The Understudy: A Novel (12 page)

The Love Interest

H
e hid Han Solo on top of the wardrobe.

At 8:48 precisely, as he’d done exactly ninety-nine times before, and as he would do another forty-five times more, Stephen left his dressing room, went down to stand in the wings and watch Josh’s performance. Tonight, standing in his usual spot, he saw Nora and once more felt a little jolt of pleasure. He tapped her lightly on the shoulder, and she turned and gave a startled yelp, perfectly understandable, given the combination of mask and body stocking, but just loud enough for Maxine to scowl across at them from the stage-right wings. Stephen sucked his belly in, lifted the mask up, mouthed a “Sorry,” and smiled reassuringly at Nora. She smiled back, a big, crooked smile, seemingly genuinely pleased to see him, then took his hand and tugged him farther back into the wings to talk.

“Nice leotard, my man,” she whispered.

“Technically, it’s a unitard.” In the name of decency, Stephen pulled the cloak tight around him. “It’s meant to make me look sinister.”

“Like you wouldn’t
believe
…”

“Well, thank you.”

“I thought that whole underwear-as-outerwear thing was over. And yet here you are…”

“You like it?”

“Like it? I
love
it! Very easy on the eye. Awfully
snug
, isn’t it?” She grinned. “Button gusset?”

“No, you sort of climb into it.”

“Lycra? Spandex?”

“Lycra-mix. I’m one of the few men in London who can really carry off a Lycra-mix unitard.”

“Oh, I think
I’ll
be the judge of that…” she said, and there was a lighthearted tussle as she tugged at the cloak. “Is it backless? Let me see…”

Meanwhile onstage, in the throes of mortal fever, Lord Byron was giving a particularly passionate dying speech.

“That’s my cue.”

“Don’t go,” she giggled, holding on to the cloak.

“I’ve got to go!”

“Just stay here—let Josh open his own damn door.”

Stephen’s cue light was green. He summoned up a stern, professional face.

“I’m
serious,
Nora.”

“But I must talk to you.”

“Okay,” said Stephen, delighted. “Okay, in my dressing room…”

“I’ll see you up there.”

“Fine, fine,” he whispered, pulling his mask down, straightening his face.

“Knock ’em dead, superstar,” she whispered, pushing him onto the stage.

As he walked menacingly across the back of the stage to open the door, the Ghostly Figure struggled to suppress a smile, but thankfully it was too dark for any of the audience to notice, and, besides, he was wearing a mask.

Back in his attic dressing room, Stephen extricated himself from the catsuit with canine grace, then, when Nora didn’t arrive, took a few moments to have a good long look at his teeth. They’d always seemed perfectly adequate before, but now, after comparing them with Josh’s, they seemed particularly gnarled and smoky, like the keys on a pub piano. After an unhappy ten minutes spent prodding and scraping with a bent safety pin, he resigned himself to the fact that Nora wasn’t coming.

Just as he was pulling on his coat, she stumbled in, carrying her coat and an exquisite bouquet of red roses.

“Mind if I come in?”

“Please—step into my office.”

“Hey, they’ve really got you tucked away up here, haven’t they? Sorry it took so long. Josh urgently needed his ego massaged. Unless someone tells him how amazing he is every twenty-five minutes, his heart stops beating.”

“So you watched the whole show, then?”

“God, no! Why would I wanna do
that
? Still, Josh doesn’t need to know that, does he?” She lowered her voice. “Tell me, d’you think this play’s actually any
good
?”

“Well, it’s not really a
play,
as such. I mean, it’s not that dramatic.”

“No, I got that…”

“But with the right performer. Someone charismatic, like Josh…”

“Or you.”

“Or me.”

“I thought you were
electric
tonight, by the way.”

“Thanks very much. That’s because you were watching.”

There was a moment’s pause, as the remark wafted around the small room, and they both wondered where it had come from and what it might have meant.

They smiled at each other, and Nora said, “So…how are you today?”

“Okay. I have some mystery bruises that I can’t quite place, but I’m not too bad. Listen, I have a vague memory of you putting me in a cab last night.”

“Pouring you into a cab.”

“Sorry about that. I’d been taking these antibiotics, you see, and clearly you’re not meant to drink on them.” It sounded a little puny, put like this, but too late, he’d said it now.

“Antibiotics, eh? You rascal. And I thought maybe you were just a lousy drunk.”

“Yeah, well, I am that too. Some people get charismatic and funny and seductive when they’re drunk. I just weep and pee on the toilet seat.”

“Now,
there’s
a winning combination.” She smiled her staggering smile, and Stephen noticed once more the lines that formed in the corners of her eyes, how fantastic they were. “Don’t worry. We were all as bad as each other, really. In fact, that’s why I was looking for you; I’m sorry for being such a pissy old witch last night.”

“You weren’t.”

“Oh, I was. Screaming at Josh in public like that.
Very
attractive. I’d blame it on the drugs and the booze, but it’s all just my fault, really—I never know when to stop. And I
hate
Josh’s parties. After you left, that’s when it got
really
gruesome—the back rubs started.”

“Did you get a back rub?”

“Are you kidding? I’d break their fuckin’ fingers. And of course they found the bongos! And that was it, everyone high as kites, jamming and bellowing about their favorite
sex
ual positions till six in the morning. I tell you, when some pretty little thing you’ve never met before starts giving your husband a massage and bellowing that she only really likes it from behind, then you
know
it’s time to call it a night.”

“Who was doing that?”

“Oh, some cute little hussy in a strappy dress—they all look the same after a while. Anyway, the point is, compared to most of the people there you were an angel. A burbling, incoherent angel, but still an angel.”

“I put my coat on this morning, and my pockets were full of canapés.”

Nora laughed. “That’s okay. They were only going to be thrown out anyway. Did you eat them?”

“I’d already sat on them in the cab, so they weren’t at their best.”

“Ni-ice. Reeee-ally nice.”

“I think there’s some of that smoked salmon tucked right down in the left-hand pocket.”

“I’ll pass, thanks.”

There was a silence, and they both suddenly become aware how small the attic room was. Now would have been a good time for Stephen to slip into his suave Cary Grant persona, flirting on the train with Eva Marie Saint in
North by Northwest,
or perhaps a more affable Jimmy Stewart type, in
The Philadelphia Story.
But Stephen suspected that it was hard to will yourself charismatic; he might as well try and will himself invisible. Instead he became acutely aware of the black body stocking hanging on the back of the door behind her, like some terrible skin that he had shed. For want of something to do with her spare hand, Nora twisted her short fringe between her fingers.

“Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know that Josh and I have kissed and made up. French-kissed, in Josh’s case. I just wanted to come by and thank you for being such good company, and for refereeing between me and Josh,” and still holding the bunch of flowers, she reached out and squeezed Stephen’s hand.

“It was a pleasure,” said Stephen, taking the roses from her, and looking around the room. “I’m afraid, I don’t have a vase or anything…”

Nora stood looking at her empty hand. “Actually, I’m sorry, the flowers, they’re not for you.”

“Right, I see…”

“They’re for me, from Josh…”

“Of course they are.”

“…though you can have them if you want.”

“No, don’t be silly, they’re yours,” and he managed, with some difficulty, to press the flowers back into her hand. After some resistance, she took them.

“By the way, it’s pronounced v
ay
se,” she said, with a smile.

“‘V
ay
se.’ I’ll try and remember.”

“As in tom
a
yto.”

“NOR-A!” projected Josh from the bottom of the stairs.

“Hey. I should go,” said Nora, pulling on her coat. “Josh is taking me out to some insanely expensive Japanese restaurant, then we’ve got to go home and pull up all the floorboards, in case his award’s under there or something. Honestly, the way he goes on, anyone would think they’d kidnapped a
child
. But I just wanted to say it was nice to meet you properly. So. See you around, yeah?”

“Hope so,” said Stephen.

“Bye, then.”

“Bye.”

“Nora! I’m waiting, sweetheart,” called Josh, from the bottom of the stairs.

“He’s worried his sushi will get cold,” said Nora. “See ya.”

“Bye.”

She smiled once more, and closed the door, and it occurred to Stephen that he would almost certainly never see her again—not properly, anyway—maybe just a brief, formal good-bye at the last-night party. He felt all the air go out of his body, and slumped down in his chair.

“But, listen—” said Nora, appearing once again in the doorway—“we should meet for coffee sometime. Josh is getting his teeth whitened or his dimples syringed or his head shrunk or something, so I’m by myself most days.”

“We could go to the movies one afternoon.”

“Movies in the afternoon. I
love
that. I’ll get your number from Josh and give you a call.”

“Here you are!” said Josh, appearing in the doorway behind, scooping his arms around her waist, just beneath her breasts, pressing his cheek next to hers. “Come on, love, we’ll be late.”

“Hey, maybe Stephen could join us!” said Nora, without much conviction.

“Not tonight—I want you all to myself,” and he tightened his grip, lifting her slightly into the air. Nora twisted her head around and kissed him, a please-put-me-down-now kiss, then they both stood and turned back to Stephen, both grinning, as if standing on a red carpet waiting to have their photograph taken.

A moment. Then—

“So. See you, mate,” said Josh.

“See you, Josh.”

“Bye, Steve,” said Nora.

“Bye, Nora.”

And they were gone.

Stephen waited briefly, then silently followed them out, standing on the landing with his back to the door in silence, listening to the sound of their kissing and their voices echoing in the stairwell.

“So, what were you two talking about?” he heard Josh say.

“About
you,
my love…” The sound of another kiss, then: “We only ever talk about
you
.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know, I know…”

“Come here,” said Josh, then something muffled, that Stephen presumed was “I love you.”

“You too, sweetheart. I love you too.”…And Stephen stood silently, listening to them leave, hoping very hard that he wasn’t about to fall in love with Nora Harper.

New York, New York

N
ora Schulz was seven years into her career as a professional waitress when Josh Harper snapped his fingers at her for the first, and last, time.

Much is said and written about the perils of achieving success too early, but Nora couldn’t help feeling that early failure was no great shakes either. After their assault on the lower reaches of the Billboard chart, Nora Schulz and the New Barbarians took a different direction to harder-edged, more experimental material, which in turn led in the direction of the bargain bins, internal wrangling and an acrimonious breakup. Taking comfort from the fact that she was still only twenty-three, Nora had picked herself up, swallowed her pride and pragmatically decided to look for a restaurant job, just for a few months, just to tide her over while she wrote new material and found a new record deal.

Her first job was in Raw!, a terrifying eat-as-much-as-you-can sushi restaurant in the West Village, with a kitchen that smelled like a rock pool, and a chef who somehow managed to make tuna actually taste like the chicken of the sea. Then came Dolce Vita, a chic Italian-restaurant-cum-money-laundering-operation where she’d stared, nightly, over a tundra of empty white tablecloths. This was followed by a fanatical macrobiotic vegan place called Radish—less a restaurant, more a brutal totalitarian regime—where music, alcohol, saltcellars and pleasure were all strictly proscribed, and pallid, sick-looking customers picked silently over their beetroot carpaccio before leaving, too weak to tip. This was followed by eighteen morbidly unhappy months in an upscale midtown cigar bar, Old Havana, where she’d been ogled nightly by boozy young executives in identical Banana Republic high-waisted pleated trousers, pulled up snug against their crotches by wide, gaudy suspenders. Although incredibly lucrative, revolution came to Old Havana when she punched a customer for trying to slide a twenty-dollar bill down her blouse. The cigar he’d been smoking at the time had exploded gratifyingly over his face, exactly as in a Warner Brothers cartoon, but the brief feeling of elation was swiftly followed by redundancy and burned knuckles.

A short spell working as a masseuse in Central Park came to an end after people complained that she pressed way too hard, and a short, desperate period of unemployment had followed. Her music career, the reason she’d moved to Manhattan in the first place, had diminished to little more than a hobby—a Sunday-night residence, accompanied on guitar by the nicest of the New Barbarians, in an arty West Village bar, where customers competed to shout over their unusual, acoustic jazz version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” By now, Nora was seriously contemplating admitting defeat and returning to live with her divorced mother and two younger brothers in their small apartment under the Newark flight path.

Then, at the last moment, she landed a job at Bobs, an unpretentious neighborhood bar and restaurant in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, and had fallen in love with the place, moving to the area to be nearer her work. It was everything a restaurant job could be. The food was good and reasonably priced, and customers tipped accordingly. The owner, Bob, was charming and benign, the cooks were clean and friendly, washed their hands after going to the toilet, and were relatively drug free. No one stormed out halfway through their shift, no one hurled abuse or bread rolls at her in the kitchen, no one locked her in the meat fridge as a practical joke, no one stole from her locker. Shifts were flexible, allowing her to do the occasional gig elsewhere if, and when, she got the chance. People remembered each other’s birthdays. As waitressing jobs go, it was the Holy Grail. And that was the problem. It was all too easy.

Because the rest of her life was a disaster. Her most recent boyfriend, Owen, an almost catatonically slothful and bitter wannabe screenwriter she had met at the restaurant, had become writer-in-residence on her futon. There he’d lie, fully clothed, all day, with food debris in his scrappy beard, reading and rereading a book,
Screenwriting Made Simple,
over and over again, with no apparent outward sign of it being made simple. His days were broken up with occasional raiding expeditions on Nora’s fridge, or to the local video store, where he rented movies solely so that he could eat vast quantities of salty snacks and give a long, tooth-numbing commentary: “…This is what they call the inciting incident…conflict, conflict…ah—the B-story begins!…Hey, here comes that Second-Act Confrontation…”

But if, as
Screenwriting Made Simple
claimed, character really was action, then Owen was someone with virtually no character at all. The relationship had become sexless, loveless, almost entirely without affection, and was sustained solely by Owen’s inability to pay his own rent, and Nora’s morbid fear of being alone. Her doctor had prescribed her Prozac, which she’d started taking somewhat reluctantly, her guilt and anxiety about being on medication fighting with the advertised sense of contentment. The months sloped by, and turned to years, and nothing changed. She started to drink more, to comfort-eat and put on weight, to smoke too much of the dope she bought off the busboys. She turned thirty, and for her birthday Owen bought her a DVD box set of the
Alien
movies and some disconcertingly crude lingerie in the wrong size, a lurid tangle of elastic and scarlet PVC straps and buckles, the kind of thing more usually worn by women who dance in cages. Nora was not a cage-dancing kind of girl, and she had hurriedly stashed the thing in the back of her drawer. Sexual activity had petered out some months before, anyway, and most nights were now spent lying awake on the futon that had started to smell indelibly of Owen, her head woolly after too much red wine and Tylenol PM, woozily contemplating whether to stave his skull in with his laptop, or strangle him with the lingerie.

Her own career, always a long shot at the best of times, had started to seem fanciful and futile. New York was bulging with attractive women with pleasant jazz-folk voices and bossa nova versions of “Big Yellow Taxi.” It wasn’t even as if she could dance or act; in a city where almost every waitress was a so-called triple threat, Nora was merely a single threat, and not a particularly threatening one at that. At twenty-three she’d been a singer who did some occasional waitressing; then, at twenty-seven, a waitress who did some occasional singing; and, finally, at thirty, a fully fledged waitress. Ambition and self-confidence had started to leach away, replaced by envy and self-pity, and more and more she’d started to avoid going home in the evenings. Owen would be there, in the small overheated room, deconstructing an action movie through a mouthful of pistachios, and she’d get sarcastic, and snipe at him, and they’d argue, and she’d feel angry, and ashamed at herself for not telling him just to get out.

In search of some other creative outlet, she picked up his copy of
Screenwriting Made Simple,
read it, digested it, and started to sit up late, smoking and making tentative notes—dialogue she’d heard from the guys in the restaurant, stories from her days in the band, bits of family mythology, pages and pages of it, all scrawled in a woozy longhand in the early hours of the morning. Reading these back the next day, straining to be objective, she began to suspect that maybe they weren’t so bad, and maybe there was something else she could do after all. Then the next time she tried to write, the page would remain resolutely blank, and this new ambition would suddenly seem as impractical and futile as all the others.

That long, cold winter, waking up late in the morning with another hangover, and the warm pretzel-scented breath on her face of a man she’d long since ceased to care for, it had become clear to Nora that she was numb with loneliness. Her luck would have to change. Something good would have to happen, and it would have to happen soon.

Then, in April, Josh Harper walked into her restaurant and ordered the club sandwich.