Unsympathetic Magic - Laura Resnick [5]
Finally ready for our first take—a mere ninety minutes behind schedule—Nolan and I now stood face-to-face, waiting for the director to call, “Action!”
I was close enough to see that, under his recently freshened layer of makeup, the actor looked even redder than before. But our lighting for this scene was so shadowy, I supposed it probably wouldn’t matter.
“Action!”
Nolan turned into Conway in a nanosecond. He grabbed me and shook me, his hot breath brushing my face as he demanded I tell him what I knew. I struggled and prevaricated, pretending I knew much less than he supposed, but I didn’t waste any breath trying to appeal to his compassion. My resistance infuriated him. He shoved me away—so hard that my heel caught in a crack on the sidewalk and I staggered sideways before I fell back against the wall. He pursued me, closing in on me. I knew we were off our marks now, as did he, but the scene was working so well that we kept playing it. As he leaned into me, though, I could see that he was even redder now, and sweating again.
An instant later, Nolan tripped over his lines. He tried to save the moment, but then he swayed dizzily, closed his eyes, and put his hand to his forehand.
He shook his head and, completely out of character now, said, “Nah, I lost it. Let’s go back.”
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Yeah, fine,” he said tersely.
He didn’t look all right. He looked . . . well, not all right, anyhow.
I said, “Are you sure? Because you look a littl—”
“If you could manage to hit your fucking marks, that would be a big help,” he snapped.
I fantasized about stomping on his genitals with my high-heeled boots.
We started the scene again. This time I fell backward into the wall exactly where I was supposed to. But when he pursued me and leaned into me . . . I saw that his eyes were watery, and his gaze was blurry. Nolan uttered Conway’s next line with a thick, clumsy tongue. I kept going, whining Jilly’s dialogue at him. He blew his next line completely, stumbling over a few disjointed words then falling silent.
There was a long pause. My tormentor just stood there, gripping my shoulders, looking dazed and sweaty. In contrast to his deep flush only moments ago, he was now sickly pale, as if suddenly drained of all his blood.
“Are you okay?” I prodded at last.
Nolan gave a little start, as if suddenly realizing I was there. He let go of my shoulders, staggered back a step, and mumbled, “I think I’m gonna . . .”
A moment later, he vomited all over the sidewalk, splattering my boots.
2
Jilly’s boots were a nuisance to put on and take off, so the wardrobe intern who got assigned to clean Michael Nolan’s vomit off them told me not to bother removing them. I took off Jilly’s curly lamb vest, then went and sat in the wardrobe van, where the intern sponged at my leather-clad feet.
After getting sick on camera, Nolan had been escorted into an air-conditioned location trailer, where he awaited the attentions of a medic. It was hoped that, now that he’d evidently gotten something nasty out of his system, he would be able to finish the night’s work after a brief rest. Meanwhile, though, we were all stuck waiting around, and it didn’t take long for people to start getting bored. Also hungry. And since Nolan, who’d just tossed his cookies all over the sidewalk, had eaten food from the catering van earlier, no one wanted to eat D30’s catered fare now.
When I emerged from the wardrobe van, one of the other cast members told me that the production intern who’d purchased Nolan’s stomach remedy on 125th Street had seen an eatery there which boasted the best fried chicken in Harlem. The cast and some of the crew had gotten permission to go there for a meal while waiting for the verdict on Nolan. They had strict instructions to be back within one hour.
As they walked down the dark street, headed toward 125th, I debated the wisdom of eating anything, let alone fried chicken, if I was going to be on