Confessions of a Falling Woman Page 11

  “If you’re upset about the trip”—I’m still not sure this is the problem—“okay, I blew it. I should have consulted you first. I’m sorry.”

  Robin remains silent and impassive. If I thought I was going to get off that easy, I’m about to be disappointed. Not a chance, bub.

  “Listen, they’re going to be up there all summer. Can’t we just postpone it a few days?”

  “I can’t just pick up and go anytime, Dan.” She pauses while we both add the silent coda that, unlike me, she has a real job, the kind that pays a grown-up salary and benefits in exchange for her freedom.

  “Besides, that’s not the point,” she says. “You’ve been broody and miserable for I don’t know how long. Skulking around the house, making me feel guilty if I’m not miserable, too. Then you start hinting around about burning your union cards, calling up Zak and throwing in the towel, and I fall for it. You really had me going this time. I’m thinking, well, maybe this is a good thing. You know, hard but good. Maybe we can start planning a life. But we can’t even plan a vacation.”

  Contrition fails me. “You call that a vacation? Spending a week with Jack and Mina?”

  Robin draws herself up into the rigidly correct posture she assumes when she is furious. “All that matters to you is that a bunch of people you don’t even know like you. You’re like Sally Field. It’s pathetic. You get a couple of auditions and, presto, everything else vanishes. You’re right back in it. I don’t matter. Nothing else matters but waiting for the damn phone to ring.”

  “Well, shit, I’m sorry to louse up your plans. I was just under the impression we could use the money.”

  “Money has nothing to do with this.”

  “What the hell am I doing this for, then? Because I thought it was the money. So what is it? You tell me. The thrill of dressing up in a rat costume?”

  “I don’t know why you’re doing this. But don’t pretend it’s for us.”

  Robin gets up, stalks over to the old desk in the corner, and begins yanking open drawers and rifling through the contents. She pulls out an opened pack of Marlboro Lights and continues searching the drawers. We both quit smoking three years ago, and I’m surprised to see there are still cigarettes in the house. “I can’t take it much longer,” she warns me.

  Finally, she finds what she’s looking for, a book of matches. She tamps a cigarette out of the pack and lights up, inhaling jaggedly.

  “What kind of a stunt is this?”

  Her eyes train on me defiantly. “Maybe it’s my turn to be stupid and self-destructive.”

  I proceed to list every stupid thing she’s done in the last eleven years. I even make some up, stretch the truth a little to make my point. “But you don’t see me complaining,” I crow. “Sure, I’m difficult to live with sometimes. But at least one of us knows what it means to make a commitment. At least one of us was listening when the minister said for better, for worse.”

  “No question, you take the prize for stubbornness, Dan. Now if you could just learn when to quit.” Robin is still glaring at me, but she doesn’t look so cocky now. I note with satisfaction that her hand shakes when she draws the cigarette to her mouth.

  “What did you think, everything was going to be easy?” I’m skidding wildly forward now, ranting like a drunk, spewing up rage. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch the dog slinking across the floor and cowering behind Robin’s legs. “Things get a little rough and first thing, you’re ready to pick up and leave town. Your husband doesn’t turn out to be a star like you’d counted on, well, screw him. Or better yet, screw one of his friends.” This last is below the belt, a coded reference to her one serious indiscretion, a night many years ago when she got drunk at a party and ended up in a locked bathroom with Gordon Hopper. She didn’t commit adultery, but it is a technicality that rests uncomfortably on the question of how much further things might have gone had there been a second bathroom in the apartment.

  “Well, I don’t work that way,” I bellow. “Like if someone’s holding a knife on me, I think of you. I try to protect you. I don’t hide under the bed and leave you out there to die. You’re worse than an animal.”

  The words spray out of my mouth before I even know I’ve thought them. They shock me into silence. Across the room, Robin stares dazedly at the glowing tip of her cigarette. It is as though the eye of the storm has settled over us and sucked the air out of the room. The quiet feels oppressive and threatening.

  “I was…” Her face contorts painfully as she tries to form the rest of the sentence. I think I hear the word “scared,” but I may be imagining this. Then she twists away from me, hiding her face. Puck crawls out from under the desk and worms his way up into Robin’s embrace. I reach out and touch her, but she flinches, so I hover there, the hun, the outsider, listening to her suck at the cigarette and exhale. Now that they are actually needed, I am stupidly at a loss for words; all I can think to say is “I’m sorry” and “I didn’t mean it” over and over like some idiot Miss Manners. It’s too late for apologies.

  Robin carefully stubs the cigarette out in the dirt of her African violets and swivels around to face me.

  “I’m going up to Camden.” Her voice is flat. “Think what you want, Dan. But I was there for you.” And then the coup de grâce. “Not that it matters. Because I’m through.”

  Here’s what I’m hoping. We say these things and they’re out, and whatever dark hole they flew out of, you can’t stuff them back in. It doesn’t even matter if they’re not true, if you just said them in some kind of lunatic seizure. But I’m hoping that whatever it is between us, this cord that is anchored in our guts and that rips at my lungs when I’ve wounded her, I’m hoping that it’s stronger than we are.

  Another day, but from where I sit, in a molded plastic chair facing the door to the Rep’s sanctum sanctorum, it looks weirdly like yesterday. On the way in, I passed Kyle McCann leaving. He had on the same pink shirt, the tie loosened to achieve exactly the same effect (rule number one for the callback: wear whatever you wore before). He was also wearing the same self-satisfied look. The one my dad used to threaten to wipe off my face for me.

  The big blond Cornhusker is here again, too, still nodding and gesturing and moving his lips. I briefly made a game of trying to identify the scenes he is reviewing, like charades, but he happened to catch me watching him and has retreated to a corner where I can’t see his face.

  I have broken rule number one by returning here in dry and pressed clothing, but I still probably look about as haggard as I did yesterday. I woke up about four this morning feeling seriously hungover, my muscles achy, and with a bleary sense of regret. Oh, yes, I remembered. What was it you said? That she was an animal? Nice work, you putz. Robin was curled away from me, asleep. I considered waking her, getting this whole thing straightened out before she left for the day, but then thought better of it. Instead, I went out to the living room and watched CNN for an hour until I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke, the sun was glaring and she was gone.

  After I get out of here, I’ll give her a call. I’ll offer to call Zak and weasel out of the first refusal. He won’t be happy, and I can’t imagine how I’m going to explain it. I forgot I had planned a vacation in Maine? The truth sounds too lame, so I’ll have to come up with some plausible lie.

  They call in the beefy blond; Eric Swanson is his name. He can’t be reading for Terry, but he seems a little too fresh off the college football squad to play Hal. Who would take that guy seriously as a candidate for senator? On the other hand, maybe that’s just what they’re looking for, a Dan Quayle type.

  This is just the kind of thinking that sabotages an audition before you even get in the door. Worrying about things that are out of your control. What if this, what if that? I’ve got plenty on my plate right now without dipping into the long view.

  The door opens and Eric is ejected, looking like he just blew the game and would really like to pound something. I’m up.

  When they bring me
into the room, David Stover, the director, says “Ah, good to see you again, Dan,” and the wax museum stirs perceptibly from out of a sluggish doze. They sit up in their chairs and turn their expectant smiles on me. “How about the scene with the reporter?” Stover suggests.

  When you hit it out of the park the first time, everyone wants to see you do it again. So you go in and try to re-create that moment. You measure out the same pauses, repeat the same gestures. Every inflection is exactly as it was before—but lifeless. Dead. Deader than the wax museum’s vacant gaze. You can’t step into the same stream twice. Whoever said that, it’s lamentably true.

  The scene started out flat, I could feel it, but I’m chugging along, trying to pump some life into the corpse, gearing up for that moment in the scene where it sparked yesterday. But that moment comes and goes, and nothing. Stover takes a slug of his coffee and then stares into the bottom of the cup. Helen Wolfe, the casting director, lets her eyes wander to her watch. The only one still in the room with me is Arthur Haines, and he looks worried. Sweat begins to blur my vision, I’ve lost my place in the script. I can feel myself drowning up here, and the voice in my head is hysterical, screaming DON’T PANIC! DON’T PANIC! DON’T PANIC! DON’T PANIC! DON’T PANIC! DON’T PANIC! Then bingo, something clicks, and I let the water close over my head, I give in to the terror. Which happens to be exactly right for the scene. I’m underwater and I’m thrashing, but there’s a rhythm to it now. I can feel the panic channeling into the character. The lines come from nowhere, spilling out of my mouth, one after another, as if I’d just thought of them. It doesn’t get more real than that. I crash through to the end of the scene, my heart ricocheting off my ribs. A little over the top, but I’ve definitely got their attention.

  We take a breather, sixty seconds or so to wipe the sweat out of my eyes and catch my breath. Shift gears, on to another section, this one at the beginning of the play. This time, things go more smoothly. I sail along, right past the first point where they might have cut me off. Good sign. Two pages, three, four, past another break, and all the way to Hal’s exit.

  At the end, Stover takes me back a few pages and gives me an adjustment.

  “How about this section again, starting with Sheila’s entrance. Pick up the cues faster this time. No pauses, no thinking. It should be rapid-fire, like screwball comedy.”

  This is not criticism; this is a sign of interest. It means “I’m thinking you’re right for this, but before I sign you on, I need to know one thing: if I tell you to do something, can you just do it and not give me any crap about motivation?”

  So we run it again, this time in high gear. I’m firing the lines at the reader, and she’s batting them right back. Arthur Haines is nodding vigorously, and several times he barks with laughter. You gotta like a guy who’s in your corner and doesn’t make a secret of it.

  Stover is more circumspect, but there are subtle tells if you know where to look.

  He rubs his palms together briskly and makes a note.

  Translation: You can take direction. Good. Great.

  He asks Helen Wolfe a question, sotto voce, without taking his eyes off me.

  Translation: Do we have to see anyone else for Hal? Or maybe, Who is his agent, again? Something along those lines.

  Afterward, as I’m taking my leave, Helen turns her maternal smile on me.

  “The play goes into rehearsal in two weeks. Would that present any conflicts for you?”

  I feel that little ping a gambler gets when he’s been dealt a flush. It’s all I can do to keep from laughing giddily at the absurdity of the question. Of course, I don’t have any conflicts, Helen. I haven’t had a conflict in years. What I actually say, after a suitable pause, is that there’s nothing that can’t be changed.

  And then a gesture that needs no translation: Haines winks.

  It’s three A.M. I’m watching Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal. They’re a vaudeville team and just as they get their big break at the Palace, Kelly gets drafted. He slams his hand in a trunk so he can get a deferment, but his sacrifice isn’t appreciated by Garland; in fact, she cuts him loose because he’s put his career before his country. But it’s a musical and it’s Gene Kelly, so not to worry, they’ll get back together in the end. The movie is pretty slight, but Kelly and Garland are so committed, they actually make the turkey fly by sheer force of will. When Judy Garland sings “How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree,” she’s practically pole-vaulting across the stage, her brow gleaming with sweat, her elbows pumping. In the Method-trained smugness of my youth, I was critical of performances this big, but nowadays I find I really like to see actors throwing themselves over the top. I want with all my heart to feel that simple exhilaration again. I’m tired of subtleties.

  Robin is sleeping in the next room, and Puck has been patrolling the rooms all night. He’ll come in here for a few minutes and start to settle down, and I can see him trying to forget about the suitcase parked next to the bedroom door. I tell him that it’s okay, no one’s abandoning him. “The two of us guys are going to batch it for a few days,” I say with Gene Kelly–influenced joviality. He wags his tail limply, humoring me, then trundles back down the hall to check again on the status of the suitcase. Earlier, when I leashed him up, he hesitated at the door as though this might be some kind of trick. It was the shortest walk in years, one quick piss at the front door and then a dash back to the apartment to make sure she hadn’t slipped off without us. His anxiety is palpable.

  I know just how he feels. Theoretically, I got what I wanted—I’m staying here—but it’s not sitting well on my stomach. This morning, I called Robin after the audition. I had worked out the beginnings of a nicely contrite little speech that would culminate in an offer to bag the whole commercial thing and just go up to her dad’s place as planned.

  “Last night was entirely my fault,” I began and left a little opening for her to contradict me.

  “It doesn’t matter whose fault it was.”

  This wasn’t the encouragement I had been hoping for, but I agreed that, no, it didn’t matter. “What matters,” I continued, “is that our marriage comes first. You’re wrong to think that my career is more important.” Actually, when I was imagining this conversation, I think I may have counted too heavily on her to jump in somewhere, but she seemed to be waiting for me to finish. “That’s never been true.”

  “Okay.” Her voice registered that, yes, she had heard me but she wasn’t about to be taken in by a word of this malarkey. “I’m on another line. Can we talk about this tonight?”

  “I’m working tonight, but, yeah, sure. Actually, I was just calling to say that if you want me to, I’ll weasel my way out of the first refusal thing. We’ll just go ahead and go.”

  She sighed audibly. “I don’t want you to ‘weasel’ out of anything, Dan.” And she hung up before I could backtrack and substitute the word “weasel” with something less, I don’t know what, less weasely.

  We never actually did talk about it. When I got home from work, she asked me how the audition went, showed polite interest when I told her that it went well, and then moved seamlessly into a laundry list of instructions on how to survive her absence—when to water and feed the various plants, which of the vets to speak to about Puck’s medications, what was still at the dry cleaner’s—instructions that might, it occurs to me now, be intended to keep the place running without her indefinitely. Her manner was pointedly casual and gracious.

  I repeated my offer.

  “I can call Zak in the morning and get out of this commercial thing. Honestly, I don’t mind.” And suddenly I didn’t. Go figure.

  Robin turned, and for a moment there I thought she might haul off and belt me, that or burst into tears. Whatever emotion she was struggling with, though, she managed to suffocate.

  “No, it’s probably best this way after all.”

  I don’t know exactly what that means, except that it’s the kind of line they
used to give to Olivia de Havilland all the time. The wispy bravery of it was supposed to make you admire her gentle courage. But Robin is not the Olivia de Havilland type. She’s more like Bette Davis, sarcastic and plucky and not about to let anyone step on her, thank you very much. This quiet restraint is unsettling.

  So she’s going up to Maine tomorrow where she’ll spend the week with her family, kayaking, dining on lobster and mussels, generally lounging around the beach. I’m going to stay here, hunker down in front of the air conditioner and watch TV and maybe, if I’m lucky, spend a day dressed up in a rodent suit. Mulling it over, I’m having a hard time pinpointing exactly what is in this for me. Of course, there’s the money I stand to make if I book this commercial. But Robin is right: if I said that my choices were motivated by money, you’d take one look at my life and conclude that I was just about the stupidest person on the planet.

  Garland and Kelly are doing a rousing finale, their arms locked, legs kicking, smiles beaming. It has nothing to do with being happy. It’s not about making good choices. Everyone knows that about Garland, but it’s no less true of the rest of us. Actors act because we don’t know what else to do.

  While Robin was in the shower this morning, I took a peek in her suitcase and attempted to determine by its contents if she is leaving me for a week or for good. There was no conclusive evidence either way, at least not on the top layer, and I knew better than to dig for clues, because I could never hope to reassemble the careful still life she had constructed: shirts stuffed with rolled socks, sweaters carefully folded, shoes wrapped in paper and tucked into the corners. One might wonder where in the wilds of Maine she anticipates wearing her red silk kimono. But, I consoled myself, if my ultimately practical wife had decided to leave me, surely my things would be packed, not hers.

  Of course, I could have asked. But then she would have told me, and I just couldn’t bring myself to tempt fate like that. So, instead, I pretended that everything was fine. I walked her downstairs to the waiting car service and put her bag in the trunk. I told her to have a good time. She gave me the pressed lip, indulgent smile I’ve seen her give store clerks or waiters when she decides it’s not worth making a fuss. “You, too.”