The Stand-In

by Deborah Moggach

  ‘You have a reservation?’

  I shook my head. ‘Can I have a table for one –’

  ‘We’re fully booked.’ He turned away, brusquely. He hadn’t recognised me.

  Just then the waiter passed, the one who had been so friendly before; he looked straight through me. Stung, I turned away. Without Lila I was a nobody. Worse – I was invisible.

  I walked slowly down the street. It had been raining; a bus thundered past, splashing my legs. No wonder New York was a city full of paranoids. No wonder lone men in parkas took pot shots at celebrities. There’s a bank somewhere on 6th Avenue which has a curved steel door; at the end of the day it rolls around closed. The whole city suddenly seemed to do that, to revolve around and close me out, presenting me with its reverse side, blind metal. The other side of that open, eager welcome I had when accompanied by Lila.

  I caught the first bus that came along. Inside it resembled a day-release centre. Everyone seemed odd, but in a mild, tranquillised way. Some buses were like this. A woman wearing knitted cobwebs swivelled her head from side to side, making clicking sounds with her tongue. A bald man, who stank of wine, was measuring two pieces of string and arguing to himself. His feet were bandaged in about eight pairs of socks. Why do lunatics always wear so much on their feet, I wondered? Or else nothing at all.

  I got out when I recognised the Flatiron building, a landmark I remembered. I walked for a while along the lower end of Broadway, the dark end without the theatres. Buildings vast as warehouses loomed up on either side; I was in the wholesale garment district. Through windows I saw shadowy racks of clothes, waiting for women to put them on and pretend to be someone different. My feet ached.

  It was that night, when I seethed with bitterness, that I first wondered what it would be like if I dressed up as Lila. It was just a passing fancy then, nothing more. But I remember the moment. I had gone into a late-night grocery store to buy some cigarettes – I had been smoking heavily recently. I stood behind an old black guy who was buying a coffee. When he took it, he produced a bottle of Brut aftershave from his pocket, poured some in, and left the shop.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ I asked the store owner. But he was Korean and didn’t respond; maybe he didn’t know what I was talking about.

  It was one of those nights in New York when you only meet loonies. I walked along, feeling part of some vast, crazy detritus. It can happen so fast, in that city. In the morning you’re working on a $20 million movie, giving advice to a world-famous movie star. A few hours later you are flotsam.

  At that point I became aware of some stretch limos parked across the street. I was somewhere near 13th Street, and over the road I could see a roped-off doorway guarded by heavies. There was a long line of people, waiting to either be admitted or turned away. Later I learnt that it was some night club – Nell’s, I think. Looking across the traffic I thought: what if I wore my Lila wig and arrived in a limo, would I get in? What if I used my Lila voice – girlish, but with that gravelly edge of a smoker? I had practised it, you see. I had been watching her. I had been watching all the cast and crew, in fact. I could do the location manager’s Southern drawl, the publicist’s Bryn Mawr, the warm brown tones of one of the actors, Joss Ridley, an up-and-coming guy who had just worked with Dennis Quaid and told everybody what hellraisers they were together. But mostly I had been watching Lila.

  I ended up in a place in the Village that served Cajun cooking. I hadn’t a clue what Cajun meant, then, but the place looked friendly and I needed that. Nobody told me it was fully booked; in fact it was practically empty. There were checked tablecloths, and black-and-white Marlene Dietrich photos on the walls. Out the back was a yard; a spotlight shone on the slimy fallen leaves.

  A waiter called Clayton served me. He told me his name early on; most gays, I’ve noticed, seem to be nice towards a woman on her own. Maybe because they know what it’s like to be lonely. He had a neat, blond moustache. He brought me something pan-seared in a burning sauce, and asked what I did. For a moment I thought of pretending – I could be anything in the world – but that would have made me feel lonelier, Besides, he said he was an actor, resting between jobs, so I told him.

  ‘It’s a tough business,’ he said. ‘This is a tough city. If you’ve made it, it’s the most exciting place on earth. If you haven’t, you don’t exist.’

  He said his last job had been the voice-over for a llama in an ad for the Bronx Zoo. Before that he had been in a mini-series called High, about a detox clinic up in the Rockies.

  ‘I played a heroin addict whose mother was an alcoholic lesbian,’ he said. ‘They cancelled the second series.’

  ‘Actually I’m only standing-in,’ I said. ‘For Lila Dune.’

  Several of his friends were stand-ins, he said. Some were failed actors; some were budding actors, hoping to be spotted. ‘But who spots a stand-in? It’s kind of a dead-end job but it’s also seductive, because the money’s good.’ He knew Tom Hanks’s stand-in, and Charlie Sheen’s. ‘They get to become some kind of doppelganger,’ he said. He was an intelligent bloke; he’d majored in philosophy, he told me, in Athens, Ohio, before getting stage-struck. ‘They think they’re going to get buddy with the star, they’re going to go to all the parties. But some stars, they don’t say a word to them all through the shoot, they wouldn’t recognise them in the street.’

  ‘It’s not like that with Lila,’ I said. I gazed out at the yard. A single tree rose out of the greasy sediment of leaves. I said, more to convince myself than him, ‘We’re getting to be pals.’ I thought of our giggly lunch at Chez Hortense.

  ‘That’s what a girl I knew thought, with Faye Dunaway. She used to buy her cigarettes for her, she used to run errands.’

  ‘This is different!’

  His voice rose to a camp falsetto. ‘Lordy Lord, we’re talking one of my all-time favourite movies! We’re talking All About Eve!’

  I looked out at the tree-trunk, glistening in the spotlight. Beyond the high brick wall a siren wailed. Every minute of the night, it seemed, sirens wailed.

  ‘What do you think of Lila?’ I asked.

  Like most people in the profession he had a poor opinion of her acting ability; in fact, he said, she couldn’t act at all.

  ‘I can,’ I said loudly.

  He didn’t hear my boast; he was fetching me a coffee. When he came back we played that game where you think of what sort of car, or animal, or book somebody would be. We did it with Lila. I thought: it must be strange to be famous, because people who haven’t met you can play games about you.

  ‘Car?’ I asked.

  ‘Pink Cadillac convertible,’ he said.

  ‘With something wrong with its gaskets.’

  He laughed. ‘Animal?’

  ‘Warthog,’ I said. ‘Just kidding.’

  ‘I know, she’s a Saluki.’

  ‘Isn’t that a motorbike?’

  ‘That’s Suzuki,’ he said. ‘Movie?’

  ‘Sunset Boulevard,’ I said.

  ‘Bitchy bitchy,’ he said, smiling.

  Give her a few years, I thought, and she would be cracking up like Gloria Swanson. She would be lying on her couch with liver-spots on her hands, Forrest had noticed them already. She would be surrounded by photos of herself, hundreds of celluloid lies.

  ‘We’re just a teeny bit jealous,’ he said. ‘Aren’t we?’

  He sat down next to me. ‘Mary Pickford had a stand-in. She had her for years and years. She was more than a stand-in; she was a friend, secretary, confidante. One day Mary Pickford’s offered this part but they want her young, that’s how her public sees her. Face-lifts were just starting then – this was back in the forties. So Pickford sends her stand-in to a clinic in Beverly Hills, to have a face-lift. In those days it took six weeks; it was a difficult operation. So the stand-in had the operation, and after six weeks . . .’ He paused. ‘They took the bandages off.’

  ‘What happened?’ I whispered.

  ‘It was fine! The stand-i
n looked wonderful! So Pickford goes to the clinic and has the operation herself. And after six weeks they take off the bandages.’

  He stopped, sighed, and looked around the empty restaurant.

  ‘What happened?’ I yelped. ‘Go on.’

  He looked at me, pausing for dramatic effect. He lined up the tabasco bottle, next to the salt.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ I nudged him.

  ‘When they unwound the bandages,’ he said, ‘they found that they’d severed a nerve in her face. Just one side. For the rest of her life Mary Pickford had a kind of half-smile, like this.’ He did a rictus grin. ‘She became a recluse. The stand-in stayed with her and looked after her, until she died.’

  I walked back along Christopher Street. Like stars, the gays come out at night. It was eleven o’clock and the pavements were crowded with men in black leather trying to pick each other up. They glinted like beetles in the street lights. Nobody looked at me. I was not just invisible as an actress, it appeared, but as a woman too. Men wearing Nazi caps jostled each other significantly; the street was criss-crossed with eye contact, like search lights in some war of which I had no part. A bondage shop declared, ‘Come in! We’re Open!’ In the window, dummies wore chains and masks; their black leather jockstraps were stuffed with newspaper.

  I suddenly missed Trev, painfully. When I got back to my hotel room I phoned again, but I just got the answerphone. In England, it would be five in the morning. I undressed and climbed into bed. I missed his body but I missed the talk too. Clayton’s story had disturbed me. It had lodged in me, like something bulky I couldn’t digest. I wanted to talk to somebody English. Thoughts spring into your mind, don’t they? Silly things like: what’s happened to rissoles? Does nobody eat them any more or do we just call them something else, like quenelles? Or a man on the bus looks just like the little old geezer in Last of the Swnmer Wine and there’s nobody to remind you of his name.

  Things like that. I wanted to be reassured. I only had an inkling, then, of how homesick I would become. It just caught me at odd moments; I felt breathless, as if I had been winded. That was all. It passed soon enough. I turned off the light and went to sleep.

  It doesn’t pass, now. I feel it all the time. Sometimes it gets stronger, like one huge wave in a heavy sea, and then I’m engulfed. Everyone sits here like zombies; I suppose I do too. But inside my head it’s chaos. There’s no distractions, nothing to disperse it, so I sit here with my thoughts winding tighter and tighter until I want to scream. I want to scream out to her, that Jules of two years ago. She is lying on her hotel bed. In the cupboard hangs a bronze dress, not her style at all but she had bought it. She is already beginning her slow metamorphosis. She is wearing more make-up nowadays, too. She is starting to say ‘candy’ instead of ‘chocolate’, have you noticed? I can hardly remember Clayton now, but he mentioned All About Eve. I don’t know about that. Sometimes it seems more like Jekyll and Hyde.

  She gets up, unbuttons her jacket and climbs out of her skirt. She folds them neatly; she’s always been obsessively tidy. People don’t guess that, but then they don’t guess a lot of things about her.

  She stands there for a moment, in her Saks slip. The glow of the city, through the window, drains the colour from it. She strokes her breasts slowly, feeling the silk. She steps out of her briefs. In front of the mirror she piles up her hair and turns her head one way and then the other. She doesn’t seem to care that the window blinds are open and the curtains tied back; she doesn’t mind who is watching. In fact it turns her on. It always has. That is when she comes alive. That is why she’s an actress. She strokes her belly, then she slides her hand down between her legs. She touches herself, through the Lila-silk. Nobody can see her; opposite, the offices are empty. She is alone in a vast, indifferent city. Danger lies ahead of her, but she has no idea what it is. I want to shout out to her: Get out! In this city of disguise and slippery illusions, in this violent, schizophrenic place where anybody can become anything, she is heading for disaster. I want to shout: Go back to England, before it’s too late!

  Four

  I HAD VIOLENT dreams that night and woke up with a sense of foreboding. It had suddenly turned cold; even in my overheated hotel room I could feel it. There was a change in the air.

  Down in the lobby two businessmen with early flights to catch were checking out; one of them looked at his watch and said, ‘It’s six below in Chicago.’ He was enormously fat. I remember everything about that morning: the stiff new arrangement of gladioli, slanted like spears in their vase; the icy blast when the porter opened the door to take out their luggage.

  Out in the street it was freezing and grey. The air clamped down like a steel lid. People walked by, muffled up anonymously; we lose our personalities in the cold. The bundles puffed past, exhaling breath. Steam rose up from the manholes, thicker than ever today. I walked briskly, up towards Lex. Between the offices, the Chrysler building slid into view. Sheathed in steel, it resembled a giant’s hypodermic syringe; its needle was shrouded in mist.

  Today we were filming in Rockefeller Plaza – a scene where Lila arrives in a cab to collect her son, who is ice-skating. When I arrived a crowd had already gathered. Dwarfed by the surrounding buildings, a row of flags hung limply around the sunken expanse of ice, which looked smooth and milky. For some reason Rockefeller Plaza made me uneasy; the four walls of buildings blocked me in, I felt both confined and exposed. Extras, wearing skates, sat around the rink nursing plastic cups of coffee; steam rose between their gloves.

  I had my wig fitted, then I went into the wardrobe trailer. Kelly, the wardrobe mistress, wrapped me in a thick, chestnut fur coat. It was fox or something, I didn’t know anything about furs.

  ‘Isn’t it adorable!’ she said. ‘The furrier’s getting a credit at the end of the picture, so I told him to send us two.’ She grinned at me. ‘See, someone thinks about you.’

  Outside, an icy wind had started to blow. I pulled the fur around my face. Everywhere I looked, people stared; they even watched from the office windows. I huddled into my collar. After two weeks in the cocoon-like privacy of Mary-Lou’s Riverside Drive apartment I felt unnerved, coming out into the open. I glimpsed Lila, hurrying into her motorhome. She was dressed in an identical fur coat. For once we didn’t just look vaguely similar, we looked the same. In fact Bob, the AD, called out to me, ‘We don’t need you yet, Miss Dune!’ before he suddenly realised his mistake.

  The taxi-cab was parked near the rink. I was to get out of the cab and go over to my mark, beside the rink, where I was to wave at my son, trying to get his attention.

  As simple as that. I climbed out of the cab, walked the few steps to the rink and stood there. A gust of wind blew my phoney blonde hair across my face. The sky had darkened; maybe it was going to snow. To one side of me the crowd was shunted back as the camera, on its crane, was wheeled back a few feet. I remember that. There were cops, too; they were stopping the traffic, way over the other side of the Plaza. The air was heavy yet blustery, a Tab can rolled past my feet. I remember the lights, shining on my face. They had to adjust them, because the sky had darkened. It was 9.30; the minutes ticked by. That morning I felt more like Lila than I had ever felt before. Maybe it was the fur coat wrapped around me, luxuriously tickling my cheek; both of us under the same skins. I remember the AD calling out, ‘Raise your arm, honey.’ I raised my arm, as if I was waving, and they shifted the second camera to get my face into shot. Beyond the buildings the traffic rumbled; it sounded like distant thunder.

  And then, a split second before it happened, I saw something. It was just a tiny movement in the crowd opposite, on the far side of the rink; a tiny stir, like a finger in an ants’ nest. I was aware of it, momentarily, and then I heard a faint, sharp crack. I had never heard it before, in real life, but the moment I heard it I knew exactly what it was.

  It passed by me, very close. I cowered, my arms around my face. I heard the whistle of it, and then a curious, resonant sound, almost a
plop, like a pebble dropping into a pond. The bullet had entered the rear end of the taxi-cab. Over the other side of the rink, somebody screamed; there was a scuffling in the crowd. I saw a cop, running, and then another.

  Over our side it took a minute for anyone to realise what had happened. In real life it always takes much longer or shorter than you think; time is thrown out of joint. I think I was the only one who knew what it was. I turned and looked at the cab. The yellow metal was pierced by a small, scorched hole. I thought: it looks like an anus, and then I started giggling. I was shaking so much that I slid to the ground, I literally crumpled.

  Maybe I was hysterical; maybe they thought I had been shot. I remember wondering if I was acting it well enough. Would I fall this way? I saw myself shot again and falling, more gracefully this time, getting it right. Were they going to let me do it properly?

  Somebody had tried to shoot me, somebody in the crowd. Suddenly I felt furious.

  What an impertinence! It seems a funny word to choose, but that was what I felt. Fancy shooting at me! I giggled more wildly. Poor old stand-in, I thought. The only time I can get shot is when somebody uses a fucking gun.

  I suppose some of the crew had realised what had happened, by now. Bob hurried over.

  ‘You OK?’ he asked, helping me to my feet. I felt as ungainly as a new-born calf. The row of extras was staring at me, from the rink.

  ‘Sure you’re OK?’ he asked again. A cop was running towards us; he seemed to be miles away. Bob’s face shrank and blurred, and I felt myself bumping against him as I slid down, between his arms.

  The next thing I remember, I was sitting in the production trailer. The continuity girl, Corey, was gazing at me, her jaws working. I smelt the spearmint of her bubble gum. I laughed, weakly. I decided to play it jokey and noble.

  ‘Some people’ll do anything to get noticed,’ I said.

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You know, hiring a gunman –’

  ‘Honey,’ she replied, ‘he was after Lila.’