So when Lars stormed off the set, she was left exhausted and appalled. Of course everyone knew that they were sleeping together, so there was no way to interpret Lars’s explosive reaction as anything other than a fed-up lover whose fuse had finally been lit. And while everyone liked Alison, Lars was the director. She was doing a great job but everyone also knew that she wouldn’t even have this part if Lars hadn’t handed it to her. Within seconds the delicate balance of collegial affection which had kept the set afloat evaporated. Ronnie, the first AD, called out, efficiently, “Everyone take five!” and scurried after Lars. The sound guy scurried forward, to carefully disconnect her mic and her wire. Everyone else scurried away.
The whole thing was so stupid, but there was something truly frightening about how quickly everyone had evaporated, as if cued by some offstage god in a paranoid nightmare. Bewildered, Alison stood alone on the set for just long enough to realize they weren’t kidding, and then she went back to her chair, guessing without guidance that maybe she should stick close to the set while Ronnie and Norbert and Lars worked out what to do next, in consultation, of course, with the studio. But the small island of slingback chairs which had been placed near the set for the actors to lounge in was also deserted. None of the few crew members who lingered nearby would meet her glance. She considered taking her chair and waiting, like a good girl, for everyone to return, but her heart choked her. She stood up, confused and impatient. When they wanted her back on the set, they could just come and ask.
The closest path back to her two-banger was through the soundstage. The set of the mocked-up apartment where she was supposed to be putting on lipstick was tucked back in the far corner; she cut through it, and through the Mexican bar where she waited tables and where the black ops regularly got drunk, before turning to the loading dock, which opened out onto a hard, featureless concrete pathway. For once there was no twenty-two-year-old production assistant walking ahead of her while reporting her location to someone else on a walkie-talkie. She turned a corner and found herself face-to-face with a small army of union carpenters who were hauling a magnificent Mayan temple out to another loading dock, where it would be picked up and shipped out to the nearby desert hills which were being transformed into yet another jungle set. Seeing the deconstructed pieces of the set being placed so neatly on the silent concrete gave Alison a sudden rush of panic. I like this job, she thought. I really like this job.
She walked around another corner, wishing desperately that there was someone whom she could call. Her mother was no good; she never lost her tone of mild judgment whenever Alison even inched toward telling her what her life looked like. Megan was lost in her children, and Jeff—the one brother who had, long ago, in their youth, almost understood her—she hadn’t talked to for almost a year because he was off on another grant somewhere, maybe in Hong Kong. She was tired of talking to Ryan, who would just tell her to go suck it all up, that she was going to be a star but she wasn’t yet and she owed everyone an apology. She wondered what the guys would say if she showed up at whatever trailer they were hanging out in. At least they liked her. They seemed to like her. They enjoyed working together. Alison took a few steps toward the line of closed trailers and remembered that none of them were called to the set today; when they rescheduled this third reshoot they gave everyone else the afternoon off. The alleyway with its line of trailers was empty, still and ruthless in the afternoon sun.
She knew that something dreadful had just happened to her, but she honestly couldn’t tell what. Having been skeptical for so long about the different steps she was required to take up the path to where everyone wanted her to go, she finally had allowed herself to relax into the delights of all the delightful things which were being showered upon her. Pretty clothes, flirty boys, nice hotel rooms, terrific sushi—seriously, the sushi in Los Angeles was so good it temporarily made up for the sunlight and the loneliness. But the whisper of fear was back upon her; she remembered in the moment poor Pinocchio, hanging out with the wrong crowd, allowing them to drag him to that terrifying amusement park where they all turned into donkeys. She wondered briefly if she might be sprouting a tail.
The problem with all this light and heat, she thought, is there’s no place to hide. Maybe that was why people just flattened out, finally, it was less risky to just let go of whoever it was inside you that made you a person. There was no time for that stuff out here anyway. You had to go to the gym, to sit in the sun, to make an appearance at restaurants where people went to see and be seen. She hadn’t started hanging out in clubs yet but she knew that was next on the agenda; Ryan told her definitively that she was going to have to “come out” from Lars’s “shadow” and claim a place in a hipper, more current crowd. After practically throwing her into Lars’s bed himself, Ryan was ready to move on; Lars Guttfriend, one of the biggest action directors in the business, was yesterday’s news. People weren’t people out here, they were moves on a chessboard in a town where no one knew how to play chess.