Confessions of a Falling Woman

by Debra Dean

  You see why I couldn’t go back there after she died.

  What I keep coming back to, Russ, is that you and Megan were a mystery in my life. I expected to marry a businessman, my father more or less, to raise two anonymous children, to vacation in Europe once or twice, to live out my days unsurprised. God knows, I never suspected I would care for a man who was afraid to fly, who liked canned peas and couldn’t be trusted not to say whatever came into his head. I never imagined I would be wrenched with love for a child who had your temper, my crooked teeth, and a laugh that neither of us had ever heard before. Where did that laugh come from? Even if Megan had lived, she would have remained a mystery. Even if I had stayed, I would never have been able to explain the fact of you in my life. Just pure dumb luck.

  I feel inexplicably lucky. Against all reason, I believe that I can send these words out into the night and they will find you. You needn’t write back. If you hear me, that’s more than enough.

  DAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL RAT SUIT

  If I were to go to sleep right this minute, I could get maybe four hours. But that’s a long shot. An inversion seems to be taking place in my life: I float blearily through days that are fleeting as dreams, and then snap to at about midnight for what feels like my real life.

  What I’m discovering is that the life of an insomniac very probably resembles that of a cloistered monk. Take away the unexpected diversions that fill up one’s days, the soothing distraction of other human beings, and then just try to avoid becoming contemplative. The mysteries of the universe saturate the night air, questions hang unanswered in the silence. The trick here is to stay anchored to the planet. It is why I tend so carefully to my habits.

  Midnight, I walk the dog. Then I slide into bed beside my wife, Robin, and go through the motions of trying to sleep. I shift into a series of positions: on my side with a pillow tucked between my knees, then on my back, my stomach, and so on, eventually returning to the fetal position. After a half dozen or so reps, it’s up to check that the front door and windows are locked. They are. Back to bed. Next, a review of every relaxation exercise I can remember from years of acting classes. Somewhere in there, Puck usually has to be walked again. He is twelve years old, and the heart medication the vet has him on causes a prodigious thirst. Once I’ve escorted him down to the street and back, we both get a drink of water, he gets a dog biscuit, and I help myself to a few cookies. Then I settle in front of the tube and run the channels. Sometimes I get lucky and stumble onto a good movie. One of the channels is doing a Gene Kelly festival this week, so I watched the last half of On the Town before I came to bed tonight. After a while, I undress again and return to bed. I lie in the dark, as I’m doing now, watching for the shadows in the room to shift, waiting for the dark to gather itself into some recognizably malevolent shape.

  The street lamps cast a dim light through the window shades, enough to see bulky shadows in the bedroom: the highboy, the television, the valet stand lurking in the corner. Now and then a car swishes by up on Prospect Park Drive. Farther out, past our quiet neighborhood, the city buzzes with sirens and car alarms and the muted rumble of traffic on the BQE, but my ears are tuned to this room, the rooms on either side, the circumscribed territory of a city dweller. All is quiet just now, except for the rhythm of Robin’s breath and the dog’s light snores, as muted as the sounds of the sea in a shell.

  Four weeks ago, a man broke into our apartment. We had rented a video, ordered in Chinese, and were holed up in the bedroom, stripped to the skin because the night was sweltering and this is the only room with AC. A Thursday night, every light in the place on, the television murmuring, the ancient air conditioner rattling. No one who wasn’t high as a kite would even think about breaking into an apartment when people were obviously inside. It’s partly the irrationality of the whole incident that keeps me awake. In New York, you operate on the principle that while, yes, there’s a lot of evil in the city, it’s more or less predictable. Not like the suburbs, where the violence is hidden and explodes randomly, where the killers all look like computer programmers. Here, there are rules. You put dead bolts on the doors and gates on the windows, you assume the “don’t fuck with me” expression when you’re on the street, you avoid certain neighborhoods, certain parks, you keep to the front cars on the subway, you spring for a cab if it’s late. And when you read about some tourist who got pushed onto the train tracks or a woman who was beaten in the park, you remind yourself that you don’t stand at the front edge of the subway platform. You wouldn’t dream of going jogging in the park before dawn. It’s a terrible tragedy, of course, but they broke the rules.

  I go over it in my head frame by frame, trying to figure what I’ve missed. The film we’d rented was a Bergman; Robin had thought maybe it would seem cooler if we were watching people shivering in bleak, snowy landscapes. Somewhere midway through, she had fallen asleep, lulled into a stupor by the drone of Swedish voices. Her freckled limbs were sprawled luxuriantly across the mattress, her hair curling in damp tendrils around her face. I can remember considering and then discarding the impulse to wake her up again. Instead, I picked at the last of the sesame noodles and was trying to see the film through to the end, when I thought I heard something in the kitchen. I pulled on my boxers and went into the kitchen. The security gate across the window was ajar.

  Afterward, the cops said we should have had the window closed. Never mind that there was a locked gate covering it. Never mind that a ten-year-old couldn’t squeeze his hand through the openings. According to them, I should have known that some crackhead with an hour to spare, a metal file, and the manual dexterity of Houdini could crouch on a fourth-floor fire escape and somehow saw off the lock.

  There was a rustling sound coming from the study across the hall. I went into the room. A rickety thin man stood in the shadow of the open closet door, his hands pushing through the rack of winter clothes stored there. He saw me, and we stood there a long moment, eyeing each other, neither of us certain what to do next. In the dark, his eyes were glazed and bright.

  I began to talk quietly, soothingly. “Everything’s going to be okay. It’s going to be fine. Really.” Over and over, the same words, as monotonous and meaningless as the Swedish floating in from the next room.

  In slow motion, his hand went into the pocket of his jacket.

  “I got a gun,” he said, but his hand stayed in his pocket and it was dark. It might be a gun, it might be just his hand, no way of knowing. “Turn around. Get down on your knees, motherfucker.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said, “but it’s going to be all right. No one’s going to get hurt.”

  I could hear my heart thudding in my ears and the sound of this voice, my voice, but far away and as calm and detached as a doctor’s. “Everything’s going to be fine. Just go back out the way you came and everything will be fine.”

  Miraculously, he moved to follow my instructions. I stepped away from the door, and he stepped toward it. We circumscribed a slow half-circle, like dance partners. A step, another step, the murmuring of my voice, my heart doing the rumba, and this guy, his eyes locked onto mine. He was afraid, too. I could see it.

  When he got to the door, he tried to pull it shut with me inside, but my hand caught the other side of the knob and pulled back.

  “It’s going to be okay,” my voice said. “I can’t stay in here, but it’s going to be okay.” I thought of Robin asleep in the bedroom. Maybe a minute passed, each of us pulling, then I felt the pressure release on the other side, and the door swung open. He was disappearing into the kitchen. I followed him around the corner, still talking, and planted myself in the doorway while he backed slowly toward the open window. Under the lights of the kitchen, he looked frail and less dangerous than I’d imagined. Maybe it was the baseball cap. I remember being surprised by that, the Mets cap. I was a Mets fan, too. He was still backing up, feeling his way behind him with the hand that supposedly had held a gun. A few inches short of our goal, almost home free, h
e stopped, and I saw his eyes light on a paring knife in the dish rack. He grabbed it and came lunging back across the kitchen toward me. I held up my hands to block him, thinking to myself I’m history now and feeling remarkably calm about that. Then, for no reason that I can imagine, he stopped, the knife a bare inch from my hands, wavering, glinting. Our eyes locked again and we stood frozen like actors in a film when someone stops the projector. This is it. See, this moment, right here. This is when everything changes.

  And then the film jerked to life again.

  “Don’t tell him I was here, man,” he said, shaking the knife at me for emphasis. He backed toward the window.

  “I won’t.”

  And he scrabbled out the window and disappeared.

  I stared at the open window, a minute, maybe less, before I ran into the bedroom. Robin was gone. Bedsheets were strewn across the empty mattress. I yelled her name and heard a rustling coming from under the bed. As I came around to her side, she managed to pull herself free from under the low bed frame. Her eyes were wild with terror.

  “Are you all right? Robin, are you all right?” I know I wasn’t thinking clearly because I had the frenzied idea that somehow he had gotten to her while I was inside the study. She shook her head and tears brimmed up in her eyes.

  “I thought he had a gun.” She sprang into my arms and we held each other. She was shaking, as though she had caught a chill, and foolishly I wrapped the comforter around her.

  “It’s all right, sweetie. He’s gone. It’s all over.”

  Now that we were safe, the fear I hadn’t felt earlier bubbled up in my veins, light as helium. We might have been killed. But no, I reminded myself, Robin had been safe. She’d been hiding. And then my brain snagged on a question.

  “Robin, did you call 911?”

  She shook her head no, her breath coming in hiccuping sobs now. I noted the phone on the nightstand, still in its cradle.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart,” I told her. “Everything is going to be okay now.”

  I was wrong about that, though. For starters, this incident has destroyed my sleep, not something I was great at to begin with. Even Robin, who can sleep like the dead for nine, ten hours at a stretch, starts at the slightest sound. She happens to be out at the moment, but it is a restless business: she jerks and twitches and occasionally whimpers something indecipherable.

  Me, I watch and listen. It gives me a lot of time to think. And what I’ve been mulling over during these vigils is the possibility that my life has jumped the tracks. Or worse, that there were never any tracks to begin with.

  Maybe a crack-addled brain can explain singling out a secure and well-lit apartment to burgle. But then, how to explain why I’m not dead, or at the very least lying in St. Vincent’s recovering from multiple slash wounds and sipping my dinner through a straw? Everyone says we were lucky, no one was hurt, nothing was stolen. And maybe I should feel grateful, but it’s a disconcerting thought when you get right down to it. Luck cuts both ways.

  Case in point: my life as an actor. When I moved here from Tulsa in ’75, I gave myself five years to make it. I wanted to be a star, but one who did interesting, offbeat work, one who, even when LA came courting, would never completely abandon his roots in the theater. The actor’s actor: a De Niro, a Pacino. I never owned up to wanting the stardom part, though. Instead, I made it known that I simply wanted to do good work, to be an artist, to have a life in the theater. At the time, these seemed like humble aspirations.

  Nearing the end of my fifth year in New York, my résumé listed a mercifully unnoticed workshop production, Nick in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Passaic Playhouse, the role of Flight Engineer on a TV movie of the week, and a smattering of extra work. Nights, I did phone solicitation, trying to sell vacation packages. In short, I hadn’t made it by anyone’s definition, but by the standards of a business where the unemployment rate hovers around ninety-two percent, I was holding my own. I had acquired my union cards and a decent, though not powerful, agent. I was paying my dues and honing my craft—quack, quack, quack, quack, quack—all the things I told myself while I dialed for dollars.

  Then I got cast in an off-Broadway play called Crosshairs. I was convinced, along with the rest of the company, that we had our hands on a brilliant play, so I was not surprised, much less grateful, when the Times agreed. Frank Rich said my performance was “disarming” and “hilarious,” and I thought that, well, yes, that was about right.

  The upshot was that my life was transformed. Suddenly casting directors were chummy, women brazenly available. The show moved across town to Broadway and started raking it in. I spent money like water, picking up checks for all my unemployed friends, buying a share in a summer rental out in Montauk. I signed autographs at the stage door and pretended modest surprise when people recognized me. More important, I started getting seen regularly for film roles, and there were a few key names in the business—what’s the point of dropping names now?—they liked me and were introducing me around. The end of my fifth year came and went, and if I noticed, I don’t remember.

  Another nine years later, I am thirty-seven years old and I don’t work much in the theater anymore. No, let’s be honest: I haven’t done a play in three years, and months go by between auditions. I have no explanation for any of this, none whatsoever. Except luck.

  When people ask what I do, I say I’m an actor. Strictly speaking, though, what I do is bartend. I still snag the occasional commercial, and every once in a while my friend Stuart throws me a job recording a book on tape, but who’s kidding who? Last week, I spent a morning pretending to be a crazed rodent in hopes of landing a national for Dobbin Copiers. I had no lines, just reaction shots: curious, excited, hysterical. Facial expressions were out, because there is some kind of mask involved. “It’s all in the squeaks, the body language,” the director told me with that amplified earnestness that commercial people indulge in to convince themselves they’re doing something meaningful. I found myself thinking, as I squeaked and squealed for all I was worth, so this is what it comes to.

  Everything could change again tomorrow—that’s what keeps you in the game—but eventually you also have to face the possibility that it might not.

  Down on the street, a car alarm shrieks to life. Robin’s breathing suspends, her eyes snap open. We listen, wait through the moments it might take for the owner to stumble from his bed and into the street, but no one comes. The alarm caterwauls and then changes key to a series of bleats. I get up, peer out the window, see nothing, pull the window closed, and turn the AC on high to muffle the keening howls.

  “Have you ever been to Santa Fe?” She doesn’t look at me when she asks.

  “No.”

  “We went there once, to look at a horse Dad was thinking about buying. I remember I was surprised at how cold it was; it was December, but I thought everywhere in the Southwest was like Phoenix. It started to snow. and the arroyos blurred and turned white. It was the quietest place in the whole world.”

  “Sounds nice,” I say, guardedly.

  The morning after the break-in, Robin announced that she wanted to leave New York. A pretty natural sentiment, given the events of the previous night, but not the kind of comment you want to give too much weight. There’s a garbage strike, one too many snowstorms in February, whatever, and everyone talks about getting out. I figured that Robin’s was just one of those empty threats that every New Yorker makes against the city.

  But she’s still circling the subject. She reads the travel section first on Sundays now. She cooks up all sorts of possibilities in places like Durham, North Carolina, or Missoula, Montana. Every night it’s a different town, and she puts herself back to sleep dreaming about the cottage or houseboat or cabin we would live in, the vegetables she would plant in our garden.

  “If we were willing to go out a bit, we could still afford to get a place with a little land,” she continues.

  “What would we do in Santa Fe?” I ask.

&
nbsp; “I don’t know, exactly.” Her voice stiffens. “We’d come up with something, though. We’re bright, capable people.” What she doesn’t say, though, and it hangs heavy in the air between us, is that her options are greater than mine. She can get a personnel job anywhere, but I can’t imagine there’s much demand for actors in Santa Fe.

  “I just can’t see myself there,” I tell her.

  “Well, where can you see yourself?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She sighs, deeply frustrated with me.

  “Honestly,” I say, “don’t you think the idea of packing up the jalopy and heading out West is a little over the top?” Sometimes a note of levity works with Robin. I’m guessing from her silence that this isn’t one of those times. I try a different tack. “After all,” I remind her soothingly, “this is our home.”

  Robin’s eyes drift to the windows, to the streetlight seeping through the metal security gates and making hatch-marked shadows on the window shades.

  “You yourself said that you might as well be in Kansas,” she says.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, I didn’t mean it literally.”

  No matter how innocuously we begin, every discussion these days circles round to some question of our future, just as it did eleven years ago when we were still trying to determine whether this unlikely pairing was actually going to work. Now, it would seem, everything we agreed on is up for review again.

  Maybe this upcoming trip will help. Wednesday morning, we’re flying up to Maine to visit my father-in-law, who has a summer home on Penobscot Bay. Six days cooped up with Jack Casterline and his loony tunes wife is not my idea of a vacation, but I can’t really kick since Jack is footing the bill.