Chương 176: CHAPTER 101 - O Blow, My Bully Boys, Blow

"Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me." Herman Melville Moby-Dick, 1851 214 Rivington Street. Friday morning. With [Script Analysis] running, it was easy to draft a friendly, Eppie-toned letter to the residents while keeping Lana off the page. She needn't write formally or excessively, nor did she need too many copies, so she opted to hand-draft the letters in the meticulous handwriting that had made Dr Kirby sigh with pleasure each time she handed in homework.

At half past eight, she had handed the stack of beautifully written letters to Bebe. She had a window propped open with an old paperback she had found somewhere in the near-empty apartment. Down below, past the stoop, the neighbourhood was alive with the sound of children who had nowhere to be until September, adults leaving for work, and women busy at the endless labours of urban domesticity.

Then she sat on a folding chair and turned off her [Persona] by relaxing every muscle in her body, so that she almost draped over the chair, imagining herself being swayed by the breeze from the window. She stayed like that for most of the morning. It was past eleven when she heard voices on the stairs. Ferroni's was first, carrying up flights that had no soundproofing. There was also Aubert's voice, which was Parisian and unmistakably exotic.

The loudest was Bebe, who had gone out after breakfast to deliver Eppie's handwritten letters, and must now be coming home.

"All six," Bebe said.

"All six what?" Ferroni asked.

"All six units. Signed. The third floor, who would not open the door, signed. Doña Tita countersigned for the association, legally dubious… but I am not going to argue with Doña Tita." By the third flight, Bebe was fighting for breath.

"But there we have it. It's a Christmas miracle." Then she heard a third pair of footsteps, in heavy boots, working its way up the stairs with far more vigour than either director or actor.

"—she ate three servings," Bebe was saying, to nobody, gassed by the stairs.

"Doña Tita fed the whole crew last night, and she inhaled three servings of la bandera; she had dessert after too… two servings…" On the final landing, somebody laughed. It was not Ferroni. Eppie's ragdoll body booted back into full autonomy. She knew the laugh the way her body knew the spruce floorboard in a black box theatre.

"She's inside right now," Bebe said.

"Just wait till you see how tiny she is." The others came up. The man who had laughed did not, at least not yet. She knew it was her Theatre Chair because of a particular thing he did: her Chair used to stand outside a room before he came into it. Not eavesdropping. Listening, so that he could come in and start the lesson with a bang. He had done it before every lesson for a year and a half, and she had thought it was a special power. In a way, their reunion was inevitable.

The [System] operated on [Causality], and those with [Karmic Reciprocity] were invariably drawn to either herself or the [System]'s machinations. Her teacher was listening now, though Eppie made no sound.

"Jack," said Dr David Cooper, from just out of sight.

"Did you say you hired a sixteen-year-old from Los Angeles?"

"Yeah," said Ferroni. Eppie could hear the man grinning, as if his anticipation were audible. And then Cooper came round the door frame wearing a turtleneck too warm for July. He stopped. Across a fold-out table and a stack of legal pads, a teenage girl sat to attention on a chair like an alert cat. Her teacher's face went. Her body leapt up so fast the chair went over behind her.

"Euphemia Fontaine." For almost a year she had heard that voice call her across a rehearsal room. It rarely used her whole name. Then she was upon him, and he had to use both hands to keep her paws at bay, lest she grapple and nuzzle him against his will.

"Dr Cooper!"" No—no, hold still." He was using his height advantage to keep her at arm's length while the others laughed at her hapless attempts at mugging her old teacher.

"I knew it was you as soon as they said you ate enough for three men."

"I'm—""So, you're our lead?" He finally caught her by both shoulders and held her like a lost kitty being checked for burrs, while she tried to wiggle out of his grasp.

"Jack. Is she the lead?"

"She's the lead," said Ferroni from the doorway, snickering.

"Surprised?"

"Dr Cooper!" Eppie couldn't help but gush.

"What are you doing on my building's stairs?"

"I am auditioning," Cooper said, grinning from ear to ear, an expression she had almost never seen while at LAPA.

"For Hollis."

"Ohh…" Eppie knew at once they had gotten the right man. Quietly theatrical, psychologically psychotic—Hollis was Shakespeare's great villain in a nutshell.

"Mr Ferroni came and found me in a converted florist's on Fox Street on Wednesday night and offered me a fortnight's work. He failed to mention that his leading lady was my old troublemaker, though." He thinks Jack found him. Eppie grinned back, her expression feigning ignorance.

"This is wonderful," Eppie announced to the room of appreciative adults sharing in the warmth of their reunion.

"Truly. Thank you, Jack. Rémy. You're just the best." + Karmic Causality Ferroni gave her the Robert Redford nod, as did Rémy. Cooper sighed appreciatively.

"You know, the last time we spoke on stage, I told you that you did not become artists at LAPA. That you arrived as ones, and that if we did anything at all, we made sure you graduated as ones." Eppie nodded eagerly. His expression grew a little sad.

"Where are you finishing school now? Guilliams? With your talents and your connections, they'll take a special admission in a heartbeat." Now it was Eppie's turn to look awkward and wordless.

"I'll er… go and get my cert," she promised.

"When I have time." Across the room, the crew's expressions were of bewilderment.

"You didn't graduate?"

"You're a dropout?"

"Our Eppie, both homeless AND uneducated?" The men were aghast. Eppie winced. Vaughan was right… She really should get that certification. The Ambassador Theatre. West Forty-Ninth Street. Sunday. Eppie and Maddy arrived by Sony's palatial town car. Even as Lana, Eppie had no idea that late-night shows travelled, or that they could put a talk show inside a Broadway house.

Standing around in her theatre black and a lanyard with her ID, and her guitar on a sling, she couldn't stop staring at the "set", which was a desk, a couch, and a blue city skyline behind them that had been trucked in from California. Having watched the show for years, the setting felt surreal—especially the skyline with the Twin Towers intact. Across from the couch where she had seen countless A-list stars banter, the band's risers were dressed to look as though they were homegrown and permanent.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. She was also amazed because this all happened in front of a live audience with no laugh tracks. From a stage that had been standing since 1921, eleven hundred red velvet seats went up and back into the dark. For the second time in two days, she played the song, this time for the cameras. They ran the chorus three times, which took nineteen minutes. Sound was the quick part.

A microphone on her, another one angled at the lower bout of the guitar, and a voice out of the dark asking for the loudest bit and then the quietest bit. Four minutes. The camera placements were more esoteric in nature.

When she asked the director to clarify, using her [Charisma] dialled to [25], the father of three explained the whole process—the four cameras, the planned angles, the tapes on the ground for focus, the 200mm that needed to refocus when she moved, how shots were reframed based on her proximity to Kimball, from her entrance to the last shot of the show. She walked the stalls beside the man with the headset, noting where the crane wanted to be, then asked one more question.

"Will you cut to the house?"

"I might."

"When?"

"During the chorus. What do you suppose they'll be doing?" the director asked.

"Singing, clapping, stomping," said Eppie, brimming with confidence in the [System]'s musical hypnosis. The director looked at her, at the eleven hundred empty red seats for a moment, and then said, "Terry, give me a wide on the balcony." Everyone in the building had heard the chorus except the people who were going to hear it in the evening. Already, the worm had invaded their ears. They took her to a dressing room with somebody else's name still on a card in the door frame.

Inside, she found her MUA, already unpacked.

"MARTA?!" Eppie clapped.

"How are you here?"

"I am ten minutes away." Mirabelle's hand-picked MUA of choice chortled at Eppie's gawking face.

"No, really. Condé Nast is about six blocks north. When Dr Vaughan told us the good news, Mirabelle put in a request and sent me down on overtime."

"I am not being a bother, am I?"

"Why would you?" Marta patted the makeup chair.

"Sit." Eppie sat.

"Kimball's got his own people, of course, but they don't know your face. Mirabelle knows what you're going for. Did you bring your Conti?" Behind Eppie, Maddy raised the dress, still in its sleeve.

"Forget it, you've got another one." Marta grinned.

"You destroy this one live on air—and it's your funeral."

"Ahaha…" Eppie promised that there would be no pot tosses, unless Kimball prepared exactly such a segment.

"Is Mirabelle here?" Eppie asked.

"She is in Milan, and she wants the photos as soon as we're done." Marta pulled a new dress bag off a stand while Maddy placed her gifted dress on the rack.

"This one has the right hem."

"And?"

"And now it's time to sculpt your face." Marta opened the kit: a fifty-pound case of pressed powder with the small bottles racked by hue, with brushes as soft as down. For forty minutes, Marta sandblasted NYC off her face, then massaged, then moisturised, then mixed a foundation in the back of her hand until it disappeared into Eppie's own colour.

"Eye shadow?" Eppie asked.

"Minimal. You will not see it." Marta turned her chin with two fingers.

"Everything goes to the eyes, though. Cat's eye. Clean lines. Bold." The liners were more subtle than Eppie expected, giving her that vintage Hepburn look. The mascara was light, and she had almost nothing on her mouth. When they were finished, the thing that shot across the room was her eyes. Looking at herself in the mirror, Eppie felt a hit of… oxytocin? I look like a ragdoll with big blue eyes, she thought. I want to hug myself… Then the hair.

Hers was shoulder-length now and wind-tossed, so Marta tethered it down flat and built it out with coils from the case and piled it up at the back, high, leaving her neck bare and her forehead covered with bangs. The effect, Eppie could see, was a year off her age, attained through elegant purity.

"Younger?" Eppie said, watching it happen.

"Is that wise?"

"Younger is the point," Marta said, studying her work.

"You are sixteen, but you don't look industry sixteen. Let them see fourteen. The right people will do the mental arithmetic themselves. The people who want it wrong on purpose… that's their albatross to bear." Marta's words reminded Eppie of the purpose of her visit. She was here to clear the air. And to throw a wrench in the face of whoever the hell was spreading these malicious rumours, ruining her father's reputation.

The song she was about to perform had cost her [51, 905] [Causality], almost one-tenth of her total pool, after performing with Kel. She had watched the number come up in Trent Davis's office yesterday afternoon with the guitar still on her knee and her father behind her doing his best not to grab a guitar of his own and start his own chant. Trent had been expectantly bewildered. He had asked her what it meant, and when she explained not only the etymology but the origin, he was truly impressed.

Her song seemed to resolve… everything. The origins of her inspiration, her propensity for old-timey music, and her ability to internalise whatever was externally happening to her and produce music from the soul. Trent had said yes before she had finished asking. He had put the BlackBerry face-down on the blotter and said, "Then we register it!" and they signed the Eppie special then and there, even before she told him about the second part of her viral plan.

"Chin up," said Marta. Eppie put her head up. Her lips were finished with a hint of gloss. The dress came out of its bag. It was a Conti, naturally, and it was midnight, and the first thing anybody would see was the collar: a wide white shawl collar, halter-cut, meeting behind her neck and standing a little away from her throat, so that her upper torso was one clean line of white against black.

Below it, the thing was severe and beautifully made—a fitted bodice, a narrow black belt with a small square buckle sitting exactly on her waist, and then a short structured skirt in a shallow scalloped hem, three inches above the knee, because of her proportions. Her shoulders were bare. Her arms were bare. Her feet went into kitten heels, because anything higher gave the wrong impression. She stood up and looked at herself; the girl in the mirror looked like a lost princess on a Roman holiday.

Which was the point. It was all line and no flesh. Nothing draped, nothing clinging, no outrageous curves. The white collar sat under her chin like something out of a very expensive school with nuns.

"Now," said Marta, retrieving a familiar box.

"The finishing touch." Inside, on white silk, in a setting of white gold, sat an enormous milk-honey cat's eye on a choker band—the sort of thing old high-society women wore with bare-shouldered dresses. It was her birthday present, retrieved from her bedroom.

"Juliana's choice," said Marta.

"Will you wear it?" Eppie put it on, and Marta did the clasp. Under the bulbs, the Cat's Eye gem came alive. She moved her head an inch, and the pale band inside the stone swung and stayed with her, the way a cat's pupils followed one's gaze across a room. The amber matched her hair, so that it did not detract from her eyes. Three women had dressed her: Mirabelle's dress, Marta's face, and Vaughan's choker. And her designer [Persona] from the [System] did the rest of the work.

She was cute and sweet, pretty but prim, heartachingly so. Costuming was art, and Mirabelle, and Marta, and Vaughan, who were all very fashion-conscious people, knew this better than she did. There were eleven cropped photographs going around online suggesting that she was a beauty with a middle-aged beast—and here, her matrons had drawn the line in the sand and said no. Here is an orphan who deserves fatherly affirmation and support. If looking at this makes you think otherwise… Please take a seat.

They were protecting her. Through fashion, through design, through craft: through their art.

"Good," said Marta, doing nothing, adjusting nothing, taking proud pictures.

"Now you look like somebody's expensive daughter." When she blinked her eyes, she could almost hear Marta's heart melting.

"I am someone's daughter," Eppie said sternly, piercing the illusion. Not a pet. Not a lover. Not a tool.

"And after tonight, there'll be no more doubt." The producer came knocking at twenty to seven: a bearded fellow called Duffy, headset on, carrying a clipboard and a stack of notes. He ran her through the sequence before it "happened naturally" on stage. Since a few celebrities had dropped f-bombs and proved that loose lips sink shows, Johnny Kimball had become half-planned and half-improvised—taped live, but never broadcast live, because the House of Mouse owned the American Broadcasting Company.

"So—Johnny comes to you after Conway. He'll do the Grammy, he'll do how it feels being sixteen with real artists covering your songs, and then he'll ask about the reading, because your people said you're a reader. It's a good bit." He turned a page.

"Then you go into the song and the story, and we're out. Seven minutes, give or take."

"That's it?"

"That's it. Bill stays on the couch—move too much, and the cameras lose you and Kimball in the same frame." Duffy looked her up and down, and his eyes softened.

"You'll be fine. Someone will come for you at half past." Maddy went after him down the corridor with more questions. When she came back, she had a list.

"Alright," Maddy said.

"Final reminder. No explicit mentions of your pictures circulating, or of Director Curon. Nothing about the Grammys past the award itself. Standards signed it. I have it in writing. That's rare.

""Why do I get it?"

"Because you're sixteen, and we're here to defend your father's honour." She turned the page over, smirking while Eppie's cheek glowed.

"Be funny, be playful, be yourself. That's it. One more thing. Kimball thinks it'll be funny if Conway picks you up for a bit. I think it's fine. Conway is very… family friendly. Got two kids himself, a little younger than you. Do you consent?"

"By the waist?"

"By your arms." Maddy snorted.

"Are you trying to get us in trouble?"

"Sure…" From what she knew, Conway made his living playing enormous children—men of forty who played Santa's Elves, lost fights to furniture, and cried in public. Off screen, he had two kids of his own and had apparently asked, in advance, whether he was allowed to pick her up. He was on the show to promote his new film, a slapstick comedy called Siblings, about two adult kids stuck at home when their mother remarries.

So they will not ask me anything I have not approved, Eppie thought, which means they have already approved everything I am allowed to say. At twenty to eight she was standing in the wings with the J-45 already resting on stage, waiting for the walk-on. The warm-up comic was out there getting eleven hundred people to shout on a count of three. A stage manager with a headset leaned in to tell her something reassuring.

"Don't worry about the cameras. We tape the whole thing, then it goes to the edit. You cough, you swear, a bit of wardrobe malfunction? Doesn't matter, we lift it out. Nobody at home ever knows."

"Nobody at home," Eppie repeated.

"But there's a live audience." He gave her a thumbs-up and went back to his board. She stood in the dark at the side of a Broadway stage and understood, quite calmly, that this was really happening. She was on a late-night show! She would walk out, and eleven hundred people would see her tonight, and then millions more, and after that she would be cut into pieces and passed around in thirty-second lengths via email chains and MySpace posts. The recording wasn't dangerous. She had a safety net.

Every faux pas could be edited— lifted out —by a red-eyed editor at a station, in the small hours, between a car commercial and a promo. The danger lay in her trying to entertain eleven hundred people who had volunteered to be there, whose opinions could not be edited, and who would go home and tell somebody about the night Euphemia Fontaine made a fool of herself. You can't just pay money for cred, Cat Sly had told her, from a stoop on Rivington Street. Somebody got to give it to you. Eppie loosened her shoulders.

Her [Traits] fired up. It was time.