The Whore's Child

“When I was inside, I was trying to remember the word for what you are. Laura told me, but I forgot.”
    â€œCuckold?” Martin suggested.
    Robert Trevor didn’t respond right away. This was a man whose equilibrium did not tilt easily, and Martin found himself admiring that. His eyes were a piercing, pale blue. Laura, naked, had allowed him to turn them on her. “Now
there’s
a Renaissance word for you,” Trevor said finally. “A Renaissance notion, actually.”
    â€œYou think so?” Martin said, pressing what he felt should have been his advantage. “Have you ever been married, Robert?”
    â€œNever,” the painter admitted. “Flawed concept, I always thought.”
    â€œSome might say it’s people who are flawed, not the concept.”
    Robert Trevor looked off in the distance as if he were considering the merit of Martin’s observation, but then he said, “Gaffer! That’s what you are. You’re a gaffer.”
    Martin had to restrain a smile. Clearly, if he’d come all this way in hopes of an apology, he was going to be disappointed. The good news was that this was not—he was pretty sure—what he had come for.
    â€œLaura explained it all to me one afternoon,” Trevor explained.
    â€œActually, I’m a D.P. now,” Martin said, and was immediately ashamed of his need to explain that he’d come up in the world.
    Trevor frowned. “Dip?” he said. “You’re a dip, Martin?”
    â€œDirector of photography.”
    â€œAh,” the other man said. “I guess that makes you an artist.”
    â€œNo,” Martin said quietly. “Merely a technician.”
    He’d been called an artist, though. Peter Axelrod considered him one. He’d gotten an urgent call from Peter one night a few years ago, asking Martin to come to the set where he was shooting a picture that starred a famously difficult actor. It was a small film, serious in content and intent, and for the first three weeks the director and star had been embroiled in a quiet struggle. The actor was determined to give a performance that would be hailed as masterfully understated. To Peter’s way of thinking, his performance, to this point, was barely implied. Worse, the next day they’d be shooting one of the pivotal scenes.
    Martin found his old friend sitting alone in a makeshift theater near the set, morosely studying the dailies. Martin took a seat in the folding chair next to him and together they watched take after take. After half an hour, Peter called for the lights. “There’s nothing to choose from,” he complained, rubbing his forehead. “He does the same thing every fucking take, no matter what I suggest.”
    To Martin, perhaps because he could focus on one thing while his friend had to juggle fifty, the problem was obvious. “Don’t argue with him. He’s just going to dig his heels in deeper, the way they all do. You want a star performance, light him like a star, not like a character actor.”
    Peter considered this advice for all of about five seconds. “Son of a
bitch,
” he said. “David’s in cahoots with him, isn’t he.” David, a man Martin knew well, was Peter’s D.P. on the film. “I should shit-can the prick and hire you right this second.”
    Martin, of course, had demurred. The following week he was starting work on another picture, and Peter’s offer wasn’t so much literal as symbolic, a token to his gratitude. “You just saved this picture,” he told Martin out on the lot. “In fact, you just saved me.”
    The two men were shaking hands then, when Peter remembered. “I was sorry to hear about Laura,” he said, looking stricken. “It must have been awful.”
    â€œPretty bad,” Martin admitted. “She weighed about eighty pounds at the end.”
    The two men looked around the lot. “Movies,” the director said, shaking his head. “I wonder what we’d have done if we’d decided to live real lives and have real careers.”
    â€œYou love movies,” Martin pointed out.
    â€œI know,” Peter had admitted. “God help me, I do.”
    â€œMerely a technician,” Trevor repeated now, improbably seated across from Martin on the opposite coast. He’d already drained half his beer, while Martin, never a beer drinker, had barely touched his.