Confessions of a Falling Woman Page 14

  “Nope, we’re still getting too much light off it,” the voice in the rafters yells. The group pauses and mulls this over. There’s a palpable tension on the set. Everyone is glancing surreptitiously at a man in knife-pleated khakis and a lemon yellow polo shirt. When he turns around, I recognize the director. He is small and wiry and would probably identify himself as a serious runner. I’m guessing he’s about my age, but his hairline has already receded, leaving behind an island of wispy, colorless hair that floats above his creased forehead. At the moment, his face is taut with concentration or suppressed anger, his already thin lips pressed into a straight line. He squints at us, then holds up a finger to indicate he will be with us in a moment.

  “Okay, so you have to matte the surface? How long will that take?” He is staring at his watch, and because he isn’t looking at anyone, there is a pause while the group decides who should answer. After a brief conference, they decide the paint job will take forty minutes, so they can do a run-through with me first.

  The director then turns back to us and makes a fairly obvious shift to a friendly public persona. “Dan, good to see you again. Chris Pitney.” He thrusts out a hand and shakes, vigorously and a fraction of a minute too long. “Boy, they got you good. Can you see out of that eye?”

  “Yeah. No problem.”

  “Next time, just give them your wallet. I had a neighbor tried to negotiate with some thug for his ID. Ended up with a knife in his side.” I nod to indicate I’m filing this away—give them your wallet.

  “No costume?” Again, the question seems not to be directed at anyone in particular, so I’m not sure if I should answer. Teeka jumps in that she can have Wardrobe bring it down to the set.

  “No. Never mind. Well, just the paws. The rest we can do without for now. It’s probably cooler under the lights without it.”

  He refocuses on me. “So Dan, let’s get you on the wheel. Just hop up there and get the feel of moving on it.”

  A stagehand holds the wheel still while I climb through the spokes and onto the wheel. There is a floor, if you will, of foam-covered bars spaced about a foot apart. I crouch on all fours and slowly advance to the next bar, one hand at a time, following with my feet. After a few false starts where I lose my footing and bang a shin, I start to get the hang of it. It’s like climbing a ladder, except that the ladder is moving underneath me, pushing me forward. I fall into an easy rhythm, alternate feet and hands working in sync. Pitney encourages me to pick up the speed.

  “What you’re doing is great, Dan. But we need a sense of urgency, a frantic quality. Maybe if you put more into the shoulders.”

  Because I have no peripheral vision on my right side, I can’t see Pitney, but I can hear in his tone that he would just love to jump up here and show me how to make this baby spin. I start treading a little faster, and almost immediately, sweat beads on my forehead and begins to trickle down my ribs. I don’t have a clue what he has in mind with my shoulders, so instead I try nosing my head side to side in quick little staccato motions. This is good, I can tell, and I hear what sounds like an approving murmur from the small crowd that has gathered at the edge of the set. A drop of sweat slides into my left eye and blurs what’s left of my vision and I stop, gripping the bars as the wheel swings first up and then back, before coming to rest.

  “That’s good. Great. Don’t go past your limit. We can always speed up the film if we have to.”

  A dark, parrot-nosed woman dressed in pink overalls has emerged through the knot of observers and approaches Pitney with what looks to be an armful of stuffed animals.

  “Oh, good. I’m sorry, what’s your name? Sheila? Sheila here has your paws. Go ahead and put those on and we’ll run this one more time. Frank, how’s it looking?”

  The paws are made of smooth white fake fur and have long prehensile toes ending in claws. On the undersides of one pair are pink cotton gloves. The other pair are designed to strap over my shoes. Sheila helps me Velcro the paws into place, and I hold up my hands in front of me, slowly examining them with exaggerated horror.

  “Can this be evil?” I intone and then laugh maniacally. There are a few obliging chuckles around the set. No telling how many of them recognize an imitation of Spencer Tracy’s Jekyll and Hyde and how many think I’m just another loosely hinged actor. I catch Jodi, Teeka’s assistant, watching me intently and sucking on a strand of hair. I wink at her, and her eyes drift to the floor.

  “Okay, whenever you’re ready…” Pitney is smiling, but it’s a thin smile of tolerance. He doesn’t have time for fooling around. I get the sense that this is a break for him, too, the chance to do a big-budget national instead of the local RV and furniture warehouse ads. He may even have private fantasies that this will break him out, that it will lead to bigger things, a TV pilot or who knows what else. Of course, he’s wrong. This is a job, nothing else, a couple days’ work, and at best it will lead to more days just like this one. I could tell him, relax, your life isn’t in here. It’s outside that door, out in the world somewhere. This? This is ridiculous. But would he listen to the one-eyed actor with the rat paws? Not a chance.

  I climb back up on the wheel, my rat nails clattering against metal, and begin climbing the wheel. The paws take a little getting used to, but they also help me visualize myself as Lab Rat. I pick up speed and start the sniffing motions and manage to keep all these balls in the air until Pitney says “Cut.” Again, the wheel slows to a halt and I can see a half-circle of satisfied mugs, some encouraging nods. We’re in business.

  Next, we run the final shot. Pitney instructs me to lie on my back on the wheel. “What we’re looking for here is an exhausted rat. But also at the end of his rope. Really crazed.”

  “In other words, just be yourself, Dan,” I joke, but of course, no one knows if I’m kidding or not, so they smile uncertainly, humoring me.

  I lie back, raising my legs and arms above me, and start slowly bicycling my feet and twitching a bit, squeaking pathetically.

  I’m practically giddy with sleeplessness and disdain, and who knows, this may be working in my favor. Whatever impulse comes to me, I follow it. I feel like Steve Martin or Robin Williams, ricocheting in high gear from one new piece of business to the next. At one point, I try grabbing handfuls of paper off the floor and flinging them overhead, shaking my feet so my claws clatter, and squeaking ecstatically. This is a keeper; even Pitney is chortling. I’ve been a little hard on him; he’s not such a bad guy. Then we do the shot with the giant copier. The doors of the copier are open, and they’ve got it rigged to spew out shredded paper from the side. I’m supposed to nose around, lift the various levers and pull out drawers. I throw in the ear scratch bit, and it gets a good laugh from Pitney. Then I scrabble over to the side of the copier where the paper is coming out and start stuffing paper into my mouth. It’s an inspired bit, and the crew is laughing. As I’m doing this, I hear a voice on my right. “A rat’s not gonna eat the paper. He should just sniff it.” I twist around and grab a peek—it’s one of the agency goons, Ben Somebody. Everybody wants to direct.

  I raise my eyebrows, à la Jack Benny, and hold up my rodent paws in appeal to my audience. This is a bad move, and I know better. I’m just the hired rat. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

  Pitney is nodding earnestly, the weenie, doing his best to pacify the suits. “Good point, yes. So, Dan, let’s try that. Just sniffing the paper as it comes out.” I sniff.

  By the time they’re done with me, I’m starving, but the catering table has been cleaned out—lots of crumb-dusted trays, wadded napkins, and used paper plates with halfeaten muffins, crusts of quiche, and melon rinds—and another three hours before lunch. I grab a couple of glazed donuts and a cup of sour coffee, and Jodi takes me to my dressing room. Halfway there, we pass a guy coming the other way. He looks like something you might see at a sinister theme park: an enormous white rat in standard issue business attire—pale blue dress shirt, rep tie, chalk-striped trousers—but minus the paws,
which I’ve left on the set. There’s a large furry headpiece with pink ears and eyes, a pointed snout maybe two feet long and with stiff plastic whiskers. Human eyes peer out through wire mesh in the mouth. A bubble of anxiety loosens in my bowels. As we pass, I take note of the long, rubbery tail emerging from the seat of his trousers.

  “That’s the stand-in,” Jodi informs me. “I got assaulted at a club,” she adds, making conversation. The remark strikes me as a bizarre segue until I remember that, in theory, we are fellow crime victims.

  “These guys come up behind me and one of them, he, like, smashes me on the head with a beer bottle. For no reason. I was just standing there. I had to have six stitches.” As she’s talking, I realize that what I had taken for a speech impediment is actually a tiny silver barbell implanted in her tongue. I am attracted and repelled in about equal measure.

  “Is that what happened to you?” she asks.

  “What?” I snap back into the present moment.

  “Were you, like, an innocent bystander?”

  “No, I guess I provoked this one.”

  We have arrived at my dressing room. She points me inside and tells me that Sheila will help me with the costume when they’re ready. I thank her, but she hangs in the doorway expectantly.

  “So, did you try to fight them for your wallet?” She brushes a wisp of invisible hair out of her face and squirms against the door.

  “No. I didn’t have my wallet with me. I was just out walking my dog.” For some reason, it seems important to stay on the technical side of the truth.

  Her expression brightens with childlike glee. “Oohhh,” she coos. “You have a dog?”

  What the hell, I go ahead and invite Jodi into my dressing room. I offer her one of my donuts, which she declines with a wrinkled nose.

  Girls are one of the perks of being an actor. You might think that you’d have to be a handsome leading man to get the women, but I am proof positive that this is not the case. Even a thirty-seven-year-old schmoe playing a lab rat in a commercial and with one eye resembling a rotting onion can, in fact, attract women. Not grown women perhaps, but it’s not a quibble to give the average guy pause. Not this one anyway. It even crosses my mind that maybe I could get along in the world without Robin after all, armed as I am with a dog and a SAG card.

  Jodi and I compare notes on urban crime and I relate, immodestly, my recent encounter with the burglar in my apartment. She is rapt as I recount his demand that I get down on the floor, my refusal, his threatening me with the paring knife. “And the funny thing is,” I tell her, “I was calm the whole time. Calm is not my usual style,” I admit, “but I was talking to this guy like I was his shrink.”

  A stickler for the truth, I don’t neglect to include Robin in the story, but the mention of a wife doesn’t cause any visible wrinkle in Jodi’s attention. This means that either I have misjudged her interest or she is one of those young women for whom a wife is not regarded as the slightest impediment. Either way, it dampens my enthusiasm. I cannot pretend, not even long enough for a protracted flirtation, that I am not married.

  “I have a couple of calls to make,” I tell her. “Is there a phone somewhere I can use?”

  “There’s a pay phone back the way we came.”

  “Thanks, Jodi. I’ll see you later.” I wait for her to exit, and then follow her down the hall at a safe distance.

  When I dial the number in Maine, I fully expect to get the answering machine—this will be my fourth message in three days, not counting hang-ups—and I’m trying to decide how much to say, specifically whether I should mention my black eye, which would then involve explaining how I came to attack a complete stranger on the street last night, when I hear Robin’s voice. I’m startled into silence until she says hello again, this time phrased as a suspicious question.

  “It’s me.”

  “Dan.” She says my name in a pitch that suggests someone else is in the room with her. “I tried to call you.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I was out with Stuart and it got late, and then when I tried to call you yesterday, you were gone.”

  “How’s Stuart?” Still the neutral conversational mode.

  “He’s fine, I guess. He’s working on one of those books, some Eastern mystic’s guide to striking it rich in the stock market, so every time he opens his mouth, he sounds like a late-night FM disc jockey. But other than that, he’s good.”

  I translate the length and weight of her silence like Morse code: whoever was there has cleared out, and she doesn’t have to be polite anymore.

  “I got the commercial,” I tell her. “Actually, that’s where I’m calling from. I’m on a break now.”

  “That’s good, right?” I don’t know whether she means that it’s good I’m on a break or good that I booked the commercial, but her inflection indicates that she is impatient with this chitchat. If I called simply to tell her I booked this stupid commercial, she’s got better things to do. My sleep-deprived brain is slogging along at a maddeningly slow pace, and I can’t devise what to say next. How to…

  “So, what’s going on, Robin?” I blurt. “Are you going to leave me?”

  There is another exquisitely full silence, and I know without a doubt that she has been considering this very question, that she is considering it still, as we speak. Telepathy is hardly the occult talent it’s made out to be; spend eleven years with another person, each of you curbing your own will and trying to bend the other’s, trying, that is, to twine in the same general direction, and you find that words become not unnecessary but supplemental.

  “I don’t know. It’s not that I want to. But…” She stops and we both mentally review all the good reasons she has to leave.

  “I don’t want you to,” I say.

  “I know.”

  And there we are. There is another painful silence that I don’t know how to fill. The thing I want to say—the world would be empty without you—I can’t seem to say, although it’s true. One of the comforts of marriage has been the dailiness that doesn’t require or even allow poetic passion. And so I suppose our vocabulary has become stunted by familiarity. Often, I will tell her I love her in the perfunctory way of ending phone calls or saying good night. I’ll listen with one ear cocked to the game while she tells me the events of her day. We bump companionably along, adjusting without thinking if something chafes. Oh, now and again I’ll happen to glance at her standing in front of the bathroom mirror in one of my old T-shirts, and my breath will catch unexpectedly. Or she’ll casually disclose some facet of herself that she’s just never happened to mention—she can walk on the backs of her toes, she was state champ in women’s archery, she wants to go to the Galápagos Islands before she dies—and I’ll have a fleeting rush of admiration for what an amazing, original woman she is. But for long stretches I am as unaware of Robin as of my own breath. Only now that I am jerked up short by the possibility of loss, when I see that love, too, is mortal and fragile, only now do I fully realize what I stand to lose here.

  “Is it living in New York?” I ask. “I mean, is that what we’re talking about?” I’m not at all sure that I can quit the city, but if that’s what’s required, I want to know.

  “I don’t want to do this on the phone, Dan. Let’s wait until I get home.”

  Long after we have said good-bye, I am still holding the receiver and staring into some vague middle distance. The phone squawks for a while, then eventually falls silent. When I bring the receiver back to my ear, I hear the sound of the sea.

  I pass a blank hour before the wardrobe person, Sheila, arrives with the costume and supervises my dressing. I’m guessing she must have small children at home. She tells me to strip to my shorts, and while I do, she watches with total disinterest. Then she hands me one item of the costume at a time, first the undershirt, then the furry white knee-high socks, then the crisp blue dress shirt, all the while narrating her views on street crime as I dress. She holds up the trousers but then retracts them.

&nbs
p; “Do you need to pee first?” she asks.

  I assure her I’m fine, but she is unconvinced.

  “There’s a girdle in here to keep the tail erect. Once we’ve got you in, you’re in for the duration.”

  She waits while I excuse myself into the adjacent bathroom. I shut the door and then stand at the toilet and urinate, aware as I’m doing so that the sound of my stream is audible in the next room. When I return, Sheila picks up her story where she left off. She picks up the rubber tail, which looks astonishingly like a phallus, except of course that it is roughly three feet long and ends in a point. A fantasy dick, the kind you have in your dreams. It’s attached on one end to fabric panels which she wraps and cinches snugly around my waist.

  “How about strapping this on the front?” I smirk.

  “Don’t you wish.” Sheila smiles wearily and shakes her head. Boys, the mother of unruly boys. Then she helps me into Lab Rat’s trousers, threading the tail through a hole in the seat and tucking my shirt in. She allows me to zip on my own.

  We strap on my paws, first the feet, then the hands. Finally, Lab Rat’s head. Sheila climbs onto a chair and lifts the huge head from the dressing table where it has been staring at me with beady, blank malevolence for the past twenty minutes. A tie dangles loosely from its neck. She hoists the monster above my own head, but before she can lower it, I grab her wrists, surprising us both. A chilly sweat has popped out of my pores.

  “Could we wait on the head?”

  Her eyebrows lift.

  “Just until we get onto the set?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Half-man, half-rat, I follow Sheila down the hallway. I have a sudden, powerful empathy for the death-row prisoner being led to his execution. The fact that my dread makes no sense does nothing to lessen its insistence, and by the time we get to the soundstage, my heart is fairly skittering inside my ribs. There are several more people milling around than were here earlier, and the set is throbbing with hot light. I’m feeling a bit woozy and have to close my eyes for a moment against the light and noise, the buzz of voices. Under the drumbeat of my heart, I can hear Pitney’s voice issuing instructions to the cameraman, and another voice saying we need to get those cables taped down before someone breaks his neck.