The Stand-In

by Deborah Moggach

  Certain facts I knew, from Lila herself. She was brought up in a trailer, an only child. Her father drove long-distance trucks. He drank heavily, and when he came home he beat the shit out of anyone who got in the way. How different from my own father, the master of self-control and icy contempt! Her drinking problems and instability were no doubt inherited from him. Finally he got into some brawl and left home for good. Like myself, Lila had grown up trying to get him back, trying to attract his attention. In her case she did it from the screen. Meanwhile, at eighteen, she had made a hasty and unsuitable marriage to Vince, the local boy who raced cars. Her second marriage had been to an older man, probably a father substitute. He was a nightclub promoter who now owned a string of clubs out West. This marriage had come to grief too. When it came to long-term relationships, Lila’s record was as woeful as mine.

  I drove through a suburban sprawl of gas stations, rusting pick-up trucks and tract homes. My heart beat faster. That sunny winter’s morning, before everything changed, I was simply motivated by curiosity. What was Lila’s mother like? What would she tell me? I was feeling generous too. Here I was, driving thirty miles to deliver birthday greetings and a bunch of lilies to somebody else’s mother. I was a surrogate daughter.

  Suddenly I started chuckling. That’s what I was: Lila’s stand-in! Not just on set, but in her family too. But then it’s easier being a stand-in daughter than being the real thing, isn’t it?

  And I was. I charmed Mrs Dunnacovicia, I could tell from the start. I gave her the armful of lilies. I acted the loving and attentive daughter – something I had never quite managed to do in real life. In fact I warmed to the part and felt myself filling it out. Besides, it was nice to talk to somebody again, after my silent days in Lila’s apartment, mouthing at the mirrors.

  Her mother was called Margosia. She asked me to call her that. She was small and plump and surprisingly youthful for somebody who had just turned sixty-one. I could see traces of Lila’s features – the snub nose, the wide eyes – in her soft face. She lived in a brand-new cedar-shingled house with an ornamental flamingo in the front yard, and white-painted tyres filled with last summer’s dying flowers lining the path. There were hanging baskets in the porch.

  ‘Lila had this built for me,’ she said, gesturing around. ‘Isn’t it just beautiful?’

  The trailer-home had long since gone, so I couldn’t see Lila’s old bedroom or imagine her father staggering about, roaring drunk and banging against the aluminium walls. Her childhood had vanished.

  I stood in the living room. On the giant TV set a game show silently played, the figures waving as if underwater. There was an orange settee and a flame-patterned rug. Along one wall was a hideous veneered sideboard filled with coloured glasses and topped with a baroque display of ornaments. Lace doilies hung over the chairs in a vaguely Eastern European’way, and on the wall hung a plinth supporting a plaster statue of the Virgin. I realised that, however lapsed, Lila was a Catholic. I thought of my father’s dry atheism and how, when I was young, I lit joss-sticks and hungered for a faith. How hard I prayed, with nobody to hear!

  Margosia came in, stuffing the flowers into a fairground vase. ‘Can’t fit them all in,’ she said. ‘My, what beautiful lilies! How did you know they’re my favourite flower?’

  I smiled. ‘I just knew.’

  I looked at the painted plaster figure. What had I prayed for – fame? Beauty? Love? An Oscar on my mantelpiece, instead of the Virgin Mary?

  She returned with another load of lilies stuck into another vase. Their perfume filled the room.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ I said again, and kissed her. Her skin was so soft that my lips sank into her cheek. She smelt of face powder.

  ‘She doesn’t have time for her old Mom any more,’ she sighed, putting the vase on the table. ‘The only time I see her’s on the TV set. Still, I’m so proud of my little girl. I always knew she was something special.’

  Mothers always say that. To them, of course, it’s true. But what about the rest of the world?

  The trouble with fame, it upsets the balance for the rest of us. It’s like when somebody takes an exotic holiday. When they return home, tanned and full of adventures, our own life thins. Perfectly acceptable a moment before, it is suddenly drained of interest. Fame does that. Lila had drained the colour from me. But we were all special to begin with. To our parents, we were. Every little girl is a potential film star. My father expected great things from me. And what had happened? What was my most lasting claim to fame? The woman who extinguishes her cigarette in a British Caledonian in-flight safety video.

  Margosia was prattling away in the kitchen. She was a simple woman, and delighted to have some company. She said she had been married again to a good, kind man, but he had died. She talked about some made-for-TV movie Lila had starred in, playing a high-flying attorney; she asked if Lila had given up smoking yet. She said there was something wrong with the furnace downstairs, and did I like decaf? I stood in the lounge, trying to catch up with all this and connect her to Lila. I wanted to ask her a hundred questions, but just then she came out of the kitchen and stopped dead.

  ‘Oh my!’ she gasped.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just then, I thought it was her, standing there!’ She gazed at me, over the coffee tray. ‘Anybody told you there’s a resemblance?’

  ‘That’s why I got the job in the first place,’ I said, smiling.

  I had told her what I did.

  ‘You know something?’ she said. ‘I’ve been to watch Lila filming, but I’ve never noticed no stand-in being used.’

  ‘Nobody does.’

  I ate a cookie and she showed me the framed photos on the sideboard. One featured Lila in a phalanx of drum majorettes; she looked a fresh, all-American girl, with her white teeth and shapely legs. Another showed her in her high-school prom dress, looking lush and blonde. She didn’t look exceptional – just a small-town, pretty girl. One of millions. I inspected them greedily. The final one showed an infant Lila being held by a handsome, gypsyish man wearing a plaid work-shirt.

  ‘Wasn’t she an adorable baby?’ sighed her mother.

  ‘Adorable,’ I said.

  ‘A real little tomboy,’ she said.

  ‘Really? So was I.’

  She rubbed the photo frame with the edge of the pinafore thing she wore, over her slacks, and put it back. We sat down with our coffee, while blurred contestants grimaced on the TV screen.

  ‘Were you a happy family?’ I asked.

  ‘She was the apple of her father’s eye.’

  ‘Does she still see him?’

  She shook her head. ‘He never came back. Not even to visit. Except that once –’ She stopped.

  ‘What once?’

  She fiddled with the packets of sugar. ‘It’s nothing,’ she muttered. ‘Know something? These newspaper people come here, people from the TV, they ask me all these questions. They’re so darned inquisitive. Can’t she have no privacy? Can’t she make no mistakes? Can’t she live like a normal person?’ She stopped, and looked up. ‘I don’t mean you, honey. I mean the others. Some of the lies I’ve read, I can’t recognise my own daughter!’

  There was an awkward silence. She had an orange smudge on her nose. It was pollen, from when she smelled the lilies. I leant over and rubbed it off for her.

  She smiled. ‘You’re different,’ she said. ‘I feel, like I can trust you. Like you’re almost one of the family.’

  I smiled. ‘Really?’

  Would you have dressed up in Lila’s clothes? Would you, if you were slim enough? I was slim enough; in fact I was slimmer than Lila because I didn’t binge on Snicker bars. I had grown to love her apartment, with its sensational views, and pranced around in it sheathed in her shiny evening dresses. They reminded me of my bronze dress I had bought in that moment of madness. My favourite of hers was a gold, pleated number from some boutique in Rodeo Drive; I imagined collecting my Best Actress Academy Award in this, shimmering bash
fully up to the platform. I had never known a woman with so many outfits – suits, jackets, glitzy evening wear, leatherwear; designer outfits by Oscar de la Renta, Cardin, Bill Blass, Ralph Lauren. Some of it looked scarcely worn. Lila was a greedy shopper. Like most Americans she had a huge and insatiable hunger for more, more, more. In movie theatres, people gorged themselves from popcorn tubs the size of dustbins. Buy, urged the babbling radio; eat urged the babbling TV. Cars had grossed-out into stretch limos, long as tugboats, that jammed the traffic and blocked the streets, parking for hours with their engines running while the driver sat in the back watching evangelical preachers braying for dollars on colour TVs. At night, when I dragged Orson out for his walk, I watched the monster garbage trucks gobbling rubbish while inside fast-food joints vast men, pale and plump as capons, stuffed themselves with junk and left a mountain of litter behind them. Skyscrapers thrust upwards, each one higher than the next, and down below the streets were a Sodom and Gomorrah of gluttony and gratification. Orson’s nails scraped as I pulled him along, accompanied by the sounds of police sirens and the night-bird whistles of the doormen outside the Waldorf Astoria and the Pierre, calling for cabs. The store windows were crammed with Christmas displays, goods heaped to the ceilings. Their aisles were crammed with shoppers. F.A.O. Schwartz was filled with plush mechanical animals, giant giraffes and elephants nodding to the bleeps of the cash tills.

  Back in England I had been a different person, dutifully recycling my Guardians and growing spider plants in my old yogurt pots. I had worried about the ozone layer and campaigned for worthy causes. I had a modest wardrobe of clothes and six pairs of shoes. Like my father, I switched off the lights when I left the room. New York both horrified and fascinated me; its brash sexual greed stirred something inside me, something that had lain largely dormant. Looking back, I suppose that my one-sided love-affair with Lila was really a one-sided affair with America herself, a country so childish and wasteful, so rich, tacky and greedy, and filled with such a raw energy that my scalp tingled.

  It tingled when I wore Lila’s clothes. Even her mother had pointed out our resemblance. For some reason, her words had a profound effect upon me. I honestly hadn’t thought of doing anything about it until then. She wasn’t a clever woman, and she hadn’t realised what she was saying – indeed, she was as egocentric as her daughter, and had remarked on the resemblance more in wonderment to herself than to me. But it was then that something had clicked.

  The idea came to me when I was walking Orson in Central Park, the morning after my visit to New Jersey. Lila wasn’t due back for another couple of days. It was another sharp, sunny, winter’s morning. A gay dog-walker strolled by. I recognised him; he was flanked by large poodles and afghan hounds which rose and fell like carousel horses as they loped along. I’d come to recognise some of the homeless by now, too, laden with their plastic bags and muttering their exhausting grievances at the bare branches. A few remaining leaves fluttered to the ground as Orson relieved himself beside the Imagine plaque. Whilst excreting, he always held my gaze. If his bowel movement was particularly loose, or copious, there was a triumphant gleam in his eye, challenging me to scoop all that lot up. We had grown to loathe each other, and engaged in various one-upmanship manoeuvres of some complexity.

  Avoiding him, I gazed idly at the plaque. Imagine, I thought. Imagine picking up a man in a hotel bar and bringing him back to Lila’s apartment. I would hide Lila’s photos and pretend it was my place. We would fuck each other senseless between Lila’s sheets and then, the next time he visited, I would have disappeared into thin air. The doorman would coldly ask: ‘Apartment 31B? Who were you wanting, sir?’

  Then I thought: Imagine dressing up as Lila. I would put on her wig and sally forth into this steaming, seething city. I would pick up a man and bring him back to the apartment. He would think he was shagging a film star. And when Lila returned he would be shown up and she’d have the shock of her life.

  This idea, though amusing and mildly arousing, seemed logically impossible. But it was just then, whilst I blenched at the smell emanating from Orson’s direction, that I remembered the dry cleaning ticket.

  I had seen it on her desk, pinned to a note for Fidelia. The note itemised various small tasks to be performed during Lila’s absence – buying dog food, calling the janitor to mend a dripping faucet, cancelling her Personal Fitness Program trainer, who apparently visited once a week to monitor her low-impact aerobics and to bully her onto her bike. I had carried out most of these instructions myself. All that remained was the collection of Lila’s dry cleaning.

  When I returned to the apartment I went over to her desk and picked up the note. Her loopy, immature handwriting blurred. For a moment I couldn’t understand why, then I realised that my hand was shaking. Wasn’t that ridiculous? I hadn’t done anything yet.

  The idea was so bold that I felt breathless, and sat down in her soft white settee. Why not dress up as Lila, and collect her cleaning? Why not see if I could pull it off? After all, I was convincing enough in the mirror. Why not go one small step further?

  Think of it purely as an acting exercise, I told myself, gazing at the tubs of dried-out cypress trees on her balcony. Would I be good enough to get away with it?

  I didn’t have the nerve to do it in daylight. I would have to wait until dark.

  If you appear on stage in the evenings, people think your days are free. Nothing could be further from the truth. Agreed, you can sleep in late. But from midday onwards you are tensing yourself for curtain-up. As the hours pass you gradually drain off your normal life, you empty yourself in preparation for the role ahead. You may behave as usual but in fact you are a walking husk, an empty shell filled with nothing but anxieties. You are like a person who is just about to make a journey. Long before you have climbed into the plane, long before you have been waved off at the quay, you have already departed. Long before dusk Jules had disappeared. It was Lila now who stood under the shower, rubbing foaming gel over her limbs. She towelled herself dry, chatting brightly to her dog. At her dressing table she made up her face with care, darkening her eyes and outlining her mouth with crimson lipstick. How wide and luscious her lips looked now! When she pulled on the wig Orson started whimpering.

  ‘I’m just going out for a while, honey, to collect my cleaning,’ she told him. ‘That putz Fidelia forgot to do it for me.’ She scratched his coat with her long red nails. ‘If my Mom calls, say I’m real sorry I couldn’t make it for her birthday, but next time she buys some pasta sauce I’ll be right there on the jar.’

  She went into her walk-in closet and selected a green jogging-suit, the sort of outfit she’d have been wearing all day when she’d just ligged around her apartment making phone calls, leafing through a pile of scripts Roly had sent over and watching the video of some TV series Lorimar wanted her to guest in.

  She dressed in the jogging suit and slipped on a pair of cream Gucci loafers. They were a little tight – that was weird, maybe her feet had grown. She combed her long blonde hair. Later that evening she was taking a meeting with some publicity guys who were working on the promotion of her new picture Sexbusters, due to open in the spring, and then she was invited to dinner with Guber and Peters, studio heads at Warner, or was it Columbia, to discuss a new project that was in development. Kevin Costner was joining them. He was going to play her young lover who is suddenly afflicted with blindness. Or was it AIDS? She’s too damn dumb to remember.

  She slid into her sable coat, wrapped a scarf around her head and put on a pair of shades – her street disguise. Then she collected her dry cleaning ticket and a large tote bag, containing some clothes belonging to Jules, her sweet little stand-in.

  Orson was jumping up and down now, growling. My, was he acting funny! She closed the door on his muffled barks and left the apartment, walking down the hall to the service elevator. She wasn’t taking the main elevator to the lobby, no way! On the set one day she had told Jules about this freight elevator. It didn’t l
ead to the lobby, see, it led to an exit door on the ground floor, round the side of the building. Fire regulations stipulated there had to be an emergency exit – one-way only, on account of security. You could get out – there was one of those push-bars on the door – but you couldn’t get back in. This guy had used it, this TV celebrity she was having a relationship with, what a fuckup that was. Anyhow, he had used this exit to get out of the building in the middle of the night – he was married, see, and famous, and if the doormen saw him it would have been kind of deleterious to his image as a regular family guy. Asshole.

  In contrast to the mahogany-panelled residents’ elevator, this one was just a scruffy metal box. Freezing cold, too. Nobody saw her get in. Lila’s ears popped as it descended to the ground floor. She stepped out, crossed a hall past the garbage chute, and pushed open the door to the street.

  The wind whipped her face. Jesus, was it freezing! Huddling in her fur, she walked up the street, past the brownstone walk-ups. It was 6.35. Lights came on in the windows.

  What does she think about? God knows. But her heart is thumping. Inside her jogging suit she’s perspiring. The noise on Columbus batters her. DON’T WALK, says the sign, but she is blundering across. Stay calm, she tells herself.

  She knows how to walk, she has practised it often enough. Lila walks with a little Monroe wiggle. She walks two blocks up the street, without mishap. One or two people look at her, but she can’t tell why. When you’re famous, you no longer know why people stare. In one sense, fame is sexy. In another, it’s the most de-sexed situation there is. See, you don’t know if people are staring at you because you’re attractive or because they recognise you. She realises this, for the first time. Are they looking at ‘me’ or me?