Chapter II: Natasha
But the next morning when she wakes, Vivienne realizes that as happy as she is with Jack and his cheekbones, she still needs an actress, so she grabs the stack of headshots she’s accumulated on her desk and adds them to her schoolbag. She is late, she has already missed first period Trig, and she’s cutting into second period Lit now. She knows she ought to hurry, but she doesn’t. She goes into the kitchen and grabs a canned espresso from the fridge as if she has all the time in the world, which she does, because high school is nothing more than a nuisance she has to deal with for the next few months before she can move onto pursuing her career fulltime, as she ought to be doing.
Her father and her brother are breakfasting with their bimbos of the week. Her dad and Alain converse, about god-knows what, while the two girls, who are the same age, twenty-five, eye each other’s prizes, wondering if they’ve made the wrong choice. Vivienne snickers at them, at the way they play whore to these two rich men. She resents that these women represent her gender, she resents the way they play themselves into corners, playing slut and then denying it, becoming stereotypes while thinking that they evade them. They are weak, these women, not like Vivienne, who is strong and smart, and knows better than to sleep with someone and stay for breakfast the next morning. Vivienne never stays. Vivienne is always the one that sneaks out in the middle of the night, she is never the one to wake in an empty bed with a note next to her head. And she never wears their shirts to the breakfast table.
Vivienne isn’t like these women, she is like her father, like her brother. She says she hates them, what they do, but she would rather be like them. She would rather be like Alain, who is only a year older, who she barely knows, because all her life he’s lived with their father in New York while she got shuffled between there and wherever her mother happened to be at that moment; LA, New York, Paris, London, LA, Paris, New York, Paris. And then the announcement of Milan came, and that had been the final straw, before she up and moved to Chicago, where her father had just relocated, where Alain had decided to spend a year, photographing the architecture and the urban landscape.
The only thing Vivienne ever saw him photograph were beautiful, tan blondes, in his bedroom, in his crisp white sheets and standing at the windows, above the sprawling city, naked, vulnerable, fragile. The photos were all pinned up to the walls of his darkroom, beautiful black and white portraits that meant nothing, nothing more than sex and lust and weakness. Vivienne prefers to be like Alain, as much as she hates him, and not like his blondes, his hallow disposable models.
She is her own photographer in her life, she is the one who turns the camera and tells it where to look and what to look at. She is smart, she knows exactly what she wants, and she’s going to get it if it’s the last thing she does. And if she has to leave a few broken hearts in her path, then so be it. But no one is going to call her weak. No one is going to marry her and leave her in a beautiful, empty house sitting on the top of a canyon, broken, running off to frolick some barely-legal starlet. No one is going to leave her in a an empty castle, and no one is going to send her her ten year old, her twelve year old, her fifteen year old daughter to pick up the pieces.
After the meeting with the counselor, Vivienne finally makes it to class. By this time Lit is over, it’s third period, which is Latin American history, where she reads the chapter on Peron as the teacher lectures on Zapata. And then it is lunch, where she lies in the garden of the park next to the school and shoots two other seniors eating lunch. The girl she can’t see, because her back is facing toward Vivienne, so she shoots 8mm footage of the boy, who is interesting. She watches them, and they don’t notice, utterly absorbed in their conversation. They are comfortable with each other, they love each other. They laugh and pout and tease an share their food with each other. Vivienne hates watching couples, but there’s an ease between these two, a comfort. She wishes the boy would look over and see her, see that she is the one imprinting him onto film.
She watches them until the lunch period ends, and they pick up their trash, laughing as they head back to school. Watching them, she has forgotten that she was supposed to be looking for her actress, looking through that pile of softly lit photos.
As she packs her crap back into her back and walks the path to school. The path is a yellow brick road in fact, because this park is called Oz Park, and beside the yellow brick road there are creepy bronze statues of all the characters scattered here and there, terrifying small children when they turn the corners. Vivienne walks past the scarecrow, thinking of the boy, in the garden, how warm he looked with his smatter of freckles and his reddish brown hair, how utterly sincere and unpretentious his mannerisms appeared, how he was not pretending, not acting sly or flirty, or calculating, or horny. She found herself wondering how that blonde had found such a boy, when Vivienne had never even seen one like him before, not anywhere she’d been, not in Paris or London or New York, or LA.
She brushed the thought away, scolding herself, steering her mind back to her film. Boys came and went, she told herself. But her passion, her film, her career, was here to stay. That’s what she was looking for.
When she walked into biology and took her seat, ready to turn on autopilot during today’s lecture on the lungs. But when the teacher called out Natasha and a thin, assured voice answered from the back, Vivienne turned to look. And there she was, her muse. The same blonde who had been sitting in the garden, her back turned toward Vivienne, talking to the interesting boy. Natasha.
Her hair wisped around her hairline in baby-fine curls. The huge windows of the biology lab allowed the afternoon sun to pierce through the room, backlighting her, so that the loose curls of her blonde ponytail seemed to form a halo. Her eyebrows were the barest outline around her eyes, her skin pale, pale enough to make her large eyes pop in their blue. She wore a white cotton shirt and denim cutoffs, there was something very unfashionable about her outfit, something off or old, but it somehow added to her appeal as a muse for Vivienne. She was different. He lunchbox sat on the black lab table in front of her, and it was made of tin, with a picture of the teenaged mutant ninja turtles on it, slightly scraped off. Vivienne grinned, and Natasha saw her, smiling back timidly, then turned to the blackboard and began to copy the diagram the teacher had draw.
“Vivienne, mind showing us the front of your head?” The teacher remarked sarcastically, and Vivienne turned toward him, beaming.
“Not at all, Mr. Johnston. Not at all.”
After class, Vivienne shoved her nearly blank biology notebook into her bag, keeping a close eye on Natasha, to make sure she wouldn’t lose her in the crowd of students pouring into and out of the hallway. She swerved around a couple of people, shoving them to the side before they knew what hit them, and was at Natasha’s side within seconds.
“Hey. I’m Vivienne,” She said.
Natasha looked surprised by the attention, and slightly disbelieving that Vivienne, the girl with serious attitude (in bio, at least), was talking to her. She couldn’t fathom why, or what she could possibly want. But it didn’t take long to find out.
Vivienne grabbed her arms and halted. The crowd kept moving around them, jostling at them as they stood in the center of the hallway during the passing period of four minutes between sixth and seventh.
“You should be in my movie.” Vivienne stated.
Natasha laughed, but Vivienne looked dead serious.
“Why? I can’t act. I’ve never-”
Vivienne waved a hand, dismissing the idea. “That doesn’t matter. I’m not looking for an actress. I’m looking for a muse. And you are just-perfect.”
Natasha paused. This girl was- well, persistent, at the very least. Also, sort of- persuasive. But Natasha had enough to do between her little sister, college applications, science fair, not to mention-
“Please.” Vivienne continued, holding Natasha’s gaze steadily. Natasha’s posture softened, but she broke eye contact for a split second, and realized that they were standing in the hallway, just steps from the biology lab.
“I have to go to class.” Natasha tried to maneuver around Vivienne.
“I’ll find you after school, and I’ll tell you all about it. Do you end ninth?” Vivienne asked. Natasha nodded, still perplexed, and dove into the sea of high school students. Vivienne grinned, pleased with herself, and headed off to Theory of Knowledge in a good mood for the first time that year.
Vivienne headed out of her ninth period class (Spanish) early, under the pretense of a stomach-ache. She walked past security, through the metal detectors, and out the door, crossing the mall. She climbed the hill across from the main building, taking a spot from which she could watch the crowd of students gush out of both the main building and the freshman annex. She spotted Natasha, coming out of the main floor, tucking a book into her bag.
She watches as Natasha raises her head, shielding her eyes from the sun, and scans the crowd. Vivienne grins. So she hadn’t forgotten.
Impatient, Vivienne waves from her spot, grinning, not bothering to wait for Natasha to spot her. Natasha smiles back and climbs to the spot next to Vivienne, sitting in the grass.
“So what’s this movie about, exactly?” Natasha asks, continuing to scan the crowd. Vivienne wonders if she was looking for the boy she’d been talking to at lunch.
“It’s for my college application, to film school.” Vivienne clarifies.
“Yeah, but what would I have to do? What’s it about?” Natasha asks again. Vivienne hates this question. It’s so… factual. Her movie is not factual. Her movies, her art, is about a feeling. Emotion. Poetry. Her movie isn’t prose, it isn’t a story, not in that Hollywood sense. It’s interesting people, and beautiful images and meaning that cannot be carried in words. If it could, she’d be a writer.
“It’s about a feeling. That feeling, when you feel close to someone, but so far away. Intimate, and lonely. The circumstances, what happens, that’s not what matters. You know?”
Natasha thinks for a moment, then nods. Yes. She knows. But what she doesn’t know is what this Vivienne girl wants her to do.
“So what would I do?”
“Your character, she’s lying in this pool, in this big gown, and we think she’s dead. But she isn’t.” Vivienne describes. Natasha waits for more, but Vivienne doesn’t say anything, the only thing she says is:
“Are you a six?”, her eyes sliding over Natasha’s figure.
Natasha nods.
“You should fit into it. You’ll do it, right?”
“I can’t.” She looks away, back at the crowd, searching it.
“Why?” Vivienne asks, in utter disbelief. After all those horrid headshots, she finds the muse of her dreams, delicate, pretty, and utterly authentic, and she refuses? This was not the way it was supposed to work. She only had a month to finish this film, she needed to shoot soon, there was no time to find another girl, and there was no one who was more perfect than this. Natasha’s face, her personality, it was the perfect foil for Jack’s sexy, dark features and his mysterious aura.
“I can’t get into pools.”
“You can’t swim?” Vivienne asked, relieved. “Don’t worry, we can just shoot at the shallow end-”
“No, that’s not it. I can’t get in, at all. Just to my knees, that’s it.” Natasha raised a hand and waved down to someone who had just come out of the school. Vivienne followed her gaze, to the darker-haired boy she had seen at lunch. He was holding a skateboard in his right hand, and he waved back with his left.
“Is he your boyfriend?” Vivienne asked, a touch of hostility in her voice. Natasha looked at her, surprised and shaking her head.
“He’s my best friend, I’ve known him since I was six.”
He walked up to them, not even looking at Vivienne, who bit her lip in irritation. Trust a guy to walk up and interrupt right when she was getting somewhere with Natasha, with her film.
“Sorry. Newspaper meeting.” He said to Natasha.
“It’s alright,” She replied, but before she could continue, Vivienne interjected, holding out her right hand.
“Hey, I’m Vivienne. What’s your name?”
“Evgenii.” He said, shaking Vivienne’s hand, then pulling his back quickly.
“Oh. Where are you from?” Vivienne asked, intrigued. The name was so- non-cookie cutter.
“Russia. We both are.” He said, motioning toward Natasha.
His face was blank, not smiling, not puzzled, but sort of cautious, as he studied Vivienne, who studied him in return.
“Say something in Russian.”
Evgenii bristled at her demand, turning to Natasha and switching to their native language.
“Who is she?”
Natasha shrugged, and responded in Russian; “She wants me to be in her movie.”
“Are you singing?”
“I don’t sing,” She began, but Vivienne interrupted.
“That sounds so great. Maybe I might have you speak in the movie, wouldn’t that be cool? Yeah, I like that. So you guys should come over, I can show you some of my inspirations, you know, the script, my storyboards, all that kind of stuff and we can get take-out-”
“Yeah, sorry, but we can’t.” Evgenii interrupted. Natasha looked at him, surprised by the finality of his tone. Seeing her reaction, he added. “What? We can’t, you have to pick up Svetlana and then we have an essay due on Woman at Point Zero tomorrow.”
Natasha turned to Vivienne, still visibly uneasy at Evgenii’s possessiveness. “Sorry. It’s true. I do have a ton of work due. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She began to stand. Vivienne grabbed her arm. “Wait.”
She also stood, joining them. “I’ll give you a ride.”
Natasha shook her head. “Sorry, but I can’t leave my bike here.”
Vivienne looked at the fence in the front of the school, where an old pink bicycle was locked with a rusting chain. Evgenii held his skateboard up in one hand and waved a dismissive goodbye as he headed toward the bike. Natasha smiled at Vivienne before heading after him. Vivienne sat again, watching them as Evgenii waited for Natasha to unlock her bike, telling her something. Natasha laughed as she secured her bag and climbed on. Evgenii dropped his skateboard and sped off, in the opposite direction from Vivienne’s house. With a smile and one last wave at Vivienne, Natasha rode after him, picking up speed.
Vivienne watched them ride off into the street, disappearing among the cars. To find her muse and then lose her, lose her to homework, nonetheless, all within three, four hours. No. There was no way, no time to find another actress, someone so quiet and interesting and perfectly contrasting to Jack. It was going to have to be Natasha, she’d have to convince her, yes, and she’d have to win over Evgenii to do it, maybe. But what Vivienne was good at was not settling, it was getting what she wanted. What her film demanded. There was no way she would take this complication and let it ruin her film, make it mediocre. No. No way she was going to let it weaken her idea, her film.
She shoved her script back in her bag and headed off toward the staff-only parking lot, where her car happened to be parked.
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