What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [67]
The next day, it was the same thing. A new girl, equally curvy and coached to be more demure when off camera, came in as a replacement. More camera setups, failed takes, mole-skin applications, arms over breasts with the back almost to the camera but not quite. Sometimes it was the new girl in the tub, doing exactly as she was told while a camera shot from overhead, keeping her head down as much as she could so there was never a possibility of noticing she was a stand-in. She dried off and quickly robed, paper cup of coffee in hand, watching the proceedings. The screaming was easily done, only a couple of takes because the editing would take care of the rest, and all the thinking the Actress had done about the moment of this young woman’s death was really for naught. What was more important was how the woman walked into the bathroom, what she was doing right before, the casual way she went about making a grand decision in her life, her effort to change course, and how the certainty of that decision was going to be silently clear to the audience: this was a changed woman, and she was doing the right thing. She was good enough to be forgiven.
It took seven days to shoot the scene, almost as long as it had taken to shoot the preceding drama, and with the holidays so near at hand, the pressure to finish fell heavy on the set. Who knew it was going to be so demanding? But it wasn’t the time involved—it was the physicality and trusting that the Director could see what he needed to see. It was the appearance of nakedness without being naked, hard as it was to tilt her body away from the camera when, right out of the corner of her eye, she could always see a voluptuous pair of Las Vegas breasts at the ready.
But in the end, she was stunned at the effect. Sitting in their screening room, never having seen any of the daily rushes, never having seen the rough cut, but now watching the finished film itself—with music!—the Actress hardly recalled that she was witnessing herself. At every sequence, she could remember the Director’s hand guiding her through the moment. Her elevated sensuality in the hotel room with her handsome costar. Her face registering the feeling of being pursued and the fear of being caught as she made her getaway. The shadings in her expression as she reveled in her own conniving and cunning while her character listened to interior voices. Even the angle of her head as she listened over a motel dinner of sandwiches and milk, a woman listening to a story, but matching it to her own, comparing it, her disrupted life not ruined at all, but a shiny thing in her hands once again, renewed.
She had become that woman entirely.
The Actress knew it even as she watched her character sit at a motel room desk, her moment of reckoning coming. In a little notebook, she scribbled out the simplest of subtractions: seven hundred from forty thousand. Something she could have done in her head. But she did it because her character was alone and silent, not even a voice in her head, and the audience in the dark needed to be looking over her shoulder as she began making amends.
She tore up the note, about to throw it in the trash, but then turned to look to the bathroom, as if remembering it as the one place where everything vile gets washed or flushed away, the camera gliding along with her as she moved to that space.
She was framed in the doorway of the bathroom, bending down to the toilet.
The camera showed the toilet, pristine and white, but unsettling somehow, a toilet never having been on the screen before, and she soiled it with the torn-up pieces of her crime and then flushed.
She bent down to lower the lid, stepping over to close the door firmly, looking up as if to make sure it was closed, then took off her robe, her back exposed to the camera.
Off came her slippers one by one, the robe on the toilet haphazard, her bare legs stepping into the clean tub, and the curtain pulled back with a quick rush of metal rings.
The Las Vegas girl bent down—they used her shots after all—her nipples hardly registering through