Alis had set the Digimatte on top of its case, with the compositor and pixar beside it on the floor, and snaked the fibe-op cable along the yellow warning strip and around in front of the door to the skids feed. I pushed the cable out from the door, gently, so it wouldn’t break the connection, and opened the door far enough so I could see, and then stood, half-hidden by it, and watched her.
“Down on your heels,” Peter Lawford instructed, “up on your toes,” and went into a triple step. Alis, holding a remote, ff’d past the song and stopped where the dance started, and watched it, her face intent, counting the steps. She rew’d to the end of the song. She punched a button and everyone froze in midstep.
She walked rapidly in the silly high-heeled shoes to the rear of the skids, out of reach of the frame, and pressed a button. Peter Lawford sang, ” — that’s how it goes.”
Alis set the remote down on the floor, her full-skirted dress rustling as she knelt, and then hurried back to her mark and stood, obscuring June Allyson except for one hand and a tail of the pink skirt, waiting for her cue.
It came, Alis went down on her heels, up on her toes, and into a Charleston, with June behind her from this angle like a twin, a shadow. I moved over to where I could see her from the same angle as the Digimatte’s processor. June Allyson disappeared, and there was only Alis.
I had expected June Allyson to be wiped from the screen the way Princess Leia had been for the tourates’ scene at A Star Is Born, but Alis wasn’t making vids for the folks back home, or even trying to project her image on the screen. She was simply rehearsing, and she had only hooked the Digimatte up to feed the fibe-op loop through the processor because that was the way she’d been taught to use it at work. I could see, even from here, that the “record” light wasn’t on.
I retreated to the half-open door. She was taller than June Allyson, and her dress was a brighter pink than June’s, but the image the Digimatte was feeding back into the fibe-op loop was the corrected version, adjusted for color and focus and lighting. And on some of these routines, practiced for hours and hours in these shut-off sections of the skids, done and redone and done again, that corrected image had been so close to the original that the ID-locks didn’t catch it, so close Alis’s image had gotten past the guards and onto the fibe-op source. And Alis had managed the impossible.
She flubbed a turn, stopped, clattered over to the remote in her pompomed heels, rew’d to the middle section just before the flub, and froze it. She glanced at the Digimatte’s clock and then punched a button and hurried back to her mark.
She only had another half hour, if that, and then she would have to dismantle this equipment and take it back to Hollywood Boulevard, set it up, open up shop. I should let her. I could show her the opdisk another time, and I had found out what I wanted to know. I should shut the door and leave her to rehearse. But I didn’t. I leaned against the door, and stood there, watching her dance.
She went through the middle section three more times, working the clumsiness out of the turn, and then rew’d to the end of the song and went through the whole thing. Her face was intent, alert, the way it had been that night watching the Continental, but it lacked the delight, the rapt, abandoned quality of the Beguine.
I wondered if it was because she was still learning the routine, or if she would ever have it. The smile June Allyson turned on Peter Lawford was pleased, not joyful, and the “Varsity Drag” number itself was only so-so. Hardly Cole Porter.
It came to me then, watching her patiently go over the same steps again and again, as Fred must have done, all alone in a rehearsal hall before the movie had even begun filming, that I had been wrong about her.
I had thought that she believed, like Ruby Keeler and ILMGM, that anything was possible. I had tried to tell her it wasn’t, that just because you want something doesn’t mean you can have it. But she had already known that, long before I met her, long before she came to Hollywood. Fred Astaire had died the year she was born, and she could never, never, never, in spite of VR and computer graphics and copyrights, dance the Beguine with him.
And all this, the costumes and the classes and the rehearsing, were simply a substitute, something to do instead. Like fighting in the Resistance. Compared to the impossibility of what Alis was unfortunate enough to want, breaking into a Hollywood populated by puppets and pimps must have seemed a snap.
Peter Lawford took June Allyson’s hand, and Alis misjudged the turn and crashed into empty air. She picked up the remote to rew, glanced toward the station sign, and saw me. She stood looking at me for a long moment, and then walked over and shut off the Digimatte.
“Don’t—” I said.
“Don’t what?” she said, unhooking connections. She shrugged a white lab coat on over the pink dress. “Don’t waste your time trying to find a dancing teacher because there aren’t any?” She buttoned up the coat and went over to the input and disconnected the feed. “As you can see, I’ve already figured that out. Nobody in Hollywood knows how to dance. Or if they do, they’re splatted on chooch, trying to forget.” She began looping the feed into a coil. “Are you?”
She glanced up at the station sign and then laid the coiled feed on top of the Digimatte and knelt next to the compositor, skirt rustling. “Because if you are, I don’t have time to take you home and keep you from falling off the skids and fend off your advances. I have to get this stuff back.” She slid the pixar into its case and snapped it shut.
“I’m not splatted,” I said. “And I’m not drunk. I’ve been looking for you for six weeks.”
She lifted the Digimatte down and into its case and began stowing wires. “Why? So you can convince me I’m not Ruby Keeler? That the musical’s dead and anything I can do, comps can do better? Fine. I’m convinced.”
She sat down on the case and unbuckled the pompomed heels. “You win,” she said. “I can’t dance in the movies.” She looked over at the mirrored wall, shoe in hand. “It’s impossible.”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t come to tell you that.”
She stuck the heels in one of the pockets of the lab coat. “Then what did you come to tell me? That you want your list of accesses back? Fine.” She slid her feet into a pair of slip-ons and stood up. “I’ve learned just about all the chorus numbers and solos anyway, and this isn’t going to work for partnered dancing. I’m going to have to find something else.”
“I don’t want the accesses back,” I said.
She pulled off the blond pageboy and shook out her beautiful backlit hair. “Then what do you want?”
You, I thought. I want you.
She stood up abruptly and jammed the wig in her other pocket. “Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait.” She slung the coil of feed over her shoulder. “I’ve got a job to go to.” She bent to pick up the cases.
“Let me help you,” I said, starting toward her.
“No, thanks,” she said, shouldering the pixar and hoisting the Digimatte. “I can do it myself.”
“Then I’ll hold the door for you,” I said, and opened it.
She pushed through.
Rush hour. Packed mirror to mirror with Ray Milland and Rosalind Russell on their way to work, none of whom turned to look at Alis. They were all looking at the walls, which were going full blast: ILMGM, More Copyrights Than There Are in Heaven. A promo for Beverly Hills Cop 15, a promo for a remake of The Three Musketeers.
I pulled the door shut behind me, and a River Phoenix, squatting on the yellow warning strip, looked up from a razor blade and a palmful of powder, but he was too splatted to register what he was seeing. His eyes didn’t even focus.
Alis was already halfway to the front of the skids, her eyes on the station sign. It blinked “Hollywood Boulevard,” and she pushed her way toward the exit, with me following in her wake, and out onto the Boulevard.