Screen Test

I will admit straight off I was trying to pick up the dark-haired girl with the broken-looking nose. Her very imperfection made her rare. And then, I’d never met either of them before—nobody had. The party was one of those get-the-new-talent-together things. I went with my old friend Jared—two grown sons of the industry, men in their thirties still casting about for something to say. He’d left early, while I’d hung on for no particular reason. I suppose it was the house itself that intrigued me. An old Hollywood bungalow, tucked up off the road. There was something tawdry and a little perverse about it. It had the feel of a forties trysting spot. A time-capsuled set, being swallowed slowly and mercilessly by California’s lushness.

The girls arrived late, flushed and holding hands like children. I remember I was standing—hiding—behind a rice-paper floor lamp. When I glanced up, they were suspended in a halo. The effect was strangely romantic, as though shot through one of those beautiful old filters that admit their artifice. The scene in Vertigo, where Kim Novak steps from the bathroom reborn as a blonde. Only it wasn’t to be like that at all.

“Oh my God, we were completely lost!” It was the shorter, blonde girl, her voice frank, a bit too loud. “I still don’t know my way around. But these hills, they’re beautiful! They’re crazy! Darling, where the hell are we?”

This last question she addressed to her taller friend, while the host stood foolishly by, touching the remaining wisps of hair back from his temples.

“Where, darling?” echoed her friend.

The two broke into conspiratorial laughter.

“I hope we didn’t miss anything important? Here, by the way. I brought a bottle of wine.”

Even this was unusual, almost poignant in its simple kindness, like a birthday girl who, in a strange reversal of custom, gives rather than receives.

“Ah!” said the host, embarrassed.

“I’m still a bit jagged.” She pronounced it with one syllable, like fagged. She had short, nearly white blonde hair, a boyish manner.

“We’ve had an experience,” put in the willowy friend. They had resumed holding each other’s gaze. Their fingers rested over one another’s elbows. I remember this as well as anything that came after: the current that passed between them when they drew briefly apart before embracing, the way a wave will tug back before it breaks.

“In retrospect, the frogs are apt,” said the dark-haired girl, the one I’d begun to think of in the necessary way men do as mine. I was standing with them now, the host happily released.

“You’re getting ahead,” her friend said.

Willow responded with a glance, a shrug of the shoulders, saying, “Were there hundreds, do you think? I’m impossible with numbers. I’ll just say, masses of frogs, mating. Is there a word—thronging?” She looked at me, before turning back to her companion. “Don’t you think it’s apt?”

“You’re still getting ahead.”

“But it was the beginning of the hike.”

“Thematically, darling, not chronologically.”

“Even so, darling.” She laughed and clasped Willow’s elbows, drawing her back in the way I’d observed earlier, anticipation flitting across her face. Her face was almost translucently pale, her closed eyelids delicately webbed with blue. I noticed a fresh pink scratch running down her arm toward her elbow. The other had the docile but slightly elsewhere look of a cat succumbing to its owner’s touch. I thought of the line from Annie Hall, “Twins, Max; twins!”

“I wanted to show her Griffith Park,” said the blonde. I’d christened her Tom.

“Because of the Observatory,” I guessed. The end of Rebel Without a Cause was filmed there.

“That’s the weird thing. I didn’t even know it was there.”

“I’m a huge James Dean fan,” Willow said, as if placating me, and Tom cried out in her booming voice,

“Darling, please! That’s like saying you’re a fan...