Spotlight(Charles E.J. Moulton) Spotlight

A Short Story by Charles E.J. Moulton

***

Jenny had come here to smile. And so, she sat there trying to go with the flow. Not letting her brain decide. Letting the energy of her heart rise to her face.

Her work was over. All her scenes had been shot. Now she sat there, coffee cup in her hand, gazing at the man she really loved, hoping, oh, God, that the difficult move he had rehearsed for so long would work on film. But, somehow, Jenny failed to smile.

It wasn't just the one take. The audience. The fact that the film would be wrapping up if he and the band could get through this in one reel like Nick had wanted.
It was the pain of her past. Pretending for so long. But wasn't that the downside of fame?

She adored him.
After all of what had happened, she wished for it to be over. For peace to rule inside the traumatized heart.

And the music played.
Camera man David Jones would never have tapped his foot up there on the flying rig, even to the hottest of big band sounds. That would actually endanger the steadiness of the picture frame. Director Richard Wittig tapped his foot, though. He even swayed, just like the song demanded him to do - and he looked like he was dancing the marimba. That made Jenny happy. But still, no smile.

The storm had calmed down. So why couldn't she?

Nick seemed to have forgiven Richard, if there had been anything to forgive in the first place. The divorce had not only strained Nick's life. It had strained her's, as well.
She had seen Richard's hair grow white in the process.

"Please, God, let Nick get through this in one take."

"Macrocosmology" could be edited into a working flick, she was sure of it, and it could maybe move to the Cannes Film Festival on time. If John then composed a jazzy score for the proverbial time travelling swing star, then Richard would pay Nick more money to turn his life into hell again for a possible sequel.
It could work.
He'd worked on the move with choreographer Jimmy Leonard on the routine since January. Sweet Jesus, even the light guy would give Nick a knife and beg him to kill him just to hear him sing.

Nick moved like a tiger, as well, the thirty piece band blasting the instrumental break, causing Wynton Orwell to swing the baton like he never had before.
Jenny could read his face like a book.
"I dig this groove!"

A Universal studio lot made to look like a concert hall in Iowa filled with fans of the N.L.S.P.C. - the Nick Loyle Special Fan Club. That served as a breeding ground for stardust. Hoagy Carmichael would have been proud.

Here in the shooting of a time travel picture, in the now, time stood still.
Jenny closed her eyes, reality slowing down, and she remembered travelling through difficult times.

***

"I am caught up in this media circus of guilt and retribution and lies and what do you do?" she yelled after supper. "You blame me for some paparazzi bullshit I have nothing to do with."

"Pictures don't lie," Tim spat.

"We were rehearsing a scene, Tim!"

That was at least half of a lie and she knew it.

"At midnight?"

"Yes."

"After a party?"

"Yes."

"By his pool?"

"By his pool."

"Yeah, right," Tim cackled.

"You know the press as well as I do, Tim," she demanded from up on the first floor landing. "They never tell the whole story, nor the real story."

"Why did you kiss Nick, Jenny? Was that work?"

She mumbled something quick about a surprise scene and that Nick's ex was just a money hungry bitch horny for alomony. It was insane how much pain one man had to take. As if getting over alcoholism wasn't enough.

The topic remained undiscussed.

Jenny cried herself to sleep that Saturday Timothy doubted she was telling the truth.

The dinners remained quiet. The car rides remained strained. The soirées where neither she nor Tim knew what to say kept gnawing at her brain. All because of the yellow press. But no matter how many times Jenny tried to explain it to him, there was still the kiss and the fact that she could not tell her husband who she was playing in the upcoming film. The woman Nick's film character had never forgotten.

Now, months later, her marriage was split up by ravine caused by rubbing tectonic plates.

She loved Nick. Not Tim.

***

Jenny drifted back into reality, into the now, gazing toward the stage. How smoothly he moved. How well he sang. He widely he grinned. That sexy man. That phoenix from the ashes.

Nick did his floss, his two-step, his body-roll, his box-step, hitting his E flat with extraordinary ease. His tone was excellent, reverberating high. The sound of the band helped to carry him further up into the stratosphere. Nick felt that to be due to the horns. His father had been trumpeter in a big band, so needless to say he'd sung with 30 piece orchestras even as a teenager.

It was a salsa arrangement with a bossanova instrumental, designed to emphasize Nick's vocals. How could it be otherwise? Underlining it like a smooth carpet was their job. The move had the whiff of a thousand dreams, his trademark pirouette causing the girls in the audience to swoon with intoxication.

The studio had been marketing Nick Loyle as the triple threat designed to wow. A High School Performing Arts Wonder Kid and Julliard Master who supposedly knew all the arts. Or so Universal claimed in retrospect.

So Nick was given a thousand scripts that flaunted his talents. Most of the scripts were alike, though. Small town boys facing hard times, finally breaking through the barriers of threshold guardians in order to achieve greatness.

"Macrocosmology" was more unusual, though. A big band vocalist stumbling on a lost time machine, sending him into race through time to find the lost love of a previous life, instead finding the God of the multiverse.

The PR campaign had hints of the original Star Wars extravaganza. Early pre-edited snipbits designed to evoke interest. Director Richard Wittig called them easy teasers. Five second long flashes. Nick running about Renaissance Venice humming madrigals, chased by angry aristocrats. Being scooped up by UFOs abducting him to perform Sinatra tunes upon alien worlds. Then the title and the line: "Join the musical multiverse!"

The final move was a second away now and Jenny again drifted back into past cataclysm.

Jenny still would not smile.
Why could she not let the past go?

***

"What's with Nick?" one tabloid had spat after another huge movie success.

"What's his secret? We want to find out where his weakness lies. It's gotta be there somewhere."

Nick was too good.
So good, in fact, that the press had tried for years to detect the cheat.

One British paparazzi even screamed "You're too damn perfect" at him walking down Kensington High Street.

The Colgate smile faded quickly.
And as it did, so did Jenny's heart.
Nick started on a five month hell ride that took him right to the week before filming.

The Academy Award for Best Actor in the remake of "On the Town" boosted his self confidence so much that he, at Elton John's party, offered Richard Wittig to secretly rehearse the final love scene with his own Jenny Willows, the manager that knew how to sing and act, back at his mansion. She would be playing the rescued Marie Antoinette in the film.
It was perfect. Too perfect, in fact. And it made Jenny proud to act a part she was actually living.

The end of the film was deemed above top-secret. No one was supposed to know that Nick's character would be saving the Queen of France from the guillotine and whooshing her back to Iowa in his time machine. Anyone leaking that information would be taken off the picture immediately. The script spoke of Nick's character having been aristocrat Axel von Fersen in his former life and swearing to save his past love. But who the lady in question was to remain a secret until the premiere.

Jenny had enjoyed standing there, playing a woman she had admired, Marie Antoinette, pretending an outcome she would have wished for her. Escaping the sans-coulotte and settling down with Axel. In Iowa. Wow, why, oh, ah!

Nick was unbelievably eager to plan the scene, which was going to be a rococo minuet danced to Wynton Orwell's arrangement of the original waltz version  of Bart Howard's "Fly Me to the Moon".
It was a pool scene scheduled to be filmed by Nick's own super sized pool just a short drive away from the party.

The secret scene rehearsal by the pool went so well that all three found nothing else had to be done on it.
Richard found it fantastic that Nick's manager played his love interest. The energy was magnetic and the kisses were heartfelt. True. Okay. It wasn't official and it as hell wasn't proper. But everyone knew they were nuts about each other, married or not.

Nick's wife Pamela was shooting a fashion commercial in Qatar at the time, so the house was empty.

Jenny was in heaven and so was Nick. They had adored each other for decades, married to people they did not love and now they could kiss under moonshine and call it work.

Nick had been forbidden to tell even his wife about Jenny's participation in the film.

No one noticed the paparazzi photographer hiding in the bushes, but when the kissing photos went online the next morning, they went viral.

A million clicks.

Needless to say, Pamela went ballistic in spite of Richard's assurance that he had been there to direct the dialogue and that it been work only. Nobody listened. It only made it worse. It was a kind of a repeat version of the badmouthing of Marie Antoinette, lies becoming reality. Soon enough, people were speculating threesome orgies. Stories circled the web.

Procrastinated Universal Studios shooting of "Macrocosmology" and sexual myth making actually only benefitted the interest in the time travel musical, causing Toys 'R Us to create an action figure of Nick's character Geoff Griffin even before the work on the film had begun.

Simultaneously, the divorce between Pam and Nick became a vicious media circus, transforming Nick into an alcoholic until just before filming began. They called the whole thing not Watergate, but Pamela-Gate and there were sides taken. Car-billionaire Benjamin Elsher of the Elshermobile openly spoke for "my good friend Nick." He, after all, was sponsoring the flick. L'Oreal's new face Fiorentina Evangelista, in the other hand, took Pam's side, calling the rehearsal theory by Nick's pool "un sacco di stronzante", using rude Italian gestures with the phrase in front of love cameras. Calling it bullshit in real American English.

The quarrels between Jenny and Tim escalated. This time, the insults were four letter words below the waistline. On both sides.

Richard had officially spoken for Nick, but kept quiet since throughout the divorce. One week before filming would start in Venice, the day after the divorce was deemed official, Richard Wittig held a press conference at the Hilton Hotel in Los Angeles, announcing that Nick's secret co-star was Jenny, his manager, who had been signed a year earlier to play an important role yet to be revealed in "Macrocosmology".

Everyone, the paparazzi, Fiorentina, Elsher and even Pam, suddenly shut up, getting very long faces, indeed.
Pam called Nick and apologized, but Nick was so busy being pissed off at Richard that he hung up on Pam just before swearing to give up booze.

Pam tried to make amends three more times which actually caused the tabloids to compare the drama with a real version of "The Bold and the Beautiful".

The "Pepsodent Prince", a nickname the Evening Star had given Nick, became the "Party Pooper" off-camera, according to some dirty tongued set riggers. Public divorce had turned him into Hamlet. And Jenny feared the worst. She was not only his manager and secret love. Not only his co-star. According to many, she was a home wrecker.

***

What kept Nick moving and inspired on stage that day, before "Macrocosmology" was finally wrapping up, was Jenny.
He had trouble focusing on moving like the character, yes, remaining the ballet dancer and giving Michael Bublé a run for his money, all at the same time.
But her smile was all he wanted, especially after Pam had become "Queen Bitch of the Universes".

"Too much multiverse," Nick thought to himself.

Okay, insisting on shooting  "Sway" at least once in one take was revolutionary in Hollywood, but in spite of everything necessary for the story. He felt like the eye in a huge storm that revolved around them alone. All eyes were fixed in Sinatra's Successor. No one seemed to care about the private person. Everyone wanted a piece of the commodity. Even his enemies. Even his fans. So, as he stood there, he involuntarily asked him who really knew him. Everyone knew the star or thought they knew the star. But who really knew ... him? She did. His Jenny.

As far as the fans were concerned, he had been right to reprimand the light guy for refusing to adjust the spotlight. Snake, most of the female fans in the audience of extras agreed, was a totally unfair nickname coined by a greedy ex-wife.
Money seemed the only thing on her mind. Nick, they all knew, was totally different off-stage. If they only could get him alone. Then they would show him what love was really about.
It was as if the trumpets were a flower's nectar and his voice a bee's head called to bloom the Earth with its semen.
This was spiritual lovemaking.

The tuxedo had the allure of a snake skin glued to his 6 foot body. The teenage girls and their mothers secretly wished, most of them, anyway, that the snake would soon shed its skin.
Perhaps it would peel off during the possible second runthrough of his song? But then again, had Nick not said he did not want to do this another time?

Nick Loyle, another victim of the yellow press, a greedy business turning interpreted lies into truths, misusing the limbic instinct of mankind to believe everything that was written with black ink on white paper. He was a candidate in a long line of lynched celebrities, blamed for things they had nothing to do with. Marie Antoinette being dragged through the mud because of her grandfather-in-law's reckless overspending, coupled with misogynous xenophobia.
The evening press calling the Whitechapel murderer of 1888 a serial killer after the first death and the women prostitutes although only one of them was.
Concentrating on Freddie Mercury's private life and not on his music during the 1981 Hot Space Tour.

And so, Nick was left with one thing: trying to find his inner peace in his work, far, far away from the ping-pong of collegial hatred versus admirer love. Many nights had been spent brooding why he had to be caught inside the interpretation of a thousand people.
A fan had called him Jesus three minutes before a director called him Satan.
That same day a manager asked him if he was retarded, showing him a headline from Variety about his supposed secret of being gay.

None of that had anything to do with him. Some of the more sordid mags had insisted he had joined an international drug trafficking ring that consumed the livers of the innocent homeless in China in order to get higher sexual pleasure. Nick knew for a fact he had no time to even think a private thought, let alone be involved in some drug traffic.

He knew no details of how rumors like that started, gossip weeklies going to great extents to prove he looked younger than ten years ago when he knew he looked like shit without make-up.

"Concentrate on your work, Nick," Nick thought to himself.

And Jenny did the same.
"You can do this."

Nick swayed, prepped, jacked and cha-cha'd and sang under the blue spotlight. He had the girls swooning. He felt the old self confidence from the Academy Awards returning.

In that perfect moment, just a moment before the final leap, his manager J. Jenny Willows of JJW Enterprises, she prayed. She summoned all her strength, one hot tear falling down a hot rouged cheek, sending the Catholic God she had been unbelievably drilled to serve obediently in Faye Quigley Grade School in Virginia. She sent her new spiritual healer Buddha a message to, please, give her best friend Nick the strength to transform. She experienced these three beats before the leap as a kind of divine slow motion. A moment of mystery. The  months preceding this moment had lead up to it.

"Just one more minute and the film will be wrapping."

Nick's expression somehow looked eternal. He was floating in air, like a phoenix, swinging around once, twice, three times, his foot bending too deep.

Jenny inhaled, her shallow breath a sign of dear, fearing he would fall like several times during rehearsal. It was as if she cared more about Nick than herself. More about him than her husband. But how would she tell him that? Now that Nick's divorce was official, did she dare to take the necessary steps?

Then, in that split second of life in action, magic spread across the studio lot. The entire film crew gasped, the fans glowing in the wizardry of blue light, as the triple threat landed smack middle of the stage, grabbing the mike and smattering his high A flat.

Then, the last chord of the band had Wynton laughing. Nick grinning from ear to ear like Michael Flatley after a thousand taps. Like Luciano Pavarotti after his high C. Nick mouthed a happy "Yeah" toward his fans.

"He got through it," Jenny mumbled to herself, hearing the cheers almost as if in a dream. "Sweet Jesus, he got through it."

Now anything seemed possible.

As David's camera panned over the three hundred extras toward the singing face, Richard leaning back in his director's chair, laughing. Jenny fell onto her couch, her left hand slapping onto her lipgloss.

Her heartbeat still raced as her client, her lover, her co-star, stood there with eyes closed and arms spread. Jenny's throat still revealing a thumping pulse, the relief of not having to go through the terror of the insistence on a second complete runthrough of "Sway" with all that entailed - it could not be described in words. In any words.

Distant noise. Disbelief. And a faint smile on Jenny's lips. A band leader slapping the baritone on the shoulder as he walked back to his trailer.

Jenny heard the production manager leading the extras to their dressing rooms. She saw the band packing their instruments together in the corner of her eye. The familiar disassembly of a film set had no meaning to her other than as background noise. But it was more like the steady hum of a far away scenario than reality.

It was a strange mix of feelings that haunted her soul. Relief about now having wrapped. Relief of hard work paying off. But now, she looked back at a private battlefield. Her own and Nick's.
Pain, sheer agony of seeing the soul of a man she had secretly loved for years being torn apart by wolves and hyenas.

"I want a piece of you," they had seemed to drool. But where was Nick's own piece of himself, she wondered? And what about her own life? She took the cloth hanky out of her hand bag and tried off a tear. How much of that tear was joy and how much pain?

When she came to, she was still holding  her coffee cup in her hand. She folded a brown lock behind her ear, biting her lip. Richard criss-crossed between the riggers and gaffers, telling them where to put what and when. It seemed so normal,  like life had been before that paparazzi picture hit the web. But who knew when the press would fabricate another scandal launched by some journalist who wanted to get ahead?

***

The stroll across the studio lawn was tiresome, her conflicting thoughts tearing her down.

When Jenny knocked on the trailer door a few minutes later, the July light piercing her eyes and lack of an air-conditioned space nearly killing her, the answer was solemn.

The squeak of the opening door sounded like a worried bird caught with his wing in barbed were, so Jenny tread in lightly. Like a kitten fearing to step on a rubber ducky in a room full of sleeping dogs.

Nick looked up. The only time he smiled in private nowadays was she was there. She took three careful steps up to his couch, aiming to keep her clicking heels at a minimum noise on the parquet floor.

He looked up, resting his elbows on his knees, grabbing her hand and kissing it. "You are my sunshine," he sang. "You make me happy when skies are grey."

"Aww," she mouthed, caressing his cheek.

He gestured toward the lot and onto his own tuxedo and the strawberry smoothie on his table. "And I'm happy this ain't Jim Beam."

Nick reached over and kissed Jenny.

Jenny's surge of warmth started in her heart, funnily enough, where all her truths lay. It spread to her brain as compassion. Down to her toes as strength and into her belly as love. She reached out her hand and put it on his. His hand was ice cold. The left one.

"Happy you got through this."

Nick half-grinned, looking a bit like Elvis.
"It was good, wasn't it?"

"Oh, yeah."

Nick got up, kissed Jenny on the lips, drinking the fresh smoothie the female fan had made him. He looked out at the Universal lot. "I think I'm returning."

She walked up to where he stood, looking out at the gravel, the halls, the fake cities. The illusion.

Jenny knew what this was because she'd had this conversation with him before. She could not say the blamed him. "Rumors had it Elvis had the same problem. Thousands of people adoring him on stage. In Graceland, not one person calling him to care for the man behind the mask. Only his cousin."

Jenny felt his hand warm up. It was as if her mere presence made him calm down. The only trouble was she did not know what to say. "I guess I am your cousin then."

One kiss.

"You're the cream in my coffee."

Another kiss.

"The peanut butter on my toast."

A third kiss.

"The rainbow after a spring shower."

"I'm happy I saved you from the guillotine."

"I'm our rockabilly bride," she swooned.

Nick looked up at Jenny again, giving her the half-smile and the one raised eyebrow. "Well, ya know," he drawled in his southern rockabilly imitation, "since Priscilla left me, you've been mah only friend, so thank ya ver' mush."

Something in his manner caused Jenny to relax. Her laughter bubbled up from her power belly and hit her larynx. She grabbed him by his waist, stroking his bottom. This wasn't forbidden. It could not be shameful to love. It felt like home. "I caught myself fearing some photographer will be hiding in the bushes soon," she said, carefully, "and turn our lives upside down again."

"I hope not."

Nick chuckled sardonically, leaning over to smooch her neck.

"Funny how cameras can be friends and enemies at the same time."

"How so?" Jenny said as Nick raised bis head.

"I turn into me in front of the camera," he whispered. "There, I feel free and I can deal with people on a personal level. I am an engineer in Manhattan or a farmer in Kentucky and it's..."

He searched for words.

"...real."

"I'm real, too, Nick."

His face broke into a million happy wrinkles.

"For you I would give all of this up."

Jenny saw his wide toothpaste grin, the one he had become so famous for, she felt his pain of never being regarded as his private self, only for what people thought he was.

"I love you," she whispered slowly, an incredible surge of warmth spreading from her belly down to her womb and up to her bosom. "I've never loved anyone else. Ever."

She knew that Timothy, he'd had an affair for years. There must have been a reason why they had no kids. With Pam gone, nothing stood in their way. She hoped. She was still young enough to have kids.

Nick dived into Jenny's eyes. No, into her soul. And the electricity sent shivers down both of spines. The subsequent kiss was hungry. Passionate. Yearning. Wet. Romantic. Sweet.

Forehead to forehead, their eyes closed, their hands caressing each other's locks, they breathed into each other's mouths, knowing fully well what the other one was thinking of. One divorce was not enough.

Soon, they were in each other's arms, hungrily compensating for never being able to relax. Always pressured to perform, the industry's endless demand to top the last performance. Threats from studios to ruin a celebrity's reputation if he didn't agree to the terms. The sex was hungry for tenderness and touch, not for penetration. For care, not for performance. When Jenny made love to him, she made love to the guy she had known when he had been an actor playing small bit-parts. The one they called a misplaced telenovella heartthrob. It was unfair then and it was unfair now. Finally, Nick squirted into Jenny vagina and it was happily unprotected sex. Proud sex enough not to pretend. 37 years old still seemed a fair age for a pregnancy.

When she kissed her secret boyfriend at the door of his trailer, a guy who just happened to be famous, she hoped she would be carrying his child inside her.

***

Walking back to the lot, Jenny wondered how she would break the news to Timothy. But then, there he was, the man she had not slept with for over a year, holding his divorce papers in his hand. The conversation was stilted, nervous and quiet, as usual. Like two sophomores who had discovered each other masturbating over other people's pictures. Not even a kiss. Timothy left her looking down.

Then, out of nowhere, Jenny blurted out a thank you. It was a short one, not even a heartfelt one. Just an obligation and a hint of what this would be meaning to her and to Nick.

Timothy turned, looking over his shoulder at Jenny, looking like the supporting actor some romantic movie. Cary Elves in "Liar Liar", maybe.

Even standing in the open lot doorway between the illusion of the concert hall and studio street had the atmosphere of a good bye. Timothy nodded, the hint of a Californian wind ruffling his blond hair. She could sense his anguish. It was her's, as well. So many words in her head. None of them correct.

One moment persisted, like a dove's feather hanging in mid-air. A Forrest Gump moment. There was no anger there, just a realization of truth. All those sleepless nights lying next to someone who loved someone else.

One or two noises, stage steel constructions being disassembled, clanged behind them. It was as if reality did not exist.

Timothy walked up and reached for her hand, leaning down to kiss it. It was a respectful kiss, more a peck, really, but within it lay an eternity. A blessing. The willingness to let go. When he arose again, something fluttered inside her. A butterfly, it seemed. One whose broken wing had been damaged. One now realizing it had regained a forgotten ability.

"I know you love him."

Jenny caressed Tim on the cheek.
She nodded.
"See ya around."

Nothing but the open road and the willingness to let go.

The only one spotlight that had not been disassembled still shone mid-stage when Nick walked into the studio from his trailer. If it was fate, chance or intention was anyone's guess. Clear was that he then stood there in the spotlight, looking like a million dollars, feeling quite ordinary. Richard, who had just finished discussung possible camera edits with David, turned his head to look at his brooding star just as Jenny walked up to hug Nick.
The three of them caught glimpse of one another, the director, the agent and the client, their gazes seemingly devoid of tension. Somewhere in that extraordinary light, their souls were held together by a butterfly that just very recently had leaned to fly. And when Jenny gathered inside the spotlight, their beings merged into one spirit. One physical light shone upon them, but another light appeared in their hearts. Their gazes mingled and it became increasingly more difficult to differentiate who was who. Richard found himself in their midst, holding something as exquisite as a half-full glass of red wine. And Richard made sure to point out that the glass was not half-empty. After all, he was the director of a nearly completed musical motion picture. And with the only the edits and the music left, the movie was indeed like a drink yet to be refilled.

Somewhere in the distance outside on the studio street, a rigger had taken a break, waiting for a truck. "Save the Last Dance for Me" was playing through what had to be a smartphone. Nothing was said. The three of them laughed, first a chuckle, then a laugh, then at last a guffaw. It had to be fate, the trio managing to sail through the scandal, finish a motion picture, the stars of the film coming out as a real couple. They were to have twins. One daughter named Marie Antoinette, one son named Axel. And so, director Richard Wittig whistled to the rigger to connect his phone via bluetooth to the speakers.

Soon enough, Jenny, Nick, Richard and a worker named Clark Kent found themselves dancing a mix of salsa and rhumba, glasses of red wine in their hands. It was a passionate dance. A sexy feast. A witty moment. Raucous, randy, rhythmic, revealing, revolutionary, right, risky and romantic.

Now, Jenny smiled.

The wonder kid had made it into the spotlight.

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