“That’s not bad at all,” Tanith said. “But keep working on it.” He made
an offensive gesture and she laughed. “So obviously Tina and Sharon saw
‘Diamond Dogs’ at the dress rehearsal. Sid’s seen it all in fragments on the Dropbox. Vicky’s in it. Are the rest of you coming next week?”
“I think that’s a yes,” Victor said. “Are you going, Jim?” He knew perfectly well that Jim was. Andy had been in touch to say ‘get a ticket if you don’t already have one,’ and of course they’d secured one for Loretta.
“Yes, I’ll be there. It’s going to be weird seeing a show at Chrome when I’m not taking video.” Loretta obligingly asked him about that, so he started talking about how he’d been doing video for the Underground Cabaret for eight years; how he’d pitched Andy to them for their posters; how he’d met Andy in the first place. “I was doing second assistant to the third assistant director on a production with a lot of moving parts. Andy was there, why were you there?”
“Jesus, I can hardly even remember that far back. That was like two thousand six. Before my first exhibit. I’d only been out here for a year or so, I was still scratching around for any kind of photography job. I was doing continuity. They had really overdressed sets and a fuck-ton of costume and somehow with this huge crew they didn’t enough people to remember where all the shit went or whether the collar was buttoned or unbuttoned, so they yelled for help. A friend of a friend was involved somehow and told me about it. God that was a mess.”
“Jim, how old were you then?” It was Tanith asking, for a reason nobody cared to investigate. She probably, being Tanith, had read the room and determined that Andy and Victor were trying to do a little matchmaking. Jim and Loretta were, after all, the only unmarried people there.
“I was twenty-five. A few years out of college.” He was smiling.
“Getting my ass kicked by Hollywood.”
“Welcome to the club.” Tanith drank some wine. “It took me till age forty-two to get noticed.”
“So I’ve still got four years.”
“Stick around these people,” Vicky said. “All kinds of crazy shit happens.”
“Yes.” Sharon topped up a few wineglasses. “Crazy shit. Like buying a triplex you didn’t even need.”
“We needed it not to get torn down and a six-unit piece of garbage put up
by some money-launderer,” Andy said. “Our life would have been hell for years, or more like forever. Fuck that.”
“Also it’s a cute building.” Victor was smiling.
“It’s cute now,” Sharon said. “Paige and the gang really love it. That was a good thing you did.”
“It was all their idea. I might have left it vacant.” Andy shrugged. “We had a minute to deal with it.”
“I remember you said that,” Tanith said. “Your minute kind of went sideways on you.”
Victor leaned back, still smiling, a little smug. “We’ve got another minute. I’m not working till next July. We’re going to be dancing, Andy’s working on this big new photography thing, and we’re going to put together a concert.”
There was a chorus of “No shit!” “When?” “Where?” from everybody but Vicky and Sharon. Sharon said, “Your Broadway thing?”
“That’s right.” Victor glanced at Andy. “We’d better get our set list ironed out. Decide who’s singing what. Get Valerie started on the arrangements.”
“Monday morning,” Andy said. “Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Well,” Tanith said, “maybe this is the point where we talk about Tina’s thing.”
Tina shook her head. “Your thing.”
“You started it.”
“You wrote it.”
“God help me,” Reza said. Victor, Jim, Sid, and Andy laughed. “Is there coffee?”
“There is coffee,” Andy said. “Let’s get that rolling.”
Not much later, everyone had coffee or some other after-dinner beverage, several people were having dessert, and everyone was taking turns looking at the proof of Tina’s new graphic novel. “It was Vicky,” she said,
“which Vicky knows. After I saw her on set. I’d had this idea for a noir thing ever since ‘Agent Carter’ got cancelled.”
“So full of rage,” Tanith said. Vicky and Sharon were nodding. Loretta
seemed to be taking mental notes. Andy made a ‘we have it’ face and she looked relieved.
“All the rage. Anyway, so that one image was really the first one. Vicky in the suit with the revolver, the cigarette and martini glass. I know you don’t smoke,” Tina said, semi-apologetically, “but this is set in the forties and everyone did.”
“If we make a movie,” Tanith said, “there are tobacco-free cigarettes.”
“Anyway I had some other stuff but it wasn’t until I saw these fuckers do their fight – I watched that fight like a thousand times while we were editing -
that I got more of an idea about a story. But it wasn’t coming the way
‘Nightingale’ did, and Tanith was right there, and she can write, so I threw it at her and ran away.” Tina shrugged.
“I really wanted to get you on the stage for this,” Tanith said, looking at Andy and Victor. “But I knew it wasn’t possible so I didn’t even bring it up.
And what you’ll see is really only a dance concert. It’s great, and I love it, and we’re totally taping it, but what’s on the stage isn’t a movie. This book, I think, is potentially a movie. I wrote the script as if it were a movie. There’s a ton of guys in it.”
“They all die,” Sid confirmed, “all but two.”
“Because we are bloodthirsty bitches,” Vicky said with satisfaction.
“And I kill you guys first because you’re the baddest
