Silence

Come into the storeroom and I’ll show you where to put it.” Then Cherie unplugged the telephone and the camera rolled. There were three takes, one close-up on Sylvie, one on Mark, and one that showed both of them at once.

The next shots were in the storeroom. Cherie explained the scene: “All right, Sylvie. You’re the one who drives this scene. You’re pissed off at your husband, and you lured this handsome guy in here. Now you’ve got to make him glad he came in.”

“How do you want me to do it?”

“I want this to look natural. Real. You come in, you lock the door, and then you do what you would do. If I want something changed, I’ll say, ‘Cut,’ and have you do it differently.”

Sylvie had spent twelve years as a ballet dancer. She was accustomed to having people look at her closely and impersonally, as a body assuming poses, so she didn’t feel as though stripping off her clothes was a big step. She had spent all of those years learning to move and to place her body in positions that were graceful and beautiful, and to set her face in expressions to convey feelings and attitudes she didn’t necessarily feel. That was about all the acting that was required.

Mark was her boyfriend and they were used to each other. The only part that was disconcerting to her was when Cherie stopped them and told them to change positions, or Daryl the cameraman moved into her field of vision to remind her that they were not alone. When Cherie decided that they had exposed enough tape, she said, “Cut.” Then she took Sylvie into her own office and let her use it as a dressing room. She said, “You’ve got a gift, honey. This is going to be a good movie—as these things go—and you’ll get all the work you can do from now on.”

“Thank you.” Sylvie was still feeling breathless and a bit addled, trying to concentrate on what had happened and what was happening.

“It’s not a compliment,” Cherie said. “I’m telling you that you’re going to get rich.” As they walked back to the soundstage, Sylvie said, “Aren’t we going to wait for Mark?”

“No. He’s not in the next couple of scenes, and we’ve got a tight schedule.” When Sylvie got to the soundstage, she saw the re-dressed house set and the nightgown that the costume and makeup girl had on a hanger, and understood. The scene with her husband Bill wasn’t going to be just an argument at the breakfast table before they both left for work. She was supposed to have sex with him, too.

Sylvie thought about everything as she sat down and let the makeup girl work on her. She stared at herself in the mirror. She stole a few curious glances at Bill as he stood talking to Eddie Durant on the set. She could get up and walk out the door. Nobody would stop her, and probably nobody would even blame her. She was a twenty- year-old girl who had been talked into something. There was no reason for her to go on. This was all about Mark’s ambitions, not hers. There were hundreds of other girls just like her, waiting for this chance.

“Sylvie?” Cherie called.

She stared at herself in the mirror. Her face was beautiful in this light. She could never have made her skin look so radiant, her eyes so big. Her hair was shining. She was amazing.

“Sylvie!”

“Coming.” She stood up, took a few hurried steps to join the group, and said to Cherie, “Where do we start?”

That night the production wrapped at nine, and Sylvie went outside to find Mark. His car wasn’t where she remembered it. She went to the office and found Lily, the receptionist. She was just returning from the inner offices, where Eddie Durant had been signing the day’s payroll checks. Lily leafed through them quickly and handed one to Sylvie. She said, “Uh, Mark? He’s been gone for hours. Where do you live? I can give you a ride.”

When Sylvie got home, she waited for Mark’s call, but it didn’t come. At ten-thirty, she tried calling him. He answered after a few rings. She said, “Where were you?”

“Where were you? I waited for a couple of hours after I was done.”

“I had some more scenes to shoot.”

“I heard.”

Those words had the end in them. The day’s experiences had changed his plans. He was not going to be a star. He was not happy that he had been at the studio or that he had brought her there. He was not going to see her again.

Call-waiting signaled a few times that she had another caller. She said to Mark, “I’m tired. I’ll talk to you another time,” knowing that she wouldn’t. She clicked the flash button to get the other call. “Hello?”

“Sylvie, it’s Eddie Durant. Cherie and I just went through today’s tapes to do a director’s cut, and I’ve got to tell you, we couldn’t keep our eyes off you. We’re writing you into a movie we’re starting day after tomorrow.”

“Gee, I hadn’t really thought about that. I just got home a while ago.”

“We’ll pay you two thousand—double the last time—for a day’s work.”

“Can I have time to think about it?”

“Sure. Call me later tonight. We’ll be here editing until at least one or two.”

That was the beginning. On Thursday she drove to the studio and listened while Cherie Will explained the script to her in the five minutes it took to have her hair and makeup done. Then she spent the day having sex with three different men she had never seen before.

Eddie and Cherie had her working three days a week for the next month. Sylvie kept telling herself that she ought to call the tile company to tell them she had found another job, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to tell Martha, the middle-aged office manager, that she was acting. Martha would instantly sense what sort of movies they were, and she would talk. Sylvie didn’t want the men in the company hurrying into video stores to find a tape with a picture of her on the box. The tile company still owed her about three hundred dollars, but going in to pick up the check didn’t seem worth it.

Now nearly twenty years had passed, and Sylvie felt so different that she could only reconstruct some of the young girl’s feelings. Many of the faces had faded in her memory and lost their clarity. As Sylvie stared ahead through the windshield, thinking about the distant past, something startled her. The display on the laptop computer’s screen had changed. “Paul! The car is right up ahead. It’s not moving.”

The idea of tracing Jack Till’s car this way had been a revelation to Sylvie. She knew that the car-rental companies had been using the global-positioning units installed in rental cars to catch customers violating their contracts by speeding or taking their cars out of state. Paul had gone to the rental company where Till had rented his car, and given a thousand dollars in cash to a mechanic in exchange for teaching him how the company found a lost car. They simply went online to the service that monitored the global-positioning system, typed a code, and watched the display on their own computer. The code for Till’s car had cost another thousand.

Till appeared to have parked in the lot at the end of Castillo Street, at the Santa Barbara Harbor. Paul pulled into the lot and searched for the blue sedan, driving up and down each aisle as though what he was looking for was an empty space. Sylvie was the one who spotted Till’s car. “There. Right near the entrance.”

“I see it,” said Paul. He drove up the next aisle so he could pull out and follow if Till and Wendy Harper came back and got into the car. “You get out and check the dock and the shops.”

Sylvie got out of the car and walked toward the docks. A few stores along the wharf sold bright-colored kayaks, wet suits, or expensive clothes for people who hung around beach resorts. Sylvie checked each of the stores. There was nobody in any of them who remotely resembled Jack Till, even from a distance. She walked out onto the dock and stopped at the jetty where the commercial fishing boats unloaded. There were big turnbuckles where they tied off, and an electric winch on an armature for lifting the heavy wooden boxes that were piled on the back of the fish packers’ trucks parked nearby.

She saw a bored-looking blond boy with a tan so deep that the whites of his eyes glowed as though he were looking out of holes cut in leather. He sat on the back of one of the trucks listening to a radio and waiting for a boat to come in. Sylvie considered the chance that the boat would contain Wendy Harper, then dismissed the idea. She walked farther out along the dock and studied the row of fishing boats, each with its net rolled up on a big drum near the stern. Some of the boats looked deserted, worn and dirty, as though they hadn’t been out of port in years, but she supposed that was probably the sign that they were out often. It was possible that Till was retrieving Wendy Harper from one of the hundred or so yachts that were anchored in the harbor, or moored along the next set of docks, but if so, there was no sign of a dory going to or from any of them.

She went back the way she had come, and got back into the car beside Paul. “I couldn’t find him. He could be meeting her in a boat. I’ve been everywhere else. They could be on the beach, but I figured it was best to come