Author: Emily M. Danforth
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/emily-m-danforth/page,21,568862-plain_bad_heroines.html
“Well now we have to know,” Harper said.
“Please tell us,” Merritt said. “I won’t interrupt.”
Audrey did. She told them about the videos she’d watched, and the scenes she’d read. She told them about the open patio doors and the night shadows and the scuttle she’d heard behind her in the house. Harper nodded along, made a point to do so—it did all sound sort of creepy—but then Audrey got to the song surprise-playing on their speakers.
“Oh shit,” Harper said. “Wait, the chant thing? No way. That thing freaks me the fuck out. I’d have lost it.”
“I did lose it!” Audrey said. “I screamed and then I, like, flailed around like an idiot trying to get it turned off. And then when I did, it seemed like the rooms were foggy or something. It just felt wrong, like something was there with me inside the house that shouldn’t be there.” Now she seemed to be losing confidence again, rushing through the rest. “And then later there were all these dead wasps floating in dishwater in our kitchen sink, but I mean like dozens, and I didn’t see them come in anywhere. Some of them weren’t even dead yet.” She looked between them, embarrassed. “But when I say it now, it also just feels like a bunch of coincidences that I’ve strung together.”
“You don’t have to play it down,” Harper said. “That sounds scary as fuck to me. Jesus.”
“Move over, clowns in the storm drain,” Merritt said.
“Don’t even joke,” Audrey said. “Last night I would’ve taken a clown in the storm drain.”
Harper hopped from the edge of the desk. She felt wired. “Listen, that fucked-up chant thing comes on at night in my house when I didn’t tell it to? I’m losing my shit. It would be weird not to lose your shit over that.”
“No, I know,” Audrey said. “I did lose my shit.” She smiled, took a breath. “So hey,” she said, looking at Harper. “Because I am mortified that I told you all of that and don’t want to talk about it anymore, and also because I’m a little nervous that we’re wasting time: I had this possibly dumb thought that we could use the desk to stand in for the Orangerie table—in the scene. I mean get under it together? What do you think?”
Harper liked the idea a lot. Audrey Wells was gonna work for this, she could feel it. “Totally,” she said. “When the hail comes. I love that.”
Harper thought she maybe then heard Merritt make some small noise to indicate her displeasure over the idea, some signal of disapproval or judgment, but if so, it was a very small noise, with no follow-up, and besides, this was not Merritt’s specific area of expertise. In this instance, Harper would not defer. This part, this letting a character swallow her up, this fitting of herself into the self of another, it was the best part of all of this—the part people sometimes said she was such a natural at.
Merritt’s potential judgment over their acting choices notwithstanding, Audrey’s story seemed to have worked as kind of a conversational bridge to get them past their earlier tension: maybe because it both made Audrey seem vulnerable and let Merritt feel superior. Whatever the case, now Audrey was asking Merritt a question about the shorter of the two scenes—the one with cousin Charles—and Merritt was actually being helpful in her answers.
She told Audrey that, in her opinion, Charles was always more taken with Clara than was appropriate for cousins. But it’s possible he might not have even realized how deep her infatuation with Mary MacLane’s book ran (Charles was no reader) except for the crucial fact that Mary MacLane herself had visited Newport, Rhode Island, during the summer of Clara’s obsession. And Clara’s family, of course, summered in Newport. For a week or so in August it was a common topic of societal discussion there: Mary MacLane would be coming to attend a wedding and write an article for the New York World about what she called “the pomps and vanities” of those with “the Money.”
Unsurprisingly, Clara Broward had become every bit the 1902 fangirl at the prospect of actually meeting her idol, and cousin Charles, egged on by the gossip around town, took notice of this. Mary MacLane suddenly seemed worthy of his daft attention. So he stole the book from Clara, read it (let’s be real: skimmed it), and declared it, and Mary herself, an affront to decency. And Charles got Clara’s mother riled about it too, convincing her that Mary MacLane was the most vile of influences and that Clara must be protected from her dangerous way of thinking.
As a direct result of his meddling, Clara was not allowed to go to Bailey’s Beach and meet Mary MacLane when she came to Newport. And for this, Clara would never forgive awful Charles. Or, if eventually she might have in the distant future, there just wasn’t any time to—she died not two months later.
Merritt knew her stuff, and even though Harper had heard her say some of these things before, she was glad she was now saying them to Audrey. As she listened, and without really thinking about what she was doing, she headed to the wall of windows behind it, touching the cigarette at her ear as she went. The view was of Bo’s side yard and then on into the neighbor’s backyard, where a mom and toddler were in the garden. As she looked through the glass at them, Harper could suddenly smell lilacs that shouldn’t even be there this time of year—ripe and heavy with blossom, full of perfume.
“Clara locked herself in her bedroom the whole time Mary MacLane was in Newport,” Merritt said. “She did try to sneak out once, but a maid saw her and called for her mother, and Charles caught her in the garden. I mean, he basically tackled her is how she wrote about it after. So here she was, Mary MacLane right there in her town—I mean, right, right there, down the street and visiting with the sole purpose of observing people like Clara’s family, like Clara herself, even—but she couldn’t go meet her. It’s fucking heartbreaking. In her diary entries from that week Clara talks about having these really vivid dreams—or daydreams, it’s unclear—that Mary would come through her open window at night.”
“Come through her window and what?” Audrey asked Merritt. Her voice sounded like it was a greater distance away than Harper knew it to be. “Wait, do you mean like sex dreams?”
“I do mean like sex dreams,” Merritt said. “I mean, we’re talking more subtle than 50 Shades of Mary MacLane, but yes.”
Audrey was now asking about maybe seeing the diaries, more than just the entries reproduced in Merritt’s book. Harper had wondered about this too, was going to turn and get in on the ask, but she felt magnetized to the scene out the window. She couldn’t pull away, though she couldn’t say why.
The woman out the window was now picking tomatoes and the toddler happily stomped around, her purple jumper cladding a body built for cumbersome, destructive movement; her mother clearly exasperated. Harper smiled, leaned closer to see which of the crops would be harassed next. And then, in a flinch, the scene changed. The child was crying—Harper could just hear the shrieking through the window, and now the little girl was clutching her cheek, screaming. The mother shot up from her crouch and tore off one of her gloves to cup the same place on the child’s face that the child was holding. The mother’s other arm reached around, picked up the screaming toddler, and carried her off and into their house.
The child had just been stung. That was the explanation Harper’s brain filled in for her. A bee, maybe. Could be.
But Harper knew it wasn’t.
As she stared, in the space between window and garden, she saw several small things drifting in the air—could be ash, caught on the breeze, or insects. Whatever they were, they caught the glint of the sun as they drifted. And now there were even more, their soft forms collecting on the air as if hovering there. And now still more and more until, as if some wrong lens had been placed in front of the window, the scene changed, and it was snowing. It was impossible, but it was. The world outside the window was white with snow—the trees caked in it, the garden killed by it—its plants stiff and gray, frozen, the tilled ground mounded white, and footprints, from garden to house, showing the path the mother had walked with her screaming child. Though somehow the tomatoes remained bright red, now almost
like shiny Christmas tree ornaments—much too red against the snow. And in the moments, for they were only moments, Readers, when Harper tried to make sense of this change, it was as if a white hand crept up the window, and now there was snow and ice clinging to it too, reaching across its panes and forcing Harper to peer through gaps in order to continue to see the garden.
In the span of these queer happenings, the room had grown prickly behind her. Prickly between Merritt and Audrey, that is, some line apparently crossed, judging by Merritt’s current tone. Harper could sense that—she could feel it tickle at the back of her neck, palpable tension—even as she continued to blink at the strangeness outside the window.
Somehow, she knew that if she turned away, the winter scene would be gone. If she spoke of it aloud, called to Audrey and Merritt to come see, or even tapped at the window to try to knock free some of the snow, or to feel the ice and cold collected on the other side of the glass, then it would all return to the way it was before, the way it should be: sunny and hot and SoCal in summer. And she didn’t want that to happen yet, though she couldn’t say why. She felt a bit light-headed. She could smell the lilac again. And then—
“That is not what I’m asking about at all.” Audrey’s voice, its strained tenor, pierced Harper’s snow world, its whites and grays swirling away, leaving glinting sun and green and brown—shiny cars in the driveway, one corner of a blue swimming pool. All as it should be.
Audrey’s voice, however, said otherwise: “It’s not the fact of the kiss,” she said, “it’s what you just said about us doing it today.”
“What I said is that you seem really uncomfortable with it,” Merritt said. “Based on what you just said.”
Harper’s bare arms prickled with gooseflesh. She couldn’t tell for sure if it was from the scene out the window or the one developing behind her. “I just watched this kid outside get stung, I think,” she said, turning to find both Merritt and Audrey staring at her, neither of them happily.
“Are we supposed to kiss today?” Audrey asked. “I mean, is that what they’re looking for with this whole setup?”
Audrey’s question was enough of a surprise to Harper that whatever had just happened out the window was shoved below it. At least for now. “What do you mean, with this whole setup?” Harper asked. She came around the desk to join them again. “I’m sorry, catch me up—I must’ve missed something.”
“In the scene,” Audrey said. She held her sides up like a placard. “The kiss at the end.”
“There’s a lot of kissing at the end,” Merritt said. “They spend the entire scene building to that action.” She made a line with her mouth, almost the pure emoji form of that expression. Then she broke that line to say, “Clara wants to kiss Flo. She’s into it. I’m thinking the actor playing her should probably not be weirded out by the idea of women kissing.”
“I don’t even know where you’re getting this,” Audrey said to Merritt. “That’s not what I said.”
“Huh. Clearly I got it from something you said.”
Audrey was back on one end of the chesterfield, her body in a knot. She shook her head to herself, like a bobble doll, and then turned to face Merritt full-on. “Yeah, so I’m bi,” she said. “Not that it’s really your business, but no, the idea of kissing a woman does not make me uncomfortable. Not as a person, not as an actress. I don’t—”
“Actor,” Merritt said flatly.
“What?” Audrey said. If a word can sound like an eye roll, that one did.
“Why does it have to be actress? Is it still poetess? Do you go to a doctress? Actor. One word for all humans who do the thing.”
“Last time I checked, they still give awards for best actress,” Audrey said.
Merritt sniffed. “Well if they give awards for it, I mean: holy shit.”
“OK,” Harper said, trying on what she hoped was like a reasonable but chill counselor voice. “Come on—Audrey’s not in charge of naming things. I mean, plus heroines, right? Like the whole namesake of our purpose.” By now she’d caught the thread of their disagreement and was considering how to say the next part without Merritt storming from the room.
“Yes, in 1902,” Merritt said.
“Just so you know, Merritt,” Harper said, “this is like standard practice. We always talk about anything physical, you talk it through with your scene partner and decide how to do it or if you even should. I mean, especially for an audition. It’s never a given. Or it shouldn’t be.”
Merritt blinked at her. “Yes, and all of that makes sense,” she said. But she said it as if nothing Harper had just said had anything to do with whatever was pissing her off in the first place and now she was additionally annoyed to have been educated about their process. “It just seemed to me like there was some real subtext in what Audrey said earlier. But forget it. I must be mistaken.”
“I really don’t know how this got so confused,” Audrey said. She looked at Harper to make her case. “I wasn’t even saying that I don’t think we should do the kiss—I just wanted to talk about it, see where we’re at.”
“Totally,” Harper said. “We still can do that, right?”
“Right, yeah,” Audrey said. She paused, then added, “And I would ask that no matter the gender of the person I was doing this scene with.” She looked at Merritt. “I really am sorry if you thought I was saying something else. I wasn’t.”
Merritt shrugged, noncommittal. “I misunderstood. Mea culpa. I just wanted this movie about queer women to actually have some involved.”
“Well if they cast me, I’ll count for one of them,” Audrey said.
Merritt offered no reaction to this.
But Harper said: “Fuck yes you will.”
Audrey Wells was gonna work for this. She could feel it.
The (Real) Chemistry Read
Audrey tried to tell herself that she was now feeling very determined to do the kiss and to do it well. To do the whole thing well; blow them out of the water with her talent at being Clara Broward. Because fuck Merritt Emmons and her nonexistent subtext. Fuck her, sitting there in Bo Dhillon’s club chair, watching them.
While Merritt watched, Audrey and Harper sorted their blocking. They practiced getting under the desk and working through where their bodies would settle next to each other, what made most sense in this scene for their characters and the shifting provocation between them. Then they choreographed the kiss, how it would start and end. They rehearsed that choreography twice. It felt fine to Audrey, not mortifying, definitely technical and definitely being clocked by judging Merritt, but fine. It was fine. Harper’s lips were dry, on the first go, but she noticed that herself and applied minty balm and now they were shiny with it. The kiss could work, Audrey thought, they could manage it like the professionals they were.
Right now, what they were lacking in all this choreography was the context of the scene that would deliver that kiss, land it, so that it made sense and wasn’t just a thing they were practicing. They needed to run that scene in full.
So they did.
The first time through, Audrey played Clara as more aggressive and in command than she did in the next one, but in neither did they kiss.
They were tight, under that desk, their arms near to being in each other’s lap and their faces close, but the scene called for Clara to kiss Flo when she sensed that Flo wouldn’t kiss her. And Audrey did not do it. Both times Harper said her final line, “Telling you won’t be enough,” and then she turned her head, their mouths hovering, Audrey practically tasting cigarette, but after a moment or two of lingering, she ducked out from under the table and said, “Should we run it again?”
Both times she did that.
But then they ran it a third time. And this time Audrey felt better. She didn’t rush the lines she’d rushed the two times previous. She felt like she’d found about the right place to settle Clara, somewhere between tentative and flirtatious, knowing and unsure. And she felt, in the way Harper responded, that she too thoug
ht they were improving. And so that time Audrey thought, I will kiss her. And she felt totally good with that decision, with trying the kiss out once and then, depending on how it went, doing it for Bo and the others, too. She felt like making that decision, to herself, even brought a kind of correct momentum to the scene, a kind of accurate tension for what was to come, something Clara herself would have been feeling as she prepared to do this thing for the first time.
But then, about six lines before the end of the scene, before she was going to do it, she was, it was like sound effects delivered a knock-knock-knock on the office door. Harper and Audrey stopped, and looked, and Merritt said, “Yes?” And the door opened and Bo was standing there grinning at Audrey and Harper under his desk and saying, “Hey—nice blocking. You two ’bout ready to kill it?”
“I think so,” Harper said to him, and then to Audrey she said, “Yeah? That was feeling really ready to me.”
And so Audrey said sure. Sure. Because what was she gonna say? No—stay under here and let’s kiss first to make sure I can do it in a minute. I guess she could have said that, Readers. She could have said exactly that. But she didn’t, and now Harper was ducking her way back out from under the desk and offering Audrey a hand to help her up, and Bo was telling them that he would gather the masses. And that’s what he did. And in the very brief amount of time it took for that to happen—since they’d all been waiting around for this, they came quickly—Harper asked, “So, the kiss. Yes? Or no? Or? Where are you with it?”
“Yes,” Audrey said, saying it confidently to try to help herself to feel confidently about it.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Audrey said again.
“Cool, I think so, too,” Harper said, flashing her Harper Harper gap-toothed smile. There was no more time to linger on it anyway, because people were already entering the room. Soon Bo’s office was fairly stuffed: Merritt had moved to Audrey’s old seat on the couch and now Elaine Brookhants was there next to her. And two of the suits in the club chairs. Bo standing in one corner with Heather and somebody else. Josh the agent and two others from Harper’s entourage against the bookshelves. And other people too, scattered among them, plus Gray and Noel in the doorway, barely even in the mix.