Maybe the Moon

was from Neil, saying he missed me—but another, later at night, when I was almost asleep. It was Callum, asking if I’d like to be his guest on the set of Gut Reaction . They were shooting a crucial scene, and he thought it might be fun for me to observe. That’s what he said, anyway.
    And get this: he sent a limousine for me. This vulgar white barge that looked as if it could accommodate a Jacuzzi pulled up outside the house after breakfast. Renee cooed and swooned over it, then ran back to my room to get my sunglasses. I put them on just to please her, but they felt so right somehow that I left them on for the ride to Icon. The driver was a buff blond named Marc, who pumped me shamelessly about my function at the studio. I wasn’t about to bill myself as a sightseer, so I took the easy way out and played mysterious. “Played” is the wrong word, really; I was beginning to feel mysterious.
    I could tell we’d reached the gate when I heard Marc talking to the guard. In an eerie flash of déjà vu, I conjured up the days whenMom and I had done this very thing in the old Fairlane, bound for Stage 6 and the green plastic realm of Mr. Woods. It wasn’t the same guard, of course—the voice seemed younger—but I got a little shiver, anyway. I remembered my maiden visit: the first time I’d seen a backdrop stacked against a building (a piece of snow-covered alp) and spotted a star’s name (Mary Steenburgen) on a trailer and caught the rich, tarty scent of gardenias growing in the dust outside the commissary.
    The driver took me to Stage 11, where I was met by a young production assistant named Kath—not Kathy, but Kath, she told me after I got it wrong—who led me into the dim, cavernous building and helped me into a deck chair near the action. Callum was in this scene, she said, which was taking way longer than expected, which, of course, was nothing new in this business. Her sweetly condescending tone annoyed me, so I nodded solemnly to show her I already knew a thing or two about this business, thank you, and the delays it entails. I wondered what Callum had told her about me.
    The set was the psycho’s apartment, a city loft stocked with fifties furniture and barbells and—yes, Jeff—a poster of Judy Garland. It’s night. The only light comes from a Lava lamp and a strip of green neon blazing beyond the big, grease-streaked windows. Callum kneels outside the door, jimmying the lock in his cop’s uniform. The psycho hears him and rushes to open a hatch in the floor, revealing the coffin-sized space where Callum’s terrified kid brother lies captive.
    In mounting panic, the psycho gags the boy with something that looks like an S & M device—a black-leather-and-chrome hood—then closes the hatch and pulls a Persian carpet over it. Clad only in a jockstrap, he shinnies up the wall into the shadows. Callum enters cautiously and crosses the shadowy room, stopping over the very spot where his brother struggles to be heard. The set is revealed in cross-section, so that the camera can move in one seamless, stomach-churning motion from the boy in the box to his oblivious brother to the fiend crouched above them both, watching it all from the rafters.
    So far, according to Kath, there had been over a dozen takes, for reasons apparent to no one except the director. He was a real stickler, she said, a perfectionist of the old school. The cast was punchy as a result. When the psycho accidentally demolished a statue of David with a lethal flourish of the Persian rug, the kid under the floor—who, remember, had been munching leather all morning—broke into an all-out giggling fit. It spread rapidly, catastrophically, as those things do, first to the psycho, then to the crew and almost everyone on the set. Only the ever-cool Callum was a model of composure when the director finally called glacially for “a little professionalism, please.”
    He got the shot he wanted on the nineteenth take. When they finally broke for lunch, Callum exchanged words with the guy in the jockstrap, then came over and crouched next to me. “Remind you of anything?”
    “Oh, God,” I said, rolling my eyes.
    “Exciting business.”
    I glanced at the director, hunched over a clipboard as he gave notes to an assistant. “And I thought Philip was anal.”
    Callum smiled without showing teeth, committing to nothing, remembering where his bread was buttered. “Feel like a bite to eat?”
    “The commissary?”
    He nodded. “It’s