Wild Licks

by Cecilia Tan

  I wrote that. At the time I’d used the word race rather than fight because it sounded better with hate. But now, hearing it over and over, I couldn’t help but think, had I paused to consider that in this race, if I slowed down, I might be caught by the shadow pursuing me? I’d been referring to the way my parents and their ilk had allowed greed to warp their values. All the times I’d told myself I did something for the sake of the band’s success, had I merely been fooling myself into thinking I wasn’t like my parents because being a successful rock musician wasn’t something they would have supported? Yet success meant I’d created a large amount of wealth for the record company, and not an insignificant amount for myself and my bandmates.

  Some of whom put the money to good use. Axel had bought a house for his mother, for example. We all gave to charity, me more than the others. Was that really enough to assuage my guilty worry that I was turning out exactly as I’d feared?

  No, I told myself, that’s the only good thing to come out of the Gwen situation. You are finally learning to resist and eliminate the Need. The Need is just another form of greed, inappropriately transferred from material possessions to possession of a woman’s body.

  These were the thoughts that occupied my mind while we filmed. So it was somewhat startling to see the script that Redlace handed around to us while we were in the shuttle bus taking us and the crew from the soundstage to the next location for filming.

  Redlace was a tall man who looked to be in his mid-thirties but slightly balding. He ran a hand through his dark hair as he stood in the aisle of the shuttle bus to address us and only succeeded in making a tuft of it stick up oddly.

  “As you’ll see, I’ve taken the song and interpreted it as a plea for heart and passion to win out over material possession and appearances. Roderick Grisham will be playing the part of the rich husband and a young ingenue whom I think you are familiar with will be playing the part of the trophy wife—Gwen Hamilton.” He punctuated this announcement with a wink in my direction.

  I blinked and shot a look at Christina, who was sitting next to the director at the front of the bus. She gave me an innocent look in return.

  A truly innocent look. After all, Christina knew nothing of the Montreal meltdown between me and Gwen. So I couldn’t really blame her. I’d been planning to simply tell her no the next time she tried to fix us up for publicity. It hadn’t occurred to me there would be another opportunity to cross paths with Gwen in a professional realm.

  Everyone was quiet for a while, reading the script. Axel was cast as the hero of the piece, meeting the heroine at a posh function in a Cinderella moment, her losing her shoe. Did Redlace really think invoking a clichéd old fairy tale was cutting edge? Besides, the overall message didn’t seem all that radical to me. Old rich guy loses trophy wife to sexier, younger rich guy…? Not exactly a rousing moral.

  I reminded myself I didn’t care.

  They brought us to a multilevel house on a hill, white-stuccoed with flat roofs and huge plate-glass windows, making me wonder if Redlace was planning a stone-throwing scene as well. We were shepherded into a rec room down near the garage on the house’s lowest level that had been converted into a temporary production office and staff lounge. An instantly recognizable man was sitting on a sectional sofa there, sipping a cup of tea.

  “It’s my pleasure to introduce you to Roderick Grisham,” the director said.

  “We’ve met,” I said. “Mr. Grisham, nice to see you again. I was quite impressed by your turn in Midnight.”

  “Oh, I would have much rather played the monster, you know, but they want someone young and devastatingly good-looking for those roles these days and alas I’m no longer young,” he said wryly, making me chuckle. “Still, such an honor to work with Ariadne Wood. I was like a schoolboy on Christmas when they told us she was due to visit the set. She’s quite reclusive, you know, so I’d never had the pleasure. Such a gracious woman, one of England’s best. The only reason she hasn’t received every literary accolade we offer is that so little value is placed on fantasy. Imagine that! We penalize writers for taking full use of their imagination. We want them to be imaginative, but only a small bit. The establishment is so terribly small-minded.”

  A female voice from behind me added, “I would bet if she hadn’t been a woman she might have had an easier time of it, too.”

  “Oh, quite right, quite right, Gwen,” Grisham harrumphed, taking her hand and tucking it into his arm. “Kenneally, have you met this charming young lady yet? May I present Ms. Gwen Hamilton, who will be my costar on this production.”

  The moment I had heard her voice, my heart had turned to a lump of stone. I could barely swallow, and I turned stiffly toward her.

  Gwen offered me her hand as if she were a stranger, and I kissed it as if she were one, even though she said, “Yes. Mal and I know one another.”

  “Ah, but of course!” Grisham said suddenly, tapping his forehead with his fingers. “You introduced me to her, didn’t you, Kenneally? At the Midnight premiere. No wonder you two are giving me such sideways looks.”

  Yes, yes, let him think that was what he was picking up on, not that I was paralyzed by her presence. Gwen.

  “Okay, folks, have a seat,” said an Asian woman who hurried into the room. “We’d like to get some of these exterior shots done before we lose the light.” As everyone seated themselves around the sectional sofa and on the armchairs by a nearby wall-mounted flatscreen, she gave way to Redlace himself.

  “All right, you’ve all seen the script, but it’s been brought to my attention that, ah, there are a couple of elements we might want to tweak to keep in line with band image. I may be a total diva about some things but honestly, people, Basic is paying me a fuckton of money to do this and I’m not exactly bucking for an Oscar with it. So let me hear you: Is the adultery theme going to alienate your fan base or the American public at large?”

  “Adultery is not ‘on brand,’” Christina piped up.

  “I didn’t think you guys had to worry about looking squeaky clean, but yeah, I don’t want you to just look like a bunch of worthless fuckboys either.” He gave a nod in Christina’s direction and took a long swallow from the aluminum thermos he was carrying before he went on. “Frankly, I wrote this script while sitting on the crapper a couple of weeks ago and then I forgot about it. I’m, shall we say, not attached to anything in it. Our main constraint is we’ve only got two and a half more days of shooting on the schedule and we’ve already booked locations and wardrobe, obviously. So any changes we make can’t be too radical. You get me?”

  No one said anything for a few seconds, though a few people glanced at each other. Gwen raised her hand. “Mr. Redlace?”

  “Oh my God, call me Miles or I’ll have flashbacks to that time I was a substitute teacher and let me tell you it wasn’t pretty.”

  Gwen nodded and smiled. “Miles, okay.” She wasn’t the slightest bit intimidated by him being a Hollywood big shot, and that was good. She was merely polite. “How about instead of being the trophy wife, she’s the guy’s daughter, and he’s a widower who’s overprotected her all her life?”

  Redlace raised his eyebrow and opened his mouth as if he were about to object, held the pose for a moment, and then said, “Go on.”

  “When we were filming the getting ready scenes upstairs, I saw the props people had created—family photos that are all over her dresser. So I thought the past history of the family could be shown in the photos.”

  Redlace turned to the woman next to him. “Nancy? Oh, by the way, everyone, this is Nancy Cho, my right hand. My right brain, sometimes.”

  “Hi,” she said, and barreled right into answering the question. “Yeah, we can totally do that. Easy. I had another thought, too, Miles.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m not totally happy with the way we’ve got the cameos for all the band members planned. I know the original idea was to have them appearing as gardeners, deliverymen, and so on. It feels corn
y and like it might detract from the drama of the house scenes. My thought was—and feel free to shoot me down guys if you find this offensive—to make this banquet thing we’re shooting tomorrow into a wedding, and you guys be the wedding band.”

  The director was nodding his head. “Good, good, I like it. Very organic.”

  “We can totally ham it up as the wedding band,” Axel said.

  I cleared my throat and said, “My objection is that the story merely transfers the woman as trophy property from one rich man to another. Not exactly uplifting or radical.”

  “Gwen said almost the same thing.” Nancy snapped her fingers. “That’s why it’s brilliant! Now it’ll be one of the musicians in the band who gets her, right?”

  “Yes, yes!” Miles enthused. “Much better from a promo standpoint and also great job striking a blow for the artistic underclass. But is it still…cheating?”

  “Not if she’s his daughter,” Gwen reminded him. “In fact, that could be why they elope. The musician should propose to her, and after the father refuses, they elope.”

  Grisham spoke up gleefully. “Oh, yes, that is so much better, because now I can play the heartbroken widower whose own emotional scars have caused him to utterly ruin his daughter’s life to this point. Such pathos.”

  The director was nodding his head vigorously. “I like it, I like it. That’s way more dramatic than the crap I came up with. You’re right, gives you a lot more to work with. The reason the father can’t go along with the proposal, it’s not just class snobbery; it’s that being widowed left him so twisted and broken he can’t bear the thought of the daughter—who is the spitting image of her mother—leaving him!”

  No one spoke for a few moments, and I wondered if that meant the meeting was over, but apparently Miles was not yet done and those who had worked with him before sensed this.

  “It still could use a little edge.” Miles stood there, thinking, while everyone watched him. Then he upended the coffee down his throat and slammed the thermos down on the coffee table. “Yes! I have it! Tell me if this is too much—it’s going to be a huge challenge for the two actors involved. But after the proposal, right? She goes to her father to say, Daddy, look at my ring. I said yes, and he goes berserk and tries to force himself on her. Father-daughter insanity-driven incest. Doesn’t get much more challenging than that.”

  “Um…,” Christina said. “Um… about the band’s image—”

  “Oh, oh, oh, of course, but what I forgot to say is that our hero of course breaks in and stops it before it can happen,” Miles said. “Then they run away with totally clear consciences because, come on, ew. Right? Am I right?”

  Christina nodded. “Okay. That works! That totally works.”

  He turned to Grisham and Gwen. “I know Roddy can handle the challenge, but, Gwen, this might be a tad bit more than you signed up for.”

  “Bring it on,” Gwen said, her chin in the air. “I like a challenge.”

  “Okay, great, let’s get to—”

  Axel raised his hand like a schoolboy and even said in a parody of a whiny schoolboy voice, “Um, Mr. Redlace? I have one more question.”

  “Ha-ha, sure. What is it?”

  “Well, it’s more of a suggestion. I’m thinking it should really be Mal who does the scenes with Gwen, while I do the lip synch scenes with the knife. See, then I sort of represent the force of desire metatextually, while Mal can just, you know, be badass. He’s the one with the badass look, after all.”

  Nancy waved her hands excitedly. “He can break in by smashing a window with an electric guitar! That would be the most stunning visual!”

  “He’s the one connected with Gwen in the press,” Christina pointed out. “That would be perfect.”

  I groaned inwardly. Perfect. Yes. Ugh. Well, it would be acting, not real, so I supposed I could put up with anything for two days. It did sound like I was going to get to smash a gigantic window.

  “Great! Get the band into the wardrobe trailer to get outfitted and the camera crew should meet me and Roddy in the upstairs bedroom to tackle some establishing shots,” Redlace said. “Nobody wander off. When you’re off, stay in this room. Feel free to watch the TV. We won’t be using the ambient sound from these shots, after all.”

  Off to the wardrobe trailer I went, feeling Gwen’s eyes following me until I was out of sight.

  * * *

  GWEN

  The second day of shooting, we arrived at the ballroom of a local hotel where I’d actually attended society functions in the past. Set dressers were adding extra red velvet drapes and chandeliers, though, because apparently it didn’t look posh enough. A few dozen bored extras in formal wear sat around banquet tables checking their phones. The band was in matching tuxes with black velvet lapels.

  I had brought a few pairs of my own dress shoes, not trusting that they were going to have something that would fit me well and that I could walk in a ball gown. This turned out to be wise when a full hour of the filming was me walking past the stage where the band was playing and making eye contact with Mal.

  Yes, for a full hour, my job was to take these same fifteen or twenty steps over and over and look Mal full in the eyes. They did it from many different angles, with the cameras on the stage, on a dolly beside me, with a handheld close to my face, from over Mal’s shoulder, from behind me toward him, and so on. “Seems silly, I know,” Miles said, “but this is the aha moment, the love at first sight that makes the whole thing go. So it’s got to be this hugely significant zap of connection.”

  We got set, me with one arm draped through Roderick’s and did that first take.

  “Cut, cut, cut!” Miles hurried up to us. “Gwen, when I said ‘zap,’ I didn’t mean like you were trying to fry him with laser beams from your eyes.”

  “Oh, sorry! I was…just trying to get the angle right!” I blushed a little. I guess I had let a little too much of my upset with Mal show through. I also couldn’t get used to how short his hair was—long for a regular guy but short for Mal.

  “Remember, you’re an overprotected ingenue who looks up and sees…sees…” Miles gestured with his ever-present coffee caddy in his hand, trying to find the right word.

  “An angel?” I suggested.

  He nodded. “Your salvation from the trap of your life. Yes. And Mal, you’ve got to return that look like you’ve never seen a woman so beautiful, like you practically want to just walk off the stage and follow her because you’ve fallen in love on the spot. Look at her like you’re holding yourself back from saying ‘I love you’ right then and there.”

  So, twenty, thirty, maybe forty times I did that walk, sometimes with a tiny flutter in my lashes as I looked up, sometimes without, and Mal looked right down into my eyes like he adored me more than anything.

  After the hand-held camera work, when they were readying the dolly, I saw him sit on the edge of the riser and try to dab his eyes surreptitiously on his velvet-cuffed sleeve.

  Roderick saw it, too, and pulled the handkerchief from his pocket. “Here you are.”

  “It’s nothing,” Mal said, waving the cloth aside.

  “Dear boy, it is most certainly not nothing. If it were, I would be out of a job.”

  I had turned my back to them, pretending to be watching the cameraman adjust something, but my ears strained to hear.

  “Let me give you a bit of advice,” Roderick said. “The secret to being a good actor is to own those emotions.”

  “I’m not an actor,” Mal insisted.

  “Today you are,” Roderick said sharply, as if affronted that Mal might undertake his duties with less than one-hundred percent commitment. “People think our job is to pretend. They’re wrong. Our job is to be real. Even if only in the moment. You have to believe what you say and you have to feel what you feel. What emotion provoked this reaction? Yearning? It looked like yearning.”

  “Yes,” Mal said simply.

  “You’re doing fine.” The elder actor patted him on the shoulder
and then the camera was ready and we went back to it.

  The next scene was a ballroom dance scene. I congratulated myself again for bringing shoes that fit.

  “Let’s establish Dad’s inappropriate feelings toward his daughter here,” Miles said. “Gwen, your attention should keep trying to go to the band onstage, while you go through this increasingly awkward dance. At the end we’ll have you pull away somewhat suddenly, and then, Roderick, you’ll stumble and fall drunkenly. Gwen, you’ll hurry over to help him.”

  Well, that at least was a reaction I was familiar with. My own father had gotten falling down drunk a lot when I was younger, though he’d been sober for a couple of months now. Well, unless he fell off the wagon in St. Maarten. I resolved to call him tonight when I got home.

  “You’ll excuse me for touching you in entirely inappropriate ways, my dear,” Roderick said. “But when he says ‘action,’ I am about to become a dirty old man.”

  For my part, it wouldn’t have been so long ago I would have been simply thrilled to ballroom dance with Roderick Grisham, who starred in many of the BBC shows I loved so much. But my role here wasn’t to be impressed by this lauded A-list actor. It was to play a girl getting more and more creeped out by her father.

  Like he had told Mal, you have to make it real, but I couldn’t think about my own father here. Instead I thought about how I felt, how confused and horrified but not quite sure if it was really happening, when Mal had taken me into that restroom with those waiters.

  And so it went. As we turned and moved, I swiveled my head to keep looking toward Mal, whose expression went from dark to darker as the filming went on. At one point Miles even commented, “You look like you’re ready to leap off the stage and beat him off her with that guitar. Excellent. Keep it up.”

  The final shots we needed at the ballroom site were by the bathrooms. They let the extras go, since this would be mostly me and Mal alone, with just a few people going in and out of the restroom entrances: Ford and Nancy.

  The script called for us to meet by chance by the entrance. I couldn’t help but remember running into him at that record company event—the event that led directly to this one because I’d introduced my agent to his band’s manager.