Amnesiascope: A Novel Part 2

"Yes."

"They're less willing to take responsibility for their contradictions."

She didn't say anything to that.

"They're less romantic."

"They're less romantic?"

"Of course that isn't necessarily a good thing or a bad thing."

"Women are less romantic than men?"

"Yes."

"I don't think so."

"Actually, it's the only thing I'm reasonably certain of."

"I don't know any woman who would agree with that."

"That's because for a woman, romanticism is a pattern of behavior, or maybe even ritual, whereas for a man it's a matter of life and death. a.s.suming he's the sort of man who was ever willing to die for anything in the first place."

"Yes, well," she answered witheringly, lighting another cigarette, "maybe women haven't always had the luxury of dying for romance."

"Well, there you go."

"Anyway, you're generalizing."

"That's what you asked me to do, remember? Your contradiction, your responsibility."

She widened her eyes ferociously. She asked my name and I told her, and she said maybe she had heard of me; I told her I doubted it, and she asked if I wrote some books once, and I admitted I had. "I read a review of one, maybe," she said. "The last one."

"That was a while ago."

"The pretentious one."

"All my books are pretentious," I a.s.sured her. "The last one was just especially pretentious."

"My name's Jasper."

"Interesting name."

She was bored with how interesting her name was. "It's a name without a reason," she explained. "No, my parents didn't think I was going to be a boy. No, they didn't conceive me in a town called Jasper. No, they didn't name me after Jasper Johns or an Uncle Jasper who left them a million dollars. ..." On her finger was a ring in the shape of a cat, curled around a red stone. She held her hand up and even let me take her fingers in my own so I could examine it. She looked at me like she saw right through me. "It matches the one in my l.a.b.i.a."

"Pardon me?"

"It matches the ring in my l.a.b.i.a."

"I don't believe you."

But of course I did. I believed it completely. She appeared genuinely unconcerned with whether I believed her. "Well, I'm not going to prove it to you," she said.

Inspiration was at hand. Not because I was in control of anything but because her control was so complete she found giving something to me easy, a gesture of s.e.xuelle oblige in lieu of the evidence that there was a cat ring in her l.a.b.i.a, which was the only thing that matched anything else she wore, namely the ring on her finger. "In my story," I said to her as calmly as I could, "the artist poses a question to each model, who is a stranger to her."

"Yes?"

"Where does he touch you?"

She nodded.

"There's no preface to the question, and the 'he' referred to is irrelevant. Sometimes the model is surprised by the question, sometimes she's amused or threatened. In each case the artist a.s.sumes she's taken control of the situation by catching the other woman off-guard, until one night she meets a model who answers as though she's been expecting the question all along."

Thinking only a moment Jasper said, "Under my breast. Below my nipple."

"Which one?"

"The left." She said, casually, "When his hands are raised to my breast, you know ... he's exposed to me. Disarmed."

"Disarmed?"

"Like in the gangster movies. When the bad guy puts his hands in the air."

"Or the good guy sometimes."

"Or the good guy."

"Is he the good guy or the bad guy?"

"He's the good guy," she answered, "when I'm the bad guy." She leaned back where she sat and looked me in the eye. "Last night I went to this opening, a little gallery downtown out near the third ring. I thought I might see myself there. I mean, in a painting."

"You mean you actually are a model?"

"-but I was walking through the exhibit and by the time I was halfway, I'd had a little wine, and was feeling a little. ..." She smiled and widened her eyes again that way she had; in moments she suggested complete dementia, in others almost unearthly composure. "So maybe I was there after all, and I just didn't recognize myself."

"What does it mean when you see a painting of yourself and you don't recognize it?"

"It means the artist ought to give up painting, as far as I'm concerned. Did you think it meant something else? You didn't think it meant something deep and psychological, did you? I don't think too much about the meaning of things. Halfway through the exhibit I b.u.mped into him or he b.u.mped into me, I don't remember. ... He acted like he knew me, but as far as I know we've never met. It didn't matter. We went back to his place. I went into the bathroom and took off my clothes. When I came back he was pa.s.sed out on the bed, so I undressed him and blindfolded him, and tied his wrists to the bedposts with my stockings. I found his keys and turned off the lights and went to this little bar I like, down by the beach. There's a good jukebox there. I was drinking and started talking to this woman, I don't remember her name-she was quiet, like someone who was dying to be wild but just didn't know how, and we had another drink and I said, Let's go see this guy I know. So we went back to the apartment. He was still tied to the bed. We did what we wanted. Sometimes we kissed each other, sometimes we touched him. Sometimes we just left him there and didn't pay attention to him at all. We'd wander around his apartment and look at his things and drink his liquor and stand naked on his balcony, looking out at the ocean, listening to him thras.h.i.+ng on the bed inside trying to get free. The more desperately he thrashed, the more we liked it. I could tell she was holding back, waiting for me to let her know that whatever we were going to do was all right, and finally we went back to bed and I got on top of him and then she did, and then we both did at the same time. I know what you're thinking. You're thinking it's every man's fantasy. Every man thinks it's his fantasy. But when I held his face between my thighs and put myself in his mouth to make myself come, I could tell he realized it wasn't his fantasy, it was my fantasy. Afterward the other girl got on top of him and it was taking her longer, so I started whispering in her ear, telling her I was a man and how I was going to f.u.c.k her from behind. That made her come. We finished and put on our clothes and went back to the beach bar where we had another drink. We were still laughing about it. He's probably still there, tied to the bed."

I believed all of it, the way I believed the bit about the l.a.b.i.a ring. But while I had been given everything I could hope for, somehow she was still in charge; sort of like she said, I thought it was my inspiration, but now I realized it was hers. She got up from the table and finished the last of her wine.

"Maybe you'll write another book someday," she said on her way out, "even more pretentious than the last." And then she disappeared through the door and I sat there staring at it for five minutes, just to be sure she wasn't coming back. Then I swallowed the last of my wine, gathered up my notes and rushed back to my apartment, where I bolted the door and turned out the lights and by the glow of the desk lamp wrote down every single word, every single thing about her I could remember, every single thing she said. ...

We call our movie White Whisper because it doesn't mean anything at all, at least as far as we can tell. "But just where," Viv asked one night, reading the finished script, "do you propose we find an actress with a cat ring in her l.a.b.i.a?" Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Do you actually know a woman with a cat ring in her l.a.b.i.a? Also," she added, flipping back several pages, "women are a lot more direct."

"What do you mean?"

"When they talk to each other. A woman doesn't say b.r.e.a.s.t.s, she says t.i.ts."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure." I replayed in my mind my conversation with Jasper: did she say b.r.e.a.s.t.s or t.i.ts? So over the next several days I revised the script, making the second draft more explicit, to which Viv objected that now it was too explicit. "I mean, think about it. Would a woman say that? So I revised the script again, taking things out, to which Viv complained it now needed something more, something else. To which I became irritated and suggested maybe Viv didn't really know what the script needed, to which Viv answered I didn't need to get so temperamental about it and anyway she was just trying to antic.i.p.ate what the head of the network might say, to which I proposed maybe the head of the network ought to write the script and we'd see whether he thought women said b.r.e.a.s.t.s or t.i.ts a.s.suming he thought women had anything to say at all, to which Viv pointed out that the head of the network wasn't a he but a she. To which a little bell ought to have gone off in my head right then. Sure enough, when we went down to the network to meet the head honcho, who should be sitting behind the desk but Veroneek; next to her, Joe the wolf began howling the second I walked in. Veroneek grabbed him by the jaws and hollered down his throat, "Keep it quiet in there, Joe!" h.e.l.lo, she said, looking back up at me.

h.e.l.lo, I answered, a little astonished.

Hmmm, Viv said, looking back and forth between us. Veroneek had apparently succeeded in her campaign to seize the L.A. airwaves. Isolated in an abandoned lot on the edge of Beverly Hills, Network Vs. was a charred black satellite dish that fanned out over a single red elevator that led down to an underground broadcasting station that beamed sensual propaganda to America on a twenty-four-hour basis. Over several evenings Viv, Veroneek and I conducted auditions for White Whisper as the elevator unloaded one bevy of women after another into the dark network hallways lined with flickering monitors. The women had been a.s.sembled by a fat casting agent who unb.u.t.toned his silk s.h.i.+rt low enough to reveal a prominent hickey on his chest, which over time metamorphosed from red to purple to black like the larva of an insect; he insisted on attending the casting session in order to take nude photos of the actresses-for "the files," he explained. There were shy girls from Maryland who turned off the light in their own bathrooms to undress, and seasoned professionals who were out of their clothes before they were inside the door, only to realize with shock that there was actually dialogue in this movie they were expected to read. There were women who would only take off their clothes for Viv and Veroneek, which meant I had to leave the premises, and women who would only take off their clothes for me, which meant Viv and Veroneek had to leave the premises. There were women with cropped hair and braces on their teeth who appeared to still be virgins at the age of thirty, and Chinese lesbians who traveled in pairs, one with the hard look of experience and the other an eighteen-year-old who had yet to shed her baby fat. This last cherub in particular excited me. She had about her that perfect blankness of youth that begs to be defaced. For the rest of the week I wracked my brains trying to figure out how to work Chinese lesbians into the movie.

Any sentimental notions I might have had, however, about surveying a parade of naked women quickly gave way to reality. The harsh light of the network's underground offices cast a dead pall over even the loveliest, let alone fortyish over-the-hill actresses apologizing for their various birthmarks, scars, piercings and the ravages of particularly brutal C-sections. The spectacle was dismaying not simply because all the plastic in their faces and limbs and b.r.e.a.s.t.s had hardened to the point of petrifaction, but because their bodies wore their panic like their eyes; all Viv and I could do was cringe. No, really, we pleaded with them, you look beautiful. We wanted to take them all to dinner and buy them drinks and convince them they were still ravis.h.i.+ng, with long careers and many acting opportunities ahead; our movie just wouldn't be one of them. Within forty-eight hours the message was out in the world of erotica: we were the sensitive p.o.r.nographers. Come audition for us and we would feel sorry for you.

We cast the two less significant models first. As one actress after another failed to make the cut, a character we originally imagined as latin became black and finally a redhead. For the role of the "shy" model we chose a tall doe-eyed brunette who mumbled inaudibly and held her arms close to her; this introvert, we later learned, had a reputation for happily sucking any c.o.c.k in Hollywood to get a part. The two lead roles eluded us. We offered the part of the painter to the virgin with the braces, who gave a very good reading even if she did insist we clear three or four city blocks before she allowed Viv, and Viv alone, to gaze upon the sacred splendor of her nakedness. That evening she went to her theater group where the other actresses, any of whom would have taken the part in two seconds if she had the chance, shrieked in disbelief that any self-respecting thespian could possibly think of performing in such a project; she hastily reconsidered and so informed us the next morning. Two days before the shoot was scheduled, I finally convinced Viv to cast a young woman named Amy Brown who had just rolled into L.A. from Tennessee a couple of years back, right before the Quake. Amy had curly black hair, a small mouth with slightly crooked teeth, and didn't at all fit the image Viv had of the character. But she was alert and intense, and I liked the way she kept leaning into the wall when reading her lines, like a girl trying to act tough but unconsciously trying to hide from everyone. I also liked the way she took off her clothes; she was determined about it without being altogether casual. Maybe the thing that most impressed me was that her name was Amy Brown as opposed to Diamond or Starlight or Snowflake or all the other names we'd heard in the past few days, and I figured any woman who had been in L.A. two whole years and still thought Amy Brown was a good enough name to make famous suggested a sense of her own ident.i.ty that, along with a steeliness of purpose, we could use right now.

Then there was the character of the model that I had modeled after Jasper. Marshaling all my powers of invention, I had named this character Jasper. By pure default our best prospect was an actress Viv and I called Catwoman, who arrived at the session in a tight little black body suit. Her lips were inflated like they'd just been blown up with an air-hose at the gas station down the street, and her teased hair appeared to have been styled with a toilet plunger. As she read her lines she would slink along the wall and dig in her nails as though she was going to hump it. Faced with Catwoman's growing inevitability, Viv was beginning to cover her face with her hands and groan a lot, and we became so desperate to find a Jasper that even the screwiest ideas began to seem like a brainstorms. I thought, for instance, I had quite an inspiration when, driving home from Network Vs., there at the end of Melrose Avenue as I came around the curve off La Cienega, the Red Angel of Los Angeles rose like an answer: Justine as Jasper! Of course I wasn't entirely certain anymore that there even was a real Justine, though once twenty years ago I thought I saw her driving a red Corvette north on Rossmore where it turns into Vine. And if there was a real Justine, I thought now, was she as timeless as her billboard, or ancient, hiding her face in shadows and encasing her body in an aerodynamic cathedral of undergarments that attempted to launch her fantastic b.r.e.a.s.t.s into eternity? So when I got home and called her, still remembering the phone number on the billboard, I never figured on anyone actually answering. I figured I'd get a long ring into nothingness, or a recording telling me the number wasn't in service, or maybe a machine that simply exclaimed, in the manner of her billboards, "Justine!" Instead I was stunned when a woman's voice answered "h.e.l.lo," and I didn't doubt for two seconds it was the Angel herself, and I was so startled I hung up immediately. ...

By the fourth day of the auditions I realized I had to try and find the real Jasper. I didn't have the courage to tell Viv there was a real Jasper, because she would want to know how I could have let her slip away in the first place and also about the l.a.b.i.a ring business, which didn't sound like the kind of thing someone just confesses in a bar. For several nights at the Feverish I waited for her to show up. I asked various people if they had seen her, and wasn't entirely surprised that no one had the slightest idea who I was talking about. The waitress who had served us our wine that night didn't remember, no matter how much I hara.s.sed her, nor did the bartender, no matter how much I badgered him, as though she was my hallucination, as much an illusion as Justine-the ragged doll muse who enticed me into her room high at the top of the tower of inspiration and then slammed the door, took the key, and folded the stairs up in a suitcase when she reached the bottom.

The final night before the shoot, as I was about to give up on Jasper and leave, I was distracted by a conversation behind me. People at nearby booths were talking about this and that, and there was nothing about this one conversation in particular, about the talkers or the tone or volume of their conversation, to necessarily draw my attention ... but when my ears caught a familiar reference I couldn't place at first, I had to listen several minutes before I realized the movie they were talking about was The Death of Marat. I turned to peer over my shoulder, thinking maybe it was someone from the newspaper. But it was a man and woman I had never seen before, and they looked back at me as if to say, What's your problem? The more they talked and the more I listened, the more it sounded-Well, the more it sounded like they weren't talking about the review I had written, but a real movie. The more I listened, the more it sounded as if ... well, they were talking about the movie as if they had seen it. They were talking about scenes I never mentioned in the review-scenes, in other words, that never existed in my imagination, let alone on a screen. "The use of lighting in the monastery sequence was extraordinary," the guy said. Monastery sequence? I thought to myself, truly alarmed, until finally I lurched to my feet from the table, almost tipping it over; people at other tables looked up. "I guess the whole d.a.m.ned city's in on the joke!" was all I could sputter at them. "Jerk," I heard the waitress behind me murmur as I left. "a.s.shole," confirmed the bartender.

I'm not exactly sure how, since I tried to be circ.u.mspect about it, but soon it seemed the whole newspaper had heard about my new vocation as a writer of p.o.r.nographic movies. The Cabal in particular was fascinated. Ventura read my tarot and drew huge life lessons from the event. Struggling to remain non-judgmental, he never directly addressed the question of whether it represented a major turning point, or just my final fall from whatever state of grace one could consider my life to have occupied. ...

There wasn't going to be anything glamorous about the filming of White Whisper. Given its length and a budget that was almost visible to the naked eye, it would have to be shot in one night, with every scene afforded no more than one or two takes, maybe three if we thought we could push it. The actresses had only a few hours of rehearsal in Viv's loft, with me reading Jasper's lines, since it wasn't until the last possible minute that we finally reconciled ourselves to casting Catwoman, who had the personality of a cat if not the l.a.b.i.a ring. The day before the shoot, Viv, Veroneek and I frantically scoured the city scouting locations in abandoned factories and dingy alleys, casing rundown rooms that were distinguished mostly by the tell-tale signs, on rumpled beds and stained floors, of other productions that clearly had been even less elegant than ours. I admit that as each place smelled worse than the other of p.i.s.s and s.e.m.e.n, it gave me some pause about the whole project. I admit that for a moment or two I felt downright disreputable, just the way the New Paragons would have wanted me to. We finally decided to go with one of the Glow Lofts that appear after sundown in the industrial district east of Downtown, a white windowless cavern like the inside of a huge egg, with curved corners and cubbyholes lining the perimeter that could instantly be converted into dressing rooms, rehearsal s.p.a.ces, an office and kitchen. Its preeminent virtue, however, was that it didn't smell.

On the big night, the minute the sun fell and the loft came into view, Viv's crew backed the vans up to the loading dock and moved in. Within the hour the dolly tracks were laid and the cameras and lights and booms were up as well as the set-a makes.h.i.+ft artist's studio with easels and a paint table and a platform where the models posed. The crew was Viv's usual circle of bohemians and drug addicts. The cameraman was a big burly Texan named Harris and the makeup woman a former "cosmetics technician" from a local fas.h.i.+on magazine; the paintings were supplied by one of Viv's ex-boyfriends. The producers were Lydia and Niles, a wife-husband team from New York who used to be in the theater. Lydia was intelligent, dedicated and pleasant, and Niles was a putz of the first order. Viv, Veroneek and I were all saddened to learn Lydia had lovingly tattooed Niles' name on what presumably had been an otherwise perfectly acceptable bottom. Niles expounded on his vast knowledge of everything from art direction to makeup to sound editing, walking around the set in a stupid baseball cap barking meaningless orders into his walkie-talkie and quickly managing to insult Viv's ex-who only did the paintings in the first place as a favor to Viv-and grope all the women on the set he didn't happen to be married to, the most prominent of whom was our star. Waiting for our other actresses to show up, Viv decided to shoot the film's last scene first in which Amy Brown, as the repressed painter who comes to exchange roles with her model, stands naked on the model's platform; as everyone prepared the shot, a simple zoom-in on Amy glowing in the lights like a trailer-trash Modigliani, Niles was determined to give her his personal supervision. In and out of the scene he darted between takes to "fix" Amy's hair, constantly brus.h.i.+ng a curl from her brow as Lydia grew more and more visibly enraged, Niles' name blazing away on her a.s.s.

Probably the only reason it didn't escalate into an out-and-out marital crisis was that Lydia and Viv were currently preoccupied with a bigger problem. Catwoman hadn't shown up. After several hours trying to track her down Viv finally placed a frantic phone call to the casting agent with the gangrenous hickey on his chest who, just before midnight, lined up another actress. Thirty minutes later Viv came over to say later the new actress had arrived and was looking over the script: "We have a new Jasper," she announced, an odd look on her face.

"You have an odd look on your face," I said.

"Well, it's funny."

"What's funny?"

"She really is Jasper."

"What do you mean she really is Jasper?"

"I mean, her name is Jasper." And sure enough, sitting in a chair in the shadows as though she appeared out of nowhere, the way she appeared out of nowhere the night I met her, was Jasper. She wore a different dress, simpler and looser-an altogether less imposing incarnation, but as cool and slightly ethereal as she was at the Feverish, my script in her hand rather than a gla.s.s of wine. Viv introduced us, and Jasper just looked up from the script and said, I like the part about the l.a.b.i.a ring.

You don't happen to have one, do you? Viv laughed.

I'll surprise you, Jasper laughed. Viv laughed some more. They both laughed together and then, looking at the expression on my face, laughed some more. In no time at all they seemed to be getting along famously, and then Viv returned to the set and I sat with Jasper trying to explain the script. I was explaining the character to her, which is to say the character I stole from her in the first place; I was explaining the things the character said-which is to say the things she originally said. She gave absolutely no indication of realizing any of this. She gave no indication of ever having met me at all. She read the lines like they were completely new to her, like she had never heard them before; she even a.n.a.lyzed and interpreted them as she went along, trying out different inflections. "I don't like t.i.ts," she said, "I'd rather say b.r.e.a.s.t.s." Given the circ.u.mstances, I told her she could say just about whatever she wanted as long as it followed the general drift, and that we were going to have cue cards and someone to prompt her, so there was nothing to worry about. Oh no, she insisted, I'll learn the lines, I'm a very quick study. Finally I left her alone to go over the script by herself. I was happy to leave her to it. There was something about her now that unnerved me, as though the night I met her she had stepped out of my id but tonight she stepped out of someone else's. A few minutes later she was in makeup, still poring over her lines, and soon we were ready for her. The minutes pa.s.sed as everyone waited; in the meantime we were shooting everything else that could be shot-scenes with the other actresses, close-ups of paint brushes, close-ups of canvases with Amy and canvases without Amy, close-ups of thighs that looked like lunar plains and b.r.e.a.s.t.s that looked like spheres over deserts. Viv kept going back to the makeup room to check in on Jasper and kept coming back without her. The crew grew mutinous.

Jasper finally appeared. She glided onto the set like she did into the Feverish. She moved as though not walking through the real world but through the corridors of her imagination, where she might pick up one of its artifacts, casually admire it and then, bored, toss it over her shoulder. She didn't so much drop her robe as let it slide off her, ascending naked to the model's platform; she took off everything but the cat ring on her finger. The crew, men and women alike, were stunned by the sight of her. She was impossibly lush; you could practically hear last night's s.e.m.e.n still slos.h.i.+ng around in her. I had two reactions to her. The first was that I wanted to f.u.c.k her, because not to f.u.c.k her would be to insult G.o.d and slander the divine order of things, and the second was I wanted to get the f.u.c.k away from her, because it was about to become clear, as I suspected from the first, that she was absolutely crazy, the Abyss Walking like a Woman, madness so generic it practically had a bar code on it.

We had written all of her lines on cue cards, and script a.s.sistants were at the ready to prompt her. We began filming. She got through the first line of her monologue-the one I had transcribed practically word for word from that night at the Feverish, about picking up the guy at the art gallery and tying him to his bed-and then forgot the second line. The script a.s.sistant prompted her but she refused to take the cue, asking instead that we begin again. Viv called cut, we took a break. After a couple of minutes Viv called action again and we started from the top; Jasper once again got through the first line and once again forgot the second, and once again refused to take the cue. Once again Viv called cut. When Viv again called action, Jasper now forgot her first line; the cue card was waving in front of her face but she refused to read it; Viv called cut, we took a break, Viv called action, Jasper began: "I was at a gallery the other night, thinking I might. ..." She shook her head. Now Viv told Harris the camera man to just keep rolling. Jasper started again. "The other night, at this gallery, I was there and-" Over and over she started and stopped, the camera constantly rolling: "At this gallery the other ... at this ... I was at this gallery where I thought. ... I-" Suddenly she dissolved into sobs. It's all right, it's all right, Viv a.s.sured her, and Jasper nodded Yes, yes, OK, and she took it from the top and actually got several lines into her speech before she lost the train of thought, at which point she collapsed naked on the platform like a woman having a fit, before suddenly leaping back to her feet: "OK, OK, OK! I'm all right, really, I can do it," and beginning again at the top, camera still rolling, she once more got several lines in before everything fell apart.

By now Harris the Texan and the rest of the crew just wanted to rip the film out of the camera, tie a noose and toss it over the highest rafter. Every breakdown pushed them closer to vigilante justice. Viv was cool beyond belief. People were screaming at her and she was making fifty decisions a minute while always keeping her eye on the big task at hand, with the calm authority of someone so comfortably in charge she never had to raise her voice or make a demonstration of her power. Now I heard her voice in my ear. It was a soothing voice; she was smiling a little too broadly, beaming a little too brightly. In the monitor behind her I could see Jasper pulling on her robe and lighting a cigarette. "What?" I said uneasily.

"Well. ..." I didn't know why but I already had this feeling Viv was about to say something very peculiar. "I think we've gotten as much out of Jasper as we're going to get. We almost have enough to intercut with scenes of Amy. But we still don't have Amy's scenes with Jasper. ..."

"Shoot Amy's scenes in close-up," I suggested helpfully. "Someone else can read Jasper's lines off camera."

"Exactly." Her calm was as terrifying as it was awe-inspiring.

Suddenly I saw the light. "Forget it."

"You haven't even heard what I'm going to say."

"Forget it."

"You haven't even-!" Furiously, she spun on her heels and began to stomp away.

"All right," I succ.u.mbed, "tell me. ..."

"Never mind."

"Tell me." This was Viv's genius; I was now begging her to tell me this idea I knew I wasn't going to like.

"All you need to do is read with her," Viv said, fists on her hips.

"Why can't someone else?"

"Fine. We'll get someone else."

"You could do it."

"Fine. I'll do it. I don't have anything else to do right now, except direct a movie."

"Veroneek can do it."

"Fine, Veroneek can do it. I just thought maybe you would do it, that you would want to do it, because you wrote these lines and you understand them. I thought you would be able to see how much better it is for Amy to act with someone who knows how to read the lines and what they mean."

"But wouldn't it be better for a woman to read the lines?"

"Why would it better?" She threw up her hands. "No, fine. We'll find a woman to read the lines."

"All right, all right. I'll read it."

"I just thought it would be easier for Amy."

"I'll read the lines."

"I think you should take your clothes off."

"I'm sorry?"

"Amy is supposed to be a repressed painter, remember? You wrote it. Remember, she's exploring her own psychological nakedness, through the physical nakedness of the model she paints? She's affronted by that nakedness."

"It's a naked woman she's affronted by."