The Last Take

I sat on the edge of the set, on the arm of the fake sofa, and held the prop teacup in both hands. It was cheap porcelain, the kind that chips if you look at it wrong, but the painter had done a good job making it look old. Saucer, gold rim, little blue flowers. My wife would have turned it over, checked the bottom, and made up a whole history for it. She was good at that. Four years gone now, and I still did the thing where I picked up an object in a room and asked her, out loud, what she thought of it.

The chandelier above me was foam and hot glue. Supposed to be 1889, some manor house in the story, but the candle bulbs were plastic and two of them had burned out and nobody cared because the camera never looked up. She would have laughed at it. She laughed at everything fake that was trying hard to be real. That was most of what a film set is.

The scene we shot today was a quiet one. My character, the widower, sits across from the love interest and finally tells her the truth about his wife. Then they kiss. One kiss. The director wanted it small, just lips, held too long. We did eleven takes. On take nine it stopped feeling like acting and I had to blink a lot and look at my hands until they called the next setup.

I put the teacup down on the table and the table wobbled, because the table is also fake, and I almost laughed at myself.

"Mr. Voss?"

I turned. A woman was standing at the edge of the set with a red bin in her arms. Jennie, the PA. Twenty-four, sharp, always moving, always three steps behind the director with a clipboard. She had been the one who handed me my hat and my gloves before every take today.

"Nobody's supposed to be in here," she said. "I mean, nobody's supposed to still be here. Strike started an hour ago."

"I know. I stayed."

She looked at me a second, then nodded, like that was a normal thing a lead actor does. Maybe it was. She started working along the prop table, picking up fans and gloves and a candlestick, dropping them in the bin.

"Craft services left a carafe of real coffee," she said. "Not the decaf they lie to us about all day. Actual coffee. It's in the hallway if you want it."

"I want it."

"I'll bring you a cup."

She brought me a cup. It was too hot and too strong and it was the best coffee I'd had in weeks. I thanked her and she went back to the props, and we were quiet for a while, and it was a good quiet. The air smelled like dust and dried glue. Somewhere far off, a crew guy was rolling cable and singing to himself.

"That last scene," she said. "The kiss. That was hard to watch, in a good way. Everybody got quiet. Even the grips."

"Thank you."

"My boyfriend at the time, well, ex-boyfriend now, he was a DP on a shoot I did two years ago. He always said the quiet scenes are the ones that cost the actors the most. All the machinery of it stops and there's just the two of you."

"That's about right." I turned the cup in my hands. "Can I tell you something that stays here?"

"Sure."

"I haven't kissed anyone since my wife. Today was the first. And it was with an actress who is very nice and very professional, and I had to fake half of it because the real half scared me."

Jennie stopped sorting props. She stood there with a fan in her hand and looked at me, and I expected some PA deflection, some joke to move past it. She didn't do that.

"How long?" she asked.

"Four years in February."

"That's a long time to not kiss anyone."

"It's a long time to do a lot of things or not do them."

She put the fan in the bin. She had a way of moving that wasn't hurry, exactly. More like she'd decided exactly where she was going and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. She came around the prop table and stood a few feet from me.

"There's a trunk over there," she said, and pointed at a costume trunk by the wall. "Props said it's all going back to rental. I've been finding stuff in it all night. You want to see the weirdest thing they've ever handed a period production?"

"Show me."

She knelt and dug, and came up holding something wrapped in a cloth, and when she peeled the cloth back my eyebrows went up on their own. It was a translucent silicone toy, long, curved at the tip, a faint lavender color, still sealed in its plastic bag. The kind of thing that does not belong anywhere near 1889. They must have planned a racy background shot in a brothel scene and cut it, and somebody had shoved it in the wrong trunk and nobody noticed for three months of shooting.

"Oh my god," she said, and went red to the ears. "Okay. So. This was in the trunk. With the corsets. This whole time."

"That's quite a find."

"I should log it and put it in lost and found." She didn't move to do that. She held it up and turned it in the light from the work lamp. "It's actually nice quality. Body-safe silicone, not that cheap stuff. Someone in the props department has taste."

"Can I ask you something, and you can tell me it's none of my business?"

"You can ask."

"Do you use things like that?"

Jennie looked at me. I expected her to laugh it off. She