The Stand-In

by Deborah Moggach

  ‘What the fuck’s this double-negative?’

  Drinking my coffee, I called over, ‘It’s like: I wasn’t shooting at nobody.’

  ‘Whadd’ya mean?’ she asked.

  ‘Which means, I must have been shooting at somebody.’

  She stared at me. ‘Why’re you saying that?’

  I shrugged. ‘Just an example.’

  We finished early that day and Lila dragged me off to her nail salon. She seemed tense; she said she didn’t want to be alone. It was down on Murray Hill, near my hotel; she said she had been going there for years and had a favourite girl called Timmi. It calmed her down, she said, having her nails done; it was so therapeutic.

  Pinky’s Fingernails was down on 37th, next to some fancy new condos. The sign said Nail Sculpture. We got out of the car, and Lila told me I should get my nails done too.

  Inside it was hot. There was plastic panelling on the walls and trolleys of enamels in every shade of pink and crimson; they looked like miniature blood transfusions. At each trolley sat a Korean girl, waiting for custom like a concubine. They wore panne velvet and a lot of jewellery. They were chatting and giggling with each other; they were hardly older than children. ‘These girls,’ said Lila, ‘they know the dirt about everybody.’

  I pictured celebrities’ mistresses, having their nails filed so they could tear their rivals’ eyes out. They would claw each other like cats. Lila greeted Timmi affectionately and sat down. I was put into the seat next to her, and a child-bride called Marni or something asked me if I wanted linen or silk wrapping. She said it would make my nails beautiful and strong.

  ‘You been in a fight?’ she asked in her sing-song voice, lifting my hand and looking at the scar. Another girl came over. They sighed, like wind through dry grass.

  ‘Silk’s finer, honey,’ said Lila, leaning over. ‘But linen lasts longer.’

  She had silk and I had linen, like some fairy story where she was the princess and I the serving maid. Marni filed my nails and then glued on featherlight squares of linen, layer after layer on each nail, building them up. As she worked on my hands I listened to Lila. She was talking to Timmi, who obviously adored her. In fact, the giggly female atmosphere seemed to suit Lila; deep down, I suspected that she preferred women to men – they were less harmful. Besides, she was like me, she didn’t have much of a family, and these girls seemed like little sisters to her. Lila was no snob; I’d noticed already that she was at her most relaxed with working-class girls – beauticians, make-up assistants. After all, that’s where she came from herself – untwist fate and that’s where she would have remained. She would be working in a beauty parlour and married to a Toyota salesman.

  But she hadn’t, had she? She was famous, and it had nearly cost her her life. Timmi was listening as Lila told her about yesterday’s shooting, a drama from which I was by now totally excluded.

  ‘These psychopaths,’ she said, ‘they’re nuts. Jesus Christ, do they freak me out. Jodie Foster, Olivia Newton-John, all of us, we all get it. Like, these letters. Irma throws them in the garbage before I read them, but I know they’ve come, just by the look on her face. Some of them, they call my answering service. These fruits – sometimes they even got my personal number! I have to change it every few months. There’s all that hate out there, you wouldn’t believe.’

  ‘Who could hate you?’ asked Timmi, painting blood-red enamel onto Lila’s nails. She mopped a drop that had smudged, because Lila’s hand was unsteady.

  ‘Someone out there, he wants to kill me,’ said Lila.

  ‘But you said they’ve taken him in.’

  ‘If it’s not him, it’ll be someone else,’ she said. ‘There’s always someone. Trouble is, you don’t know who they are.’

  She waited for a moment, until her nails were dry. I sat beside her, listening to my own girl’s tinkling bracelets as she worked on me. Then Lila reached for her bag.

  ‘From now on,’ she said, ‘I’m taking no chances.’ She undid the clasp. ‘This morning, Irma and I went shopping. I bought something that’s going to make me feel a whole lot safer. A whole lot.’

  Timmi looked in her handbag and gasped. I leaned over. Amongst the mess of make-up tubes and hairbrushes, half-buried in Lila’s sluttish debris, nestled a pistol.

  ‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ crooned Lila, as if it were a baby.

  It was indeed pretty: a small, shiny Smith & Wesson. Its handle was mother-of-pearl; it had a snub little shaft. So this was why she had arrived late for work.

  ‘From now on,’ said Lila, ‘it’s going to be right here, in my purse. And that’s where it’s going to stay.’

  Some of the other girls came over to look. They sighed and tinkled. I remember thinking how indiscreet Lila was being – she would show anybody anything. That was her nature. They clustered around, ogling the gun; Lila looked like Snow White, surrounded by her dwarfs. She demonstrated the safety catch, clicking it open and closed. They tittered fearfully.

  Lila closed her purse and I sat back in my seat. Marni asked me what colour I would like my nails. For a moment I didn’t hear. My jaw was aching. I suddenly realised that last night I had been technically unfaithful to Trev.

  ‘Choose a colour, honey,’ said Marni.

  I started, and looked at Lila’s blood-red nails. ‘The same as hers,’ I said.

  Five

  THE DAYS PASSED. I got a card from Trev, postmarked Edinburgh. I couldn’t read the date, it was smudged. The painting showed a skating man, from the National Art Gallery of Scotland. ‘Pissing with rain. I’m pissed too. Robbie likes idea but he’s pissed as a newt. Taking “carry oots” to his place. Miss you, my brainy little sassenack (?).’

  Why the (?)? Was he doubting his affection, or his spelling? Or my brains? Who was this Robbie, so suddenly intimate? Trev wouldn’t go to an art gallery with a BBC producer. He wouldn’t go to an art gallery at all, unless some girl took him. Besides, wasn’t the BBC man called Bill?

  My suspicions festered, but I was helpless. I wanted him here with me in New York, waiting in my hotel room at the end of the day. I wanted him to laugh with me at the dogged joggers and at the tracksuited fathers I saw in Central Park. They pushed strollers, briefly bonding with their babies whilst their wives stayed home, ordering up some brunch and kvetching to their girlfriends about co-dependent relationships. I missed the way he said ‘diabolical’. I remembered how we had gone to a restaurant once, when he was wearing a borrowed suit for somebody’s wedding. No waiters had appeared so he had pretended to be the maitre d’, ushering in customers. He had strolled round the tables taking orders.

  Was another woman getting all this now? Something was up; I knew it. His postcards were too brief and bland; his absences from my flat too prolonged and unexplained for somebody who was supposed to be working on a script. But I was four thousand miles away; five time-zones separated us. When I managed to get him on the phone I put on a cheery voice and asked him no questions. I just told him my news.

  We shot scenes in Irving Place, on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, outside the Apollo Theater in Harlem. We shot a night-time chase sequence through SoHo. All over the city traffic was stopped for us, as if for some fatal accident. I felt full of coiled energy, as if I were a jack-in-the-box with a weight straining to hold me down. Maybe it was the sharp, exhilarating air. Coming from a sluggish English autumn I wasn’t prepared for the nervy bite of a November in New York; it hit my veins like heroin, it ran through me like quicksilver. Way up at the top of the buildings, inching higher as the days passed, the sun shone; windows flashed messages to each other. Dizzyingly high, up on the roof of apartment blocks, tufts of bushes stuck out, as surprising as pubic hair. Each building pushed up higher than its neighbour, greedy for air. Some were tinted glass; some were sheathed in a thin skin of mirrors, making narcissists of the neighbours with which they were competing.

  Down below I paced the echoing, hooting streets. I was adrift, floating on the windy currents that blew up the s
ide streets. I walked for mile after mile, warmed, momentarily, by the blasts of hot air from, the doorways of stores that sold training shoes and bagels and compact discs. I was both powerless and powerful, restless and focused. I paced the streets, mouthing the words of overheard conversations and practising my accents. I sat in public plazas, on the cold concrete rims of fountains or tubs filled with bark chippings, and watched people. I watched, all the time. Men and women passed me without a glance. But I noticed them. When it grew too cold I went indoors, into the vast, glazed public spaces that create a city within the city. I sat under the stars of Grand Central Station; I sat, half-hidden by glossy rubber plants, in the lobby of the Hyatt. I sat on a spindly chair in the lobby of the IBM building, where clumps of bamboo transformed typists, munching their lunch, into women of Chekhovian melancholy; amongst the greenery they ate tubs of coleslaw. I rode up and down the escalator in the Trump Tower, past a Babylonian waterfall splashing down mottled, blood-red walls. I wandered its marble floors, mesmerised by the energy so throbbing I could almost touch it with my new linen fingernails.

  I thought the Trump Tower was the most hideously vulgar place I’d ever seen. I said to Lila: ‘This book I read, it described it as the inside of the stomach of someone who’s eaten pepperoni pizza.’

  Lila, however, adored it. ‘But last time I went, I couldn’t move on account of all the people staring at me,’ she said. ‘And now I’m totally freaked.’

  It was the end of November. We were sitting in the wardrobe trailer, the washing machine humming beside us. Kelly had fetched us coffee and doughnuts. Like all wardrobe mistresses she was enormously fat; whilst clothing others, it seems, she had given up on herself. But she was motherly, and we had some of our best chats there. Lila thrived in a harem atmosphere, where we all sat around and said what a lousy time we had with men.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like if I was just a normal person,’ said Lila, her mouth dusted with sugar. ‘Just a regular guy. I could just go anyplace and nobody’d notice.’ She took a bite of her doughnut. ‘It must be strange.’

  I said, ‘It’s your life that’s kind of strange.’

  The machine started its spinning cycle; the engine whirred and it started rocking, as if people were struggling inside. I took a gulp of coffee and looked at Lila. She wore a pink tracksuit – we had just shot a scene in the Sheeps Meadow. I leant over and wiped a blob of jam off her chin.

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ I said softly, licking the jam off my finger.

  I said she should become someone like me.

  ‘Let’s try it,’ I said.

  We borrowed this mousy wig from make-up. Our next day off I took Lila back to my hotel, for the first time. She wore the wig and the desk clerk didn’t recognise her. This gave her a terrific buzz. We scuttled into the elevator, laughing.

  ‘Can I go through with this?’ she asked, removing her shades as we stopped at my floor.

  ‘Don’t be a sissy,’ I said.

  I opened the door and let her into my room. It was its usual neat and featureless self. The first thing everyone does in a hotel room is go to the window and look out. On the ledge was my pair of binoculars. I haven’t told you about them, have I? She picked them up.

  ‘What are these for?’ she asked.

  ‘Watching things, of course. You ever seen Rear Window?’

  She shrugged off her fur coat and wandered around my room like a child, idly curious. I sat on the bed, watching her as she opened the fridge and looked at the bottles of miniatures. It was strange having her there. I thought how film stars resemble children. They are kept purposefully retarded. Everything conspires to stunt their growth. They are pampered and yet exploited; they are told lies, people tell them only what they expect to hear, they are protected from the windy outside world. Away from her familiar surroundings Lila seemed more vulnerable, lost and mousy in her lank wig. For once, I felt more powerful. We were on my territory now.

  ‘First you’ve got to scrub that stuff off your face,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll lend you some of my clothes. We’re pretty much the same size.’

  I opened the drawer, where I kept my t-shirts. Half-hidden amongst them was my store of Salem cigarettes – five packs. I didn’t smoke them but I kept them for her. I covered them up; I didn’t want her to see them.

  ‘Make your choice,’ I said, pulling out t-shirts. There was one saying Stop Global Warming, another one saying Protect the Rainforests; their commands clamoured at me quaintly, from my old days. I pulled out another one. It said First Aid Theatre. ‘I was working with them when I first saw you,’ I said.

  She was in the bathroom, wiping off her make-up. She didn’t know anything about my former life; she wasn’t interested. Was that fair? After all, I was interested in her life, everybody was. In interviews they asked her opinion on everything from night-replenishing creams to surrogate motherhood and listened, gleamingly, to her banal replies.

  ‘You want to hear about me?’ I asked. ‘Me, meaning you.’

  ‘Holy cow, do I look flaky,’ she said, wincing at her reflection in the mirror.

  ‘Touché,’ I said.

  Her bare face gazed at my reflection, over her shoulder. ‘Huh?’

  ‘Nothing. Now, you’ve got a small flat – not apartment, flat.’

  ‘I’ve got a small flat,’ she repeated, trying out her English accent.

  ‘In Belsize Park. And a large mortgage. And you’ve got three videotapes which you re-use all the time, and an A-reg Renault that keeps breaking down. Remember it? You saw it once.’ I spoke faster. ‘And you hand-wash clothes that say Dry Clean Only, and you buy milk in bottles not cartons because it’s a penny cheaper, and you pull all the fluff out of your Hoover bag so you can use the bag again –’

  ‘What’s a Hoover bag?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘And your heart thumps when the mail arrives, not because it’s some nutcase who’s in thrall to you but because it’s your bloody bank manager who isn’t.’ I paused for breath. She looked startled.

  ‘Why are you shouting?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m not. I’m just trying to explain.’

  She moved away from the mirror. ‘Sometimes you have this crazy look in your eyes.’

  I went into the other room. ‘I’m perfectly normal,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me. Come and get dressed.’

  I laid out jeans, t-shirt and sweater on the bed.

  ‘It’s just an interesting exercise,’ I said. ‘We used to do it at drama school. Role reversal, role-swapping.’

  She adjusted her wig. ‘Sometimes you spook me.’

  She stepped out of her slacks. Underneath she wore creamy pantyhose, with a ladder down the thigh. I passed her the jeans and she pulled them on. They were slightly too tight; I was leaner than her.

  ‘My name is Julia,’ I said.

  ‘My name is Julia,’ she repeated, in an approximately English accent.

  ‘I’m a remarkably talented actress.’

  ‘I’m a remarkably talented actress,’ she repeated.

  I corrected her. ‘Rem-ar-kably talented.’

  ‘Rem-ar-kably talented.’

  ‘My hobbies are making origami out of old magazine interviews with Lila Dune and fucking strange men in hotel rooms.’

  She looked at me. ‘You kidding?’

  ‘We’re all liars, aren’t we?’ I smiled at her. ‘Give us our lines and we’ll say anything.’

  She unbuttoned her blouse and took it off. She wore an underwired bra – beige lace. ‘You’re making me nervous,’ she said. ‘You have any valium?’ She pulled on a t-shirt and my blue sweater.

  I stood back and inspected her. She looked back at me. She did, in fact, look surprisingly nervous. Maybe she felt insecure, looking so ordinary. Maybe she was having second thoughts about the whole enterprise. Funnily enough she didn’t really look like me, despite the clothes. I could manage the transformation much better, the other way round. I could act like her because I kne
w her mannerisms and I could copy her voice. That was because I was a real actress. She just looked lost – an unremarkably pretty woman who didn’t know what to do with her hands. Her beauty was somehow dissipated.

  ‘One thing we’re getting straight,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to smoke your goddam cigarettes. They have a high tar content.’

  I laughed and we went downstairs. We walked down the street, towards 3rd Avenue. Nobody looked at us.

  ‘It’s like I’m invisible,’ she whispered.

  ‘Join the club.’

  ‘It’s neat!’

  ‘Think so?’

  We walked past the key-cutting booth and the Golden Brioche; we turned the corner and walked past Pinky’s Nail Sculpture. She paused at the window. Timmi was squirting the glass and rubbing it down.

  ‘Hi Timmi!’ She waved. But Timmi didn’t recognise her; she just went on rubbing.

  We walked along 3rd Avenue, past the scruffy stores and Szechuan restaurants. Lila hadn’t walked around New York for years; she was like an invalid re-learning the use of her legs.

  She said, ‘This guy, this fan, he came up to me once and he says Do you know who you are? I said That’s a good question.’

  Laughing, I gave her a lesson in English vocabulary. ‘Biscuit not cookie,’ I said. ‘Lorry not truck.’

  But she wasn’t listening. She was too entranced by her sudden freedom – the freedom of the nonentity. It was rather touching really. Fame is a prison, and she had been let out for an afternoon amongst the hoi polloi. The seedier the area the better; 3rd Avenue was unknown to her, it was another country. Celebrities have their own network, their own exclusive grid. They travel in their limos between Mortimers and their apartment in the Upper 60s, between one First Class Lounge and another, places where they are welcomed discreetly, cushioned from gawpers and where they only meet people like themselves.

  That was another reason why Lila wasn’t recognised. Famous people are not just identified by their faces but by their environment and their props – the stretch limo, the fancy neighbourhood, the fur coat. Shed that and they are halfway to resembling the rest of us.