against them. Renn’s personal assistant had to take a leave of absence due to a family emergency, and the cinematographer contracted a virulent strain of food poisoning from a plate of crawfish that laid him up for three days. On top of that, the costume designer’s assistant quit because his boyfriend broke up with him over the phone, and two hours later he had fled home to Long Beach in tears to try to convince the boyfriend to change his mind. There were twenty-four days left on the schedule and about forty-five more pages of the script left to shoot, and if any retakes were necessary, they would have to be done before the company left New Orleans. Building sets on a soundstage in L.A. would be prohibitively expensive, and Renn intended for everything to be shot on location anyway. This was very important, in his view, to maintaining the authentic atmosphere of the picture.
When he told Elise that he had asked his son, Billy, to fly in from L.A. and work as his personal assistant for the remaining weeks of the production, she had hidden her curiosity from Renn. Since moving to California, she had interacted with enough men around his age who pretended to an amiable camaraderie with some of the younger men they worked with, but on at least two occasions, she had sensed an undercurrent of vicious competition between the older and younger man, in one case, a father and son. She had been a psychology major at UT-Austin, and even before college had believed that her hunches about people were often correct. Most of the time, even among the wealthy and powerful people she now interacted with each day, little happened to prove her impressions too far off.
Billy arrived on Bourbon’s set on a windless, thickly humid Thursday afternoon. He was visibly exhausted, unsure of himself, very cute. She could tell that he was surprised and flattered when she told him that he looked a lot like his father. After the introductions, Renn was anxious to get the next shot under way and hadn’t kept Billy on the set long enough to have a real conversation with her or anyone else. She later learned that Renn had given Billy a time-consuming PR task (which Billy promptly forgot about, and hearing this later, she felt sorry for him, considering how tired he looked) and an off-site errand for him to do with George’s assistance, Renn’s driver, a taciturn, slow-to-smile man who gave Elise the creeps, but Renn had told her that he trusted George more than anyone else he had worked with over the past twenty years.
It wasn’t until a couple of days later that she and Billy had a chance to talk for more than a few seconds. Renn was conferring with her costar, Marek Gilson, about a crucial solo scene, and the crew was setting up the next shot. The heat was still oppressive, and she was resting in her trailer and thinking about returning a call from her sister, but she wasn’t looking forward to doing it because she thought that Belle wanted money but would not be able to ask for it directly, something that drove Elise crazy. Through the window she saw Billy walking by and got up to open the door and call out to him. In the glimpse she caught of his face before he could rearrange his features into nonchalance, she thought she spotted nervous excitement, and possibly joy. Her heart sped up a little, responding to his flattering happiness.
“Come in and put your feet up for a minute,” she said. “You can help me go over the lines for my next scene.” She had already memorized them but thought he might refuse, fearing his father’s wrath, if she didn’t have a good reason to invite him in.
He hesitated, smiling up at her. “Are you sure? I don’t want to bother you.”
“Don’t be silly. You wouldn’t be bothering me at all. But are you in a hurry?”
He shook his head and ascended the three metal stairs that led to her trailer’s door. She debated for a second about leaving the door open, not wanting to fuel any rumors that she was having an affair with both the father and the son, but the thought emboldened and irritated her. She shut the door, almost slamming it. If she wanted to have a conversation with the director’s son, innocent or otherwise, that was her business. They were adults, for Christ’s