Feast of Saints (7 page)

As she stood there watching their conversation, she appraised Jake. He did look different. With dawning horror she realized why. He’d lost at least thirty pounds. He was as sleek as a fashion model. He was attractive before, but now he was finely tuned and cut, ultra-slim for filming. How could she have been so stupid? She should have asked him about any plans to change his appearance for the role. And she should have done that a month ago.

She’d have to start all over with the major molds, she thought, surveying him closely. She could probably salvage the completed work on his hands and feet, which were simple tendon and nail appliances, but she’d have to make another lifecast of his face and chest. Her mind was racing, trying to calculate how much time she had, what she could save of her current materials and what absolutely had to be redone. As she stared at the new Jake, she mentally tape measured his shoulders, chest and waist.

She’d spent so much time with his plaster cast, she could well imagine, even with his shirt on, how different he looked underneath. His muscles would be sinewy and long, his pectorals flat plates instead of rounded mounds. His abs would stand out like a metal washboard.

Everything about him was starkly angular, including his cheekbones, jaw and brow. As she mentally registered the changes in his physical appearance, Lilly had a rush of a much better vision of him artistically.

The concept she had worked on so hard was based on a much bulkier Jake, and most of the elements of the design played up his muscle mass. Bulkier Jake had inspired a design that amplified physical aggression. In her new vision, she would take full advantage of the cutting angles to create a much more refined and sinister character, more in tune with Nolan’s esoteric screenplay.

However, it was going to take some major adjustments, and the boards she’d so proudly showed off last night to Greg, currently leaning against the wall outside the conference room, were all wrong.

She was so focused on the work cut out for her that she almost didn’t hear when Phillip finally decided to introduce her to Monty.

“Mr. Davidson, it’s a real pleasure,” she said, extending her hand, which was tiny and swallowed in the director’s beefy grasp. “I’m honored to be working on this project, and grateful to Mr. Greer for recommending me.”

She should probably say something complimentary about Jake Durant, but she just couldn’t think of anything nice to say about him at the moment. Maybe it wasn’t his fault that her presentation was completely wrecked, but it was hard not to feel resentful that he didn’t think to tell her what he planned. What did he think she was going to do with all those molds of him? Go home and play Playdoh?

She had come prepared to present her concepts at this meeting, but now they didn’t convey at all her new, supremely better, vision of this character. Getting out of the meeting without having to show her design was going to be tricky.

Lilly ended up being saved by the errant Maya who, shadowed by the young woman from the table outside, showed up ten minutes later. Lilly had spent the ten minutes lobbing softballs at Monty about his past work and his vision for this film, making sure he kept talking so that she wouldn’t have to.

Jake said little as she repeatedly diverted the conversation each time it threatened to come back to her special effects concepts for his character. When Maya showed up, Monty looked at Lilly apologetically. She hopped out of her chair like a jack-in-the-box and picked up her purse, signaling that she understood that Maya took precedence and that it was no inconvenience for a below liner like herself to reschedule. Nobody bothered to introduce her to Maya Trent as she made her way out the door.

However, once in the hall, Lilly stopped short. She couldn’t leave yet. She couldn’t delay even an afternoon rescheduling the lifecast session with Jake. The two people she needed to do that, Phillip and Jake, were virtually impossible to reach by phone, but they were sitting right behind the now closed conference room door.

Admitting what had happened was going to make her appear inexperienced and unprofessional in Jake’s eyes, but she saw no other choice but to wait for him to come out and ask to speak with him. It’s not like she could hit him over the head and cast him while he lay unconscious, as appealing as the thought was.

She sat down to wait and texted Greg that it could be a while. “Going good?” was his reply. Lilly, who felt sick to her stomach, didn’t respond, knowing he’d think that she couldn’t because she was still in the meeting.

Surprisingly, the door opened in under thirty minutes. If Monty was still put out with Maya Trent, it didn’t show. He was all smiles when he turned to the table girl and commanded, “Shut it down, we’re done for the day.”

Monty, Maya and Phillip were talking about a drink in the lounge and headed toward the stairs, with Jake a few paces behind.

For a moment, Lilly just watched him. Something about Jake’s whole being compelled attention. His stride was consistently fluid, each movement tied to the next. If you were to freeze-frame him at any given point for a candid shot, he would still look as elegant as if he’d posed for a portrait.

Now or never, she thought, standing up from her perch on the edge of the settee in the little seating area across from the conference room. Her knees were knocking in earnest now.

“Mr. Durant?” Lilly called softly, trying not to attract Monty’s attention. Jake looked back, then raised his brows in surprise when he saw who had called his name. He redirected his path toward her. The other three were at the stairs before they realized Jake had peeled off. At Phillip’s look, Jake waved him on, saying he’d be down in five minutes.

Turning back to her, Jake gave her a hard stare and cut right to the chase, “You’ve had a month. How far along are you?” The attitude he projected was not of an actor slash client. Jake owned the controlling interest in Mjicon, which had contracted with her for this film. His tone and his choice of words made it clear that he was speaking to her as her boss’s boss.

Lilly stood her ground. “You might have mentioned during the three hours I spent making casts of you that you were going to drop thirty pounds. None of the concepts I designed work with the
new
you
,” she said, gesturing to all of him.

When he placed his hands on his hips to scoff at her, she rushed on, trying for a more conciliatory tone, “I’m not complaining. This is better. It’s going to be much better.”

Exciting, too, she thought, a fact that she had realized as she cooled her heels the last half hour. The unsettling disconnect that had troubled her while working up the design for this character had drained away. In her mind she could see how ultra-cool the minimalist applications were going to look on him. He was going to be fabulous.

Thinking of Becky’s “creepy sexy” comment, she would revise it to five percent creepy, ninety-five percent art house sexy. Beckham meets Bowie sexy.

“Can we go in the conference room for a few minutes? I know you told Phillip five minutes, but can you give me ten and just let me make some notes?”

Without further ado, Jake pulled out his phone and texted. “You’ve got fifteen,” he told her.

Lilly walked to the portfolio she had left unopened just outside the conference room door, hoisted the strap over her shoulder and headed into the room. Jake followed and shut the door behind them.

Setting the case against the wall, she turned to Jake and asked without preliminaries, “Would you mind terribly taking your shirt off?”

Without questioning her, he walked to stand by the conference room table and slowly unbuttoned his shirt, shrugged it off and laid it over the chair he’d been sitting in earlier.

“Um…” she bit her lip, looking at his undershirt, “T-shirt, too?”

In a languorous, mesmerizing move, Jake pulled the undershirt over his head and draped it next to his dress shirt.

“Pants, too?” he asked with an ironic twist of his mouth.

For a moment, her mind simply blanked. She blinked twice, willing away the sudden fogginess in her brain. “No, no, this is fine. Thanks.”

Lilly stepped closer to study Jake’s torso, striving for dispassionate professionalism. Thinking of all the times she’d run her hands over his plaster torso in her studio at home, she had to press her fingernails into her palms to keep from reaching for him now.

Groaning silently inside, it dawned on her that the last few weeks obsessing over him might have been prompted by more than just a good work ethic.

Hastily, she turned away and unzipped the large black portfolio case. She pulled out the collapsible easel and one of the boards – the one with the full frontal of Jake in his prior incantation – setting it on the easel so that the artwork faced away from him, toward her. Standing behind the foam board where Jake couldn’t see her face, she let out a silent puff of air and breathed in deeply to settle herself. Then she bent down to the case and pulled out several charcoal pencils from an inside pocket. Straightening and peering around the board at Jake like he was a model at an artist’s studio, Lilly began defacing her hard work.

She worked in a fury of long strokes, short strokes and smudges, pausing often to peer at Jake and occasionally licking her pencil tip to darken it for added definition on some of the bolder elements. Jake moved to lounge against the tabletop and pulled out his phone to scroll through texts and emails while Lilly intermittently paused to appraise his half naked body. He seemed utterly insouciant.

When her flurry of drawing slowed and she became more focused on her canvas than him, he pushed off the table and came to stand beside her. Jake opened his mouth to speak, but she shushed him as she made the last few changes.

She talked as she sketched, “It’s rough, I know, but I just wanted to get the outlines down. You can see how detailed my original was… well, you could if I hadn’t drawn all over it. The final will look that finished.

“When you looked more like a normal, albeit hunky, male,” she said, with a disparaging sidelong look at his silky slim torso, “I thought my design should exaggerate male violence. I’m afraid I’ll need to make new molds of your chest, back and face. I can work with some of what I have, but some of it….” She turned to Jake, who was frowning down at her intently, “Well, I think I’ve got enough to get started,” she tapered off.

“Is something wrong?” she asked when he remained silent.

Not sure she wanted to hear the answer but compelled to ask, “You don’t like it?”

Jake didn’t answer right away, making her even more nervous. “That’s not it,” he said finally.

So he didn’t not like it. Suddenly, it struck her that she had never asked him his vision of the character. Although he might like her designs, he could have a very different vision of how Allegrezza should appear. She’d focused on Jake’s physical form as a living canvas for her design, not as a person, an actor, whose job it was to adapt his whole body and mind for the role.

She mentally kicked herself again. He, not she, would be the one to make this character come to life. If he didn’t connect with her imagery, she realized, this wasn’t going to work.

Lilly stuck her pencil behind her ear, reached down and pulled out a second board that was a close up of his face. Tugging her pencil from behind her ear, she directed Jake’s attention to the rendition of his face.

“These elements have to go,” she said, picking up a rubber eraser and scrubbing over the scowling brow applications. Although her applications were a creative improvement over the mainstream vampire look, they were still somewhat typical, playing off aggression rather than cunning. With her new vision and Jake’s new look, they felt overdone.

“I’m going to get rid of most of the facial applications. With the right highlights, your bone structure is going to be dramatic enough. See… like this,” she said, shading around his eyes with the pencil.

Turning to Jake’s actual face, she traced her finger over the jutting surfaces of his cheekbones; then, turning back to the board, she erased some of the color over the bones to highlight them and used the charcoal pencil to deepen the hallows of his cheeks with shading.

“I want to play up your new look just enough to give the hint of a skull,” she said, “but not so much that you actually look skeletal.”

She looked from him to the board and mused, “I’m going to have to get to know the lighting engineers.”

Picking up an eraser, she rubbed it under the arch of Jake’s brow on the board, lightening the colors of the original. “We’ll highlight here,” she said, touching the same area on Jake’s face, “and shadow here,” she said, running her fingertip over her own eyelids.

“I’ll have to do something about your broken nose because it messes with the facetted look, but I think I can do that with highlights and shading, rather than applications…. Maybe one small filler, here,” she touched the spot directly above the slight bump of his nose, which, to her trained eye, had been broken once long ago and corrected, maybe before he could afford the best plastic surgeon in LA.

She turned back toward the drawing and, licking the pencil to create a darker line, altered the shape of his eyebrows, changing them from an angry V to a refined arch that completed the transformation of the character from brutish to smoothly cynical.

“I’ve got several ideas for your hair that I’ll have to go over with the stylist. All of them are traditional, but severe. Nothing spikey or trendy. I’d already planned on lightening your skin tone, but I’m going to move more toward the blue scale,” she said.

She didn’t bring any color pencils, so she described what she felt needed to be conveyed. As she talked, she occasionally sketched – tweaking the outline of his lips, shading under his jawline, highlighting his Adam’s apple.

“In the book, this villain is an unrelenting monster. But the screenplay has him interacting with humans in a way that inspires a hope of redemption. The contrast had me thinking of an Allegrezza who regrets what he has become and acts out in aggression as an outlet for his frustration and self-loathing. But that’s too sloppy now. You look so ethereal,” she said, staring into the eyes of his portrait and using her pencil to lighten the center of his irises and darken their rims.