Stages (25 page)

She was really remarkable. Wearing a bulky scarf wound around and around her neck and a little white sweater dress th
a
t clung to her body, she stood out even among all these famous people. Her hair had been streaked by the sun—it wasn’t dyed—and it framed a face that was all small pleasures.

Leaning against a wall, David watched and waited. Again the young woman looked at him, this time pointedly. Five minutes later she excused herself from the executive and walked over to the bar.

David met her there.

“Hello,” he said. “Our host didn’t introduce us…but nobody’s perfect. I’m David Whitman.”

“Rebecca Reynolds,” said the young woman, offering her hand. “Nice to meet you. I…uh, noticed you earlier.”

“That’s the best notice I’ve gotten in a long time,” David replied.

“Really? You’re an actor, huh?”

“I used to be. Now I’m an agent.”

“A case of man bites dog, huh?”

“Exactly.”

David was a little surprised at how taken he was with her. She was actually making him a bit nervous. Women did
not
have that effect on David. He loved them, enjoyed them too much to be…disturbed by one of them.

“Are you an actress?” David asked.

“More or less,” Rebecca replied. “I model too. I like modeling ’cause it’s such a nice, easy,
dumb
job, you know?”

“I know,” said David. “I’ve never known any models with ulcers. I’m not sure who’s better off, people whose work is totally mindless or people who work at what they love doing….”

He raised an eyebrow at one of Weinberger’s outsized paintings. “Like Picasso,” he said.

“I don’t understand artists or art,” Rebecca said. Orson Welles had just brushed past her on his way to the hors d’oeuvres. “I grew up in a small town in Georgia. And I never went to college.”

“But I don’t think art is made to be understood anyway,” David said. “Pull it apart trying to understand it and you ruin it. That’s the function of the critic. It’s kind of too bad you never run across a critic with the looks to do modeling. So you’re from Georgia, huh? You still have a trace of a southern accent. But I wouldn’t have known what part of the south you were from. I grew up in New York, and a New York Jew like me is never going to understand the south—it’s like you saying you don’t understand art.”

“Well, ignorance is bliss,” Rebecca said.

“That’s certainly true of these parties,” David said. “I used to think that if you were famous, you couldn’t possibly be boring, but, boy, did I learn fast.”

“It’s amazing how many of them don’t have any
interests,
isn’t it?” Rebecca said. “Except
the business.
Gawd.”

“This
is
a company town,” David said. “It’s not like New York…where you run into ego from
all
walks of life.” The two of them stood there in silence for a moment. “I’ve got an idea,” David said. “Why don’t we go someplace else…for a drink or something?”

“That’s a
good
idea,” Rebecca replied. “What place were you thinking of?”

“How about my place?”

They left the party five minutes later.

When they got to David’s place, they each had a brandy. Then she was waiting for him, on his bed, nude.

The sight of her nearly overwhelmed him. Her skin fairly glowed in the dim light. David thought,
I’ve never seen such beautiful nakedness before.

Rebecca,
he breathed as he touched her, half thinking that to name the wonder of her would make her real. But she felt like a dream too.

*

It was after the party, and Weinberger was in his bedroom, with its view of the spotlighted Italian cypresses. He was on the telephone.

“Did she get him?” asked the voice on the other end.

“She got him,” Weinberger said.

“Good,” said the caller. “I owe you one.”

“Think nothing of it,” Weinberger replied. “She hasn’t lost her touch, Becky.”

“Why should she? She’s what—twenty-two?”

“She must be around that. I forget. How old was she when she was with you?”

“She said fifteen.”

“I think she was eighteen when I had her. At any rate, she is older now. More experienced. Becky with more experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

“You’ve gotten soft.”

“True, I’m not as hard a man as you are, Donny.”

“I’m a shmuck. That’s why I’ve lasted.”

“Hooray for Hollywood,” said Weinberger as he stubbed out his French cigarette. “Land of the enduring shmucks.”

43

Veronica Simmons was determined to forget everything Paula Rubin had thought she’d known about acting. Veronica would go by instinct alone. None of the Stanislavsky nonsense,
nothing
would be allowed to get in the way. Veronica was determined to make herself a blank, a cipher. She would begin to move, she would start to think, only in the narrow path of the playwright’s words. Her whole history as a human being had to begin and end there, if she wanted her audience to believe her. The thing, Veronica thought, the trick must be…
to close out everything in yourself, and all you’d ever learned about life, except what was in the heart of the character you were playing.
Then you could believe yourself in the truth of the lines you were reading, then you would be getting at the absolute honesty of shared feeling, the thing always missing in a
bad
performance, which the audience always recognized as obvious and clumsy lying.

Maybe there was a secret advantage, then, to be had in going to an audition as a complete nobody. You were pure and unspoiled, ready to be defined, to be colored in within the lines.

When Veronica Simmons showed up at an Off-Broadway tryout, on a gray October day, the director, taking her in at a glance, did not expect much.

Before calling on Veronica, he’d asked three other actresses to read for the part of Ann. Ann was a hooker, without the heart of gold. She was supposed to be around thirty and to look older. Even though she was street wise, life had smacked her around. Basically she was pretty desperate. The only comfort she had was in her little moments of private sadness, which couldn’t come off as sentimentality. The director, Alvin Sampson, had explained all this, and was being exasperated for his efforts. They couldn’t even get Ann’s Brooklyn accent right.

The first woman had sounded like a housewife from New Jersey, and had read Ann’s lines as if she were doing a suggestive detergent commercial. The second one had sounded like a gun moll out of a thirties gangster movie. The third Ann had been much too old for the part and had come off like a fallen Ruth Gordon.

With resignation Alvin read from his clipboard, “Miss…Simmons?”

Veronica stood up and said evenly, “Yes.”

“You don’t list any previous experience at all, I see,” Alvin said skeptically.

“I couldn’t list any credits because I don’t have any,” Veronica said simply.

She was so straightforward she disarmed Alvin somewhat.
Credit her with looks, anyway,
he thought. Her eyebrows disturbed him. She hadn’t used a pencil on them, and they were almost too natural for comfort, like a glimpse of pubic hair at the binding of a bikini.

“All right, Miss Simmons,” Alvin said. “If it’s on-the-job training you’re looking for, I don’t mind seeing if you’ve at least got the basic skills. Give her a script, would you, Meg?”

The script was folded open to the page where Ann’s lines began. Reading the part of Skeet, her pimp, was a young black man named David. David had obviously been one of the token blacks at some college in the countryside. He gave due consideration to every word he spoke, and his neat-as-a-pin manners, together with his tea-with-milk skin, only reinforced the impression of pasteurization. Some pimp.

“Dave, you want to let Miss Simmons take a minute to settle herself and then feed her her line?” Alvin asked.

David nodded and looked at Veronica studying the page as if he were waiting for a secretary to hand him a report.

The words were swimming before her eyes. Her mouth was dry, and her cheeks were burning.

“Ready?” Alvin asked.

Veronica managed to turn her head and smile.

David crossed to stage right where the imaginary window was. Peering into the wings, he said, “Hey, look…that fuckin’ dog jus’ took a piss on one a mah whitewalls.”

Tentatively Veronica walked across the stage. Something strange was happening to her; it was though she had taken a great leap into the air, and in the air she had wobbled for a moment and was now streaking toward contact.

She knew this person. She’d heard this voice.
Once, long ago, on Sixth Avenue—her mother had pulled her away quickly when she’d said to the woman in the doorway, “Won’t they let you in?”

“She’s cute…” the hooker had said as Paula was being escorted to safety.

All of Veronica fixed on the sound of that voice, on the essence of those words.

She’s cute.
Take pity.

“I like those kinda dogs,” Veronica read.

Alvin’s mouth opened.

It opened a little wider with every line Veronica spoke. The thrill he was experiencing seemed to spread like a sunrise across the sky; he could only give way to the wonder of it. Alvin was thirty-eight years old and had been in the theater forever (time measured in rehearsals had a way of expanding when the shows opened and closed the same night, going from conception through development to the grave like little wasted lifetimes unto themselves). Yet he could still be surprised by the marvelous spectacle of talent cutting through the crap.

Watching Veronica Simmons becoming Ann, Alvin wanted to weep: she knew him, and she knew Ann, and everyone here recognized her. Alvin could feel it all around him, because as Ann, Veronica was one of those shadows across the heart that you see moving and then realize that yes, this groping, these fits and starts are your own reaching out, and the moon above is your light.

At the end of the second page of the dialogue between Ann and Skeet, Alvin snapped his pencil in two in his hands.

Hearing it, David paused.

“Go on,” Alvin said.

Four pages later, the scene ended.

All twenty-three people in the audience applauded.

“Thank you…Veronica,” Alvin said after a minute. “That was a…very convincing reading. Did you…uh, grow up in Brooklyn, by any chance?”

“No, I grew up in Queens, as a matter of fact,” Veronica replied.

“Hm. Well, I must say, for somebody who didn’t grow up in Brooklyn, you sure do have Flatbush Avenue down pat.”

Afraid that he was gushing, Alvin paused. Then he said, “Meg has your address and phone number, right?”

“Got it right here,” Meg said before Veronica could answer.

Alvin wanted to step on her like an ant for speaking when he might have listened to Veronica’s voice.

“Yes,” he said, seeking safety in irrelevance. “Everybody make sure that Meg has their address…so we can get back to you about callbacks.”

He got back to Veronica Simmons the next day, at nine in the morning, not to ask her to a call back but to tell her that she had the part of Ann.

“Christ, you
are
Ann,” he said.

When she hung up the telephone, Veronica’s chest was heaving. She walked around her apartment in circles for a couple of minutes, unable to settle anywhere. She stopped in front of the mirror and she said to her image, “Gee, I guess we really
aren’t
Paula anymore.”

44

Aaron and the two other young lawyers with whom he was to have opened the storefront office in Newark never quite got it together, so a few months after he and Kathy were married, Aaron accepted an offer from a firm in New York. They rented a small, one-bedroom apartment on the ground floor of a brownstone in the West Village. It was essentially a railroad flat, but it had exposed brick walls and a garden with a southern exposure.

Kathy spent more than a month scrubbing and painting. She had the Watergate hearings on TV, and every so often she would pause in front of the set to make faces at Haldeman or Ehrlichman. When she’d finished with the inside of the apartment, Kathy spent another month outside, hacking away at the garden. There was one poor twisted cherry tree that ants climbed in columns; the rest of the yard was an archaeology of the Depression—broken dishes and bottles, the handle of an ice box, a Ford radiator cap, a doll’s leg. When she’d finally reclaimed the soil, Kathy had no fingernails left, but she did have a tiny organic vegetable garden, a rosebush, tulips, daffodils, and five ferns that she’d dug up herself on a weekend drive into Connecticut.

In the evenings Kathy and Aaron would have white wine and cheeses from Murray’s in the garden. They’d run an extension cord through the window and bring the television set outside so they could watch Walter Cronkite tolling the bell for Nixon. One evening Aaron brought home a bumper sticker that read IMPEACH THE COX-SACKER. Kathy absolutely loved it, and they put it on the rear bumper of their Volkswagen, but then somebody peeled it off. Before they could replace it, Gerry Ford was president.