as she stepped off the gondola.
The summit was one of the highest peaks in the Wakatipu basin and promised stunning views. On any other day, the strenuous hike was just what Lilly could have wished for to clear her head and try to find a mindset that would help her do more than just muddle through the next few weeks. But with zero sleep and the stress of the last two weeks, not to mention the months before that, Lilly found the uphill clim
b to be drudgery.
Long past the point she should have given up, she kept pushing forward.
She was out of gas by the time she reached the summit. As promised, a beautiful panoramic view stretched out before her of the Remarkables, Lake Wakatipu and Queenstown far below.
On the south side of the summit, a knife-edged rock cliff overlooked a sheer drop to the valley. Feeling exposed, Lilly crouched down and scooted closer to the edge, the wind whipping around her. Swinging her legs over the rocky ledge, she sat and stared out into the air.
She couldn’t remember a time in her life when she felt so unhappy. This miserable, tired person sitting here in this beautiful place was not the person she had been, or wanted to be. She needed to find a solution that would mend her life. Getting away from LA, far from the love and support of her brother and friends, had been a mistake, a mistake amplified by the gruesomely repetitive zombie production line and the confrontation with Sergei.
As she thought of returning to LA, her thoughts turned to Jake. She took a deep breath and puffed it out in frustration. Then, sitting on the edge of the mountain, she pulled out the Jake box in her head and opened it. On top were all of the moments Park had uncovered in the video of her last night. Digging deeper, she examined all of her feelings and her experiences with Jake. There was the Jake that drew her and intimidated her at the same time, so talented, so competent and confident. There was the Jake who spoiled her with food and thoughtful gifts. There was passionate Jake, who made love to her gently, and roughly.
