It's All In the Playing (15 page)

“I’m in the country. I have a private apartment of a friend. I wanted you to meet me here.”

I was flabbergasted.

“How was I supposed to know?”

“Yes, well,” he said, “that’s been a bit of a problem. Well, can you come here?”

“Now?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered. “It’s lovely out here. I could have my aide come and collect you.”

“Gerry,” I said, “I’m working. And we’re leaving tomorrow for Stockholm. I can’t.”

“Yes,” said Gerry. “I understand. I can be at my office in two hours. I’ll send my car and aide to collect you. I have a budget meeting in the afternoon, but I long to see you.”

Two hours later I was picked up by a young man, highly discreet, who spoke only of the weather and the news of the day. I eluded the press by exiting a little known side door. He dropped me off at Gerry’s private office. Since it was Saturday, nobody much was around. I looked at his door. I had never been here before. This was the place where he had taken my phone calls and sat until early morning solitarily reflecting on our relationship. I walked up to the door. It was open. I walked in. Then I saw him. His magnetism charged the entire room and he smiled with such happiness that the London fog seemed to lift. I crossed the room toward him. We shook hands and then we embraced. He felt familiarly solid in my arms. We didn’t hold each other long. We both needed to look at each other, register the facial expressions. Gerry held me out from him and then, while pleasurably perusing me, he circled me and talked.

“My goodness,” he said. “You certainly have become successful over the past few years. You’re looking wonderful.”

I scrutinized every flicker, every movement he made as I turned and took him in. The tie was askew (it was a tie I remembered). The belt was dangling as usual, his socks crept down over his shoes, and as he gestured and laughed I felt transported back in time, the same old feelings I had had for him a few years ago sweeping over me again.

“Thanks, Gerry,” I said. “You haven’t changed much with the hard work. You seem so full of energy and enthusiasm.”

He hung forward, his gaze falling on my lips. I
remembered it was this habit of his that had arrested me so thoroughly the first night I met him. That and the blazingly intelligent dancing eyes. I wanted to embrace him again, but I held back. I looked around his private office.

“So this is it, eh?” I asked. “This is where it’s all happened for you.” Marvelous how banalities help us over uneasy moments.

Gerry took a few grand sweeping steps in front of a long bookshelf. He moved with graceful abandon, completely unaware of how he looked or what picture he was presenting; not even a taste of self-consciousness was evident, whereas I stood there wondering if my mascara had flecked on my cheek and if my flat shoes looked all right with the long skirt.

Gerry bent over one of the bookshelves.

“I have your letters secreted away in various books here,” he said. “I couldn’t bear to part with them.”

He reached for a book.

“No, Gerry.” I stopped him. “That’s okay. I don’t need to reread my letters. I’m having enough
déjà vu
reenacting my relationship with you on film.”

Gerry straightened up and smiled. He threw back his shoulders and thrust his hands in his pockets. It was decidedly a gesture of pride and self-congratulation. It was then that I understood that the role he had played in my life was pleasant and satisfying to him. And the role he played in my book, and now on film, was a testament to the timelessness of our relationship—books and films being the sincerest form of flattery and recognition.

Double vision prevailed for me as I observed him. I had adjusted to believing that Charles Dance was Gerry for weeks now. I had made that quantum leap in my imagination, putting the real Gerry somewhere out to pasture. Now as I stood before him I began to wonder who
I
was! Or put more precisely, what
reality
was. I was living an experience that proved I could make reality
anything I wanted it to be. I thought of Akira Kurosawa’s classic movie
Rashomon.
Reality was in the eye of the beholder. Definitive truth didn’t exist. Truth was relative. If I needed an actor to be Gerry for three months so that I could emote sincerely, then I would do it. Gerry had only played a part in my life anyway. But what hit me with some impact now was that I had played a role in my own life, and was still doing it. I stood in front of Gerry fully aware of how I looked and what I was doing. I knew the emotional buttons to push in him and what would trigger a response. It was no different from the professional exercise of acting. And each of us did it every day, every moment of our lives, except probably when we were sleeping. Even then we were probably getting direction for the next day’s scene from the greatest director of all: our higher selves.

Then, as I gazed at Gerry, listening to him reminisce about us, in a kind of fugue, I found myself wondering something really bizarre. If each of us creates our own reality, then perhaps each of us creates the characters who
people
our reality. In other words, perhaps Gerry was
my
creation, existing only in my dream. Perhaps he didn’t exist for anyone else at all! It was a really weird feeling, a kind of shift to some other reality. Perhaps this room, these drapes on the window, these love letters of mine stuffed between the covers of political books, were only an aspect of my dream. Maybe Gerry was the stuff dreams are made of, like the movie we were making; a player in my play, and now someone else had stepped in to play him. Perhaps Gerry had, from the beginning, spoken lines only I had wanted to hear. Were pieces of my past, my present, and my future reflected in Gerry as he moved about the room being himself? Was he wondering if
I
was real? No. Not Gerry …

I came to with a jolt. We sat down next to each other on his couch. The sun had broken through the
hazy clouds and dusty sunbeams slanted through the window across our laps.

“What did you think of
Out on a Limb,
Gerry?” I asked, trying to ground myself into an earth plane reality.

He turned and searched for words as he gazed out the window. “I couldn’t read it all at once,” he said haltingly. “I read bits and pieces before I went to sleep. Some of it is beyond my understanding.” He paused a moment. “Do you still believe in those spiritual things—souls and everlasting energy and things like that?”

Now I was very matter-of-fact.

“Yes, Gerry, more than ever. I think the world is in the mess it’s in because we are spiritually ignorant.”

Gerry shrugged defensively.

“But,” he said, “these are religious wars which are causing the mess.”

“I know,” I replied. “That’s the point. Religion doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with spirituality. Each religion thinks it has a hot line to God. When the truth might well be that we are
all
attached to God. We are all part of God.”

Gerry sighed.

“I don’t believe in God. I believe in my work.”

His words smacked the air. Charles Dance had just rehearsed those same lines with me that morning.

Gerry went on. “I don’t believe spiritual ignorance is the problem in the world, even with all the religious wars.”

“What is the problem then?” I asked.

Gerry straightened up.

“Nuclear proliferation,” he said. “We’re going to blow ourselves up if we don’t stop.”

I looked out the window. Birds shook themselves in the sunlight on a nearby branch. I heard a child laughing on the street below.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t think we are going to do that and I think the more afraid of it we are, the more we
contribute to the energy of its possibility. So it won’t be part of
my
reality.”

Gerry looked pleadingly into my face. It was a moment of moving confusion on his part—he who was always so sure of the rightness of what he believed. He genuinely wanted to understand the outrageousness, to him, of what I was saying. Charles Dance was playing the part the same way. Charles himself was more open-minded about metaphysical truth, but still there was a legitimate confusion about the unknown that he had not dared to contemplate. The actor and the understudy were well cast in the New Age illusion of my play. I sat there wondering how I was playing myself. More importantly, why had I chosen to go back over this reality I created for myself?

Gerry and I talked about the world, Gorbachev and Reagan, Mrs. Thatcher,
Terms of Endearment,
and life itself. It was all happening again—the same interplay, same attractive chemistry, same intelligent sensuality. But he had a budget meeting and I had a rehearsal.

We stood facing each other. I finally decided to question the future.

“What would you do if you gave up politics?” I asked.

His eyes glided over every inch of my face. I could feel him want to include me in that future.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said discreetly. “There will be something wonderful for me to do. I love the world and the people in it.”

We stood, delicately facing each other down.

“May I have your new phone numbers?” he asked shyly.

“They’re not new,” I replied.
“That
hasn’t changed either.”

He understood. Quickly he wrote out his new numbers and handed them to me. I folded the paper and put
it in my pocket. The action was identical to that of our first meeting. The feelings were, too.

“Remember me when you’re in Sweden,” he said unnecessarily.

“That’ll be my job, Gerry,” I answered. “Somewhere under every inch of that silent snow I’ll feel you.”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember.”

We parted and I knew we were still—and always—a part of each other’s lives. I had no idea then how strange an impact our interweaving would have on me later.

   I was late for the afternoon rehearsal with Charles Dance.

“Where were you?” he asked, enacting Gerry’s tendencies to a T.

“Oh,” I said, “I had a meeting with someone who reminded me that all of life is a movie and our progress is measured by how we play our parts.”

Charles looked at me quizzically. Then he picked up his script to fulfill my illusion of
his
Gerry.

   Our company invaded Stockholm, Sweden, the next day. We had wanted snow, but our schedule had us arriving a little early in November for such cold.

The English camera crew would now work side by side with Swedish grips and lighting technicians. Swedish actors would play the parts of the Swedes who first introduced me to trance channeling in my book. And we would actually film a trance channeling session in Swedish with the trance medium playing himself, and Ambres, the spiritual entity and teacher, playing himself. It would be the same process as with Kevin Ryerson and his entities, except it would be in Swedish.

I was deposited at the Sheraton-Stockholm Hotel, which I noticed was adjacent to a railway station. I wondered if our company manager had changed the current on my sound machine. I decided to trust that he
had, even though I remembered that Sweden matched no other current or amps in the world.

After rehearsing well into the night with our Swedish actors, I retired to bed knowing I had to get up at 6:00 A.M. I closed the windows to my room as I heard a train streak by. I hated to close windows because I love fresh air. I got under the covers and turned on my sound machine. It obscured the train sounds very well.

But it wasn’t long before I smelled smoke curling from my bedside table. I looked over at it. The sound machine was on fire, silently smoldering from within. And it was the only one we had. I could see the handwriting on the wall. This movie shoot was going to be about reliving illusion and the reality of a sound machine that never worked.

I sat bolt upright in bed, fully aware that I was about to make a scene. It was 2:00 A.M. I got up, put on my robe, and marched down to Stan’s room and then to the room of the company manager. I woke them up and proceeded to read the riot act to them about the entire success of our film depending on the technological perfection of my sound machine. I told them that if I couldn’t sleep I was a terror and I wanted them to see the first act of my terrorism. It was effective. They were properly terror-struck. The machine was fixed in due time.

As I lay in bed listening to the sound of Fast Surf Number II over the railway station below, I wondered in all seriousness why I had created the reality of that machine’s burning up. Clearly it had something to do with testing my sensitivity to terrorizing others. I had not passed the test very well.

The word was out the next day regarding my sound machine. Several members of the crew inquired curiously about why it was so essential to me. I tried to explain “motivational suggestion,” and much to my surprise, not only were they interested in how that worked but they also expressed private interest in what I had written
about. More than a few of them had had a grandmother or relative who professed to have been into the spiritual stuff for decades. Each crew member was interested in a different aspect of it. Some were intrigued with the reincarnation aspect, some with the eternal energy (the more technologically advanced related to this), some with the philosophy of “knowing we are all connected to the God-force,” some with the laws of cause and effect. I would have expected a California-based crew to resonate to the material in the script, but when I heard the English and Swedish crew members profess the same personal interest, I was once again reminded of how universal our individual searching was. Who are we? Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where do we go when we die?

As the television shooting hours unfolded I realized that making a miniseries was a way of life, not a project. There was time for nothing else, particularly when shooting on location. We quickly became a family attempting to survive the tick of the clock together. Sometimes we shot so long into the night that there was no food. I took to stuffing my tote bag with fruit and cheese and Danish, which the Swedes provided as a businessman’s breakfast adjacent to the morning elevator in the hotel. During the days there were jokes about “bagging” the pigeons instead of feeding them, or at least to save bits of bird bread for the crew. A kind of long-suffering gaiety actually developed out of the extended working hours and the universal difficulty of obtaining edible nourishment.