by Susan Isaacs
“Jesus. Jesus. How can you say that?”
“How? Easily. Because it’s the truth.”
Ice was going to be Nicholas’s triumph. He’d known it from the minute he read a review of a biography of Sheldon Jackson, a missionary who’d gone to Alaska in the late 1870s and dedicated himself to helping the Eskimos survive. Jackson had fallen in love with the real Alaska, not the Alaska being plundered by trappers and miners. Shocked by the near-starvation of the Eskimos—the basis of their livelihood, the fur seal, had been wantonly butchered by whites—Jackson had fought the establishment he was part of for the Eskimos. Displaying enormous ingenuity, he had introduced reindeer as a replacement for the nearly decimated seal population. The final scene had come to Nicholas in a bright flash: Jackson and his Eskimo friends stand desolate on an endless stretch of glaring white, when suddenly hundreds of reindeer surround them, and they laugh, cry, hug the animals, and whoop with glee.
Nicholas had planned everything. He’d bought the rights to the biography even though Jackson was an actual personage. He wanted no lawsuits, no controversy, to tarnish the reputation of Ice. He’d spent half a year working with three different writers to see that the screenplay was flawless.
As executive producer, he signed the best craftsmen in the business, chose the finest actors, designers, and cameramen. He’d gathered together meteorologists, Eskimo guides, survival experts. He’d engaged a company that designed scientific equipment for research in Antarctica to come up with casings for cameras, lights, and sound equipment. He’d allowed a generous two months on location and had arranged for the rest of the film to be shot at the studio in Astoria, in Queens, so he could be driven home nights and be with Jane for the second two months of the project, something he’d never been able to do before.
And, as star, this was going to be his finest hour. Every critic who ever claimed he “held back,” or was “too WASP,” would see emotion enough for five films: rage, terror, lust, grief, aching gentleness. Ice would prove his seriousness to Jane too, because he knew she thought films second rate, even though she claimed that wasn’t “necessarily true.” It was true. He knew she wanted him back in the theater. For eight years, she’d never stopped working on him—“Don’t you miss an audience?” “Don’t you want to do something different?” “Wouldn’t it be nice to test yourself again?”—never realizing that he had moved into a whole different league. He’d give her a performance that would make anything done in the last ten years on the New York stage look sick: A hundred, two hundred years in the future they’d still be studying Ice.
But nothing about Ice was what Nicholas had forecast. The meteorologists had fed everything into their computers and agreed that April and May were still wintery enough to look awesomely Alaskan, though not so wintery that the weather would hold up shooting. But nearly every day it snowed, and the wind drove the snow so hard it whipped horizontally. They could not leave their hotel for five days. When they did, they discovered the reflectors on the spotlights had shattered and two of the microphone booms were irreparably cracked. They called for replacements, but then the snow began again, and even the most daredevil Alaskan pilots stayed on the ground.
The inactivity affected the company. Nicholas realized that nearly everyone in the cast and crew was taking drugs. He began drinking six or seven bourbons a day—the hotel bar had run out of everything else and deliveries were suspended indefinitely. Snowed into the ugly, plastic-modern hotel, the company fought with each other, had fast sexual liaisons, then wandered through the halls looking for other partners or another fight.
Nicholas drank even more but couldn’t get drunk. He thought of his father’s ability to lose control and for the first time envied him. All he felt was numbness in his arms and legs, as if the only thing the alcohol affected was some mechanism in his circulatory system. He stayed in his room, the Presidential Suite. All red, white, and blue laminated plastic from the last year’s bicentennial, with a fake white fur spread on the bed. He was always cold. He had no place to go, no one to talk to. Murray had offered to come, but bringing Murray to Alaska made as much sense as bringing a polar bear to Sardi’s. Still, he’d always talked to Murray every day when he was on location and now, with phone service erratic, all they could do was shout a few frustrated words at each other. “Stay well, Murray.” “Love ya, Nicky! Don’t freeze your whatsies off.”
Shouting was all he could do with Jane. “How are things?” “Fine!” she’d shout back, although he knew the volume was not a reflection of their enthusiasm. He felt truly out of touch. Even later, when phone service improved, their conversations seemed lifeless, as if affected by the climate. “Have you met that psychiatrist?” he finally asked. “Not yet. But someone’s been to the house a few times,” was all she said. “How are things going, Jane?” “Okay,” she replied. “I’ll tell you all about it when you get home.” Their phone conversations had always lasted for an hour. Now they were brisk and efficient, as though they were partners in some well-organized business that almost ran itself.
He called the girls at their school in New Hampshire, the same school his sisters had attended. Neither of them sounded right either. Victoria was only concerned that he might not be home in time for Father-Daughter Weekend in early June. “If Kippy’s father can come, and he’s Majority Whip, I don’t see why you can’t. Really, Daddy. I mean, you know where I was on Mother-Daughter Day. In the stacks, doing my term paper.” She sounded like a petulant girl friend. The older she became, the less satisfied she was with what she got from him.
Elizabeth was bubbly and diffident at the same time, trying, as always, to win him over, but never confident she could succeed. “Daddy, want to hear a joke? Only if you want to. Okay? What’s green and sings?”
“I give up.”
“Oh.” She had failed to interest him. He could hear her unhappiness. She was so easily bruised.
“Lizzy,” he said, brightening his voice, “you know how terrible I am at riddles. Now tell me the answer, so I can tell everyone what’s green and sings. We need some laughs up here.”
“Elvis Parsley!”
“Elvis Parsley,” he repeated slowly.
“Don’t you get it? Green and sings, Daddy.”
Nicholas closed his eyes. “That’s a great joke, honey. I’ll tell it to everyone.”
“Want to hear another one?”
Ice was so over budget it made him sick. Literally. He had sharp, violent stomach pain at night, like jagged rocks being jammed into his intestines. Each drink seemed to ease the pain at first, and then to make it hurt more. The only way he’d finally gotten some sleep was to take the codeine and aspirin pills the assistant director offered him. The third night, having dinner sent up by room service—cold poached eggs served on an orange cafeteria-style tray—he began anticipating his pain so he could take the pills. Frightened, he flushed the pills down the toilet and lay under the heavy fake fur cover doubled over, hugging his stomach, imagining—quite accurately, it turned out—the terrible concessions the studio would now demand of him.
When they were finally able to begin shooting, he knew just how bad Ice was going to be. The pivotal emotional scenes seemed merely hysterical. The scenes of subtle feeling were heavy-handed, preachy, and boring. His acting was false and he couldn’t even figure out a way to fake it. The dialogue—“I won’t let you down, my friend. Not for anything”—which in Connecticut had been so right, so true, came out like lines from a rusty Western.
The stomach pains grew worse. Nearly every night he threw up what little food he’d been able to get down during the day. Too sick even to hold up his head, he’d sit on the bathroom floor, his chin resting on the freezing rim of the toilet, and retch until nothing came up but small amounts of bitter liquid that he could not get out of his throat. The icy tile floor permeated the bath mat he sat on. He could not control his shivering. After another week, he stopped drinking, but still the retching did not stop. His cheeks became hollow and too
k on a gray cast his makeup man could not entirely obscure. He looked old.
He felt old. The project was fatally flawed. The studio flew in their man to “assist,” to wrest control of the film from him. The daily rushes drove him, daily, into deeper despair. Everything, from camera work to costumes, looked cheap, like a quickie TV movie.
Nicholas looked around, hoping he was the only one who was troubled. He wasn’t. The truth was written on everyone’s face. Ice wasn’t even half filmed, but the whole company knew exactly what he knew: Nicholas Cobleigh had failed.
23
Inside this house are two people who molded Jane Cobleigh: her parents, Dorothy and Richard Heissenhuber. Inside this house, right behind me. And what, we wonder, is inside the hearts of these two people tonight as the daughter they nurtured…
—Lou Unterman, WLW-TV News, Cincinnati
Ellie Matteo looked as though she belonged in a spaghetti-sauce commercial. Her dark Italian prettiness was tempered by a skeptical expression, as if she had to be convinced that all the ingredients were fresh and no preservatives were added. Her black eyebrows were tweezed into thin, challenging arches, adding to her somewhat daunting demeanor. She did not look like a woman who had spent twenty years on a single block in Stamford, Connecticut, unable to cross a street.
She stood beside Jane in the center hall, under the chandelier. “Okay,” she said, “today we’re going to try standing in the open doorway. If you can.”
“What if I can’t?” Jane asked.
“I’ll put a gun to your head. No, seriously, if you can’t we’ll go into the kitchen and have another cup of coffee and I’ll come back in a couple of days. Now, here we are, right?” Jane nodded. The front door was closed. Sunshine streamed through the narrow windows on either side of the door, forming two bright parallel lines on the floor. She and Ellie were perpendicular, forming a capital H. “Okay. Imagine the door open and you standing right smack in the middle looking outside.”
“You’re not going to open it?”
“Not unless you tell me to. Now just imagine it.”
Jane shut her eyes for an instant, then opened them. No clear picture formed in her mind, but she imagined the shiver of cool morning air on her arms. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse, and when she rubbed her upper arms she could feel gooseflesh. A shudder crossed her shoulder, as if she’d been standing outside, inappropriately dressed, far too long.
“Now,” Ellie said, “what do you feel? On the one-to-ten scale. One, you’re relaxed; ten, you’re having a severe panic attack.”
“Three.”
“Okay. How would you feel about my opening the door?”
“Can we wait a minute?”
“Sure. Now, we’re just going to stand in the doorway today, okay? You may feel, whoopee, this is a piece of cake, let’s take a stroll down to the main road—”
“I won’t feel that.”
“Okay. But just in case, remember we take one step at a time. That’s all. You spent—what, six years in the house?”
“Yes. And another couple not being able to do things—go into town, drive. For a while I’d go with my husband or with a friend, but—are you going to open the door?”
“Do you want me to open it?”
“Not yet,” Jane said. Her lips were so dry they kept sticking together. “The first time you tried. What did you do?”
“You mean with my phobia? Oh. I stood on the corner of my street for three quarters of an hour with the woman from the clinic who was helping me—she’d had an elevator phobia—and then I went home. The next time I put one foot into the street.”
“And then?”
“And then, one step at a time. Just like today. You’re not going to New York. You’re not going to any big parties where people are going to surround your husband and separate him from you. You’re not going to the Academy Awards. You’re going to stand in the doorway of your own house. If you want to.”
“Could you open the door?” Ellie did, then came and stood beside her again. The day was warmer than Jane had thought. She remembered a day that had felt like this—warm spring so sweet the air was almost syrupy—soon after they’d inherited the house. She and the girls had planted annuals to the left of the house. She even remembered what they were: petunias and larkspur, clouds of purple and white brightened by green foliage. She could recall turning a clod of earth with her spade and hearing Elizabeth’s oooh of delight when two worms crawled out.
“One to ten?” Ellie asked.
“Oh. Still three. Four. Four because I know I have to—”
“You don’t have to.”
Jane took a step toward the door. Ellie stayed beside her.
“Still four,” Jane said. She turned to Ellie. “What if all of a sudden I run upstairs screaming?”
“You’ll run upstairs screaming.”
“Is that what you’re trained to say?”
“Pretty much.”
“Oh. You’re very honest.”
“I have to be. You have to have confidence in me.”
“What did your husband say when you told him you put your foot into the street?”
“Something like ‘Hey, Ellie, way to go.’ He gets that from the kids. He’s a math teacher, but he coaches the girls’ swimming team.”
“‘Way to go,’” Jane said softly. She walked toward the door briskly, as if it were a thing she did several times a day, but stopped abruptly when she was a foot away.
“One to ten?”
“Five.” Her heart was starting to thud. She was so close to fresh air. She should raise her head and sniff. Along the drive that led up to the house, she saw a huge bed of white geraniums. She hadn’t known the gardener had put them in; to have seen them would have meant looking straight down from an upstairs window, something she did not like to do. Hundreds of geraniums. A profusion, a dazzling excess, an indulgence of rich people. “Four.”
“Want to try another step?”
She was about to say not yet when her body moved for her. Her feet stepped onto the molding, her arms flew up, and her hands grabbed the doorframe. “Seven!” she shouted. “I can’t catch my breath. My heart—eight. I can’t.”
“Do you want to step back?” Ellie asked, standing right behind her.
“Seven.”
“Good.”
“I can breathe now.” Jane swallowed. “But my heart—” It was pounding and with frightening irregularity would skip a beat. The metal weather stripping on the doorframe cut into her palms, but she could not lower her hands. She might fall if she did, tumble outside. “Eight again. Going up. Eight.”
“Eight,” Ellie repeated.
“Oh, God. It’s a beautiful day and I can’t even appreciate it. I should be feeling the warmth and—”
“One step at a time.”
“Smelling flowers.”
“One to ten?”
“What? Six. But I can’t. I can’t do it. Oh, God. Seven.”
“Jane, you’re standing in the doorway.”
“What?” Dizzy. She was afraid to look back at Ellie, afraid to lose her balance.
“You’ve been standing there for over two minutes. You did it.”
“I did?”
Murray King leaned against the paddock fence. He wore his country clothes: a brown suit, a white business shirt unbuttoned at the neck, and a pair of cracked leather ankle-high boots he told Nicholas he’d bought in 1957 or ’58, in anticipation of a blizzard that never occurred. “Who cleans up the horses’ business?” he asked.
“We have a girl groom,” Nicholas said. “She takes care of everything.”
“You know, when I was a kid in the Bronx, there were still some horses. The milkman and the knife-sharpener man had them. I’d see these big things of horse manure in the street. You know? With all that straw sticking out of it. Feh. I used to think there was some guy who came along at night and sprinkled straw all over the stuff so it wouldn’t stick to people’s shoes, and I couldn’t figure
out why he never did it for the dog poop. Another half cent’s worth of straw, big deal.” Nicholas glanced down at the fence. Murray’s hands were getting old-looking, the veins knobby, the skin blotched with liver spots and irregular red patches. “I can’t believe Janie,” Murray said.
Nicholas banged one boot against the other, knocking off some dried mud. “She’s making progress.”
“All these years. And now, all of a sudden, two, three months…I couldn’t believe it, Nicky. She came out to the car and gave me a kiss. My mouth dropped three feet. This is some doctor she’s got.”
“It’s a clinic. Most of it’s done by former phobics. It’s a kind of behavioral psychology. They’re not interested in getting to the root of the problem.”
“Who needs roots? She goes outside. She goes in a car.”
“Just to the clinic twice a week, for therapy.”
“Still. It’s like a miracle.” Nicholas nodded. He scraped the bottom of his boot on the lowest slat of the fence. “Something wrong, Nicky?”
“No.”
“Is that no, nothing’s wrong, or no, this isn’t the kind of thing we talk about in good company?”
“Murray, please.”
“All right. I’m only saying she looks happier than I’ve seen her since…You’re looking better, Nicky.”
“It’s only temporary. We start cutting Ice Monday. Mary Rooney, the editor—”
“Yeah?”
“She said it’s going to be a smash.”
“She did?”
“With white fetishists. She said there’s so much glare from the snow she’ll have to wear sunglasses.