Cal bought the shirt without asking what it cost.
He had gone into the hotel shop for water. There was water in their equipment room, water in the lobby, water in the cold metal tubs along the garden path. He wanted someone to bring it to him, and the shop had a woman behind a desk who seemed willing to go and get anything he liked.
She saw him looking at the pale shirts on a rack.
“They're linen,” she said.
“I gathered.”
“You can try one.”
He took a white one into the fitting room and stood under a light designed to forgive the hotel's guests. His old shirt looked gray in his hand. He had two others upstairs, both black, each with the same permanent bend in the collar from the camera strap.
The new shirt fell properly. He could lift his arms without pulling the hem out. For once the face in the mirror looked like the man he meant to be before someone asked him for money.
He wore it to the desk.
The price was three hundred and ninety dollars. The woman told him after she'd wrapped his old shirt in tissue paper, and he didn't change his face. He paid with his debit card. The machine accepted it with a tiny approving noise.
“Would you like a bag?”
“Yes.”
He took the bag and the cold water to a table outside the bar. He had twenty minutes before the portraits. A waiter asked if he wanted a menu. He said yes to that too.
He could leave.
Not invisibly, not without upsetting a contract, but he could get in a car with his bags and let the calls come while he drove. He could pay another operator to cover tomorrow. They had the angles, the schedule, Juno. A competent replacement would make an attractive wedding film.
He took his phone out and looked at the rental car parked in the hotel's appalling paid garage. He had the key in his room. Everything he needed was here.
The waiter returned with a menu and set a small dish of olives beside it.
Cal ate one, carefully, before ordering.
He could replace the damaged audio recorder, get out of the editing room with no window, put a proper shooting week into No Visitors without asking Juno to advance expenses. He could pay her the eighteen four.
He opened the proposal.
The first page loaded with its old photograph of a gate in the desert. He'd spent four hundred dollars getting a driver to take him out there, another three hundred persuading him to wait. Beyond the gate, a private road ran toward the unfinished houses. The owner had taken the call, asked to speak off the record, and then never answered again.
Cal had kept the photograph because it was beautiful. Looking at it now, he saw what Gideon would say. He had made a film about not getting in.
The waiter brought his food: stone crab already cracked, a small silver bowl of sauce, a glass of white wine he had ordered because it sounded better than beer. Cal ate a piece of crab and felt something inside him ease. He could afford the driver again. He could afford three drivers. He didn't have to like any of them.
Gideon came out of the bar, looking for someone. Cal raised his hand.
“You found lunch,” Gideon said.
“Late.”
He looked at the plate, then the new shirt. Cal wished he'd put the shop bag under the chair.
“Sunday still all right?” Cal asked.
Gideon had already started looking beyond him. He brought his attention back.
“Of course.”
“I've been thinking about the access.”
Gideon took his sunglasses off, folded them and put them away. Cal waited.
“I've got a way in.”
Gideon was looking toward the other tables. “You're still using that gate?”
“Not if I can get inside.”
“I pulled it up this morning. On my phone. I kept trying to see if there was someone in that little building.”
“There was a guard. You can't see him from—”
“Rafi!” Gideon raised a hand past Cal's shoulder.
He touched the back of the empty chair and moved on without sitting. Cal watched him greet the man in a jacket patterned with large dark leaves. The man opened his arms so broadly he nearly hit a waiter carrying glasses.
Sunday, ten-thirty. Cal had spent fourteen months trying to reach Gideon's assistant, and now Gideon was out here touching his chair. Leaving meant sending something later, hoping the man remembered why he had wanted it. Staying meant being in the room.
He drank the wine. He had to be back at work. He signed for lunch, tipped more than he normally did, and took the bag upstairs.
Juno was coming out of their equipment room. She stopped at the sight of the shirt, then looked at the bag.
“Mine's got a hole,” she said.
“It's a different look.”
She didn't answer. She was trying to pull the spare battery pouch open with one hand.
He held the door for her. “You want one?”
“No.”
She got the pouch open and looked inside. “I need batteries. I thought these were fresh.”
She moved past him carrying B and a spare battery pouch. He put his old shirt on the table beside the drives. Adrian's little interview had finished exporting. The frame on the laptop showed his hand, palm up, asking them to believe it hurt.
Cal sent the clip to Lena.
Downstairs, the planner was directing the portrait group away from the corridor that led to the service stairs. Someone had set a belt barrier across it. A hotel manager stood on the far side, letting two staff members through and turning a guest back toward the lobby.
“Garden side,” the planner said, holding out an arm to gather the family. “We can still use the bench.”
The group had grown from two people to seven. Pam had arrived with a niece whose eyes were pink. Adrian stood a little apart, holding two pairs of sunglasses. Lena was trying to persuade the niece that she could wear hers if she wanted. The planner said the lenses would reflect everything.
“Then we get reflections,” Cal said.
Juno glanced at him.
He put Adrian and Lena on a shaded bench on the garden side, away from the service passage. Pam wanted the water behind them. The planner wanted the flowers. Adrian asked whether he should put his arm along the back of the bench and nearly hit Lena in the ear doing it.
“Don't arrange yourself,” she told him.
“He's arranging me.”
“He hasn't started.”
Adrian dropped his arm. Lena took his hand and put it on her knee.
Cal saw her fingers close around it. He had seen those hands on Felix's chest less than three hours ago. Now Adrian was looking at her as if the worst thing that could happen was for her to be unhappy with the pictures.
“Look at her,” Cal said.
“I am.”
“Good.”
He moved to his left. There was a crease in Adrian's shirt where the fabric pulled across his stomach. Lena reached to flatten it, then gave up and put her own arm across him. Juno was low on the other side of the bench, filming her wrist against his sleeve.
The niece said something about the sunglasses. Pam said she hadn't said that, she'd only said they might be inappropriate. The argument went on behind Cal. In front of him, Lena leaned her forehead against Adrian's for a moment, eyes shut.
He let the shot run.
When they finished, Adrian got up too fast and had to sit down again to retrieve the sunglasses from under him. The niece laughed. Pam's mouth moved as if she wanted not to, then she laughed too. Cal shifted to catch her. Beside him Juno was already on the niece, her camera tilted just enough to keep both women in the frame.
They held the moment between them. No instruction, no request to do it again.
Adrian asked to see it. Juno showed him, and he bent close to her monitor. Cal watched the big hand come up toward her shoulder and stop short of touching it. He thanked her by name.
“We need you for the rehearsal,” the planner told him.
“Now?”
“In ten minutes.”
He turned to Lena. “Are you coming?”
“I'll catch you.”
He kissed her without noticing the camera. A quick kiss, almost on the nose because he'd started moving before she'd turned her face. Then he followed the planner inside with Pam and the niece, still holding both pairs of sunglasses.
Juno stayed beside Cal.
“Get the rehearsal,” he said. “I'll come in.”
She looked at Lena, then him. “They'll want you on the aisle.”
“You can do it.”
“I can do it. They booked you.”
“I'm coming.”
Juno went after them. She did not hurry.
Lena remained at the bench. She touched the place under her eye where her face had rested against Adrian's, checking her makeup with the end of a finger.
“I sent the interview,” Cal said.
“I watched it.”
“He gave us something good.”
“Yes.”
She looked at his new shirt. Unlike everyone else, she didn't look away quickly.
“You got it?”
“I got it.”
“Good.”
Someone was dragging a container over the pavers beyond the hedge. Cal could hear the uneven scrape and then a thud as it caught. He wanted it to stop. Lena waited until it did.
“Adrian thinks you're making another film,” she said.
“I'm trying.”
“About places people can't go.”
“People too.”
“He likes that you do things he can't.”
Cal looked toward the doors Adrian had gone through. “He could pay someone.”
“He pays you. It doesn't make him able to do it.”
She took the pins from her hair one at a time and gathered it again at the back of her neck. He could see a small red patch where Felix had caught her arm. She covered it with her other hand while she worked.
“What do you want to see?” she asked.
He thought of the island, the airfield, the gates that looked so good because they were closed. He could leave with a quarter of a million dollars and make another film whose best scene was a truck. Or he could stay in this garden with a woman whose private life contained something he could hardly bear to think about and a husband who had watched his entire film.
“Not the rooms,” he said. “What people do in them.”
Lena tucked the last pin in. “Would you come when it's just us? Not with all these people.” She looked toward the doors. “Someone was telling him how to kiss me. I can't have that every time.”
“I don't mean a film about a billionaire buying flowers,” he said.
She was still looking at the doors.
Her phone rang inside the white bag. She reached to silence it without looking. It stopped. He could still hear the groundsman's container scraping behind the hedge.
“Adrian and I are doing something after the wedding,” she said. “A new business. We haven't talked about it in public yet. People will want to make it into something. I'd rather have somebody who knows us.”
“I don't know you.”
She let that sit between them.
Then she said, “Stay near me.”
He felt her looking directly at him, without the camera between them. There was fear in it. He recognized that now. It did not make her less attractive.
“You want me where you can see me,” he said.
“They're going to call me back in a minute. Come in with me.”
He could demand more. Another number, properly bigger this time. It rose in him and failed to interest him. She was offering something he hadn't put a price on yet.
His phone buzzed. A photograph from Juno: the center aisle, two rows of white chairs, Adrian standing at the wrong end while the planner tried to move him. A message followed. Are we using your interview before or after the walk?
Your interview. He could hear her saying it.
“Gideon wants to talk Sunday,” Cal said.
She picked up her bag.
He looked at Lena's arm, at the mark she had covered and forgotten to cover again. It would take very little to put her in front of the blank little lens and ask her what she'd wanted, just before she put her hands on Felix. He could imagine her face while she considered answering. That was the part of the thought he liked most.
“I'll be here,” he said.
She took his wrist and moved him half a step out of the path of a man carrying a ladder. An ordinary touch. He felt it after she'd let go.
Cal put his phone away without answering Juno. He raised the camera as Lena turned toward the doors. She looked back, and he kept her in the picture. Then she went inside and he followed, walking backward a few paces to hold her face as the light changed.