The Missing Person

by Doris Grumbach

  “Temporarily, okay,” he said. “But you might have waited until the body was removed.”

  Dolores laughed. “Where’s the body? I heard she just fainted.”

  “Well, yes,” he said. “The dope’s pregnant, I hear. But she may be back tomorrow.”

  For once, Dolores’s luck held. The pregnant stand-in stayed out three weeks with morning sickness. By that time Dolores’s good nature, her ability to hold still for long periods, and her patience with every detail of the job, gave her permanent possession of it.

  Gloria Gibson was a spoiled, erotic, self-loving woman with a vile temper and the kind of ripe figure that disturbed the netherworld of men’s fantasies. She liked her new stand-in because Dolores had no apparent sex appeal, or “s.a.” as Gloria referred to it. She approved of the fact that, if Dolores had once been good looking, there was now only vestigial evidence of the fact.

  In the two years that she worked as Gloria Gibson’s stand-in, Dolores changed the style and color of her hair whenever Gloria did, ran her errands, fed and walked her dog on the set, and listened patiently to her endless harangues against her husband (“that bloke, the bastard,” she called him) who, she said, was “living on her,” while playing around with a starlet at Paramount named Honey Moon, “that bitch.”

  Dolores never grew fond of Gloria—she was too imperious and too indifferent to all existence except her own and her dog’s, who was named Lovey. But she understood the vast river of ignorance and insensitivity that flowed within her. Gloria was an empty woman, a beautiful and salable outer skin. From watching her, Dolores realized she had learned a truth about the movies when she discovered this. For a strange technical reason she could never quite fathom, the camera was able to suggest meaning and content in the slow lowering of Gloria’s heavy, shadowed eyelid, like the sudden entry of the ocean onto a beach on a calm day. The less thought there was behind the movement, the more audiences seemed to understand. In the same way, they responded to the meaningless throb of a vein in a hero’s fine forehead, his brows lowered with congested anger or passion, as they preferred to think of it. They assembled the details the camera flashed to them and made whole, complex men and women out of them, deluded by the larger-than-life twists of a colored mouth, the rise and fall of a beloved eyebrow, the flicker of light in a luminous eye.

  Near the end of Nefertiti’s Passion, Gloria’s last picture, she was taken ill. Mary Maguire got the story first and ran it in exuberant capital letters at the top of her column:

  TIRED OUT, AT POINT OF COLLAPSE AND COMPLETE EXHAUSTION FROM STARRING IN THREE MAJOR PRODUCTIONS WITH ALMOST NO TIME OFF, GLORIA THE GORGEOUS GEE WILL BE RESTING IN PALM SPRINGS FOR SOME TIME. DR. ALBERT LEVY INSISTS. HUSBAND THEO, AWAITING ASSIGNMENT AT PARAMOUNT, WILL VISIT WEEKENDS. BOTH DENY RUMOR OF RIFT. BUT WE KNOW, YOU KNOW, GLORIA.…

  Gloria’s sanatorium was indeed in Palm Springs; her doctor had indeed insisted. She had locked herself in the men’s room of a downtown theater and slit her left wrist with the razor blade she had brought in a handkerchief from her bathroom at home. Her husband could not be located. Doctor Levy had sewn and bandaged the cut wrist, and then committed her to a place called Rest Haven, with instructions that she be kept in a private room and watched day and night.

  Surprisingly, no word of this reached Mary Maguire until a few days after she had printed the version of the story supplied to her by the press agents of Premium Pictures. The manager of the theater, aware of possible consequences, had notified the Studio before he did anything else. The Studio said thank you, they would call their own doctor, believing this move would provide security for themselves. But the revised version reached the Hollywood columns by means of the director of Rest Haven who realized at once his guest’s publicity value to his Haven.

  Mary Maguire printed it all, both the official story and the later, more accurate one, and she added her own ironic detail: The picture at the theater Gloria Gibson had chosen for her act of desperation was an old one, Out of Sight, Out of Mind, in which she had starred with her former lover, Brock Currier.

  Gloria gone, the picture halted, Dolores was out of a job. It was as well. She had been putting off a physical examination she knew she ought to have and which, when it was over, sent her to the hospital for an operation. After a month of recuperation the doctor discharged her, saying cheerily, “We got it all.”

  Dolores reported back to Premium, and was in luck again. The stand-in for Franny Fuller had been severely sunburned on Sunday at Catalina Beach and summarily fired because of the condition of her skin under the lights. Dolores got her job.

  At first Dolores found Franny hard to know, even harder to understand. She had none of Gloria’s vanity; she never looked at herself in mirrors. But the odd thing was, Franny did not seem to be interested in other people either. She lived in some gray no-man’s-land, a kind of gentle fog, existing without being aware of it, or of anyone. Her voice was wispy, high, frightened, like a child just discovered locked in a closet. When Franny spoke to her, Dolores noticed, her voice seemed produced by an inner mechanism that projected it between those opulent lips without her willing it.

  And her breasts: Dolores regarded them with awe. They were high, erect and lush where other women’s were often shapeless or flat or flabby. Composed of rowdy, uncontained flesh, they boiled up between her broad, soft shoulders. Curious thing about those breasts, Dolores thought. She holds them before her, indifferently, almost cold to their presence. They seem to be separated from her, like falsies worn over flat chests.

  And her hips: they present the odd spectacle of being disconnected from her trunk, mobile, on their own. They move in circles as if to defy the forward movement of her legs. Like some great toy, she seems made of fascinating moving parts, a magnificent but curiously mechanical woman.

  Franny was polite to Dolores, more than polite. She made an effort to say pleasant things to her although, Dolores noticed, rarely did she look at her as she spoke. When Dolores was first hired to stand in for Franny, she tried helping her, as she had Gloria Gibson, but she found this offended her. Franny wanted to do things for Dolores, to give her anything she might mention she needed or wanted. It was fatal for Dolores to say she was out of anything. Franny immediately sent for a carton or a gallon of it. Dolores thought perhaps Franny’s gifts made her feel safe from involvement, as though the act created a protective distance from them.

  At first Dolores let Franny have her way to see how long it would last and how far she would go. Her obsessive giving stopped abruptly, halfway through The Princess and the Pomegranate. On a very hot afternoon, Franny invited Dolores to share her dressing room during a break in the shooting. Dolores’s was beastly hot and had no fan. “Try in here,” said Franny, not looking at her but smiling vaguely and pushing her gently through the door.

  Franny’s dressing room was huge, decorated entirely in white and equipped with a white chaise longue and a giant fan that made it a haven from the heat of the set. They talked of how hot it was as Franny stretched out on the chaise. Dolores sat in an easy chair, her dress open at the neck.

  “Back where I come from this would be called a heat wave,” Dolores said.

  “Where is that?” Franny’s question sounded flat, like an incurious statement.

  “Alabama. We lived there until I was eighteen. But out here it is bad form to talk about heat waves. It’s not supposed to get this hot. So everybody says it’s unseasonal.”

  “If you’re hot, take off your dress. I’ve got all sorts of robes behind that door. Try the white one.”

  Dolores stood up, stepped out of her dress and reached for the white one.

  “Very handsome,” she said, generally, to the long peignoir of some extraordinarily thin material and a long neckline of feathers.

  “Take it. I’ve got another at home just like it.”

  Dolores shut her eyes against this new donation. Poor Franny. She doesn’t know how to keep anything. To her the value of things lies in being
able to dispose of them fast.

  Dolores turned around to face her. Franny’s mouth was an O of horror.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “What’s that … thing you’ve got?”

  Dolores pulled the white robe wide open. It was to be the only thoughtless act she ever committed against Franny Fuller. Later, it seemed inexplicable that she should not have realized what she was doing. She was to wonder: Was I being vindictive? Do I envy her that extraordinarily perfect body?

  A great flat scar ran under Dolores’s arm and up to the dividing point of her chest. With a final, pitiless motion she unhooked her brassiere and let it hang in her hand. Another violent seam dissected the left side of her chest on which there was no breast. The brassiere she held in her hand contained one full breast made of pads of layered cotton, sewn on to it, which her mother had put together.

  Franny stared. Her bright-blue eyes widened in shock. The sight seemed to torture her, but she was unable to look away.

  “What happened to you?”

  For the first time in the unintentionally cruel pantomime Dolores hesitated. How can I talk about all this to this frightened child? Then she said: “I had cancer. A lump in my breast, small, like a pea. I thought when I went in that they were going to cut it out and I’d have just a thin little white scar there. But they said the lump was malignant and they took the whole breast and part of my arm here, too. Preventive, they said. But don’t worry, I’m fine now.”

  Franny’s eyes moved away from the ruin of Dolores’s breast. She closed them. From under her lids, thin and blue as paper, tears poured down her cheeks. Dolores was suddenly frightened.

  “For goodness sake, Franny, you’ll ruin your make-up. I’m fine now. Lots of women have this.”

  “Oh no. Oh no,” Franny moaned. She brought her knees up, clasped them, and buried her beautiful head in her arms. She cried aloud, making sucking, gasping noises, her head moving convulsively, her hair falling around her knees.

  “No. No, No,” she screamed.

  “Stop that, Franny. Stop now.” Dolores knelt down and shook her. But Franny was possessed by her vision of destruction. Her crying turned to shouting; she screamed defiance at what she had seen. Dolores pulled her dress on hastily and went to the door. She called for Reuben who came running, took one look at Franny, and went to find the set nurse.

  At once all the activity of the set converged on Franny’s dressing room. A doctor drove up to the edge of the set, leaped out of his car, and raced for the dressing room. In the confusion of persons working over Franny, and because she was not up to explaining to anyone what had happened, Dolores slipped out and walked back to her little box of a dressing room, like an arsonist, she thought, leaving the scene of the fire while the firemen fight the blaze.

  No one worked any more that day or for two days after. Franny was taken home and stayed there to rest. When she came back to the Studio, she sought out Dolores in a new, pathetic way. It was as though she now recognized her as a partner to some inner wound of her own, as though her missing self was a parallel to Dolores’s lost breast. Dolores understood the relationship. At least, she thought, she has stopped giving me everything. She guessed correctly about Franny’s new feelings of hopelessness, as if nothing she had to give could make up to Dolores for her lost breast. So she stopped trying.

  The picture proceeded for three uneventful weeks, until the day everything went wrong. Franny blew her lines four times, Brock Currier shouted angrily at her, she stared at him, turned on her heel, and went to her dressing room. Reuben Rubin watched his stars in silence. Then he followed Franny and knocked gently on her door.

  “Go away.”

  “Oh, come on, Franny. It’s me, Rube. Let me in.”

  “No.”

  “What are you doing?”

  There was no answer.

  “Are you coming back soon?”

  Her silence frightened him. He rattled the doorknob.

  “Franny?”

  Brock Currier had followed Reuben at a distance. He came up behind him. “Ignore her. She’s sulking, the filthy bitch.”

  “Go to hell, Brock. Every moment of this costs money. Franny?”

  The door opened, and Franny, dressed in gray workman’s pants, a black silk shirt, and wood-soled clogs, came out. “I’m sick, Rube. I’m going home.”

  The truth was, she did look sick. Great dark circles had worked themselves up through her faded make-up. The blue craters that were her eyes made her cheeks look sunken, and her blond hair, pulled back and piled on her head, gave her the suffering, withdrawn look of a movie spinster-type. After the dumb, lovable blonde married to an English lord that she had been playing a half-hour ago, the change was startling.

  “Franny, you’ll be all right. Stay here. I’ll send Jay for Doctor Levy. He’s right near here. Brock, for God’s sake, apologize.”

  Brock hated his part—the English lord with all his looks and manners who turns out to be a fool, manipulated by the curvy, ignorant farm girl from Oklahoma. He wanted it to be over so he could move on to better things. He said to Franny, not looking at her: “Sorry, darling. Lost my head. Let’s have at it again.”

  Franny seemed not to have heard him. She took Reuben’s arm and pulled him along with her.

  “Please. Please, Rube. Don’t be mad. I’ll be back in the morning. I promise. You can use Dolores on the run-through of the next scene. Just today. I feel awful, Rube. No kidding.”

  He believed her. The pressure of her hand on his, even though he knew it was just a signal of her need, made him happy. His awkward, undersized Jewish businessman’s body was suffused with joy, and he could not hold out against her. Her illness, he suspected, was one he had known something about when he was younger. It was dislocation sickness, a loss of a sense of place and self, a disease he knew to be ineluctable, one for which there is no amelioration. On the set he had watched Franny react to other players or, more often, fail to react. He knew she was searching for moorings, for a place to put her head, to house her nameless griefs, to shelter her sick heart. He longed to offer her consolation, his sympathy, something immense like an ocean or a forest of redwoods or the Hope Diamond. Instead, he said: “Okay, Franny. Take it easy. I’ll have Jay drive you home.”

  Dolores Jenkins was sitting on the edge of the set holding wool for Charlene Emory, the script girl, when she saw Franny and Reuben walk toward the parking lot. Following at a respectful distance one of the assistant directors, Jay Boardman, was struggling into his sports jacket as he walked. She put down her two handfuls of wool. “Be right back, Charlene. Hang on.”

  Running, holding her arm across her chest to keep her one breast in place, Dolores caught up with Franny and Reuben. They were talking, his head bent earnestly toward hers, but they stopped when she came up to them.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, yes, Franny?” he said.

  “Tomorrow. Yes,” she repeated in her flat, toneless way, as though the exact use of someone else’s words was superior to any response she could make.

  “Take care of yourself,” he said and kissed her lightly on the forehead. The kiss of peace, he thought, between two priests. He walked back to the set, feeling defeated and angry at the same time, like an athlete leaving the field in a fit of bad sportsmanship.

  “Is there anyone at home, Franny?” asked Dolores. “Is your husband there?”

  “No,” she whispered in her half-voice. “He’s in New York. Just Olivia, I think.”

  “Tell you what. Why don’t you go to my place? You can rest there. My mother’s there. I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming. She’ll make lunch for you. She’ll love to. Then I’ll drive you home tonight. Okay, Franny?”

  Franny looked at her, seeming not to see her. After a moment she said: “Your place. Okay.”

  She got in beside Jay in the black sedan the Studio kept on the lot for emergencies.

  Dolores said to him: “Take her to Lilac and Vine. Number seventy-three. Right abov
e the bakery. You’ll be able to smell it a block away.”

  “Want me to wait for her, Miss Jenkins?”

  “No, my mother will be there. And I’ll be home soon.”

  Jay backed up carefully, went into forward gear, and started ahead slowly, as if he were driving the lead car in a funeral procession.

  “Feel better now, Miss Fuller?” he asked in a hushed voice.

  She did not answer. Slumped down in the seat, her head thrown back, she appeared to be asleep.

  After Dolores’s call, Billie-Jo Jenkins scurried around tidying up the apartment. She greeted Franny profusely, ignored Jay’s presence, and ushered the Star into the living room. Jay hung about for a few moments, realized that his assignment, in Mrs. Jenkins’s eyes, ended at her doorsill, and left, shutting the door quietly behind him. He was used to his function as errand boy for the Great, biding his time until, as a director some day, he would do some ordering around himself. With the recent spectacle of powerless Reuben Rubin in his mind, however, he was not so sure.

  “Would you like to lie down, dearie?” asked Billie-Jo. “The chesterfield’s very comfortable.”

  “The what?” An old, hated, buried world flooded into Franny’s mind at the sound of the word.

  “The couch, I guess you call it. Where I come from—well, never mind, here, try it.” She puttered about, arranging a plump pink pillow neatly into a hollow in one cushion caused by defective springs. She had compensated for this imperfection the day the sofa arrived from the May Company and by now had forgotten that it had not always been this way. To her, no structural defect was objectionable if it reduced the cost of an object and then could be repaired with “something I had around the house.”

  Franny lay down. Billie-Jo removed her clogs and covered her with an afghan Dolores had crocheted during waits on the set.