Part 11 (1/2)
”A free-for-all?”
”Exactly! A nut orgy. Oh-ow.” Kathleen winced as Mish tugged the corset strings in another quarter of an inch.
”Sorry, almost done.” Mish double-knotted the string and began rummaging through the rack for the matching petticoat. ”How's that going, then?”
Kathleen exhaled to make her rib cage as narrow as possible. ”Oh, fine. You know.”
Actually Mish didn't. Nor did she bother to say so.
The digital trill from a tiny silver cell phone distracted Swain. She pressed the phone to her ear with one hand and waved the other like a flipper. ”Just a second. Where's that remote?”
Mish dropped the laces and began searching the trailer until she found it under a copy of HEAT magazine.
”Oprah,” said Swain, and then, directing her attention into the phone, ”She's just getting it. What channel again? Twenty-four? Okay. I'll call you after.”
Mish turned on the TV and there was the Most Loved Woman in the World. The studio audience applauded hysterically until Winfrey shushed them with four papal sweeps of her arms.
”And on today's show we'll be talking about the issue of late-in-life fertility,” Oprah was teleprompted. ”Specifically, how late is too late? When should a woman start to worry and when is it too late to try? We'll be talking to a group of women who have succeeded in conceiving later in life-one of our guests had her first baby at the age of fifty-two! Can you believe that, y'all? And a couple of other women who have not succeeded in making their dreams of motherhood come true, despite the best medical efforts. Some of these women felt they waited too long, and they are here to tell other women who want to conceive not to make the same mistake they did by putting things off until it's just too late.”
Mish, who had been searching for a needle and thread to repair a hem, fell still. ”Do you want me to come back later?” she asked.
”No, no, stay,” said Swain. ”That was my a.s.sistant calling. My fertility doctor in L.A. is going on maternity leave, so we have to find another specialist and apparently there's this guy on Oprah who's written some book. Can you believe what a coincidence this is? I mean, we were just talking about this and now it's on Oprah-it must be a sign.”
Swain motioned for silence as the commercials finished and the Oprah theme music introduced the next segment.
”Our expert today is Dr. Joe Veil, a fertility specialist and the author of Baby Love: The New Battle for Motherhood. He's here to give us the straight goods on what women trying to get pregnant later in life can realistically expect. Now tell us, Dr. Veil, what kind of odds is an average woman facing who's decided she wants to get pregnant at, say, the age of forty? We see it all the time on television, or in the tabloids. Seems every established middle-aged movie star and pop singer is walkin' around with a b.u.mp these days. Is it really as easy as they make it look?”
The camera swiveled over to Dr. Joe Veil. He loosened his collar as he spoke. ”Actually, Oprah, it's not as easy as it looks.” Dr. Veil launched into a litany of the risks and difficulties involved in late-in-life pregnancies. Swain, however, was too busy swooning to listen.
”He's a dish, isn't he? Did she say he's a practising fertility specialist?”
”I hink ho.” Mish's mouth was full of pins.
Swain stabbed a finger into her phone keypad and began talking almost immediately. ”I think he could be the one. Yeah-yeah. That's him. Find out for me as soon as you can. I don't care if we have to fly him over here and put him up at the Ritz. Get him yesterday. Me want.”
She got off the phone and let out a significant whoosh. Mish was doing up the final b.u.t.tons of her collar.
”Do you have children?” Swain asked.
”I haven't got a maternal bone in my body.” Mish grabbed Swain's dress off the rack so fiercely she felt the shoulder seam rip. ”We'd better get you on set. You're already late for your call.”
”Oh, for Chrissake, where is she?”
Richard was agitated and talking to himself. Meredith, who was sitting in her usual spot to the left, pretended not to hear. Instead, she focused on her notes for the next scene.
The shoot had moved locations to Kewkesbury Park, a sprawling Edwardian country house located at the end of the Northern tube line, and the crew had just finished setting up for one of the film's most complicated and expensive segments-the ballroom dancing scene. Dozens of extras from the London Ballet Academy milled around the set waiting to take their places for the waltz sequence. They held their heads self-consciously high (even for dancers) as a result of the rustling vintage silks they wore, the women in bustles and the men in tails and top hats. The crew members moved among them adjusting lights and lenses in militaristic form.
Kathleen Swain was late for her call and things were behind schedule as usual. Meredith had spent much of the morning wandering from room to room, exploring the corridors and back stairwells, each one leading to another set of rooms that opened onto another set of rooms. The place was damp and drafty, the ancient plaster striped with water marks from the rain that had seeped its way indoors over the years. Everything reeked of mold. And yet, to Meredith (who had a fondness for the ancient and austere), the place was beautiful.
The house, after all, was very nearly a celebrity in and of itself. In the past couple of years alone it had appeared in dozens of BBC Agatha Christie dramas, and a reality TV series in which middle-cla.s.s Brits reenacted the life of Edwardian aristocrats and their servants, as well as doubling as the interior of Windsor Castle in the TV version of Diana: Her True Story. So much production went on here, in fact, that the owner, an impoverished duke who bred dorgis (a demented-looking cross between dachshunds and corgis), had confined his living quarters to three rooms above the garage at the end of the lane. While production companies and tourists overran the grand house of his ancestors, the duke lived the cramped, frugal existence of an inner-city welfare recipient.
The crew had been waiting for Swain for most of the morning, and now Richard was becoming visibly agitated. He had already sent the first a.s.sistant around to her trailer twice, to no avail. Meredith pulled a chair over to a corner of the room, not far from the monitor where Richard was pacing and tossing out commands to his crew, and began to scribble down the complicated set of shot descriptions they had discussed the day before in rehearsal. Start MS angle toward ballroom door. Inspector enters. Pan his walk X-L-R across room past waltzing dancers. Hold Full 4/should over Inspector to Miss Celia seated on the sidelines...And so on, describing the entire scene through the unblinking eye of the camera in her secret continuity girl language. Meredith spent so much time at work translating, in cryptic point-form and code, what things looked like from the outside, that she often amused herself by doing the same thing in real life. Bored on the subway or over dinner, she would find herself making shot descriptions of scenes as they were playing themselves out.
t.i.te to Continuity Girl scribbling notes in a binder. RL angle toward door of room. The Movie Star enters. Pan her walk across the room toward the Director's chair. Hold Full 4/shot over Movie Star's R-should to Director seated on chair.
DIRECTOR.
Kathleen, how sweet of you to show up for work. And looking ravis.h.i.+ng as usual.
MOVIE STAR (HUSHED).
Thank you for being patient, darling. So sorry about the delay. I'm afraid I was having a bit of a woman's problem.
DIRECTOR.
A nasty affliction, that. Now, where were we? Oh, yes, we were in the middle of making a movie.
Wide shot of the room. The crew and extras wait for the Director's command.
DIRECTOR.
Places!
FIRST A.D.
Let's have a bell!
Angle on the Sound Mixer pressing a b.u.t.ton on his panel. A buzz is heard. New angle on the red light outside the stage door.
FIRST A.D.
Quiet!
Silence engulfs the room.
CONTINUITY GIRL.
Scene 26, Take 1.
FIRST A.D.
Roll sound.