She didn’t do either. She watched the entire scene, still and silent, her face almost as focused on the screen as Alis’s had been, and then said quietly, “I didn’t think she’d do it.”
For a moment I couldn’t register what she said for the roaring in my head, the roaring that was saying, “It is her. It’s not a flash. It is her.”
“All that talk about finding a dance teacher,” Heada was saying. “All that stuff about Fred Astaire. I never thought she’d—”
“Never thought she’d do what?” I said blankly.
“This,” she said, waving her hand vaguely at the screen, where the sides of the barn were going up. “That she’d end up as somebody’s popsy,” she said. “That she’d sign on. Give up. Sell out.” She gestured at the screen again. “Did Mayer say which of the studio execs you were doing it for?”
“I didn’t do it,” I said.
“Well, somebody did it,” she said. “Mayer must’ve asked Vincent or somebody. I thought you said she didn’t want her face pasted on somebody else’s.”
“She didn’t. She doesn’t,” I said. “This isn’t a paste-up. It’s her, dancing.”
She looked at the screen. A cowboy brought his hammer down hard on Russ Tamblyn’s thumb.
“She wouldn’t sell out,” I said.
“To quote a friend of mine,” she said, “everybody sells out.”
“No,” I said. “People sell out to get what they want. Getting her face pasted onto somebody else’s body isn’t what she wanted. She wanted to dance in the movies.”
“Maybe she needed the money,” Heada said, looking at the screen. Someone whacked Howard Keel with a board, and Russ Tamblyn took a poke at him.
“Maybe she figured out she couldn’t have what she wanted.”
“No,” I said, thinking about her standing there on Hollywood Boulevard, her face set. “You don’t understand. No.”
“Okay,” she said placatingly. “She didn’t sell out. It isn’t a paste-up.” She waved at the screen. “So what is it? How’d she get on there if somebody didn’t paste her in?”
Howard Keel shoved a pair of brawlers into the corner, and the barn fell apart, collapsing into a clatter of boards and chagrin. “I don’t know,” I said.
We both stood there a minute, looking at the wreckage.
“Can I see the scene again?” Heada said.
“Frame 25-200, forward realtime,” I said, and Howard Keel reached up again to lift Jane Powell down. The dancers formed their lines. And there was Alis, dancing in the movies.
“Maybe it isn’t her,” Heada said. “That’s why you asked me to bring over the ridigaine, wasn’t it, because you thought it might be the alcohol?”
“You see her, too.”
“I know,” she said, frowning, “but I’m not really sure I know what she looks like. I mean, the times I saw her I was pretty splatted, and so were you. And it wasn’t all that many times, was it?”
That party, and the time Heada sent her to ask me for the access, and the episode of the skids. Memorable occasions, all.
“No,” I said.
“So it could be it’s just somebody else who looks like her. Her hair’s darker than that, isn’t it?”
“A wig,” I said. “Wigs and makeup can make you look really different.”
“Yeah,” Heada said, as if that proved something. “Or really alike. Maybe this person’s wearing a wig and makeup that makes her look like Alis. Who is it anyway? In the movie?”
“Virginia Gibson,” I said.
“Maybe this Virginia Gibson and Alis just look alike. Was she in any other movies? Virginia Gibson, I mean? If she was, we could look at them and see what she looks like, and if this is her or not.” She looked concernedly at me. “You’d better let the ridigaine work first, though. Are you having any symptoms yet? Headache?”
“No,” I said, looking at the screen.
“Well, you will in a few minutes.” She pulled the blankets off the bed. “Lie down, and I’ll get you some water. Ridigaine’s fast, but it’s rough. The best thing is if you can—”
“Sleep it off,” I said.
She brought a glass of water in and set it by the bed. “Access me if you get the shakes and start seeing things.”
“According to you, I already am.”
“I didn’t say that. I just said you should check out this Virginia Gibson before you jump to any conclusions. After the ridigaine does its stuff.”
“Meaning that when I’m sober, it won’t look like her.”
“Meaning that when you’re sober, you’ll at least be able to see her.” She looked steadily at me. “Do you want it to be her?”
“I think I will lie down,” I said to get her to leave. “My head aches.” I sat down on the bed.
“It’s starting to work,” she said triumphantly. “Access me if you need anything.”
“I will,” I said, and lay back.
She looked around the room. “You don’t have any more liquor in here, do you?”
“Gallons,” I said, gesturing toward the screen. “Bottles, flasks, kegs, decanters. You name it, it’s in there.”
“It’ll just make it worse if you drink anything.”
“I know,” I said, putting my hand over my eyes. “Shakes, pink elephants, six-foot-tall rabbits, ‘and how are you, Mr. Wilson?’ ”
“Access me,” she said, and left, finally.
I waited five minutes for her to come back and tell me to be sure and piss, and then another five for the snakes and rabbits to show up, or worse, Fred and Eleanor, dressed in white and dancing side by side. And thinking about what Heada’d said. If it wasn’t a paste-up, what was it? And it couldn’t be a paste-up. Heada hadn’t heard Alis talking about wanting to dance in the movies. She hadn’t seen her, that night down on Hollywood Boulevard, when I offered her a chance at one. She could have been digitized that night, been Ginger Rogers, Ann Miller, anybody she wanted. Even Eleanor Powell. Why would she have suddenly changed her mind and decided she wanted to be a dancer nobody’d ever heard of? An actress who’d only appeared in a handful of movies. One of which starred Fred Astaire.
“We’re this close to having time travel,” the exec had said, his thumb and finger almost touching.
And what if Alis, who was willing to do anything to dance in the movies, who was willing to practice in a cramped classroom with a tiny monitor and work nights in a tourate trap, had talked one of the time-travel hackates into letting her be a guinea pig? What if Alis had talked him into sending her back to 1954, dressed in a green weskit and short gloves, and then, instead of coming back like she was supposed to, had changed her name to Virginia Gibson and gone over to MGM to audition for a part in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? And then gone on to be in six other movies. One of which was Funny Face. With Fred Astaire.
I sat up, slowly, so I wouldn’t turn my headache into anything worse, and went over to the terminal and called up Funny Face.
Heada had said Fred Astaire was still in litigation, and he was. I put a watch-and-warn on both the movie and Fred in case the case got settled. If Heada was right — and when wasn’t she? — Warner would turn around and file immediately, but if there was a glitch or Warner’s lawyers were busy with Russ Tamblyn, there might be a window. I set the watch-and-warn to beep me and called up the list of Virginia Gibson’s musicals again.
Starlift was a World War II b-and-w, which wouldn’t give me as clear an image as color, and She’s Back on Broadway was in litigation, too, for someone I’d never heard of. That left Athena, Painting the Clouds with Sunshine, and Tea for Two, none of which I could remember ever seeing.
When I called up Athena, I could see why. It was a cross between One Touch of Venus and You Can’t Take It with You, with lots of floating chiffon and health-food eccentrics and almost no dancing. Virginia Gibson, in green chiffon, was supposed to be Niobe, the goddess of jazz and tap or something. Whatever she was, it wasn’t Alis. It looked like her, especially with her hair pulled back in a Greek ponytail. “And with a fifth of bourbon in you,” Heada would have said. And a double dose of ridigaine. Even then, it didn’t look as much like her as the dancer in the barnraising scene. I called up Seven Brides, and the screen stayed silver for a long moment and then started scrolling legalese. “This movie currently in litigation and unavailable for viewing.”