Carver seemed to mull this over as he ate more salami and some grapes. He took another few swallows of coffee. Frank sketched all of this, using a few hurried pencil lines to depict the way Carver’s mouth moved as he chewed and the angle of his shoulders as he sipped from a mug. Probably useless for the frog, but interesting nonetheless. To Frank, anyway.
Finally, Carver scrunched up his face. “Do you mind if I ask a really nosy question?”
Of course. Frank had been expecting this, and he made sure his expression was neutral. “Bastogne. The ground was damned hard there.” He’d landed poorly, damaging his foot and ankle. And because Bastogne had remained under siege for almost a week, he couldn’t get proper medical attention right away. He’d been lucky to avoid amputation, the doctors said. Lucky to walk on that foot again.
“You were a paratrooper?”
“Yes.”
Reed’s generous mouth tightened. “I spent two years flying B-24s. But you never could’ve persuaded me to jump out of the damned things. I don’t have the balls for it.”
Frank, who like everyone else was perfectly aware of Reed’s wartime service, shook his head. “You could’ve served with the Motion Picture Unit instead. Plenty of men in the industry did.”
“Didn’t seem right to try to avoid the Air Corps when I was young and fit and already knew how to fly a plane.” A hint of a smile crossed his face. “I learned when I was making one of my films. I liked it a lot when it meant skimming a little Curtiss-Wright over the desert for fun. Not so much when I was dropping bombs and getting shot at in a Liberator. But even that was a hell of a lot better than jumping out of a plane.”
Frank managed a genuine smile of his own. “Jumping out wasn’t the hard part—it was the landing that got you.” He tapped his cane for emphasis.
They laughed together for a moment, which was surprisingly nice, and Frank was pleased that his pencil captured Reed’s expression when they did. He looked more open, Frank thought.
“Actually,” said Reed, popping another grape into his mouth, “that wasn’t the nosy question I was going to ask. Although I’m glad you told me. I was going to ask whether you like your job. Is this what you want to be doing?” He spread his arms, apparently to encompass the entire studio.
Talking about the war was painful, but at least Frank’s feelings about it were fairly straightforward. Not so much his emotions about work. He considered a glib, easy answer and dismissed the idea. He wasn’t in the mood to lie.
“I’ve wanted to be an artist as long as I can remember. Watching animation is what fueled that dream. My grandmother used to take me to the Saturday matinees at the Palace Theater, and those were pretty much the only art I ever saw.”
Reed leaned forward again, smiling softly. “It was the Avalon for me. Chaplin, Navarro, Valentino. Not to mention Garbo, Colbert, Dietrich, Bow. I wanted to be one of them.”
It was much too warm in here. Frank wanted to remove his suit jacket, but then he’d have to put down paper and pencil and find a graceful way to take off the jacket and hang it on the back of his chair, all of which were beyond his current abilities.
He sipped lukewarm bad coffee instead. “Later, I got it into my head to be a serious artist, but I was too broke to afford art school. Took whatever work I could find. Laborer. Housepainter. Delivery boy. Dishwasher. Spent my spare time in an unfortunate foray into expressionism—thankfully, none of those pieces have survived. Took a couple of night classes when I could scrape up enough cash. Felt pretty damned fortunate when I landed the advertising job.”
Reed was listening intently, as if this tale were genuinely interesting. It occurred to Frank that while a visual artist might learn by looking at people, an actor might learn by listening to them. Hearing their inflections, observing the way their emotions manifested as they talked about things.
Not that Reed was likely to end up playing anyone like Frank. Who would want to see that movie?
“War,” Frank continued. “You know how that went. I guess I could’ve gone back to the old job, but….” He shrugged. “The GI Bill paid for me to attend Chouinard Art Institute. Mr. Rask hired me straight out of there—he and Mr. Disney did a lot of that. I felt as if animation was a step up from shilling cigarettes and motor oil, but I still figured that someday I’d make it big as a respected artist.”
“Maybe you will.”
Frank snorted. “I won’t. But that’s okay. Along the way, I realized that what we do here at the studio matters. Even if all we’re doing is giving kids dumb ideas about their future careers. So that question you asked me about three hours ago, before I blabbed away? The answer is yes. This is what I want to be doing.”
Oh man. Saying it out loud like that felt good. Freeing. It wasn’t the deepest confession he could make, but it was important nonetheless. Even better was Reed’s reaction. He didn’t scoff, or look impatient, or treat Frank’s words with any flavor of scorn or boredom or callousness. Instead, he nodded, smiled warmly, and looked into Frank’s eyes. “Thank you. This project… well, it’s not the usual for me. It means a lot to me to know that it’s important to you.”
And then, as if he realized that Frank was very close to bursting into a rainbow of unrestrained emotions, Reed hopped to his feet and pushed the cart nearer the door. Then he repeated his tour of the room, this time while telling amusing anecdotes about Montgomery Clift and Bette Davis. Nothing catty or mean-spirited, just little stories that made it sound as if he found them charming and entertaining. While he spoke, his hands were almost constantly in motion and often the rest of him as well, as if he were performing a complicated and fascinating dance.
Frank drew so furiously that his pencil point snapped and he had to pause to sharpen it.
He didn’t say much at all until Reed—now Carver due to mutual agreement—paused to disassemble a small piece of machinery that Frank didn’t recognize. This reminded him of what Carver had said earlier about working on his car. “Do you like to tinker with things?”
Carver shot him a quick grin. “You could tell, huh? I guess I like to see what makes things tick. You know, with a car or an airplane or any type of machinery, you essentially have all these pieces of metal. None of them are all that useful on their own. Some of ’em don’t look that great. But you put them together and you end up with this beautiful thing that can accomplish astounding feats.” He waited a beat before continuing. “It’s the same with people. If you examine the individual components and see how they come together, you can understand the whole person and appreciate how, how… special the person is.”
In a way, this was the opposite of what Frank did. Instead of assembling parts into a whole, he reduced a thing into its most basic parts, a mixture of lines and arcs. That was beautiful too, in its own way: a recognition that no matter how complex something seemed, at its core it was simple. And that all things were composed of mixtures of the same few elements.
He didn’t say any of this aloud; he was afraid it would seem strange. Instead he said, “That’s why you’re such a good actor.”
Carver pressed a hand to his own chest. “Even the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agrees.” Then, laughing, he relaxed his posture. “But thank you. And yeah, I think it’s what helps me get into the skin of the characters I play. I don’t want to act like somebody—I want to feel them. Then it’s not even acting, it’s just automatic. I speak and look and behave exactly like that character because I know how they’d speak and look and behave.”
“Is that Method acting?” Frank asked. He’d read an article about that once, when he’d figured that a movie studio employee ought to know something about the profession.
