Vivian paused, fork hovering when she muttered, “Who has time to clean up all that viscera?”
Flexing her jaw to avoid smiling, Vivian kept her attention on her salad. When Bryn laughed, the sound unexpectedly rich and contagious, Vivian filled her mouth with spinach.
“How do you resist jumping in the pool when it’s so hot?” Bryn asked when they’d finished eating. Head tilted back to bask in the fan’s manufactured breeze, the flush on her skin was an attractive smattering of pink rather than the red of embarrassment.
Vivian wanted to say that she hadn’t willingly lingered under direct sunlight since her early twenties. A tan wasn’t a sufficient reason to accelerate the evidence of aging. But that would bring attention to her age. A topic she would rather not consider.
“So you’ve already read the entire book?” Bryn asked, a hand running through her choppy shoulder-length hair. “How do you stay in the moment?” She adjusted her curtain bangs before propping her elbows on the table.
Vivian couldn’t distill a lifetime of acting training and experience into a pithy response. She picked up her water glass, the outside damp and the ice melted. She did her best to answer Bryn’s question.
“It is not my job tostay in the moment.” She corrected the faulty premise first. “It is my job to know Jo, not to guess at her. To know her history, her choices, and ultimately, her fate. To know her so completely that when I’m in the booth, I’m seeing through her eyes and feeling through her skin and tasting with her lips.” She set down her glass and tried an analogy. “Imagine a concert pianist learning a symphony one movement at a time so the crescendo can surprise them.” She shook her head. “They learn the entire piece. Master every note, every rest, every shift. They internalize the composer’s full story until it bleeds from their fingertips. And then, they play.”
Bryn looked at her like she’d forgotten how to swallow or blink or breathe. Vivian couldn’t help herself. She’d accidentally monologued and had to go in for the kill. Viscera be damned.
“What you’re chasing… that moment of genuine reaction… doesn’t come fromyoursurprise. It comes from Maggie’s. And you can’t hope to conveyheremotions without deep study and uncompromising discipline.” She stood. “Read the music. There is no other way to play the song.”
Vivian didn’t wait for Bryn to sputter a response. She walked across the deck and toward the guesthouse. Posture impeccable and hips swaying with her measured stride, Vivian didn’t have to look back to know Bryn was watching her. She felt the familiar and tangible weight of a rapt audience’s gaze dripping over her skin.
Vivian didn’t smile when she reached for the doorknob, but her chest tingled with satisfaction. A reaction to being perceived she hadn’t enjoyed in years.
* * *
More tired than usual after such little progress in the booth, Vivian took an extra-long shower before dinner. The chromed jets aimed directly at her tense shoulders weren’t nearly as good as a real massage, but her masseuse couldn’t squeeze her in until Friday. A just reward for having hopefully completed the book by then.
She was pulling on a pair of navy silk pajama shorts and a matching button-up top when her phone rang. Vivian sauntered to the writing desk by the window overlooking the pool, annoyed with herself that she’d forgotten to leave it ondo not disturb.
Harvey was calling, and Vivian was sure she didn’t want to know what he had to say. Instead of leaving a message, Harvey called again. Good news never followed back-to-back calls.
When she picked up, she braced herself, but not hard enough.
“Stilted performance?” Vivian repeated Harvey’s feedback on the first three chapters. No, not Harvey’s feedback—Yenni Montoya’s.
“The chemistry is lurking under the surface. It just has to come through?—”
“It was perfectly fine, Harvey.”
Harvey sighed. “She doesn’t wantperfectly fine. She wants to”—a pause, a shuffling of paper—“feel it in her bones.”
Harvey giving her performance notes was bad enough, but that he was acting as a mouthpiece was infuriating.
She wanted to point out that they’d paired her with an untrained recording partner, but she focused on the more immediately obvious irritant. “Why is she even listening at this stage? I don’t tell Yenni Montoya how to write her damn books. Why is she telling me how the hell to do my job, Harvey? Did you tell her to stay in her fucking lane?”
“Listen, I understand your frustration,” he replied rather than addressing her concerns. “Why don’t you get to know Bryn? I bet you can muster some common ground? Connect?—”
“Is everyone losing their minds?” she asked half to herself.
“It can’t hurt, V.”
“You know I hate nicknames.”
Harvey chuckled. “Why don’t you want to get to know her?”
Many reasons came to mind. The only relevant one was how unnecessary it was to their job.
“She pretends to be so… earnest.”
“Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?” Harvey sounded more relaxed, like he already knew he’d get his way.
