Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories (12 page)

And then the film jerked to life again.

"Don't tell him I was here, man," he said, shaking the knife at me for emphasis. He backed toward the window. I won't.

And he scrabbled out the window and disappeared.

I stared at the open window, a minute, maybe less, before I ran into the bedroom. Robin was gone. Bedsheets were strewn across the empty mattress. I yelled her name and heard a rustling coming from under the bed. As I came around to her side, she managed to pull herself free from under the low bed frame. Her eyes were wild with terror.

"Are you all right? Robin, are you all right?" I know I wasn't thinking clearly because I had the frenzied idea that somehow he had gotten to her while I was inside the study. She shook her head and tears brimmed up in her eyes.

"I thought he had a gun." She sprang into my arms and we held each other. She was shaking, as though she had caught a chill, and foolishly I wrapped the comforter around her.

"It's all right, sweetie. He's gone. It's all over."

Now that we were safe, the fear I hadn't felt earlier bubbled up in my veins, light as helium. We might have been killed. But no, I reminded myself, Robin had been safe. She'd been hiding. And then my brain snagged on a question.

"Robin, did you call 911?"

She shook her head no, her breath coming in hiccuping sobs now. I noted the phone on the nightstand, still in its cradle.

"It's okay, sweetheart," I told her. "Everything is going to be okay now."

I was wrong about that, though. For starters, this incident has destroyed my sleep, not something I was great at to begin with. Even Robin, who can sleep like the dead for nine, ten hours at a stretch, starts at the slightest sound. She happens to be out at the moment, but it is a restless business: she jerks and twitches and occasionally whimpers something indecipherable.

Me, I watch and listen. It gives me a lot of time to think. And what I've been mulling over during these vigils is the possibility that my life has jumped the tracks. Or worse, that there were never any tracks to begin with.

Maybe a crack-addled brain can explain singling out a secure and well-lit apartment to burgle. But then, how to explain why I'm not dead, or at the very least lying in St. Vincent 's recovering from multiple slash wounds and sipping my dinner through a straw? Everyone says we were lucky, no one was hurt, nothing was stolen. And maybe I should feel grateful, but it's a disconcerting thought when you get right down to it. Luck cuts both ways.

Case in point: my life as an actor. When I moved here from Tulsa in '75, I gave myself five years to make it. I wanted to be a star, but one who did interesting, offbeat work, one who, even when LA came courting, would never completely abandon his roots in the theater. The actor's actor: a De Niro, a Pacino. I never owned up to wanting the stardom part, though. Instead, I made it known that I simply wanted to do good work, to be an artist, to have a life in the theater. At the time, these seemed like humble aspirations.

Nearing the end of my fifth year in New York, my resume listed a mercifully unnoticed workshop production, Nick in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
? at the Passaic Playhouse, the role of Flight Engineer on a TV movie of the week, and a smattering of extra work. Nights, I did phone solicitation, trying to sell vacation packages. In short, I hadn't made it by anyone's definition, but by the standards of a business where the unemployment rate hovers around ninety-two percent, I was holding my own. I had acquired my union cards and a decent, though not powerful, agent. I was paying my dues and honing my craft –
quack, quack, quack, quack, quack
– all the things I told myself while I dialed for dollars.

Then I got cast in an off-Broadway play called
Crosshairs
. I was convinced, along with the rest of the company, that we had our hands on a brilliant play, so I was not surprised, much less grateful, when the
Times
agreed. Frank Rich said my performance was "disarming" and "hilarious," and I thought that, well, yes, that was about right.

The upshot was that my life was transformed. Suddenly casting directors were chummy, women brazenly available. The show moved across town to Broadway and started raking it in. I spent money like water, picking up checks for all my unemployed friends, buying a share in a summer rental out in Montauk. I signed autographs at the stage door and pretended modest surprise when people recognized me. More important, I started getting seen regularly for film roles, and there were a few key names in the business – what's the point of dropping names now? – they liked me and were introducing me around. The end of my fifth year came and went, and if I noticed, I don't remember.

Another nine years later, I am thirty-seven years old and I don't work much in the theater anymore. No, let's be honest: I haven't done a play in three years, and months go by between auditions. I have no explanation for any of this, none whatsoever. Except luck.

When people ask what I do, I say I'm an actor. Strictly speaking, though, what I do is bartend. I still snag the occasional commercial, and every once in a while my friend Stuart throws me a job recording a book on tape, but who's kidding who? Last week, I spent a morning pretending to be a crazed rodent in hopes of landing a national for Dobbin Copiers. I had no lines, just reaction shots: curious, excited, hysterical. Facial expressions were out, because there is some kind of mask involved. "It's all in the squeaks, the body language," the director told me with that amplified earnestness that commercial people indulge in to convince themselves they're doing something meaningful. I found myself thinking, as I squeaked and squealed for all I was worth, so this is what it comes to.

Everything could change again tomorrow – that's what keeps you in the game – but eventually you also have to face the possibility that it might not.

Down on the street, a car alarm shrieks to life. Robin's breathing suspends, her eyes snap open. We listen, wait through the moments it might take for the owner to stumble from his bed and into the street, but no one comes. The alarm caterwauls and then changes key to a series of bleats. I get up, peer out the window, see nothing, pull the window closed, and turn the AC on high to muffle the keening howls.

"Have you ever been to Santa Fe?" She doesn't look at me when she asks.

"No."

"We went there once, to look at a horse Dad was thinking about buying. I remember I was surprised at how cold it was; it was December, but I thought everywhere in the Southwest was like Phoenix. It started to snow, and the arroyos blurred and turned white. It was the quietest place in the whole world."

"Sounds nice," I say, guardedly.

The morning after the break-in, Robin announced that she wanted to leave New York. A pretty natural sentiment, given the events of the previous night, but not the kind of comment you want to give too much weight. There's a garbage strike, one too many snowstorms in February, whatever, and everyone talks about getting out. I figured that Robin's was just one of those empty threats that every New Yorker makes against the city.

But she's still circling the subject. She reads the travel section first on Sundays now. She cooks up all sorts of possibilities in places like Durham, North Carolina, or Missoula, Montana. Every night it's a different town, and she puts herself back to sleep dreaming about the cottage or houseboat or cabin we would live in, the vegetables she would plant in our garden.

"If we were willing to go out a bit, we could still afford to get a place with a little land," she continues.

"What would we do in Santa Fe?" I ask.

"I don't know, exactly." Her voice stiffens. "We'd come up with something, though. We're bright, capable people." What she doesn't say, though, and it hangs heavy in the air between us, is that her options are greater than mine. She can get a personnel job anywhere, but I can't imagine there's much demand for actors in Santa Fe.

"I just can't see myself there," I tell her.

"Well, where can you see yourself?"

"I don't know."

She sighs, deeply frustrated with me.

"Honestly," I say, "don't you think the idea of packing up the jalopy and heading out West is a little over the top?" Sometimes a note of levity works with Robin. I'm guessing from her silence that this isn't one of those times. I try a different tack. "After all," I remind her soothingly, "this is our home."

Robin's eyes drift to the windows, to the streetlight seeping through the metal security gates and making hatch-marked shadows on the window shades.

"You yourself said that you might as well be in Kansas," she says.

"Well, for Christ's sake, I didn't mean it literally."

No matter how innocuously we begin, every discussion these days circles round to some question of our future, just as it did eleven years ago when we were still trying to determine whether this unlikely pairing was actually going to work. Now, it would seem, everything we agreed on is up for review again.

Maybe this upcoming trip will help. Wednesday morning, we're flying up to Maine to visit my father-in-law, who has a summer home on Penobscot Bay. Six days cooped up with Jack Casterline and his loony tunes wife is not my idea of a vacation, but I can't really kick since Jack is footing the bill.

The window shades are fading to gray with the first light. It occurs to me that I haven't actually witnessed the sun rise or set since I can't remember when, this despite the fact that I'm awake during most of them these days. There is no horizon in New York, no line dividing sky and earth. Even during the day, the sun is felt more than seen, the heat of it seeping down between the long shadows in midtown and wavering back up from the concrete. Shards of sunlight refract off glass buildings, but the sun itself, the sky…

I wish I could follow Robin into her dreams. I wish I could turn my back on my life and pull up the covers and be in a snowy arroyo somewhere.

But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And yada yada yada.

I'm on the lookout for signs and portents these days, and what I'm discovering is that if one is looking, they appear in multitudes. Even the most daily event sprouts wings, becomes vastly significant. I'm on my way to this audition, and halfway between my building and the subway, the summer sky suddenly darkens to a septic green and splits open. The water is starting to drip off my chin, and just as I'm warming into a long string of curses, an empty cab materializes out of the rain like a messenger from heaven. I hail the cab over to the curb, slide into the backseat, give the turbaned driver the address, then settle back and close my eyes for a few minutes. When I open them, we are inexplicably heading up Sixth Avenue and a good thirty blocks north of my destination. It turns out the cabbie doesn't speak English; he responds to each of my frenzied corrections with an uncomprehending nod. The winds shift again, we turn south, the meter ticks over into four digits, and it occurs to me that this is the difficulty with trying to read your own life: from the center, each sign seems to radiate out in a different direction.

We have just crossed Canal again, and he is heading doggedly back uptown. I check my watch: it is 9:20. If I cut my losses and get out here, I could still make it on foot. I rap on the Plexiglas and signal the cabbie to pull over.

When he flips up the meter and his eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror, he smiles cautiously, expectant. Against all odds, he seems to believe that a miracle has deposited us at the mysterious address I've been yammering from the backseat. A few minutes ago, I might have argued the fare with the guy. Now I see my own bewildered self reflected in his smooth face. I stuff fourteen dollars into the slot and climb out into the downpour.

I am losing my grip.

The audition is for a new play by Arthur Haines at Tribeca Rep. I'm reading for Hal, this right-wing preacher who's running for a Senate seat somewhere out of the Midwest. It's not the lead, the play's actually about the gay speechwriter who's working on his campaign, but Hal is an interesting character with some good scenes. And it's eight, ten weeks of work, a good play, guaranteed press. Not that I'm in a position to be choosy.

Three blocks from the theater I slow to a fast walk and start running lines in my head.

"What are they saying about us in the
Herald
, Terry?"

"Well, Paul tells us we'll be persecuted for our faith."

I duck and weave through a phalanx of umbrellas at the corner, check for traffic, dive across the intersection.

"I'm not asking you to agree with me privately, Terry."

"Don't take advantage of my good manners."

My guess is that a lot of actors are going in there and reading Hal as a cardboard villain or a buffoon, which is a mistake. This guy's likable and sincere and convincing. That's what gives the play its tension.

In the elevator, I peel away my suit jacket and shake water off myself like a spaniel. I get up to the offices, sign in: name, agency, union membership. I'm on time, which turns out to be irrelevant. They're running behind – the small reception area is clogged with nervous Hals and Terrys. A half-dozen actors are bent intently over copies of the script or staring into some private distance. Two guys in the far corner are shooting the breeze, ostentatiously at ease. One of them is Brad Whalen, who works here all the time. He's not right for Hal, but then again, you never know. I'm hoping he just dropped by.

The other guy is Kyle McCann. We have the same agent. It's not just jealousy when I say the guy is a bimbo, completely without talent and maddeningly successful. At the moment, he is lounging against the wall in the studied pose of a jeans ad and casually tapping a rolled-up script against the brick.