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The door opened and Evans Kinsella came in. He was wearing a white, belted raincoat over his corduroy slacks and red polo shirt and cashmere sweater. He made no sartorial concessions to New York. His raincoat was wet. She hadn’t looked out the window for hours and didn’t know it was raining.
“Hi, girls,” Evans said. He was a tall, thin man with tousled black hair and a blue-black beard that made him look as if he needed a shave at all times. His enemies said he looked like a wolf. Gretchen varied between thinking he was alertly handsome and Jewishly ugly, although he was not a Jew. Kinsella was his real name. He had been in analysis for three years. He had already made six pictures, three of which had been very successful. He was a lounger. As soon as he entered a room he leaned against something or sat on a desk, or if there were a couch handy lay down and put his feet up. He was wearing suede desert boots.
He kissed Ida on the cheek, then Gretchen. He had made one picture in Paris and had learned to kiss everybody there. The picture had been disastrous. “A foul day,” he said. He swung himself up on one of the high, metal cutting benches. He made a point of seeming at home wherever he was. “We got in two set-ups this morning and then the rains came. Just as well. Hazen was drunk by noon.” Richard Hazen was the male star of the picture. He was always drunk by noon. “How’s it going here?” Evans asked. “We ready to run?”
“Just about,” Gretchen said. She was sorry she hadn’t realized how late it was. She would have done something about her hair and put on fresh make-up to be ready for Evans. “Ida,” she said, “will you take the last sequence with you and tell Freddy to run it after the rushes?”
They went down the hall to the small projection room at the end of the corridor. Evans pinched her arm secretly. “Gretchen,” he said, “beautiful toiler in the vineyards.”
They sat in the darkened projection room and watched the rushes of the day before, the same scene, from different angles, done over and over again, that would one day, they hoped, be arranged into one harmonious flowing entity and be shown on huge screens in theaters throughout the world. As she watched, Gretchen thought again how Evans’ talent, kinky and oblique, showed in every foot of film he shot. She made mental notes of how she would make the first cut of the material. Richard Hazen had been drunk before noon yesterday, too, she saw. In two years nobody would give him a job.
“What do you think?” Evans asked, when the lights went up.
“You might as well quit every morning by one,” Gretchen said, “if Hazen’s working.”
“It shows, eh?” Evans was sitting slouched low in his chair, his legs over the back of the chair in front of him.
“It shows,” Gretchen said.
“I’ll talk to his agent.”
“Try talking to his bartender,” Gretchen said.
“Drink,” Evans said, “Kinsella’s curse. When drunk by others.”
The room went dark again and they watched the sequence Gretchen had been working on all day. Projected that way, it seemed even worse to Gretchen than it had been on the moviola. But when it was over and the lights went up again, Evans said, “Fine. I like it.”
Gretchen had known Evans for two years and had already done a picture with him before this one and she had come to recognize that he was too easily pleased with his own work. Somewhere in his analysis he had come to the conclusion that arrogance was good for his ego and it was dangerous to criticize him openly. “I’m not so sure,” Gretchen said. “I’d like to fiddle with it some more.”
“A waste of time,” Evans said. “I tell you it’s okay.”
Unlike most directors he was impatient in the cutting room and careless about details.
“I don’t know,” Gretchen said. “It seems to me to drag.”
“That’s just what I want right there,” Evans said. “I want it to drag.” He argued like a stubborn child.
“All those people going in and out of doors,” Gretchen persisted, “with those ominous shadows with nothing ominous happening …”
“Stop trying to make me into Colin Burke.” Evans stood up abruptly. “My name is Evans Kinsella, in case it slipped your mind, and Evans Kinsella it will remain. Please remember that.”
“Oh, stop being an infant,” Gretchen snapped at him. Sometimes the two functions she served for Evans became confused.
“Where’s my coat? Where did I leave my goddamn coat?” he said loudly.
“You left it in the cutting room.”
They went back to the cutting room together, Evans allowing her to carry the cans of film they had just run and which she picked up from the projectionist. Evans put on his coat, roughly. Ida was making out the sheet for the film they had handled that day. Evans started out of the door, then stopped and came back to Gretchen. “I had intended to ask you to have di
“I’m sorry,” Gretchen said. “My brother’s coming to pick me up. I’m going up to his place for the weekend.”
Evans looked forlorn. He was capable of sixty moods a minute. “I’m free as a bird this weekend. I’d hoped we could …” He looked over at Ida, as though he wished she were out of the room. Ida continued working stolidly on her sheets.
“I’ll be back Sunday night in time for di
“Okay,” Evans said. “I suppose I’ll have to settle for that. Give my regards to your brother. And congratulate him for me.”
“For what?”
“Didn’t you see his picture in Look? He’s famous all over America. This week.”
“Oh, that,” Gretchen said. The magazine had run a piece under the title “Ten Political Hopefuls Under Forty,” and there had been two photographs of Rudolph, one with Jean in the living room of their house, one at his desk in the town hall. Rising fast in Republican councils, the article had said about handsome young Mayor with beautiful, rich young wife. Moderate liberal thinker, energetic administrator. Was not just another theoretical politician; had met a payroll all his life. Had streamlined town government, integrated housing, cracked down on industrial pollution, jailed former police chief and three patrolmen for accepting bribes, raised a bond issue for new schools; as influential trustee of Whitby University had been instrumental in making it a co-educational institution; far-seeing town-pla
“Reading that piece,” Gretchen said, “you’d think he’s done everything but raise the dead in Whitby. It must have been written by a lady journalist who’s wildly in love with him. He knows how to turn on the charm, my brother.”
Evans laughed. “You don’t let emotional attachments cloud your opinions of your near and dear ones, do you?”
“I just hope my near and dear ones don’t believe all the gush people write about them.”
“The barb has found its mark, sweetie,” Evans said. “I now am going home to burn all my scrapbooks.” He kissed Ida good-bye first, then Gretchen, and said, “I’ll pick you up at your hotel at seven Sunday night.”
“I’ll be there,” Gretchen said.
“Out into the lonely night,” Evans said, as he left, pulling the belt of his white raincoat tight around his slim waist, young double agent playing his dangerous game in a low-budget movie.