Chapter 9: Take the Time With Him

The house had a garden and a long gravel drive and a back kitchen that Owen had found and lost twice before eight o’clock, so by the time Halliday caught up with him Owen was ready to say the numbers out loud.

“They built the whole apartment,” Owen said. “Inside the house. Every wall painted. Ceiling too.”

The outline was open on Halliday’s knee.

The story went like this. A painter — enough of a name to have a career, not enough of one to keep it — goes out one night and sees somebody across a room, and that’s the answer to the two years he’s been stuck on. He paints his way out. The work sells, the reviews come, and for a stretch it’s good. Then, with no warning the audience is given, he ends it. Rain on the windows, an argument in a doorway, the other one holding onto him, crying, asking, the painter walking out of frame and not turning around.

Then come the paintings. The ones people will actually know him for. Those get made after.

They’d shot the last part like a triumph, which was Owen’s problem with it, and he’d been having it for two days.

“It’s a happy ending,” he said. “They made it a happy ending.”

“It’s a happy ending for one of them.”

“Right. Him.”

“It’s not even sneaky about it,” Owen said. “That’s what gets me.”

“It’s a story,” Halliday said. “Nobody’s going to pin the ending on the man playing it.”

“He’s playing the one who does it.” Owen shook his head. “His own record, and he’s the one everybody’s going to hate.”

“Owen.”

“I’m saying he’s got nerve. That’s all.”

“He’s got nerve,” Halliday agreed, and turned a page he’d read twice already. “And if it looks right, everything in it gets called right. That’s how this is going to go. Artists are allowed to be strange.”

Owen thought about it. “Yeah,” he said. “Fine.”

Halliday had already pictured it, the way you picture anything you’re about to stand inside of. Calloway’s face on that part, doing all of it without trying. He kept that to himself. “It suits him,” he said.

“That’s cold,” Owen said, and went to get the drinks.

—

The makeup room had been a bedroom. The woman working on him had been on Calloway’s team four years, which she mentioned the way other people mentioned where they’d gone to school, and her hands never moved the way hands move when they’re guessing.

“A week and a half on the build,” she said. “That’s before anybody stands in it. And it’s all his — the look. He called it before there was anybody to put in it.”

She tipped his chin two degrees. “There.”

He looked.

The lenses were the pale ones. His own lashes were long enough that whatever she’d put over them had changed the whole face — soft from six feet, interested from three, and no version of it that matched anything he did on purpose.

“Is it supposed to look like this?” he said.

“Like what.”

“Like I’m—“ He tilted his head. The eyes in the glass tilted with him. “Like I’m about to talk somebody into something.”

She laughed, delighted. “It’s the note. They wanted it pretty.”

“Pretty.”

“Your part was a girl. In the first draft.”

“…In the first draft.”

“Then they cast it and they changed it. Not much. Just stopped pretending.” She picked the brush up and set it back down, which he worked out a beat later was what she did instead of shrugging. “So. Pretty.”

He looked at the mirror one more second. Whoever had signed off on the rewrite had done it in a room he would never be in, along with the four hundred other decisions that had gone past him since spring. He filed it where he filed everything that landed in his lap, which was under luck, and stood up.

—

Owen came back with two bottles and the face he wore when he’d been counting something.

“Sixty people out there,” he said. “I counted on the way back. There’s a man whose entire job is the smoke.”

“There’s no smoke.”

“That’s what I said.”

Bernie had calls he couldn’t move, so he’d told Halliday to ring him the moment anything went sideways, and at 6:40 that morning he’d told Owen the same thing, in writing, where it would hold up. Owen had shown Halliday the message twice, both times without saying anything.

Doyle was standing with a monitor and two men off the lighting crew, and when Halliday went past, he turned all the way around.

“I haven’t met you,” he said. He looked Halliday over the way people in this business looked at a face they thought they could use, which was normal, and it lasted a beat longer than normal. “You’re striking. We don’t get that.”

He put a hand on Halliday’s shoulder. It stayed a second past the end of the sentence, and there was a pressure at the end of it that could have been nothing at all. Then the hand came back and he was asking the lighting guys whether they intended to be all day about it, and that was the conversation.

Halliday stood there half a beat. A hand on a shoulder, and a half-second at the end of it that he had nowhere to put. He said something agreeable and easy, and by the time he’d said it Doyle had turned away and was talking to a man about a lamp.

At the far end of the drive, the other door opened.

The man who came out of it was on the phone. He was tall, and unhurried even walking, in a bright orange hoodie under a black-print bomber — the kind of thing that made most people look like they’d lost a bet, and on him it read as a decision. The assistant came along behind him at the distance you learn to keep.

“—I’m offering,” Lane Kirby was saying. “When else am I going to offer.”

“Later,” Calloway said. “Offer later.”

“I’ll do it cheap. Friends and family. Seven figures.”

“You said that three years ago.”

“It goes up when I win in December.”

“In your dreams.”

“…Fine. Don’t come to me in the spring.”

“I already found somebody,” Calloway said. “And what would I come to you for? You’re not even the best-looking man I’ve talked to today.”

Kirby laughed, stung. “Yeah? And the one you found—“

Calloway’s gaze had gone off across the gravel and stopped on Halliday, and stayed there a beat longer than a look needs to.

“A hundred times better than you,” he said, and hung up on whatever Kirby did with that.

Thirty feet away, Halliday was still on the page of the outline he’d been on when the door opened.

Calloway came over with the phone going into his pocket.

“Mr. Calloway,” Halliday said. He’d put a little distance in it on purpose. It was the version that didn’t ask for anything.

“Mm.” Calloway nodded at that, careless. “That’s not what you called me in your post.”

Halliday’s face did nothing, which took some doing. He’d written the post at two in the morning off the end of the couch and he’d used the first name, because that was what you wrote on the internet and because the other version read like a press release. He hadn’t thought about it since. He’d been reasonably sure nobody had read it.

“Rhys,” he said.

“Mm.” Calloway went back to his phone.

There were people on that drive who would have traded the rest of their week for the thirty seconds Halliday had just had, and Bernie would have told him he’d wasted it. He stood where he was until somebody called him for the light.

—

The room they’d built was white underneath everything — walls, ceiling, floor — and then covered over: canvases face-up and face-down on the floor, paint on the baseboards, more paint where a hand had gone up the wall and kept going. A beige blanket came off the low bed and pooled on the wood. Pillows everywhere, in the corner, under the bed, shoved into the middle of the room by whoever had walked through last.

They started in the middle of the story. The part before the rain.

The camera went in tight on a pair of bare feet on the carpet, the veins showing through the skin, and came up as they crossed the floor. Then Halliday was at the painter’s back with an arm going around his neck.

“Cut.”

“Halliday.” Doyle’s voice, from behind the monitor. “You’re walking through it. He’s the person you love. You have never loved anybody the way you love him. I don’t need a checklist, I need it to be true.”

“Sorry. My fault. Again.”

Again.

“Cut. Not that fast. You gave it away.”

Again.

“Your face. Where’s your face.”

Again.

“Cut. You’re playing the camera. I can watch you find the lens.”

It was past ten by then, and the room had gone quiet the way a room goes quiet when everyone in it has started keeping score. Between setups, two of the crew said something to each other that didn’t carry, and looked at Halliday while they said it.

He stayed where the marks were and let them reset the light.

The stops came fast and the reasons didn’t always fit together, which could mean two things. One of them was that he was bad at this. The other one had nothing to do with him. He said he’d go again, and meant it, and that was the answer he was giving.

Doyle had been directing for twenty years and had never needed longer than a morning to know what a person was made of. The ones who apologized were the ones who came around. Halliday had apologized four times before eleven, in a voice that only sounded polite, and Doyle hadn’t written any of it down, because he didn’t have to.

Then Calloway, sitting loose on the edge of the low bed with his hands braced behind him, said, “Is it that hard, being in love with me?”

Halliday turned around. “It’s not—“

“I’m joking.” He stood, easy, one hand off the floor. “I’m not that frightening. Take a minute.”

He’d been watching it since the second take. The notes landed early, every one of them before the take had anywhere to go, and nobody on that floor was going to say so out loud to a director with that much behind him, on day one of a video with a full crew’s week riding on it. He was going to be here all week.

Calloway was drinking water when Doyle came over to him, low, out of the crew’s hearing. “He’s not finding it. We may need the day on it. I’d ask you to bear with us.”

“You know I picked him.”

Doyle didn’t answer for a second. “…I’d heard that. I assumed the label—“

“Doyle.” Calloway set the bottle down. “Take the time with him.”

Doyle stood there holding the sentence. Then he said of course, of course, and offered a compliment about the last record, and then another one, and got nothing back on either.

—

After the break they got two setups that would cut, which on a morning like that one was not nothing.

Nobody said anything to Halliday about it. They said things near him, which is different, and looked at him while they were saying them.

Owen brought the food and stood over him with it and didn’t put it down.

“I watched every take,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with any of them. He’s picking at you. That’s all that is.”

“Keep your voice down.”

“I’m not—“ Owen dropped his voice, which was worse. “He’s the one who’s wrong.”

“Bernie isn’t paying either of us to be right about that.” Halliday took the container out of his hands. It was still warm and he didn’t open it. “It’s fine.”

“It’s not fine.”

“It’s fine. Go eat something.”

Then he stopped listening to Owen, because at the corner of the house Doyle had a cigarette going and both hands in his pockets and nobody to talk to.

“Halliday,” he called, at the volume of a man who didn’t need volume. He tilted his head at the space beside him. “Come here. I’ll walk you through it.”