cease and desist Read online

  And if I don’t nail it, it’ll be my last scene…

  “You look like a young Hepburn,” Manny says. My rib cage tightens. I suck it in.

  “Did she play Jeanne?”

  “No. You might be thinking of Ingrid Bergman. But, I must say after your performance today, Cease de Menich, you’ll give them all a run for the money.” And just when I think he’s let me off the hook, he holds up his hand and says, “Miss de Menich, there’s just one more question I have to ask you.” Manny leans forward, waits for all the wannabes and their mothers to lean in too.

  “Would you kill to be the last girl standing?”

  I try to stare him down, but can’t. I close my eyes, see the wounded boy’s face.

  “C’mon, Manny, no director would ever allow a bunch of teenagers to actually hurt each other.”

  You wanna bet?

  Manny smiles. The APPLAUSE sign flashes; people in the crowd are getting to their feet. He kneels histrionically as I lower an imaginary sword upon his shoulders. I sign an autograph for a stage-mom and rush to the car, but the backseat is empty.

  Where’s my Nina? I know she doesn’t like famous Francis who often alights from his trailer with crumbs in his beard and speaks to her in broken French. But why hasn’t she called? Maybe she’s fallen. We’re new in the building and hardly anyone knows her. I call her number as Yousef makes the turn down Broadway, but the line goes dead after a single ring. I look back to the studio and think I should’ve warned the wannabes about fame, that it’s stronger than any drug and always leaves you wanting more…

  “You beat up more boys tomorrow?” Yousef’s gold tooth flashes in the rearview mirror as I try to shake off the performance energy and all those hungry faces.

  “No. Tomorrow I kiss a boy. We make out.” I make this up, but I really want it to be true. I don’t know how I’m going to be the last girl standing, but I’m sick of fighting. I’ve been punching my way across battlefields for the last four months. I think it’s time to fall in love.

  We’re stuck behind a bus.

  “Even better,” he says. “God is good.”

  God? I bite my lip. Too bad Mister Ineffable isn’t here so I can spit in his face. Nina’s fine, I try to reassure myself. Maybe she’s waiting for the messenger to bring tomorrow’s scene. Nina’s probably looking at it right now—slowly turning pages with that cautious, stoic mask she wore after I survived the first few rounds; a look that told me she was so proud but scared that I was getting in over my head, that I didn’t really understand my character. And then she’ll nod in that stoic way of a Christian martyr, a nod that reminds me we’re a noble, theatrical family with a tattered pedigree—a rusted coat of arms locked away in a crypt—and like all martyrs we’ve got a cross to bear.

  My Nina thinks I was born to play Jeanne d’Arc, that we have the same chemistry—or, what she calls je ne sais quoi. Call it whatever you want—chemistry, charisma—my Nina says I’ve got it, and she doesn’t just dish out compliments; she’s a pretty strict stage-mom. I don’t feel it, maybe it isn’t something you can feel, but if there’s one thing I probably should’ve told the wannabes back in Manny’s studio it’s that having it, inheriting it, owning it, isn’t enough. You need someone you love and trust to help you nurture it.

  Call that the first rule of chemistry.

  A police line has been erected on Broadway at 43rd. We’re stuck in traffic. I tell Yousef to pull over. I can probably get home faster on foot.

  “Please stay, Miss de Menich. You’re safe in the…”

  I get out of the car and dash down 43rd Street. Storm clouds gather over the East River and the midwinter light pours down the crossstreets so evenly it feels as if I’m back on a movie set; by the time I reach Park Avenue I’m freezing in just a T-shirt. My sweater’s back in the car. I turn back and look for Yousef through the rush-hour traffic, the sea of people making their way home—but he’s gone. I pass diplomatic missions, a playground filled with girls in uniforms making their way to a bus. Grown-ups in shabby dress, chanting and carrying placards scribbled with words, pass me.

  I’m standing on the corner of 43rd and First Avenue, waiting for the light to change. I’m thinking about how I’ve got to nail my speech tomorrow. The sun’s reflection on the United Nations building is slowly turning it into a giant silver monolith—a stone-slab holding secrets from another age. I used to study it as I walked home, after surviving the first rounds. Back then, I secretly hoped the clouds would part and Jeanne d’Arc would descend from the heavens, take me under her wing, and tell me the reason I’d been chosen over all the others—tell me that I hadn’t just gotten lucky, that I’m meant to be here. But I don’t believe in that crap anymore. I may not be rich or beautiful, but I know a great speech when I see one and I know how to deliver it; Catherine the Great may be a timeless beauty, Susan B. Anthony may have a body that makes the boys drool, but if I get a great speech tomorrow I’m gonna make you cry—or laugh, or swoon, or whatever it takes for you to choose me.

  I’m not being conceited. Wanna know the secret to nailing a great speech? It’s simple—don’t trust words. I’ve been trained not to trust words, to memorize great speeches as if they were shopping lists, careful not to invest the meaning most people invest in them. When a great speech works, you can feel the words fall away. Time stops. You feel as if you’re frozen in some great mystery that has a texture, a shape, a color, and a promise that comes when you let go of everything you thought words were supposed to mean. Of course, you can never really stop time, but with the right speech, you can push it back long enough, so that the loose change in pockets, the whispers in the darkness (beyond the footlights) all pause—then you know all those people who’ve come to get away from real life, are finally right there with you, falling in love all over again.

  Love—jeez, there’s a word you should be careful of. I know what real love feels like; trust me, I learned the hard way and all I can tell you is most people have it all wrong. Love isn’t the dewy crush cultivated by girls. And it’s not the artistic mix of sex and violence Francis envisions, either. Want to know what real love is? Real love’s a bucket filled with holes and the only thing those holes drip are tears—just ask yours truly or any of the brokenhearted.

  I study the storm clouds forming over the East River. I need to get home to my Nina.

  “Are you nuts?” a driver shouts. A horn blares. The light’s changed and I’m about to be hit by a bus. I jump back up on the curb.

  “No. I’m a saint, you piece of crap.”

  Well, a saint-in-training, maybe. OK, right now—I wish I were a superhero instead of an historic figure. I wish I had a superpower. Jeanne d’Arc never spun a web to catch an archvillain or knocked out an enemy stronghold with her laser vision, but she had a power none of the superheroes could touch: She was a strong girl who knew how to stand up for what she believed in.

  A man with a grizzled beard passes. Wasn’t he the one standing in the back of the studio? I hug my chest against the cold.

  “Seize?” A gruff and familiar voice.

  “It’s Cease.” But when I turn, he’s gone.

  I push my way through a huddle of protestors headed to the monolith and cross the street to the rear of our building. The doorman gives me a big hello. Inside the apartment, a script sits on the coffee table. Nina kneels on the prie-dieu that sits beside her roll-top desk in the corner of the living room. I rush over and pick up the script.

  “Well?”

  She grunts and says, “Go see for yourself,” in a way I can’t read.

  I sit down and grab a brownie off the plate, stare down at the revisions, as if they’re an oracle, and wait for her reaction.

  “Where were you, Nina? I was worried.”

  “I thought you needed your space,” Nina says with a shrug that’s Nina-speak for something’s wrong. Provincial furniture from Pierre Deux chokes our cramped living room like the memory of dead relatives. Nina got it for the apartment she used to
have on the Upper East Side. The place she took me after the car crash that killed my mother and nearly killed me in California. We came down here to start over. Pierre Deux on Madison Avenue went out of business, but certainly not because of my Nina. A tall armoire with Chippendale wings stands between windows overlooking 43rd street, beside a Roman chaise with azure upholstery (where I’d like Nina to take a seat and tell me what’s wrong). It all looks a little stagy, but authentic—like Nina and I from the outside. But that rickety pew she’s kneeling on now has provenance. It comes from an ancient chapel that once held the de Menich coat of arms. A bishop gave it to her.

  There’s a Louis XIV bookcase with a gold mesh screen that holds a handful of journals Nina’s careful to keep protected. She shifts her swollen knees with a long sigh. The ancient wood creaks. We’re not fighting, but I don’t dare go over there. It’s her space; the corner overlooking the cloisters. No matter how much I love my Nina there’s a line between us—because when someone you love more than anyone else in the world dies, a line gets drawn between you and all the other people you try to love just as much, but can’t.

  I pick up the script.

  Scene IV. Only a virgin can teach the boys how to make love. Jeanne shares a secret with Rex and only one of them progresses to the next round.

  My calves tighten. Well—a love scene with Rex, the Aussie hunk. I guess I get to fall in love after all, but it looks short-lived.

  And then I see the line below. Nina has circled it.

  Jeanne: You can’t find God with a map.

  “Nina?”

  That line looks awfully familiar. Yes. It looks familiar because it is familiar. The line points at me like an accusing finger.

  She says nothing, which gives me time to take a breath and think of all the places this line could’ve come from, all the writers throughout the ages who could’ve written it. I drill down into the action. Break it down to the beats—let my training take over. I’m comparing notes on what love feels like with the Aussie hunk. The blocking notes are familiar.

  It’s just coincidence, Cease. No it isn’t. How can it be?

  Hundreds of plots throughout the ages sound like this one. Girl is contacted by a supernatural power and informed she must become tough as a boy to save the world. Girl meets real boy and falls in love. Girl must give up her inner boy to make room for the real boy in her life. Why?

  “Nina? What’s wrong? Why did you circle…?”

  And now she does turn and gives me a really hurtful look, a look I’ve never seen before.

  “Nina. That line…it came from…my Romeo.” I bow my head. Nina gives me that measuring gaze—a look that only an adult can give to a little girl, a little girl crying over a disaster she should’ve seen coming. And then I’m crying—low, angry sobs that tell her she’s done something beyond the pale.

  “My sweet Jeanne. My humble maid.” She’s rising now, slowly. I hear only the creak of her knees against the wood. She’s shared our secret with the world. I steal a glance at rows of black journals behind the gold mesh of the bookcase, knowing what’s in there. The brownie I’ve just dropped looks like a turd on Nina’s beautiful oriental. Nina’s shaped like a refrigerator but has all the warmth and security of a down comforter; her big arms wrap around me.

  “You’re freezing, child.”

  “I needed to walk…Nina? I don’t understand. How could the writers have known that line?”

  “It’s time we sit down,” Nina says. “It’s time we talk about your character.”

  The reflection from the sun on U.N. building at this hour usually casts a palm-size disk across our living-room wall. I search for it on the yellow and gold, fleur-de-lis wallpaper.

  “Neither of us told anyone,” Nina says. And then she lets out a sigh. “I think it’s time you accept that larger things are at work here.”

  I scoff because whenever things get weird, Nina always turns to God. I’m pretty sick of seeing that solemn look that tells me there’s something obvious I’ve been missing. She looks out at the cloisters. A rope the window washers had left is rapping against our window.

  A long beat. We in the House of de Menich are not good at talking about real feelings. That’s why we ran on stage in the first place. We’re not exactly a normal family. If there really is a coat of arms with our name locked away in a family crypt, its motto would probably read: “We keep our darkest secrets hidden in plain sight, because the only place you’d ever believe them is in a darkened theater.”

  One of us needs to change the subject, fast.

  “All right—what are these portals?” Nina asks, finally. Whenever Nina can’t find a way to share the deep secrets of my character, she blames the script. She blames Hollywood.

  “They’re places I go to move back and forth in time. It’s the same way saints travel through time,” I say. I look at my Nina’s old face, those bird-waddled lines around her eyes that flex when she’s trying to tell me something and the words just come up short.

  “That’s not the way saints travel.” Nina wears her Catholic heritage like a birthright. “Saints don’t need—”

  “Well, that’s the way Hollywood saints travel. Think of them as movie stars of another age—like Hepburn, your favorite.”

  “The director’s an imbecile.” She scoffs. I look down at the brownie crumbs scattered on the oriental. Another ten-hour day and I don’t remember the last time I ate. Unless you could call those green concoctions the caterer made, eating. I clean up the mess and grab another. Even a martyr about to be burned at the stake needs her brownie.

  “Whatever happened to good old-fashioned Bible stories?” Nina asks.

  “Nobody believes them anymore.”

  “Some of us do—”

  “Yeah. Like your sister,” I say, accusingly. I can’t keep it in anymore. “That poor excuse for a mother who tried to kill me. Sure, she believed. She believed she was God—at least, she tried to play him and look what happened.”

  Now we’re fighting. I don’t need this. That line between us has suddenly become a barbed-wire fence. There are lines that get drawn between people for the stupidest reasons. Another breath. I think about my options with Rex tomorrow. Do-or-die scenes with girls are pretty straightforward. You fight until one of you dies—with boys, it’s different. Sometimes you fight, but there is always a possibility of falling in love. Rex isn’t much of an actor, but all the girls have gone ga-ga over his body—tomorrow, he’ll probably be thinking more about Susan B’s stupendous breasts and Catherine’s porcelain skin than my lightning reflexes.

  I reflexively tug the black cloth that hangs beneath my teal, silk shirt. It’s a scapular—a peace offering. We can’t afford another fight about the past. Across the coffee table, Nina sits on the other side of a great divide. Each night, after the revisions arrive, I read my lines and feel myself slowly crossing over, each word a steppingstone and my Nina on the other side. My rock. My safe harbor. I take a deep breath and begin my journey backward.

  “Nina? My character…Jeanne.” I try to stay in character. “She would interpret the words ‘only a virgin can teach the boys how to make love’ as proof that her virginity was a source of her power and that making love meant the kind of pure love that her God believed could save the world. Right?”

  I check to see if this is sinking in and pull the scapular all the way out of my shirt and hold it where she can see it. It has a history neither of us can deny. Before Francis chose me, I had to make love to a boy at one of the callbacks. The union required that Aunt Nina be present, and when she arrived we spoke in French. I explained that I wouldn’t really be making love with the boy, but there would be a lot of kissing, my breasts would be exposed, and he’d probably fondle them the way boys do.

  Nina refused to consent. I was a child, her child now that her sister was dead, and she wouldn’t allow it. I said nothing. I gave her a look that said nothing this boy could do would ever hurt me as much as what James had already done. She consented
with one condition—that I wear the scapular that had been handed down to Nina’s grandmother—an Alsatian, whose ancestors had once resided in Domremy, the birthplace of Jeanne d’Arc.

  I kiss in a grown-up way. That’s what casting directors have told me. But the truth is I’m still a virgin. Unlike my character, I didn’t pledge my chastity to God or Jesus. I don’t think being a virgin is the secret to my strength or how I got chosen to become Jeanne. I just haven’t found the right boy. Everyone thinks that losing it is a sign of growing up, but no amount of growing would ever satisfy what I’d lost. Anyway, the boy groped clumsily for my breasts, but I guided one of his hands to the small of my back and the other to my shoulder. I found the light and pressed gently against his lips, careful not to let him move too fast.

  Whether you’re Juliet or a vampire, it was the same dance… You must show the audience no matter how hard you press, how deeply you go, there’s a hole in your heart that will never be filled. That’s how the star-crossed make love.

  Those were some of the moves my Romeo taught me. I sit up. “Whoever included this line might be trying to help me.” I don’t know why I think this, but it just feels as if someone is trying to give me a clue…I clasp my hands in my lap and check to see if Nina is with me. She nods.

  “Maybe it’s a clue?—a clue on how to outsmart Rex,” I say. My eyes race down the script, trying to prove my intuition. “This scene is about lovemaking and how my virginity is the source of my great power, my physical strength.”

  “It’s not about the lovemaking,” she warns. “It’s about what the lovemaking will do to you.” Nina doesn’t like the idea that her beloved virgin saint is being used as a sex object, and I can’t really blame her. But she also thinks I’m becoming too tough and punching out too many boys. Go figure. I tried to tell her making it as a young actress in this city is about the same as the real Jeanne trying to get the world to listen to her as a girl in 15th century France.

  “Yes. I get that. And I think my virginity is definitely a source of my power, no matter where that source comes from. But how can I play that without coming off as being prude?”