Chapter 12: Slow Work

Nobody had called a break, so nobody had taken one. The lights stayed hot, the fans kept running, and June stayed in the nest of pillows the crew had built so he could go down without breaking anything — the same square of floor where he’d spent four hours being almost good enough, one take after another.

He watched Calloway walk across the stage.

The room rearranged itself as he went. A grip who had been leaning on a flat found something to carry. The gaffer looked at his board, then looked at it again. Doyle had been standing with two other people; by the time Calloway reached him the other two had drifted back to work and Doyle was alone, waiting.

“Mr. Calloway.”

“Can I have a minute?”

“Of course.”

They went past the last frame, into the corner where the air handlers ran and the ceiling ate sound — the spot every crew in the city saved for the conversations that mattered.

“You’re demanding,” Calloway said. “More than I expected, honestly.”

“It’s hard on him,” Doyle said. “I know how it looks from outside. But you don’t get anything worth keeping out of a room that’s comfortable.” A pause the exact length of a courtesy. “You know that better than I do.”

Calloway nodded slowly, looked at the floor, and frowned at it as though a question had been sitting there since morning.

“I don’t know anything about acting,” he said. “Is he not good?”

Doyle decided he’d read the morning right. That was the trouble with these conversations: there was always more than one grievance in the room, and only one of them was ever about you.

“He’s young. He hasn’t done much.” Doyle spread a hand — honest, reasonable. “Some of it he can’t reach yet. Some of it he gets on the fourth take, which tells me the fourth take is in there. For where he’s starting from, he’s fine.” He tilted his head. “But you’re not making this to be fine, and a take that just barely holds up is worse than no take at all. I should have asked you before we started — your schedule. If we work a shot like this, does it come out of something else? I’d rather hear that now.”

“It’s fine.” Calloway gave him a smile with nothing in it. “Strict is fine.” Then, in the same even voice: “We’ll take it as slow as you need. I’m not the one on a clock here.”

“I spoke to him this morning, as it happens,” Doyle said. “Told him not to take any of it personally. He said he understood — he said with the bar set this high he’d come out of it knowing something.”

“Whatever gets shot,” Calloway said, “he isn’t getting replaced. I’ve told him so.”

Doyle’s jaw moved, once, and then he had the smile back.

“Good,” he said. “That’s good — that the two of you see it that way.”

He glanced across the stage at the subject of the conversation, standing in the pillows with his head a little down, and couldn’t read anything off him at that distance.

Out loud there was nothing in it. What had happened was that the shoot had stopped being something Doyle could hold over anybody, and it had happened in his own corner, in a voice that never went up once.

He couldn’t tell whether the man had heard anything, or had simply woken up this morning and decided he’d rather be somewhere else. Both were bad, and they were bad in different directions, and from where he stood there was no way to find out which one he was in.

“Something’s come up,” Calloway said. “Let’s stop here for the day.” He said it as an apology; it landed as an order. “Sorry. First day, and we’re already behind.”

“Of course. We’ll take the day.” Doyle’s smile stayed up. “He isn’t in a rhythm this morning anyway. Better he finds it fresh tomorrow.”

There were, as it happened, a hundred ways to make a shoot unpleasant that had nothing to do with replacing anybody, and Doyle knew most of them. He went and found the AD and told him to call it, and by the time he crossed the stage again he was simply a director calling a day.

June heard about it the way he heard about everything on this set — secondhand, and a beat late.

“Calling it for the day,” the AD said, and then said it again to two other people, in the flat voice people use when the call came from the top.

Four hours of takes, and nobody had said a word to him. Two of the lighting guys were already moving, which meant it was real. He looked for the only person on the stage who could have made the decision.

Calloway was already walking — toward the makeup room, Trey half a step behind him with his phone up, talking at a pace that suggested he was being ignored.

Trey got to the door first and stood in it, which was his version of a serious objection.

“So what’s the job?”

“There’s no job.”

“There’s nothing on the sheet.” Trey held the phone up like it had let him down personally. “There’s nothing on next week. I write next week. I wrote next week in two colors, because you changed your mind twice, and there is nothing on it.”

Calloway finished the message he was typing — two names and a question, to Deirdre — and sent it before he thought of a reason not to.

“Hello? Are you answering that?”

“I’m taking the day.” He put the phone away. “You should take one too. Isn’t that generous?”

“Deirdre will kill me.”

“Then make the most of your last one.”

Trey shut his eyes the way people do when a flight gets delayed, and opened them again, because somebody had come up behind him.

It was the actor from the pillows. Still in his makeup, in a T-shirt with the neck stretched out, breathing a little hard for the distance he’d covered. He’d kicked his sneakers off for the wide shots and never gotten them properly back on, so he’d come across the stage with his heels flattened under them, flapping.

“Mr. Calloway.”

Trey looked at him, then at Calloway, then went inside and became extremely interested in something on the counter.

“Thank you,” June said. “For being willing to believe me.”

“It’s a pause,” Calloway said. “I didn’t say I believed you.”

“I know.” He smiled. It came up before he could stop it.

He had walked into that corner on a bet, because there was nothing else left on the table to put down. The man had listened to the whole thing, asked him a real question at the end of it, and hadn’t made it funny. Nobody did that here.

Calloway looked at him for a second.

“One thing, while you’re standing there.”

“Okay.”

“If this turns out to be you putting something on a man who didn’t do it,” Calloway said, “it comes back on you. Not on me.”

“Okay,” June said again, and meant it exactly as much as the first time. He didn’t look like a person who’d been warned. He didn’t especially look like anything. “I’ll wait till you’ve checked.”

Calloway pulled the door open and went in. Trey, who had been rearranging the counter with the dedication of a man who wanted both hands visibly occupied, didn’t look up.

-

Trey had sent two more messages by eleven, both of them some arrangement of the word what. Calloway had answered neither.

Deirdre called at eleven-twenty and skipped the front of the conversation.

“Glassmoor,” she said. “Do you know what it is?”

“A show.”

“A series. In development since last winter — one of the bigger ones going this year. Doyle’s directing it.” A pause, the kind she used instead of a paragraph break. “Halliday sent them a tape for it, a while back, before this shoot. It didn’t get through. That’s the whole of it — no meeting, no callback, no second read. As far as I can find, the two of them have never been in a room together.”

“Anything else between them?”

“Nothing I can reach. I went at it from both ends and came back empty.” She shifted into the flatter voice she used for things she wouldn’t sign her name to. “Doyle’s reputation isn’t any kind of secret. Everybody has heard something, nobody has anything, and people keep working with him, which tells you what everyone is willing to know. But since you pay me for the other reading too: four or five takes on one line is strange, and it’s also exactly what a director does when he doesn’t think the actor is there yet. I’ve watched better men than Doyle do worse.”

“I don’t care whether his standards are right,” Calloway said.

“…Sorry?”

“From here on, whatever he says about a take. If I think it’s a pass, it’s a pass.”

She let that sit for a second, the way she did when she was deciding whether to spend any more of her evening on something. “You’re the artist.”

Then she came at it from the practical side, which was her actual job, and which she plainly wasn’t enjoying either.

“Here’s the arithmetic, whether you want it or not. The single’s out in under twenty days. You need this shoot quiet, and you need the room to feel normal, because everything about your next month is going to read as a man who’s distracted. And out loud, what Doyle is doing is a director who doesn’t think an actor is ready — which is the one argument in this business nobody will ever take your side on. He isn’t coming after us. He’s coming after Halliday.”

“If the shoot gets made, none of this happened. In a month you’re putting out a record and I’m not spending it answering questions about a director.” A beat. “So do I keep digging, or do we leave it?”

Calloway didn’t answer.

“Rhys.”

Nothing.

“All right,” she said, finally. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

Calloway set the phone down on the table, face down, and didn’t pick it up again.