How to Land a Movie Star novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Table Read
Hedy sits in the cast table read as the villain's target and answers her herself, then finds a new photo labeled 'Kept'.
"A girl can guess," Saskia said, and hung up.
Corin put the phone face down in the cup holder.
He didn't look at me, and I didn't look at him.
The freeway went by outside.
I slept in his guest room that night with the door locked and a chair under the handle.
In the morning there was a blue mug on the steel counter and a note in square capitals.
"COFFEE. THE GREY MUG IS MINE. DON'T."
I used the grey mug on purpose, and I washed it afterward, and I felt better than I had in two days.
The table read for THE LONG HARBOR was at ten, in a conference room on the studio lot with a view of a parking structure.
Fourteen people sat around a table the length of a bowling lane.
The director sat at one end, a tired woman with a clipboard and a travel pillow around her neck.
The executive in the grey vest sat at the other end, where he could see everybody's faces.
Marj had told me to sit at the far side of the room, in the corner, and read the stage directions aloud.
It's the lowest chair in the building.
It's where they put the person who says "The door opens" and "She crosses to the window," so the actors don't have to.
I took it with my script in both hands.
Corin sat in the middle of the table with his black coat folded over the back of his chair.
He had not looked at me since I came in, which felt like a kindness and a courtesy and a lie.
Saskia Lund came in four minutes late.
She wore a gold sequin jacket at ten in the morning.
Her silver-white hair was cropped so short it showed the shape of her skull.
Everyone at the table straightened up.
She went around the room kissing air beside people's faces.
When she got to the corner where I sat, she stopped.
"Oh," she said warmly. "You're the one."
"I'm the reader," I said.
"I'm sure you're a great many things."
The table had gone very quiet.
The director studied her clipboard.
"Saskia, sit, please," she said.
Saskia sat directly across from Corin, and she smiled at him.
"I think it's brave of the studio to keep her on," she said to the table at large. "Most places would find somebody less photographed."
Somebody coughed.
The executive in the grey vest examined the ceiling.
I felt every one of my curls try to leave my head.
Then I felt something else, which was four years of waiting rooms.
It was every actor who had ever called me Heather.
"Page nine," Corin said, in a flat voice from the middle of the table.
It was not an answer, only a way of ending the conversation.
He wasn't going to speak for me.
I understood that with a cold, clear relief, and it was the first thing about him I trusted.
"I'm sorry, Ms. Lund," I said, loudly enough for the whole table, "you're right."
Her smile held.
"I'll do my best to be less photographed. I understand you're the expert on that." I turned a page. "By appointment."
Someone at the far end made a noise.
The director put her hand over her mouth.
Saskia's eyes went flat and bright at the same time.
"Page nine," I said pleasantly. "Stage direction. 'The widow slaps the keeper.'"
I read it aloud in a voice so dry it could have been dusted for fingerprints.
"'He does not move.'"
Corin did not move.
At the corner of his mouth, so small only I was close enough to see, a muscle jumped.
We read all one hundred and four pages.
Saskia was good, and I hated that she was good.
She cried in the second act without anyone asking her to, and the whole room leaned toward her.
Corin read the keeper in the same low, level voice he had used to tell the studio executive to go away.
When he got to the line about the lighthouse going dark, the room stopped breathing.
I forgot to read a stage direction.
The director said, "Hedy?" gently, and I said, "The door opens," and half the table smiled at me.
At the end, people stood and stretched and picked up phones.
The executive in the grey vest passed my chair and said quietly, "You're lucky he's useful to us."
"I know," I said. "I've seen the numbers."
That wasn't true, but I liked how it landed.
My phone buzzed in my hand.
It was Wills, again, and this time he had sent a screenshot with no words.
The new photograph had been taken through a windshield.
It showed the cab of a black truck at a red light.
A man's big hand rested on the wheel, and a small woman looked out the passenger window with her curls coming down.
The caption read simply:
"Kept."
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