Confessions of a Falling Woman Page 12

  I got back up to the apartment and checked the answering machine, in case Zak had called while I was downstairs. Nothing. Then I went back to bed. I haven’t done this in years, slept during the day. It is one of the many little disciplines, the seemingly inconsequential rules I made up for my life as an actor. They are the things that distinguish me from a bum. I don’t sleep during the day. I don’t drink or watch TV before five. I get up at a reasonable hour, do half an hour with the weights or go for a run, shave and dress, and then leave the house. I do something productive, preferably career-related, but if not, then anything concrete and improving, even if it’s as small as picking up the groceries. I tell myself that all this matters, that even more than the rent money I bring in bartending, these habits are what keep me from being a nothing.

  But I was so tired. It was as though the sleep I have been losing for the last several weeks caught up with me all at once. I was suddenly and completely exhausted. I made some pretense of reading the paper, sitting upright at the table and jerking awake every few minutes when my chin dropped. What the hell, I finally told myself, you’re supposed to be on vacation. You can do whatever you please. Who’s to stop you? No one. Puck followed me into the bedroom, and I hoisted him up with me. It’s been some time since he’s been able to leap up on the furniture. When I lifted him, I was careful to cradle his haunches. He remained gingerly stiff in my arms. It may not have been worth the bother for him, but I wanted his company.

  Sometime later, I am swimming to consciousness in a groggy panic, dragging the empty lake of the mattress for a body. Gone. I don’t know what I am missing, but it is critical. I try to recall the last fragments of a dream, but they are drifting back beneath the surface. The room is still and stuffy, the late afternoon light oppressively bright behind the blinds. From the park, I pick out the sounds of children. They are chanting something—duck, duck, goose?—and, inexplicably, I am weepy and nostalgic for my life. I have the conviction, I couldn’t tell you why, that my life is shifting underneath me, changing radically, right this minute. I can’t even say for better or worse. It could be that Robin is working herself up to leave me, or already has, and I’m just too thick to know it. Or perhaps my career is about to really take off and I’m going to reap the rewards of years of patience and hard work. And this, oddly, is almost as terrifying.

  Everyone has these moments, I suppose, when you feel you’re on the cusp of something big, that any minute now the wave you’re riding will crest and you’ll be able to see into your future. In my limited experience, the expectation is misguided—you reach that peak and what you see is a trough and beyond that another big wave obscuring your vision. The message here is probably more mundane, something along the lines of “Avoid afternoon naps.”

  I check the answering machine. Just in case I didn’t hear the phone ringing. Nothing. Nothing from Robin, who promised to call when she got in, nothing from the agent. Nothing. Today is Wednesday. I auditioned yesterday. There’s no reason why I should hear from Tribeca before Friday. Even next week. They may still be seeing people. Certainly not before Friday. It’s ridiculous to worry until then.

  The commercial is a different kettle of fish. I definitely should have heard something by now, if they need to do a fitting, sign contracts, whatever. It’s what, four-thirty, so Zak probably won’t call today. I can’t completely rule it out yet, maybe in the morning. If I don’t hear tomorrow, then I’ll have to assume they went with someone else and this whole fracas with Robin was completely pointless. They could at least call, put me out of my misery. I mean, they have to know by now. Unless the person they want to use is dicking them around. Who knows? This whole thing is so last-minute, cast and shoot the same week. But definitely, if I don’t hear by tomorrow afternoon, then I don’t have it.

  I stare at the phone for a bleary stretch of time, as though it may ring if I just sit here long enough. So what, if Robin said she’d call? Who am I, some prickly teenager that I should care who calls whom? And the answer here would have to be yes, because I don’t pick up the phone right away. Instead, in a precise imitation of adolescent angst, I rehearse variations on an imaginary phone conversation. I try on the indignant role and discard it because, even in my own ears, I sound petulant. I try casual, just ringing up to see how you’re getting on, hot enough for you, blah, blah, blah.

  I pick up the phone and dial out the number Robin has left in case of emergency. It rings four times, and then a robotic female voice announces the number and suggests I leave a message. “Robin, it’s Dan.” I wait, hoping that maybe someone will pick up. “Okay, when you get a chance, give me a call. No big deal, I just want to know you got in okay.”

  It’s five o’clock, and the evening looms empty in front of me. The movie channel is showing On the Town at eight, and I’m not knocking it, it’s a good movie, even with Ann Miller, but there’s only so many times you can watch even the good ones, and I’ve seen it a few more times than that.

  What I need to do, I tell myself, is to get off my duff. Get out of the house, call up some friends, do a guys’ night out. Having a plan invigorates me. I dial up my buddy Keith and get his machine. “You’ve reached the home of Sarah and Keith. There’s a beep coming up and then you’re on.” “Keith, it’s Dan. Are you there? Okay, well, it’s about five, and I’m thinking it’s a good night to do a little carousing. Call me for further details.” Then I call Mike Hardin, whom I haven’t seen in a long time but have been meaning to call, who, his message informs me, is in Vermont doing summer stock until Labor Day. Then Stuart Hoffman, who is away from his desk, and Barry Ingles, who can be a real jerk sometimes but whose name is entered right beneath Stuart’s in my address book. Barry’s answering machine has one of those endless musical selections preceding the beep. I wait out the first minute but then hang up. I’m half tempted to call the operator, just to confirm that it’s not faulty equipment, that in fact every person on the planet but me is occupied.

  When the phone rings, the sound startles me. Before I pick up the receiver, I take a deep breath to collect myself and I repeat in my head a brief incantation-slash-affirmation: you deserve good things.

  “Dan-O.” Stuart’s rumbly bass booms over the line. “Got your message. You okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, nothing much.” The master of understatement. “I was just thinking about coming into the city, and I wondered if you were up for a little libation and conversation.”

  “What, now?” He pauses, then asks again. “What’s up?” His voice is quietly insistent, as though I have bad news to spring on him, and I may as well cut to the chase. I suspect this is a habit he developed from years of talking with doctors.

  “Nothing’s up. Robin’s up in Maine for a few days, and I’m just not in the mood to sit home.”

  “She went up there alone?”

  “No, not alone.” I’m trying to remember if I said anything in my message that would put Stuart on high alert like this. “She’s with her dad and his wife. I was going to go, but I’m on first refusal for a commercial, so I have to sit tight until Friday.”

  “So you’re all alone in the city, huh, big boy?” Apparently satisfied, Stuart reverts to the banter we established years and years ago, when he played Falstaff to my Prince Hal at the Dallas Shakespeare festival. The play more or less set a tone for our friendship in that he still likes to pretend that his job in life is to corrupt me. That he is gay supposedly makes him privy to all kinds of depravity; the fact that I am straight and, better yet, from Oklahoma makes me forever the innocent rube.

  In fact, he’s always led a very conventional and quiet life. Even when he was still acting, he was the designated adult in our group, the only one with a steady partner, dental insurance, matching glassware, all the markers of responsible living. When Andre got sick, Stuart stopped taking out-of-town jobs and gradually got hooked into this company that does books on tape. He started off just reading the books
, but gradually slid over to the production side, too, because they needed the insurance coverage. Now he goes to work every morning and is probably home and in bed by nine most nights.

  I take the subway in, and when we pull into Wall Street, the car fills with a swarm of worker bees heading home. It’s probably still in the low eighties on the street and a good ten degrees warmer in here. A hundred upraised arms perfume the tired air. At each stop, the doors open and more bodies squeeze in. One Wall Street hustler uses his briefcase as a battering ram, letting the doors bump open and shut until he can press himself into the last inch of open space on the inside of the car. I am wedged against a young woman with plump bare arms. Behind her, a man with his suit coat flung tiredly over his shoulder holds up a wilted copy of the Post with his free hand. We are all immodestly close, and each time the train lurches around a curve, slows or speeds up, we are flung against the warm flesh of our neighbors. The woman and I are both pretending mightily, she that her breasts are not pressed into my stomach, I that the Yankees’ win over the Angels is gripping reading.

  Stuart and I have made plans to meet at McLeary’s, one of the old hangouts on Amsterdam. It’s a typical Irish bar, sawdust on the floor, greasy sausages in a warming tray for happy hour, cheap and friendly and one of the few reminders that the neighborhood was working class not too long ago. The owner has hung some ferns in the window and put out a few tables on the sidewalk to siphon off the yuppies who now stream up and down the avenue at night, but the clientele seems unchanged from twenty, thirty years ago. A half-dozen grizzled old men watch the Yankees game at the bar; a couple younger ones flirt with an orange-haired woman in a thigh gripping miniskirt. They are like Eugene O’Neill characters in The Iceman Cometh, preserved in the smoky amber tar that coats every surface of the bar. I don’t recognize anyone except Stuart, sitting at a table near the jukebox. He grins and leaps to his feet, arms open to embrace me.

  “Hey, you’re looking good, Stu,” I tell him, slapping his back with one hand and patting his gut with the other, a guy hug. He’s built like an opera tenor, big and barrel-chested. He played Falstaff without padding and even did Santa for Macy’s one year. (“Don’t let me do that again, not if you care for me,” he said afterward with jokey terror.) Then when Andre was withering away, Stuart responded by bulking up even more, eating both portions of whatever dish he’d whipped up to tempt Andre.

  “I’m going to the gym three times a week. I hate it,” he moans, but he seems pleased that I’ve noticed. “I pedal and pedal and pedal. It’s so boring. They have videotapes where you can bike the back roads of France, but you can’t pull over and eat a nice little lunch of pâté and cheese and champagne. So where’s the fun in that?”

  I get us a pitcher from the bar, and we settle back into the drowsy glow of a late August evening. We talk and we watch the passing scene outside: the couples locked in heated conversations, the men in dark glasses and the gorgeous women who are palpably aware of being watched, the skinny guy hawking designer watches and keeping one eye peeled for the cops. The drone of the sportscasters is soothing, a white noise surging now and then with the derisive hoots of the patrons at the bar, and I’m tipsy well before we’ve drained the first pitcher. I’m having a good time. We’re yakking about the shows we’ve seen lately, who’s good in what, who stinks, who we would have cast instead.

  “Speaking of which,” Stuart is saying, “I saw Marylou on a rerun of Chicago Hope last week. Did you see it? She was doing the sister of this guy who’s dying of some disease.”

  Marylou Kolodejchuk, a.k.a. Marilou Cole, a.k.a. the woman with whom I spent a few besotted, pre-Robin years until she made a pilgrimage out to LA for pilot season and just never bothered to come back.

  “She fell back on that old plucky-through-the-tears thing she does, but she was pretty good. God, remember that night she waltzed through the back wall of the set?”

  We stroll down memory lane, Stuart and I, with Marylou waltzing and Jim Callahan listening to the Yankees games backstage and Sarkowski with that ratty old pea coat he wore everywhere, even to the Tonys that year, and Amanda and that boyfriend of hers, what was his name, the one who turned out to be freshly sprung from Bellevue, arguing at the top of their lungs on the street in front of Steve’s until someone in an upstairs apartment began pelting them with garbage. And then there was the time Amanda and Robin made fried chicken and mashed potatoes at three in the morning, and all of us sat around drinking Jack Daniel’s and eating chicken and telling stories. And the time we drove down to Louisville in Gordy Hopper’s Electra 88 with the busted muffler and the ice cubes for air-conditioning. And the time Karl went up in the middle of his monologue and asked someone in the front row if she had seen the play before and did she happen to remember his next line.

  Most of these people aren’t around anymore. Karl’s out in LA now, too, manages a plant care business, waters houseplants for all the Hollywood muckety-mucks. Calls Stuart periodically, tells him whose plants he’s doing, that Kathleen Turner keeps killing her ferns, doesn’t know what she does to them, but they’re brown as cockroaches in two weeks. Amanda married a tree farmer and moved to New Hampshire, has four-year-old twins. Jim and Dorrie Callahan moved out to Denver, so there’s a standing invitation to come and ski anytime. Steve died. Hopper went back to Baltimore after his dad’s stroke, took over the family’s office supplies business. Then Andre, Stuart’s lover, died. The knot of our circle keeps shrinking. It used to be we could make a few calls and get up a crowd on a few hours’ notice, a night hanging out here at McLeary’s, shooting pool, or a spontaneous party at one of a half-dozen apartments on the Upper West Side. Or Sarkowski’s place on West Forty-fifth, which was decorated like a frat house, someone always passed out on the couch or hanging out between auditions, amazing to think that his beach house was actually in Architectural Digest last year. Nowadays, any kind of gathering requires weeks of planning and then the evening ends somewhere before ten because there are babysitters and morning appointments and long drives back to Jersey.

  “What the hell happened?” I blurt this out with such passion that I look around to see if anyone else has taken note. It has gotten dark while we were talking and the game has ended. I suspect I am drunk.

  “Things change, Danny boy.”

  “The thing is…” I pause here because I can’t quite place what the thing is. “The thing is, I’m starting to think like this is it, one way or the other. This is my last shot. If I get this part at Tribeca, then that’s a pretty clear sign, don’t you think?”

  Stuart is listening, nodding slowly, but he’s not convinced.

  “If I don’t get it”—the possibility fills me with such anticipatory grief that I have to wait for my throat to open again before I can speak—“if I don’t get it, well, I guess that’s a pretty clear sign, too.”

  “What’s it say?” Stuart asks.

  “Hmm?”

  “The sign. What’s it say?”

  “You’re a failure, pal. Pick up your marbles and go home. Move to Santa Fe and get a job and make your wife a happy woman.”

  There’s nothing to say to this. He can’t tell me to buck up, that if not this job, then something else will come along. We know better, old soldiers that we are. And he certainly can’t tell me that it’s time to call it a day, even if it is. We sit with the silence, mulling it all over.

  There’s an old joke, goes like this: two actors sitting in a bar—maybe not a bar, but for symmetry’s sake, let’s say a bar—and they’re lamenting the sad state of the theater. One says to the other, “You know, I haven’t worked in almost two years.” The other one says, “Yeah, I haven’t had a job in three years.” And the first one takes another swig of his beer and says, “Man, I wish we could get out of this fucking business.”

  So, it’s three in the morning, and I’m lying in bed, trying to recall if my hamster, Buffy, scratched his ear with his back paw or his front paw. I’m thinking it was his back paw, like a dog, in
which case I’m going to have to sacrifice reality because I can’t get my own leg anywhere near my head.

  Zak called this morning. Tomorrow, I report bright and early to the old Astoria Studios in Queens for the Dobbins Copier commercial. “What’d I tell you, Zak,” I blurted out. “The old dog still has a few tricks left in him.” Turns out, these tricks do not include scratching my ear with my foot. Not that it actually matters.

  They messengered the copy to me this afternoon. I hadn’t seen the storyboards for this thing, so I really wasn’t clear on what the commercial was about, except that it somehow figured a rodent and a copy machine. It turns out to be a crosscut kind of thing, back and forth between me, affectionately referred to as Lab Rat, whose copier jams and shreds paper, and another guy, Office Worker, the one dressed in a stylish-looking business suit, the one who bought a Dobbins. In the first shot, Lab Rat is sniffing curiously around a copier, lifting levers, pulling open doors. This is where I’m thinking an ear scratch would be a nice piece of business. Then cut to Office Worker casually loading a stack of documents into the feeder. Then Lab Rat, and he’s running on one of those hamster wheels. Then a couple of shots of the copier and all its features. Then back to Lab Rat on the wheel again. Next shot is Office Worker chatting on the phone, feet up on his desk. Finally, Lab Rat lying belly up on the wheel, hysterical and exhausted. And then some artwork with the Dobbins logo.

  All the dialogue is in voice-over, so I don’t have any lines to worry about. Nothing to worry about, I keep telling myself. A couple of squeaks, a couple of turns on the ol’ hamster wheel, and I’m out of there. Piece of cake.