The Understudy: A Novel (14 page)

Romantic-Comedy Behavior

S
tephen had seen, on average, five movies a week since he was five years old. This was on top of a certain number of plays, and too much television drama, but it was the films that had stayed with him. He’d witnessed any number of phenomena not usually found in his own particular region of the Isle of Wight: exploding planets and melting faces, lesbian vampires and Viking burials. Movies had taught him a huge number of skills too, some more practical than others. He had learned how to kiss, how to make French toast, how to hot-wire a car and hide the dirt from an escape tunnel. He had learned that property developers were generally evil, and that taking a cop off a case because he’s got too personally involved doesn’t mean he won’t end up solving the case. He also felt that he stood a pretty good chance of landing a jumbo jet, assembling a sniper’s rifle and stitching and cauterizing his own wound.

Not all of the things he’d learned from films had proved quite so helpful. On his first driving lesson, he’d had to be physically prevented from constantly waggling the steering wheel from side to side. He had witnessed an intimidating number of female orgasms, many more than he could ever hope to be responsible for. In romantic comedies, he had seen a thousand last-minute declarations of love at airports, or train stations, usually in the rain or snow, declarations that had proved rather more persuasive than his own real-life attempts. Arriving in London at nineteen, he did exactly what he’d seen actors do when hailing a cab—raise right arm, step out into street, shout, loud, on an upward inflexion, “Tax-I!”—and been laughed at by passersby because of this. Two weeks into his professional training, sleeping with a woman for the first time (Samantha Colman, his fight partner from an erotically charged stage-combat class), he utilized a devastating little erotic trick he’d picked up from an old Stewart Granger movie—kissing his way up from the hand, and then foot, in little staccato pecks; a technique that Samantha Colman later said made her feel like an ear of sweet corn.

In all the most intense and intimate experiences of his life, he couldn’t help comparing them with how actors had simulated similar moments: his ecstasy at the birth of his daughter, say, or his grief at the news of the premature death of a school friend, yelping for joy when Alison agreed to marry him, or the smile he’d worn on his wedding day. That’s not to say any of his responses were any less sincere. It was just that, consciously or otherwise, he was always comparing his behavior with how he had seen actors respond, hoping that it might somehow match up. Life seemed to be at its best, its truest and most intense, when it most resembled life as simulated on screen: full of jump cuts and slow motion, snappy exit lines and gentle fades to black.

And this was what he most enjoyed about being with Nora. She made him feel smarter and funnier, more complicated, less shabby and mundane than he suspected he really was. She made him feel well cast, and in a central role too, rather than the understudy of some phantom other self. Not the
lead
role as such—impossible, with Josh around—but not quite a walk-on part either; nothing showy or heroic, but at least someone sympathetic, someone you wouldn’t want to see blown up, or sucked through an airlock into deep space, or devoured by piranhas. More than just human remains.

In this particular sequence, they were marching out into the winter afternoon, striding through west Soho, her arm slid through his.

“By the way, after our conversation at the party, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve been writing again.”

“You have? What on?”

“Oh, just this movie idea I’ve been thinking about for a while now. It’s set in Jersey in the eighties—about this band getting together, then splitting up. It’s okay, I think. Funny.”

“I’m sure it is. That’s fantastic. I’m really pleased.”

“Well, you were so encouraging”—and she squeezed his arm with her own—“and it’s not like I don’t have the time.”

They ended up in an amusement arcade on Old Compton Street, where Nora insisted Stephen join her on one of those dance-step machines, and as he stood next to her, stomping out a dance routine on the illuminated dance floor, he had a sudden anxiety that Nora might be one of those kooky, free-spirit types, the kind of irreverent life force who, in the imaginary romantic comedy currently playing in his head, turns the hero’s narrow life upside down, etc., etc. The acid test for free-spirited kookiness is to show the subject a field of fresh snow; if they flop on their backs and make snow angels, then the test is positive. In the absence of snow, Stephen resolved to keep an eye open for other telltale kookiness indicators: a propensity for wacky hats, zany mismatched socks, leaf-kicking, a disproportionate enthusiasm for karaoke, kite-flying and lighthearted shoplifting; the whole Holly Golightly act.

It wasn’t that he found these qualities unattractive—quite the opposite, in fact; before she became a recruitment consultant, Alison had displayed kooky, free-spirited tendencies too, and had certainly turned his narrow life upside down, etc., etc., for a few years, anyway. It was just that he was also aware that in real life, romantic-comedy behavior could wear pretty thin, pretty quickly. There was something a little self-conscious and unsustainable about this kind of thing, something of a performance—having fun, but also being aware of having “fun.”

“You can really dance, Mr. McQueen,” Nora shouted, breathless, over a synthesized cover of “Get Down on It.”

“Three years of tap,” he replied, then, feeling a powerful need to recover at least a small vestige of his masculinity, he went to look round the arcade for something to punch, shoot or drive.

He spotted it tucked away at the back of the arcade, where old arcade games go to die—
TomorrowCrime,
the first-person shoot-’em-up based on Josh Harper’s box-office hit of two years past. On the screen, a plausible computerized rendition of Josh, in the role of wisecracking rookie cop Otto Dax, in his long black leather overcoat, was gunning down murderous cyborg assassins in Megapolis 4.

Nora and Stephen looked at each other, eyes wide.

“Wanna play?”

“Of course,” said Stephen, dropping a coin in the slot, drawing and aiming the large red plastic handgun.

“You know what I think?” chipped in Josh, as Otto Dax, from the game’s speakers.

“Tell me, Josh, darling?” said Nora.

“I think it’s time we kicked some cyborg ass.”

It soon transpired that kicking cyborg ass was not one of Stephen’s special skills. Even with Nora urging him on, there were, in Otto’s words, just too damn many of them, and before a minute was up, the computerized Josh was clutching his chest, buckling at the knees and slumping to the floor. “Ah, well—who wants to live forever?” groaned Otto Dax, with his dying breath.

“So—how does it feel?” asked Nora, her hand on his back.

“What?”

“Being my husband?”

“It feels…okay,” said Stephen, blowing the imaginary smoke from the end of his make-believe firearm, and putting it back into its slot.

The Fine Art of the Double Take

L
ate that afternoon Nora and Stephen walked slowly back toward the theater. The challenge, clearly, would be getting there without remarking on the giant billboard of Josh, looming over Shaftesbury Avenue, but it’s quite hard to walk past a thirty-foot likeness of your husband in tight leather trousers and say nothing at all. Nora stopped on the corner of Wardour Street opposite, and peered up at him.

“That thing freaks me out every time,” she said, wincing. “It’s like having God looking down at you or something.”

“God in a puffy white blouse.”

“God with pecs and abs. God with gym membership.”

“Apparently, on a clear day, you can see his nipples from the London Eye.”

Nora laughed. “What I wouldn’t give sometimes for an aerosol can and a stepladder. Just so you know, that bulge in his breeches has definitely been air-brushed in.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah, definitely. Josh probably bribed the poster guys.” And here Nora slipped into a very approximate impersonation of Josh. “ ‘Bigger! Oi blahdy wan’ the bleedin’ fing bigger!’ What’s funny?”

“I love hearing Americans do bad English accents, that’s all.”

“Shut your bleedin’ face.”

They crossed Wardour Street and stood at the stage door.

“So—d’you want to come up and see if Josh is around?”

“No, I think we’ve had quite enough Josh this afternoon. Send him my love. And we must do this again soon, yeah?”

“I’d like that very much,” Stephen said, and realized that he’d very much like to kiss her too, and leaned over toward her, but suddenly became aware of thirty feet of Josh lowering over them, rapier pointed at the back of his head, so ended up just rubbing his cheek against hers. It felt like a consolatory gesture, the kind of thing you’d share with a strange aunt at a funeral, and she stiffened a little, and headed off briskly toward the tube.

Stephen signed in at the stage door, and headed to Josh’s dressing room. He had resolved to tell him about the afternoon straightaway; not that he was falling in love with his wife, of course, but the fact that he’d seen her; best keep things honest, out in the open, emphasize the platonic. He stopped on the stairs outside Josh’s dressing room, heard loud classical music playing, knocked lightly, then pushed the door open.

In classic farce there are two standard comic responses to coming into a room and seeing something you shouldn’t—the double take, and the long deadpan stare. Stephen opted for the latter. It was, after all, taking him a few moments to untangle the precise circumstances in the room, which limb belonged where. Maxine was sitting astride a chair facing away from Stephen in the direction of the window, with one leg up on the desk. She was completely naked, apart from the high lace-up boots she wore for her part in the play, and it seemed from where Stephen was standing that she had grown another pair of legs. The illusion would have been complete, were it not for the fact that the third and fourth legs were noticeably more muscular and hairy than her own, with the feet and knees twisted in the opposite direction. It soon became apparent that these legs belonged to Josh. His face was buried fairly deep in Maxine’s chest, but the rest of him was just about visible in the full-length mirror that had been removed from the wall and leaned against the daybed for the participants’ viewing pleasure.

Standing frozen in the doorway, it occurred to Stephen that (a) apart from a carefully suppressed childhood memory of his parents on a camping holiday in Brittany, he had never actually seen two other adults engaged in sexual intercourse, and that (b) all in all, this was actually a very good thing. It was all just too crudely biological, too messy and intimate and ungainly, like watching someone floss another person’s teeth. He was acutely aware of his nonparticipation and, as if on cue, just to make the situation as explicit and distressing as possible, Stephen became aware of Maxine’s words.

In a low, breathless whisper she was insisting, with an Italian accent, “Oh, Lord-a Byron, you’re-a soooo good-a…”

To which Lord-a Byron responded, “You feel so
hot,
Consuela…”…and Stephen realized that they were having sex
in character
, that this was Method Sex, to classical music. Given the historical context, Josh’s use of the word “hot” seemed a little anachronistic, and wasn’t Consuela a Spanish name? He thought it would be churlish to point this out, and decided instead to back discreetly out of the room. But as he reached for the door handle, the chair, which had been used to ineffectually jam it shut, skittered across the wooden floor and clattered to the ground, the top of the chair now acting as a very effective doorjamb, locking him in the room, which now seemed very, very small.

With some apparent reluctance, Josh extricated his face from Maxine’s chest and, remarkably, instead of looking straight at Stephen, looked in the mirror first, at himself, tossed his hair, then looked at Stephen, and even the shock of seeing someone else in the room wasn’t quite enough to wipe the grin off his face.

“Hi, guys,” said Stephen.

Without quite keeping her hips still, Maxine turned her head to look at Stephen too, with a basilisk glare. The small room was quiet, except for the sound of breathing, the steady creaking of the swivel chair and the orchestral music on the CD player, now rising to a lush, dramatic climax, which Stephen suddenly recognized as the soundtrack to
The Lord of the Rings
.

He watched as a dirty smirk started to form on Maxine’s face.

“It’s our warm-up!” she said, and started to laugh, and then Josh laughed too, a lewd, low chuckle, before he caught his breath, straightened his face, and said, in a low voice, very slowly and distinctly…

“For fuck’s sake, Stephanie. Shut the door behind you.”