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The two of them get into a playful argument over the best place to find a great hamburger, and after a traumatic scene with his wife, Matt takes Lizzie on a week-long odyssey through Iowa in search of an old-fashioned root beer stand. The root beer stand served as both a tragic and comic symbol of the country’s lost innocence. At the end of the journey, Matt discovers that Lizzie is neither as guileless nor as virginal as she acts.
Despite the movie’s cynical view of women, Fleur liked the script a lot better than the Bird Dog Caliber pictures. But even after two months of acting lessons, she didn’t see how she’d ever play a character as complex as Lizzie. She wished she was doing some kind of romantic comedy.
At least she wouldn’t have to do the movie’s nude love scene. This was the only battle with Belinda that she’d won. Her mother said Fleur was being a prude and that her attitude was hypocritical after all the swimsuit ads she’d done, but swimsuits were swimsuits, and naked was naked. Fleur wouldn’t budge.
She’d always refused to pose nude, even for the world’s most respected photographers. Belinda said it was because she was still a virgin, but that wasn’t it. Fleur had to keep some part of herself private.
The housekeeper interrupted and told her she needed to look outside. Fleur went to the front door. In the center of the driveway sat a shiny new red Porsche topped with a giant silver bow.
She raced to the phone and caught Alexi just as he was getting ready for bed. “It’s beautiful,” she cried. “I’m going to be scared to death to drive it.”
“Nonsense. It is you who control the car, chérie, not the other way around.”
“I’ve got the wrong number. I want to speak with the man who’s invested a fortune trying to find the Bugatti Royale that spent the war in the sewers of Paris.”
“That, my dear, is different.”
Fleur smiled. They chatted for a few minutes, then she rushed outside to drive her new car. She wished she could thank Alexi in person, but he’d never come back to see her.
Some of her pleasure in the gift faded. She’d become a pawn in the battle between her parents, and she hated that. But as important as her new relationship was with her father, and as much as she appreciated this beautiful car, her first loyalty would always be with Belinda.
The next morning, she drove the Porsche through the studio gates to the soundstage where Sunday Morning Eclipse was shooting. Fleur Savagar was too scared to show up on the set herself, so she’d sent the Glitter Baby instead. As she’d gotten dressed, she’d taken extra care with her makeup and pulled her hair away from her face with a set of enameled combs so that it fell long and straight down her back. Her peony-colored Sonia Rykiel body sweater complemented a pair of strappy lizard sandals with three-inch heels. Jake Koranda was tall, but those heels should just about even them out.
She found the parking lot the guard had directed her to. The toast she’d eaten for breakfast clumped in her stomach. Although filming on Sunday Morning Eclipse had been under way for several weeks, she didn’t have to report for another few days, but she’d decided that checking things out before she had to go in front of the camera would build her confidence. So far, it wasn’t working.
This was silly. She’d made television commercials, so she understood the process. She knew how to hit her marks and take direction. But her anxiety refused to ease. Belinda should have been the movie star. Not her.
The guard had phoned ahead, and Dick Spano, the producer, met her inside the soundstage door. “Fleur, sweetheart! It’s good to see you.” He welcomed her with a cheek kiss and an admiring look at the leggy expanse that the body sweater put on display. Fleur had liked Spano when they’d met in New York, especially when she’d found out how much he loved horses. He led her toward a pair of heavy doors. “They’re getting ready to shoot. I’ll take you in.”
Fleur recognized the brightly lit set on the soundstage as the kitchen of Matt’s house in Iowa. Standing in the middle of it, she saw Johnny Guy Kelly deep in conversation with Lynn David, the tiny, auburn-haired actress who was playing Matt’s wife, DeeDee. Dick Spano gestured Fleur toward a canvas director’s chair. She resisted the urge to peek at the back and see if her name was stenciled there.
“You ready, Jako?”
Jake Koranda stepped out of the shadows.
The first thing Fleur noticed was his impossible mouth, soft and sulky as a baby’s. But that was the only thing baby-like about him. His walk was loose-jointed with a rolling, slouch-shouldered gait that made him look more like a range-weary cowboy than a playwright–movie star. His straight brown hair had been cut shorter than he wore it in the Caliber pictures, making him look both taller and thinner than his screen image. Offscreen, she decided, he didn’t look any friendlier than he did onscreen.
Thanks to Belinda, Fleur knew more about him than she wanted to. Although he was notoriously reticent with the press and seldom gave interviews, certain facts had emerged. He’d been born John Joseph Koranda and raised in the worst part of Cleveland, Ohio, by a mother who cleaned houses during the day and offices at night. He had a juvenile police record. Petty theft, shoplifting, hot-wiring a car when he was thirteen. When reporters tried to get him to open up about how he’d turned his life around, he referred to a college athletic scholarship. “Just a punk who got lucky with a basketball,” he said. He refused to talk about why he’d left college during his sophomore year, his short-lived marriage, or his military service in Vietnam. He said his life was his own.
Johnny Guy called out for quiet, and the set grew still. Lynn David stood with her head down, not looking at Jake, who was all sulky mouth and hard blue eyes. Johnny Guy called for action.
Jake leaned a shoulder against the doorframe. “You can’t h
elp being a tramp, can you?”
Fleur clutched her hands in her lap. They were filming one of the uglier scenes in the movie, where Jake’s character, Matt, had just found out about DeeDee’s infidelity. In the editing room, the scene would be interspersed with quick cuts of the village massacre Matt had witnessed in Vietnam, shadow images that make him lose control until he lashes out at DeeDee in a macabre duplication of the violence he’d witnessed.
Matt began walking across the kitchen floor, every muscle in his body taut with menace. In a small, helpless gesture, DeeDee closed her fingers around a necklace he’d given her. She was so tiny next to him, a fragile little Kewpie doll about to be broken. “It wasn’t like that, Matt. It wasn’t.”
Without warning, his hand shot out and ripped off her necklace. She screamed and tried to get away from him, but he was too fast. He shook her, and she started to cry. Fleur’s mouth went dry. She hated this scene. Hated everything about it.
“Cut!” Johnny Guy called out. “We’ve got a shadow by the window.”
Jake’s angry voice ripped through the set. “I thought we were going to try to do this in one take!”
Fleur couldn’t have picked a worse day to show up. She wasn’t ready to do a movie. She especially wasn’t ready to do a movie with Jake Koranda. Why couldn’t it have been with Robert Redford or Burt Reynolds? Somebody nice. At least she didn’t have any scenes where Jake beat her up. But that wasn’t any consolation when she thought about the scenes she did have with him.
Johnny Guy called for quiet. Someone from wardrobe replaced Lynn’s necklace. Fleur’s palms started to sweat.
