Lovegame(7)
As I walk toward the first location for the shoot, I stop every few steps to introduce myself to a member of the crew and thank them for being here. From the surprised looks on their faces as I do, I get the impression that they aren’t used to that happening.
Sometimes I really hate this town and every power player in it.
Once I’m in my mother’s front parlor—as I’ll always think of it, even though this house and everything in it has been mine for several years now—Marc wastes no time in directing me to where he wants me. In this case, it’s the long, white French Provincial fainting couch my mother picked up in Paris on one of her many whirlwind European shopping trips. I perch on the edge of it, legs crossed and hands clasped in my lap.
Someone rolls in a tea cart with a full service on it and I spend a few minutes dropping sugar cubes in a cup and pouring tea from a gorgeous Royal Copenhagen pot. I pose like the perfect lady I’m not and never will be, looking demure and ladylike and oh-so-precious. At least until Marc shoves his hands in my perfectly coiffed hair and spreads me backward on the divan, with my skirt hiked up, my legs splayed and my hair hanging off the end of the couch, the ends trailing on the floor.
It’s not a comfortable position, but it’s one I’m intimately familiar with. I spent a great many of my teen years playing the disheveled mess before I figured out that cool-and-collected got me so much further than being an emotional wreck would.
At one point he even goes so far as to smudge my lipstick with his thumb and though I stiffen at the touch, the look in his eyes tells me the picture will be worth it.
Through it all, I’m uncomfortably aware that Ian is here, lurking in the background. Watching everything with his too-dark and too-observant eyes. Recording his impressions of me, and this whole process, in the small notebook that he never once puts down.
I concentrate on Marc’s directions and try not to think about what Ian has already written in there about me. I’m sure it’s colorful, considering the complete one-eighty I pulled at the café yesterday. But he’d shaken me up, and my response to being shaken is to fight back any way I have to.
It’s a lesson I learned early and well.
“Good, Veronica, darling. That’s perfect,” Marc tells me as he snaps picture after picture. “Now pout a little for me. Yes, yes…a little more. That’s right. Good, good. Can you roll over on your stomach now, darling? Yes, like that. No, no, keep your skirt hiked up. I want to see the top of your stockings. Bend your knees. Good, now maybe kick off one of your shoes—no, no, not completely off. Leave it dangling on your toes like the femme fatale we all know you are. Yes, yes, like that. Can you prop your elbows up now? Rest your chin on your hands. Yes, exactly. Now give me your most demure look—”
“Do you want to fix my lipstick?” Though I haven’t looked in a mirror yet, I’m uncomfortably aware of it smeared on the edge of my cheek. Above my lip. I don’t like the feeling, don’t like anything that doesn’t fit between the lines ascribed to it.
“No, no, I don’t. It’s perfect. You’re perfect, darling. Now smile for me. Smile, smile, smile. Like a predator, love, not the prey. I know you—ah, yes. There it is. There. It. Is. Good, good.”
Through it all the camera continues to click, picture after picture, until finally he calls a break and I end up back in the dressing room getting my hair and makeup redone. This time I’m in a beautiful, vintage, black and white Dior dress with an asymmetrical collar, puffy sleeves that go to my elbow and a thick, black patent leather belt that accentuates my waist. Black gloves and red shoes for a “pop of color” complete the outfit, as does the wide brimmed hat the stylist sticks on my head at the last minute.
They want to photograph this look with me walking up and down the rows of my father’s perfectly landscaped English garden. It was his pride and joy when he was alive and since his death several years ago, my mother and I have made it a point to keep it up. I’m not sure why I bother since it’s one of my least favorite places on the estate, but it’s what he would have wanted so…
Halfway through our time outside, Marc has one of his assistants find me pruning shears and then tells me to go crazy. I know Miguel, my gardener, will kill me if I mess up his plants, but once I cut off the first hibiscus blossom, I’m a little bit of a woman possessed. I start hacking away, cutting a couple flowers of each variety, including the very rare verbascums, and leave them strewn on the path like breadcrumbs for Hansel and Gretel to find.
As I do, I can’t help wishing that they’d been there all those years ago. My younger self could have used them.
We move from the garden to the pool, where I’m in a vintage polka dotted two-piece with a matching towel and beach ball à la Gidget. Then I’m in a red pencil skirt and white blouse in my father’s office—which I haven’t changed at all since he died—playing boss woman with my three thousand dollar shoes kicked up on his desk.
I’m in vintage pedal pushers while I arrange flowers in the kitchen and another Chanel suit—white with elaborate black piping this time—in front of the huge black gate that separates the estate from the people on the street who want to gawk at the movie stars. At me.
At one point Marc shoots me right up against the gate, my gloved hands wrapped around the bars, and I can’t help wondering what it looks like. Can’t help wondering if he’s going for the poor little rich girl vibe, if he’s trying to show just how trapped and isolated it sometimes feels being on this side of the gate.