He was right. They talked the way people talked on Federal Hill and in the Jewelry District and on the floor of the Corso Brothers plant when the presses were running, over each other and under each other and around, as if nobody had told them that the audience might need a minute. Clark Gable came reeling out of a telephone booth in a Miami bus station, drunk and triumphant, telling his editor off over the phone in front of a crowd of admiring onlookers, and Nicky laughed out loud and said, "Oh, I know that guy. I drive that guy home every Friday."
Then they were on the bus.
It was a night bus, swaying and rattling north through the dark with its windows fogged and its passengers slumped in every attitude of exhaustion and discomfort, and Theda glanced sideways and saw Nicky watching it with a frown of fierce professional attention, the frown of a carpenter watching another carpenter hang a door.
"That's a Greyhound," he said. "Thirties Greyhound. Look at that, he's got the gear shift right there on the floor. Look at the size of that wheel. You'd need arms like a stevedore." Then, a few minutes later, when the bus driver on screen got into a shoving match with a passenger and the bus went into a ditch: "Oh, come on. Never leave the vehicle. Never leave the vehicle. That's chapter one."
"Of what?"
"The Courteous Operator."
She laughed, and missed a line, and didn't care.
She had brought a pad in her purse, the little spiral-bound sketchbook she always carried, and a mechanical pencil, and she had meant to take notes. She had meant to write down favorite scenes, and lines, and the shapes of things, the brooches on Colbert's coat and the cut of her collar and the way her hat sat on her head like an afterthought. And she did draw. But twice she looked down and found that she had drawn nothing at all for ten minutes. By the time Ellie and Peter were sharing their first cabin at the auto camp, and Peter had strung a rope between the two narrow beds and thrown a blanket over it and announced, with enormous satisfaction, that it was the Walls of Jericho, she had stopped drawing altogether.
"There it is," she whispered.
"There it is," said Nicky, and they both looked down, at the same time, at the gray RIPTA blanket rolled up on the couch between them, and then up again at the screen very quickly, the way people do when they have both reached for the same thing.
At the doughnut scene, Nicky said "Hold it," and paused the tape, and the picture froze in a shivering band of static with Gable holding a doughnut in the air in front of Colbert like a professor with a piece of chalk.
"I need a doughnut," he said.
"Now?"
"This is the whole thing. This is the scene. Carmela said the doughnut tells you everything about the man. Cos!" He got up and went to the door and leaned out into the hallway. "Cosmo! You got any doughnuts?"
There was a pause. Then, from the dispatch office, Cosmo's voice, outraged: "What do you think I am?"