Radiance

Good morning, sir! I trust you slept well in the cargo bay? You missed stormrise—the great red eye is especially beautiful this time of year.

KILKENNY

I expect I shall see it again. Some small sacrifices must be made in the pursuit of one’s ambitions. I’ve seen a few rainstorms in my time. And how is your sister, Miss Mortimer? I do so miss Emily at Christmastime.

[MADAME MORTIMER’S face flushes angrily; her hand tightens on her pistol.]

MADAME MORTIMER

You know perfectly well how she is. And if you were a decent man, you’d tell me where you buried her!

The Ingénue’s Handbook

13 January, 1930, Half Past Three in the Afternoon

The Savoy, Grasshopper City, Luna

I’ve been prancing about in front of a camera for—Heavens!—twenty-two years now, so kindly invest the following statement with grave and dignified Authority.

I love wrap parties more than just about anything else in the world.

Oh, it’s lovely to plan, and lovely to work, but having worked is ever so much better. And dancing yourself silly in pearls knowing you don’t have a thing to do tomorrow is best of all! The fine and the fatigued positively sparkle with the frantic fizz of having pulled it off despite the odds—you can’t help being light on your feet with all that weight off your shoulders. It’s the party at the end of the world—the quick, fantastic world you’ve all made together, a world that now exists only on a heap of black tape in a tin can. Oh, well! On to the next one! And the funny, impish magic of a wrap party is that everyone still has scraps of their characters hanging off the

m like Salome’s veils, fluttering, fading, but not quite finished tangling the tongue and tripping the feet. You’re not in Wonderland anymore, but you positively reek of rabbit. It’s a secret, rollicking room where everything is still half make-believe. That scamp can’t stop walking like Robin Hood; that other fellow isn’t done trying to seduce you like Heathcliff; those two prizefighters might come to blows tonight because they haven’t quite scrubbed off Cain or Abel; and oh, gracious, the mischief you’ll get up to while your heart’s half Maid Marian, a squidge Cathy, a wee bit Madame Mortimer—but then, I never completely shed MM. I’ve been her almost as long as I’ve lived on the Moon, which is to say almost as long as I’ve been alive. Before the Moon, it hardly counts as living. Madame Maxine Mortimer has thoroughly rubbed off all over me. Why, just the other day, Betty Raleigh’s black pearls went missing from her dressing room and I’d locked all the doors and started interrogating suspects before I came to my senses.

Poor Betts. Her insides are nothing but sunshine and bunny tails, but she’s had a devil of a time lately. It’s intensely trying. Hartford Crane gave her those pearls right before he ran off with Yolanda Brun. The gossip rags are just full of their sopping laundry, and while Yolanda loads up her supper plate with the attention, sweet innocent Betty can hardly squeak for shame. Cheat first and cheat often, Betts, that way you’re never stuck cleaning up after your husband’s midnight snacks.

Thus we circle the point, miss it, put our car in reverse, and come round to it again, and the point is this: The Miranda Affair is in the can, along with the last, rather wobbly, decade. It’ll be Thad’s last talkie—the tide’s against us. Receipts go up the moment I shut my mouth. I’ve always liked my voice. It’s a pity MM will have to save the day with wild gesticulations, but what the people want, the people will have!

Well, never mind! The wrap party is TONIGHT. And no smoky speakeasy for our rarefied carousing, no sir! Banish silence! Tear up the title cards! My darling maestro Thaddeus has thrown us all such a treat: it’s to take place aboard his yacht on the Sea of Tranquillity! The Achelois is a grand, wasteful, brilliant beast of a thing—it’s got its own ballroom, a ninepins alley, a wine cellar fit for a bevy of Roman emperors, and Thad makes sure there’s fresh violets and a dash of snuff in everyone’s staterooms.

Or so my darling Regina tells me. This will be my maiden voyage. The yacht used to belong to Jefferson Dufresne, back when he was the King of the Historicals at Plantagenet Pictures and everyone licked his boots for the chance to fart on Bosworth Field. So Regina, my old flatmate (gosh, it feels like a thousand years ago that I had to split the rent!), got to go after she played Empress Josephine in his great big Frenchie flop. Quelle injustice! That I should have to wait until I am nearly forty, when she got to go at nineteen!

They’ll paddle us all about for a few days, and I don’t doubt we’ll all turn up on Monday with Earth-tans and hickeys. Boats practically require debauchery—why, nothing that happens aboard ship really matters! It’s a little bubble, floating free away from the world. A weak and idle theme, no more yielding but…blah blah blah. Slap that together with the divine nonsense of a wrap party and I’ll be surprised if I survive the weekend.

I plan to wear my best Plutonian buffalo fur, a ruby tiara, and not a lick else. Though at the moment I am looking quite respectable in my ecru suit and a hat with just two skinny old feathers in it. I only have this drab thing for meetings with my agent and tribulations at traffic court…bless me, but I am as clumsy as clown shoes in an automobile! But today I shall (probably) not be admonished for speeding on the Hyperion Speedway—for goodness’ sake, why call it a speedway if you aren’t meant to floor it? Today I have a perfectly ladylike luncheon date with my erstwhile stepdaughter. I’m not certain when my private little teas at the Savoy became teas for two, but I’m ever so glad they did. It’s occasionally refreshing to simply sit with someone who has known you a long while and still thinks you’re worth a damn. I suppose that’s why people have children in the first place. It’s hard to scare up such a thing, otherwise.

I do miss old Percy sometimes. Thad invited him along on the yacht, so I may rescind that statement by Sunday night. I wonder if he’ll bring a date—other than Clara? The better question is, who won’t be there? Even that bitter mongoose of a man from Places, Everyone! will get his fresh violets and snuff. I suspect Thaddeus let his secretary make the guest list. It’s chock-a-block with people who’ve nothing to do with Miranda. It’s a wrap party for my film. I do not see why both my ex-husbands should be in attendance, except that the girl who does her nails while I take my meetings thought that it would be scrumptious to see all her favourites in one spot! The Edisons are coming as well, boorish Freddy and Penelope, that fretful slip of a wife he’s got.

She wasn’t always, you know. When I met her, she was Penny Catarain, a brilliant lit fuse of a girl. A techie, good enough to get hired even with a mountain of boys ahead of her. She always gave the impression of having accidentally wandered in from a mad scientist’s conference, and felt rather desperate to get back. She worked sound on my first big studio talkie, before speaking in a flick became the equivalent of farting at a dinner party. Penny made my voice sound like a crystal fountain. But I suppose being married to an utter pig will wear a soul down to the nub. I shall make certain to get her good and sauced on the Achelois. I’ll get Mrs Edison dancing if I have to put firecrackers in her slippers.

I got Penelope alone once at the Capricorn/Plantagenet Studios treaty signing. You can’t really call it a merger when Plantagenet invaded—with a squadron of soldiers, three biplanes, and one, albeit very old and crotchety, Chinese tank—Capricorn’s backlots in order to liberate two leading men and a stack of prints being held in a vault. Those boys were nothing but an excuse, anyway, a cover to make Mr P look like the injured party. Plantagenet’s real objective was to force Cap to “sell” the rights to their marquee characters Marvin the Mongoose, the Arachnid, and Vickie VaVoom for less than I pay for stockings. I took a bullet in the shoulder over a cartoon rodent. But so it goes on the mad old Moon. I heal like a champion.

It was a jollier evening than you might expect: pink paper lanterns, extras dressed up as Marvin and Vickie signing autographs, plenty of champagne and saxophones. Penelope wore blue, I recall. We jawed about the good old days, and she got that look on again, like she’d only slipped away from her fellow mad scientists for lunch and really had to be getting back.

I took her arm. “Honey, does he beat you?”

Mrs Edison looked quite stunned. “No! Christ, what a thing to ask.”

“Then what is it? You always look like you want to lay down and become one with the floor.”

I didn’t expect an answer. I felt certain she would walk away, head high, and never speak to me again. But instead she shrugged and whispered, “He doesn’t let me work.”

People think Percy’s a vicious bear, too, but he’s not so bad. Husbands come a lot worse than mine. I often thought Percy had his head on the right way round, anyhow. It’s only what you print to film that sticks, in the end. That’s what people will see forever, not your silly, flawed memories and inelegant bumbling after happiness. The power of the final cut is what you want—and if you can make it all a little better, a little brighter, a little more symmetrical, and a touch more mysterious, well, why not do it, after all? So what if I had to do a couple of Christmas mornings over again so the light on my face looked nicer, or Sevvy could summon up a little more joy over those woolly socks? I’ve seen the film: those Christmases were glorious. Nowadays, I can only really remember them the way they looked when Percy played them back to us. It’s not the worst thing in the world, to only remember the best version of yourself.

But it is unsettling to see a child do three or four takes of Yuletide ecstasy without batting an eye, I must say.

Still, I did love him. He never minded if I wore my pyjamas for a week and didn’t brush my hair. That’s a good quality in a man. Maybe the best a girl can hope for, considering. And, by Jove, he loves that child. Did you know you can fall in love with the way a man loves someone else? It sounds all zigzagged, but it’s true. Love takes so much effort. You have to get up ever so early in the morning to really love someone properly.