Sunshine and Shadow

by Laura London

Genres: Amish & Mennonite; Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

From the author of the beloved romance classic The Windflower comes a novel of an Amish community, a Hollywood filmmaker, and a woman torn beween two worlds. When L.A. film director Alan Wilde decides to shoot his next movie in rural Wisconsin, he has no idea what he's getting himself into. First, a beautiful Amish girl bounds onto the set-and ruins the scene. Then, his leading lady storms off the film in a huff. Now Alan's come up with a crazy idea that could make or break his career: cast the Amish girl as his star . . . Susan Peachey has never even seen a motion picture, let alone thought about acting in one. As a young widow and school teacher, she's only experienced the simple pleasures of life in the Amish community. But when this handsome, charming director takes her under his wing-and captures her heart-she must ultimately choose between the only world she knows . . . and the only man she loves.

Release date: May 6, 2014

Publisher: Forever Yours

Print pages: 452

Sample

He liked the monster. Some monsters had it. Some didn’t. This one did. Take the Creature from the Black Lagoon, for instance, or the Rancor monster in Return of the Jedi. They had real charisma. If a monster had that “certain something,” movie audiences were perfectly cheerful about watching him consume half the cast.

Alan Wilde looked at his monster, realized that it was going to become the central ingredient of an instant horror-film classic, and leaned back against the woven wire fence, sparing a warm thought for his Creature Design supervisor.

It was one of the few warm thoughts that had crossed Alan Wilde’s mind in days.

The weather here didn’t lend itself to warm thoughts. Here. Wisconsin. What addled chain of logic had led him to the conclusion that he wanted to make this movie in Wisconsin? It was hard to remember that the location was close to perfect for his purposes. His staff had hyped him on Greyling. They’d given him material from the Wisconsin Film Advisory Board glorifying this restored historical village, a kind of midwestern Williamsburg. They were renting the full five hundred acres, including the original coach house, reborn into a modern hotel, for the two months before it was open to tourists. His investors were happy; the rent was cheap.

Probably it hadn’t been logic at all, only a flare of self-deceptive arrogance. If Francis Ford Coppola could make a movie in Oklahoma, then Alan Wilde could make a movie in Wisconsin. Bad thinking. Very dangerous.

Wilde glanced around the high meadow, marred as it was by the more than fifty members of his crew, shapeless in unfamiliar woolens: the sound man, the mixer, props people, special effects, electricians, grips, the assistants to the assistants—the men and women who became extensions of the visions of his mind, the will of his muscles. The trailers and the tons of heavy equipment were becoming slimy with condensation in the cold, clammy air. The actors had had to work with mouthfuls of ice chips to keep their breaths from misting. The theatrical blood had frozen so often, they’d begun to use vodka instead of water as its base. Appropriately ghoulish.

This was the last day in April. The date on today’s call sheet proclaimed it openly, but the mercury in the outdoor thermometers registered so low that it might as well have been the day after Christmas. It was supposed to warm up over the weekend.

Wilde had never been fond of spring. It was messy and unreliable, overrated—like success. Back in L.A., bodies were baking in the sun. Flowers were blooming on the hillsides. God help him, he was even beginning to miss the smog. It had to be more wholesome than this interminable chill.

Time crept, as it had so often for him lately, inching frame by frame as though he were running in slow motion to a Vangelis score. He had damned few destinations left to run to. He had the palacelike home in Beverly Hills with Japanese parchment screens and koa wood, and the pool he never had time to swim in. He had the obscenely expensive imported car that spent most of its time in the repair shop waiting for a vital piece of its imported guts to make its way through the intricacies of international mail. He had the Oscar that haunted him, the ghost of hungrier days. And he had the women who came and went like honeybees in his life, their presence leaving little impression on the curious silence in his spirit.

He ran a desultory finger along the fence wire, registering the abrasive filings of rust through his leather glove, and it occurred to him that he would never use his own character in a movie—the rich, cynical movie director. Yes, bored and cynical. Why did that sound like a law firm? Too obvious; too corny. Trite. What happened to people who turned into living clichés?

His script supervisor, Joan, was walking by, her runny nose bent toward her clipboard, her magnificent red hair turning to strings in the wind. He stopped her with a touch.

“How’re you doing?” she asked.

“Coming to the conclusion that I’m bored and cynical,” he said.

She slipped her hand under the lamb suede collar of his jacket, dragged down his head to tease her tongue slowly along the edge of his ear, and whispered a cure for his boredom. His body kept its chill, even though she was cute and trying so hard to please him. He took her chin lightly between his fingers and smiled, a smile that he knew hadn’t reached his eyes when she pulled back, gazing at him, manufacturing a shiver that had nothing to do with the weather. She left him after a playful shake of her head.

It was unprofessional as hell to flirt with an employee on the set. People were staring at him, his reputation a cage around him. Each bar of that cage was forged from a half-truth, yet still the whole was as strong as iron. His genius, his promiscuity, his frigid emotions had become industry legends. And inside there was only a human being who was wondering how to stop discarding himself.

Max, his director of photography, came puffing up, his balding head stuffed into an Irish tweed cap. He was nursing a cold, and his handkerchief blew out from the side of his face like a white banner of surrender into the chafing wind.

“I don’t like the light.” Max glared up at the absent sun as if he wanted to replace it with a tungsten bulb. “What d’you think?”

They’d been fighting all day about the light. Wilde said, “I think that I’m bored and cynical.”

“Yeah? Well, I think that I’m Ferrante and Teicher.” Still looking upward he added, “Damn clouds.”

Wilde took his D.P.’s shoulders in a friendly grip. “You want me to help you with the clouds, Max?” He redirected his gaze from Max’s crimson nose to the stratosphere. “Clouds!” he commanded. “Clear the sun!”

By odd coincidence one actually did, and a ray of sunlight shot down to the meadow at a long angle. Laughter ruffled through the crew. If they thought they were supposed to, they would have laughed at his reading of the back of a cereal box, and he knew it. But the laughter improved his mood anyway.

“Don’t let it go to your head.” Max grinned as he blew his nose. “You happy with the way that reflector’s placed now?” He indicated it with the flexing of one shoulder.

Wilde grinned back, remembering the days when the perfect placing of a reflector would have been enough to make him happy. When had the cyclone of creative decisions ceased to excite him? He glanced north, following the line of wire fence as it rushed along the meadow’s lip. Two crows perched there. If the crow on the right flies first, I’ll like the placement of the reflector. If the crow on the left flies first, I’ll have it moved. The breeze sprayed a fan of yellow grass against the fence, and the crow on the right launched itself into the wind.

“The reflector is fine.” Wilde pushed off from the fence. Scratch the self-doubt, he told himself. No one would believe it was in character.

He walked across the meadow, dispensing directions, settling back into his role of Godfather and Khan in the same way that an actor settles into a monster costume.

The actor in this particular monster costume was one of his closest friends. Dash Davis—not his real name, of course—was a veteran of TV westerns, and “oh, yeah, that guy” face to millions who couldn’t have matched it with a name. A cluster of wardrobe and makeup people had just finished twenty minutes’ worth of work attaching the monster mask to Dash’s head. One of them must have told Dash that the director was making his way through the busy crew, because as Wilde approached, the monster began to lumber toward him, hideous claws uplifted menacingly.

“Wanna kiss?” asked the monster, voice muffled by thick foam rubber.

Wilde dropped a courtier’s kiss on one gory paw. “Fangs become you.”

“Hell, this is the best I’ve looked in years. Will I play in Peoria?”

“You’ll scare the hell out of Peoria.”

Rick Lessa’s self-satisfied smile lengthened as he stood back admiring his creation, one hand hooked in a belt loop, the other running lazily through his punk haircut. He’d created the monster—and was something of a monster himself. “And Alan will do big box office scaring the kiddies until they hide under their seats.”

The remark irritated Wilde on several levels, but the directorial persona never betrayed irritation on a set. The actors were temperamental, the highly creative members of the technical crew were temperamental, the writers were temperamental. The more frantic the atmosphere became, the more calm Alan Wilde grew; the more patience he exuded. His pictures came in on time and on budget, even sometimes under budget.

“I’m looking for a PG-13, so the kiddies will have to sit this one out.” He said to Dash, “What’s it like in there? Can you see? Can you breathe?”

“Poorly. Very poorly. But I’m warm.”

“Warm? The rest of us have forgotten what that feels like. Let’s shoot this thing and go home before someone tries to wrestle you for that costume. If you’re finished, Rick?”

In a series of complex and beautifully dovetailed movements, the crew prepared to roll film. It would be a minor piece of footage, an extreme long shot of one well-mangled victim and the monster, rattling around, barely visible inside a wall of foliage. Meaningless without the sorcery of editing and score. Simple, except that in making a film, the simplest act was elaborate.

Wilde relaxed into the security of his professional anxieties. Was the special-effects foreman overdoing the artificial haze? Were the reflectors anchored well enough or was one of them about to take off like a sail into the wind? Was Dash getting enough oxygen in there?

He watched a young technician with a battery pack and blow drier feed cool air full force into the monster’s mouth. The cameraman focused on the horseshoe meadow of golden grasses where the victim lay. The monster went to lurk in the dense growth of trees.

Joan joined him and whispered, “I like the set. It looks very natural.”

“It better, after the money we’ve sunk into it.… Two weeks of planting to make a pasture look natural…” Sound was up to speed. Film rolling. Quiet on the set. Clapboard. Technicians busy making notations. “Okay. Action.”

Moments passed. The corpse lay. The monster, unseen, began to touch branches eerily. The camera panned and the assistant racked focus.

Okay. Enough of this. Very nice, and all in one take. Let’s get Dash out of that armor and call it a day. He was about to call out, “Cut. Print that.”

All at once the monster burst from the trees, his grotesque form vaulting forward like a bounding elephant. He was followed immediately by a sprite of a girl in a long dress who was doing her level best to crack him over the head with a gnarled branch.

“What in the…” Alan heard his own shock. A babble rose from the crew, echoing his confusion.

“Hey, is this some kind of a gag?”

“What’s going on? Where’s Security?”

“Where in the hell did she come from? Is this in the script?”

“No.” Alan took a swift step. “This is a total—” Total blank. Although distance obscured her features, it was clear that this was no gag. Every motion of the girl’s body radiated terror. She thought she was fighting off a monster. Crazy. Yet riveting. Vintage “Saturday Night Live.” Her full mauve skirts danced and caught in the high grass as she tore after Dash. The black triangle of a shawl was slipping from her slight shoulders. A wisp of a bonnet wanted to tumble from her dusky hair.

“Do you know what she is? Amish!” Joan, speaking quickly, had grabbed his arm. “You know, Amish. This area is full of them.…”

“Oh, my God, she’s knocked out his eye!” Rick Lessa, his lips turning white, his breath appearing in short, angry-looking clumps of vapor, was standing straight as a rod. “Five days, I worked on that eye. I’ll kill her.”

Watching Rick take off at a run, Alan decided he really might be about to have a murder on his set. He was running after Rick when it occurred to him suddenly, surprisingly, that he was laughing, sweet, irresistible, genuine laughter.

*     *     *

Spring roared like a lion. The forest path bellowed the joy of the ripening season. The bracing air nipped at Susan Peachey. Her body seemed to be bursting with strange excitement. Exhilaration. Following the wooded trail, the children seemed to float behind her like dancing leaves. Their footsteps were nearly silent on the loamy earth, their cries filled with delight as they discovered each herald of the reawakening world. Robins had returned. Hepatica, bellwort, and wild geraniums were tucked like smiles in forest corners. Pussy willows grew like soft silver kittens on arching boughs.

Susan bent, calling the youngest children to her, putting her hand under the curling leaf of a jack-in-the-pulpit to uncover the tiny green figure below.

Without warning, the forest in front of her exploded in a violent shower of nodding branches. From the epicenter, something rose—a beast… a creature… a thing of nightmares.

She froze in horror.

The monster’s eyes burned, twin flames in the pit of a carbon-black face. Under each lifting arm was a membrane that opened like a bat’s wing. Its vast, hooked talons were spreading slowly. It was immense, macabre, silent.

Then, like a lightning bolt, it lunged at her and the children. Terror ripped a scream from her throat.

Susan had no time to think, no time to decide why the nightmare creature stalked a forest where she often walked. No time to plan strategies. She only knew that it was terrible, and savage, and she threw herself between it and the seventeen children who were in her care. It never would have entered her head to act in any other way.

She had chased it twenty feet into the clearing and hit it twice when it spoke.

“It’s a costume, lady! A costume!” it said quite clearly.

She’d scarcely taken in that it had a voice when she realized that the peaceful meadow she had known all of her twenty-five years was filling with the strangest human beings she had ever seen. And they were running at her, yelling. A reed-thin person with spiky orange hair and a golden earring was having to be physically restrained.

“Let me at her, dammit. Five days of work…” he said with rasping fury.

Susan staggered backward. The grass seemed to shudder under her feet. The stick dropped from her numbing fingers, and she frantically ushered up a prayer.

The crowd swept apart to admit a man who passed through in a way that showed her the projection of power before it showed her the source. The man stopped not ten feet from her, and she had scattered impressions of height and graceful limbs. The breeze riffled through his thick, dark hair, stroking it.

His features were full of expression, more than she could absorb, revealing the complexity of the man within. Emotion played with captivating lightness on the clean contours of his face. His mouth was an elegant stretch, the span wide, the corners uplifted in a tender crook. But his eyes held secrets that took hold of her. They were a soft, very clear hue that so intermixed green and blue, it became impossible to discern the shade. The color was brilliant, the effect lavish, startling in its lightness against the sun-gilded richness of his skin. His gaze probed gently, briefly touching her body, stealing her breath. There was nothing left of innocence in those eyes, she thought.

“Not a child, after all,” he said, his eyes continuing their slow warming.

She had never heard a voice like his—soft, the tonal quality harmonic, the vowels silky and spread, perhaps the residue of an accent from the American south. Only perhaps. She had little acquaintance with non-Amish tongues.

From her posture of frozen shock she watched him half-turn to the man with the earring and say in that soft, seductive tone, “Let’s let her escape without violence this time. ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ ”

“A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye,” said the man with the golden earring, shaking off his captors.

“Possibly. But if anyone’s going to yell at her, it’s going to be me,” he said.

He began to walk toward her, not quickly, not with a threat to his stride, but her sense of disorientation was so profound that she swung her body defensively backward. Something solid connected with her ankle. She lost her balance and fell, landing on her hip. Stunned, she inhaled the marshy perfume from the bruised grass around her as a chilly dew began to seep through her skirts. She caught sight of the thing that had caused her fall. Her hand, her hem, and one of her feet were resting on the ravaged and bloody remains of a human being.

She couldn’t cry out—or escape.

Through the paralyzing agony of pity and terror, she saw wildly that the man with light eyes was covering his face with one beautifully gloved hand, shaking his head, making a gesture of mock weeping, commanding softly, “Curt, stand up before you give her a coronary.”

Under her hand and foot she felt the damaged flesh stir, then tense. Her hands were clenched under the arc of her rib cage, pressing into her frantic stomach. The ruined body stood with a young man’s grace and gave her a smile.

“It’s not what you think.” The compelling voice came closer, then the light-eyed man knelt, facing her. “This man is an actor. And though you won’t be able to tell it now, or when he rolls out of bed in the morning, he’s not dead.” He directed a brief glance over his shoulder. “Joe, will you hand me some blood?” He turned back with a cup in his hand. “Fake blood. You see? You can taste the alcohol base.”

His light eyes beating into her, he touched the cup to his wayward, smiling mouth and took a healthy swallow of the red fluid inside.

“Of course, it’s much better with orange juice,” he said, offering her the cup. “Try some—you’ll see. Fake.”

For a moment she was convinced she was going to be ill, and she bent the force of her will to keep that from happening. He must have seen—perhaps she turned green—because he removed the cup and offered his hand instead.

“I’m Alan Wilde, overlord of all this madness.”

Susan watched his fingers surround hers, the supple glove leather imparting the deep warmth of his body. His grip was surprisingly strong, the tips of his fingers lightly stroking her tender inner wrist. Tattered heartbeats filled her throat.

“I’m sorry you had to stumble on us like this. To ward off the sane we hire security people, but they seem to have made themselves invisible. Are you all right?”

He released her hand, his fingertips trailing a slow caress over the contour of her palm, between her fingers. Her heartbeats grew quicker. Every rational process of thought had been engulfed by five minutes that went beyond the total of her life experience. Every sensation was heightened and stinging. Through the wreckage of her reason, she saw his brilliant, curious gaze fasten on her, searching, searching. It was as though they were alone together, and she realized with a jolt that he was finding her as foreign and puzzling as she found him. They were close only physically, an illusion of space. Their diverse cultures parted them, two strangers facing each other across a vast chasm. Inside his easy study of her she read prejudgment, studious interest, and something that might, on the deepest plane, have been ridicule. In spite of that, multiplying her shock, she felt the unfamiliar response of her body as it welcomed his touch.

Retreating from that knowledge, and from the gathering bitter embarrassment over what she could now see was her idiocy in front of these strangers, Susan demanded motion and support from her uncertain limbs, and rose unsteadily to her feet. The monster took an instant protective posture behind Alan Wilde, the huge form exaggerating a cringe.

Susan Peachey felt the rush of painful color to her face.

She faced the monster, trying to look with something like composure into one of its remaining bloodshot eyes. “I can see…” The words faded as her throat muscles constricted from tension. She took a breath and tried again. “I can see that I’ve made a terrible mistake. If there are any amends I can make—” The heat from the blush became suffocating. Desperation or some more complicated emotion, one that she couldn’t name, made her look sideways, her gaze arrested by Wilde’s amused expression. Again she experienced that deep tug on her senses.

In that moment her mind cleared. Actors. Fake things. Actors. A glance at the hillside showed her the black box of a camera, the lens glaring down at her like the eye of some malevolent idol. She knew cameras. They intruded without care or compassion into the intimate passage of Amish life. They had come to John’s funeral, feeding on the long, somber line of buggies. The sharp spots of heat in her cheeks turned to ice.

Her dignity returned in a flood. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t cover her face. As though it were happening to someone else, she heard her own voice give her name, and the direction of her home in case there were damages they wished to assess against her. Once more she issued an apology, this time resisting those light, translucent eyes, though she sensed the caress of their interest. That man’s gaze must have followed her as she turned, because tiny eerie sparks played along her nerves. She began to run toward the children, where they stood saucer-eyed in the bushes, the youngest seeking refuge in the arms of the older ones. She swept up little Deborah, who was tearful, and led the others swiftly with her into the forest.

*     *     *

He continued to stare after her, fascinated, though the branches disturbed by her flying skirts had folded back into place, closing behind her like a turnstile to another world. Susan Peachey. Her name was so apt.

The director of photography joined Wilde. The D.P.’s cap was pulled down further, his collar was turned up, and the wadded handkerchief he was pressing crossly to his nose had reached a critical stage of saturation.

“Amish,” he said, briskly sniffing. “And they say we have all the nuts in California. Alan, if you want another take we’ll have to do it again tomorrow. Lessa says he’ll be awake all night getting the monster prettied up again.”

Wilde ended his dreamlike study of the misted trees. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll use the footage we’ve got. Tell them to go ahead and print it.”

“I already have. Do you know we had film rolling until about a minute ago? I told them to cut it and print everything up to Dash’s great leap from the bushes. Is that okay?”

Wilde recaptured the image of an earnest figure in long skirts, her face upturned in solemn apology to a monster, and remembered his own unfettered laughter. “No. Print everything.”

“What’s the point?” Max asked, face buried in innocent misery in the depths of his handkerchief. “Why spend the money to have a piece of film processed that has no earthly purpose—”

“I hire you to carry out my decisions, not debate them,” Wilde said sharply. “Print every foot of film whether you think it has an earthly purpose or not.”

Max’s brow furrowed in amazement. Wilde was surprised himself at his own uncharacteristic flare of temper. Life was an intangible disappointment, and he often felt a nagging inner impatience with things, but he usually restrained it behind a shield of cool, practiced humor. But here was the impatience, rising to the surface like steam.

Max fed the handkerchief into his coat pocket and gave his director a doleful look that asked: why, if you have to be difficult, do you do it on a day when I have a bad cold? He said aloud, “You want a print from it, you’ll get a print from it. We’ll print you the damned leader if you want. Satisfaction guaranteed.”

Wilde smiled a brief retraction of the anger, and when Max’s expression thawed he began to walk up the hill, draping an arm around the older man’s shoulders. The dispassionate narrator of his life pulled back again and observed with regret that there was little kindness in the affectionate gesture, that it sprang from a desire to charm and control.

Can you cure cynicism or is it a terminal condition? he wondered, and began, with inner desperation, to coolly tease Max, telling him all the ways that his cold was going to get pampered back at the hotel—chicken soup, bed, hot toddies…

Satisfaction guaranteed. Satisfaction had become like happiness to him—elusive.

They screened film in the hotel library, a room that Alan had decided could be appreciated only by people whose tastes ran to heavy doses of Hemingway masculinity. The stuffed wildlife mounted on the walls was a maid’s nightmare. Ben Rose, the producer, had said he hadn’t seen so much oak paneling since Perry Mason’s courtroom went off the air. They were already in Dutch with the management because someone on the crew had painted shark fins into the duck-pond landscape, and an elk’s head had been filched from the wall and lashed to the nose of a caterer’s van.

Wilde sat in a leather armchair watching the rushes from the day’s filming. A ribbon of smoke rose from the cigarillo forgotten in his lax fingers and funneled into the wall-to-wall haze. He’d had bad news this afternoon. Ulcer-making news. Carrie Tippett, his female star—if you could put a label like “star” on a twenty-two-year-old who wore a retainer and spent the day playing Angry Birds and tweeting ungrammatical messages to her fans—had put herself into the hospital after a careless experiment with heroin.

He’d worked with Carrie twice. She was not stupid, but her surgically enhanced features had little elasticity. The “face” couldn’t act and the girl knew it. For Wilde’s movies it didn’t matter. Shakespeare this wasn’t. He needed two things from a woman: great looks and great screams. Carrie knew she would never have more to offer a director, and it produced anxiety within her that ticked like a time-charge. On the phone this afternoon with Carrie’s agent, Alan had gotten the bad news at about the same time that she should have been arriving from California for a two-day settling in before they began shooting her scenes on Monday. He’d responded with a moment of some little-practiced emotion that resembled heart-struck pity, but it had passed swiftly to anger as soon as he’d learned Carrie was going to recover.

“Next time she wants to try to kill herself,” he had said gently into the phone, “tell her to pick a time when she’s not lead in one of my movies.”

The anger had continued in several variations through most of dinner. A waiter in a white jacket had been attempting to serve him coffee, when he had risen abruptly, going to the temporary location office to phone Los Angeles and order Carrie three hundred dollars’ worth of flowers, with a note attached sending his love and promising her a part in his next movie. Outside the office, he heard two of the production assistants whispering.

“Three hundred dollars. Ah-hah. Think he’s sleeping with her?”

He returned to the dining room, drank his cold coffee, and made soothing remarks to Ben, who was wringing his hands over what they were going to do for a female lead. Every day the crew was idle would cost them greatly.

It was a crisis, so Wilde became calm. In fact, he became so calm that Ben remarked acidly that if he mellowed out any more, he was likely to need CPR.

The calm lingered during the rushes until the final footage, when a girl in Amish clothing ran from the bushes, chasing his monster. He watched it to the end, and then spoke over his shoulder to the projectionist.

“Let me see it again.”

“We’ve got our first clip for the out-takes,” Dash said, sliding into the seat beside Alan as the scene began to flicker over the screen a second time. He removed the cigarillo from Alan’s fingers, dragged on it, and put it back.

“Thought you’d quit,” Dash said.

“I have. I’m just holding it.”

“It’s been in your mouth twice.”

“Just keeping it lit.”

Alan watched the girl run across the frame, and tried to assimilate the clamor she caused in his body. What have we here? Love at first sight? Fascination with the exotic? Infatuation? Lust? He knew himself fairly well, so he settled with resignation for lust.

His first thought was that she moved like a dancer. But he had lived with dancers, and he knew that when they weren’t dancing they weren’t always graceful. In this girl, every motion played with space, every line seemed merry, like a willow in the wind.

Film adored her face. She had amazing skin, the almost mythical ivory complexion of classic literature. An inner luminosity seemed to shine through the rich, pale color. Five or six freckles were scattered over a small, straight nose. And her mouth—Lord, that mouth. The lips were soft as a child’s, the shape and color erotically evocative. He wanted to edge them with his thumb. He wanted to film her in a love scene, move in tight with a camera, cover a thirty-foot screen with her parted lips. Under escaping dark curls and black velvet brows, her eyes were sweetly brown, acorns with sparkles.

The scene changed. Wilde saw himself come into the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, looking half frozen, his ghost of a smile dripping patronage. I should see myself on film more often. It reads me.

He looked back at the girl in the fil