She’s calmed down by now, thinking of this. Lila doesn’t think of it, but Jules does. She arrives at the cleaners, and stops. There’s a customer in there, a woman. Lila waits outside. Her sable coat is fabulously warm; nothing beats a real fur. She’s never heard of the anti-fur lobby, or if she has she doesn’t give a fuck. In fact she’s got two other furs back at the apartment, a ranch mink and a red fox. Why the hell not? Leave it to Jules to care about those sort of things. Jules couldn’t afford a real fur anyway.
The woman comes out. She doesn’t register Lila, standing there. Lila goes into the shop. Hot air blasts her face. The man behind the counter is small and bald. He gazes at her for a moment, and then his face breaks into a smile.
‘Well hi, Miss Dune,’ he says. ‘How’re you doing?’
‘Fine,’ she replies with Lila’s voice. She’s a ventriloquist.
‘Haven’t seen you for a while,’ he says. ‘Been away?’
She shakes her head. ‘Just filming, here in New York City.’
‘If only Florrie was here!’ he says. ‘She’ll kill me when I tell her. They showed Honolulu Honeymoon last week on TV, did you see it?’
Lila shakes her head. Her shades have slid down her nose; she pushes them up.
He says, ‘She wanted to know, was it you who shot those rapids?’
Lila swallows. Her hands are sticky. ‘No,’ she says. ‘It was a stunt man. Woman.’
‘Florrie, she cried at the end, when he was knifed.’
Who was knifed? Lila hasn’t a clue. It’s some old movie of hers. She replies, recklessly, ‘So did I.’
‘So did you?’ He bursts into laughter. ‘My, that’s rich!’
Lila fumbles for her dry cleaning ticket. It’s somewhere in her pocket. The man is still chuckling.
‘Wait till I tell Florrie that!’
Lila’s head spins. What’s she said wrong?
‘You cried when he was knifed?’ says the man. ‘After what happened in the chopper?’ He shudders with renewed laughter. ‘After what he did to you in the hotel?’
Lila finds the dry cleaning ticket and hands it over. She’d better keep her mouth shut. He takes the ticket and turns to rifle through the hangers. A moment passes.
‘I told your maid we might not be able to get it out,’ he says, pushing the clothes to one side. He inspects the ticket again, and goes on searching. ‘What was it, may I ask?’
‘Huh?’ she replies. What the hell is he talking about?
‘She didn’t know,’ he says.
‘Who?’
‘Your maid. Looked like vinaigrette.’ He finds the corresponding ticket, pinned to an outfit, and lifts the hanger. ‘Well, we did our best. Tried two stain removers.’
He lifts the cellophane. It is a creamy silk blouse. She pauses. She doesn’t know where the stain should be.
‘Can’t see it,’ she murmurs.
He smiles. ‘That’s OK then.’
It is dark in Central Park, and freezing cold. A siren wails in the distance, in the humming canyons of the streets. Here it is quiet. The ground is frozen hard as steel. Underfoot, the leaves crackle as she steps across the grass. Lamps cast pools of light onto the criss-crossing paths; she avoids them and heads for a clump of bushes. A man moves behind the trees but there seems to be no one else about. Maybe tonight it’s too cold for muggers. Even for murderers.
Hidden in the bushes, she gets to work. She pulls off the scarf and the wig and stuffs them into the tote bag. She takes off the fur coat and bundles it in too, squashing it down. Swiftly, she dismantles Lila. She starts giggling. My God, she tells herself, this dressing room is even more freezing than the previous record-holder, Wigan Rep.
For some reason, she feels hysteria bubbling up. She fluffs out her hair and buttons herself up in Jules’s grey overcoat. With an icy knuckle she rubs off her lipstick. And in a few minutes she walks into the lobby of the apartment building, smiling a greeting to the doorman as she heads for the elevator.
I felt utterly exhausted that night, and triumphant too. I had pulled out the plugs that connected me to the rest of the world, and now I was running on my own batteries. I felt emptied, as if I had played the leading role in a play whose lines I had finally mastered. After all, there had been enough rehearsal time.
I was too revved-up to sleep. I turned restlessly in Lila’s bed, listening to the wailing sirens far below. Orson was fidgety too; I heard his nails scratching on the hardwood kitchen floor as he prowled around.
I had pulled it off! I had done it! For an hour I had used my acting skills to the full; those dormant muscles ached. I hadn’t just impersonated Lila. I had taken over her part, I had become her, sliding under her skin like fingers into a glove. And the dry cleaning man had bought it; he had believed in her too.
The mattress creaked as I turned over, burying my face in the pillow. I smiled. I even smelt like Lila; I had sprayed her scent onto my wrists and my throat. Where did she end and I begin?
Eight
SOMETIMES I SEE magazines here. Not often, and not those that I would have chosen. They are usually TV Guides, or unreadably downmarket women’s weeklies from which somebody has always cut out the recipes. Yesterday, however, I chanced upon a copy of Newsweek. It described some Trevor Nunn production of Othello, where Ian McKellen played Iago. The English names gave me a jolt, then a patriotic glow. I’d met McKellen once, years ago. In this production, apparently, he had realised that lago’s strength lay in his indispensability. Newsweek said he gave an electrifying performance. Othello was as simple a soul as Lila. He had no idea how deeply he was in lago’s power, simply because Iago had made himself indispensable – quiet, efficient, and watchfully anticipating Othello’s every need. When the play opens, lago is as humble as a stand-in. But though he starts out as Othello’s servant, he ends up as his master. That’s because, like me, he has brains.
I’m thinking about my role in Lila’s life, and wondering how indispensable I had become by the time I was staying in her apartment. I was certainly pretty useful. I had helped her in her work, drawing out and developing her acting skills. I had become her confidante and adviser. I had given her a crash-course in world drama. I had stepped into the breach and taken over her daughterly duties in New Jersey. I had looked after her dog and her apartment. I had dealt with her phone calls – not many, admittedly, because her answering service had been told she was out of town. I had read the various scripts that had arrived, and had my comments ready should she ask my advice. I had moved various objects around her apartment, with more flair than either she or her decorator possessed. I had replenished her meagre supplies with virgin-pressed olive oil and Coopers marmalade. The day before her return I laundered the sheets and, practically bankrupting myself, filled the rooms with fresh flowers. I had even collected her dry cleaning. I hadn’t become an lago yet – that would come later – but I was undeniably useful. Verging, indeed, on indispensable.
So when she phoned, the evening before her return, the news was not as utterly unexpected as it might have been.
‘Hi hon!’ she called. ‘How’re you doing? How’s that whacko dog of mine? Orson?’ Her voice rose, ‘Orson, you hear me? You been a good boy?’ She seemed to be in terrific spirits; almost manic. She went on to say that the project she was involved in, some re-make of Jane Eyre, was going into production early in the New Year. ‘How about coming out to LA to work on it with me?’ She said they would fix it with my green card, with the unions, all that shit. ‘I told them, Jane Eyre, it was a British picture, right? Wasn’t it dynamite? I told them it would help, like, with you being British, it would help me. They’d fixed me up with another stand-in, she’s OK, I’ve worked with her before, but we don’t have, like, a relationship. So I told them I’d check on your availability. How about it?’
I said I would think about it, calm as calm. I probably sounded non-committal. I sank back into the armchair. My first reaction was a warm rush. She wanted me! Lila Dune, the big star!
I tried to phone him again, but of course there was no answer. He had recorded a new message on his machine, which added: ‘Please give the date of your call.’ He must have gone away. But where?
I was an idiot, of course. Looking back, I can’t begin to comprehend what an idiot I had been. I guessed something might be up. But I didn’t want to know what it was and I thought it would all be over when I returned. I was in America, remember, and utterly sealed off. America is a foreign country; the longer you stay there the more you realise this. Nobody mentions Britain; it’s our illusion that they do, but it’s a lie. America is blind to anywhere else. Besides, I had been working on a film. Nobody outside the business can understand how totally enveloping it is, how cut-off you are, both engrossed and exhausted, when you are making a movie. Even if you are just a stand-in. You are all in it together and nothing else matters. You have a whole new family and set of relationships. You eat the same food and breathe the same air. No wonder marriages collapse. News from the outside world scarcely trickles through. War can be declared, and all it means is that some items disappear from the catering wagon. You are inside a huge ego, perma-sealed.
I did guess something was up. But I didn’t guess the truth.
The morning of Lila’s return I packed up and went back to my hotel. That evening, I was going through my things and found, in my handbag, the keys to her apartment.
It was a fine, frosty night and I decided to walk uptown to her apartment building and give them back. I would either give them to the doorman or go up and see her. It would be a good excuse to say hello and re-establish contact. I didn’t have anything else to do that evening. Any evening, for that matter.
I had a bite to eat, first, in my old coffee shop around the corner. My solitary candlelit dinners in Lila’s apartment, with the spangled city at my feet, were already taking on the unreal glamour of a dream. Munching my toast I thought: did I really live there? For a week I had literally stayed amongst the stars. New York is a vertically snobbish city and just for a few days I had climbed that ladder.
I had conflicting feelings about all this, of course. Why did I get a charge from something I despised? Why was I in the thrall of some peroxide airhead? My little toe had more intelligence than Lila. It was ridiculous. I was being sucked into something that was utterly alien to me.
I remember that half-hour when I sat in the coffee shop amongst the solitary diners, the pitiless strip-lighting showing us all up for who we were. No lighting cameraman had Vaselined his lens for us. A woman at the next table was muttering, ‘Baby didn’t come for them shoes. I had them for her in a box.’ I remember my walk through the streets, the store windows winking with Christmas lights. It was December the tenth.
Maybe I wouldn’t go to Los Angeles, I thought. I would simply go back to London, burdened with Christmas presents, and put all this behind me. In this chaotic city there was madness up there amongst the rich and madness down below amongst the poor. I had glimpsed both, and they scared the hell out of me.
I walked up the park side of the street. As I neared the apartment building, a limo drew up outside. It was a white stretch job, one of the extra-long ones. I paused on the other side of the road, gazing at it idly. It was so long that it had two lozenge lights between each window.
The wind blew against my face as I watched the doormen, both of them, hurrying out. The back door of the limo was opened, and Lila stepped out. Her hair was piled up on top of her head and she wore a fluffy coat I hadn’t seen before.
The traffic was heavy, and I couldn’t cross the road to greet her. I waited for the lights to change. Just then I saw that somebody else was getting out of the limo. It was probably Irma, I thought, or Roly.
Lila was laughing. It was a man who got out and took her arm. He wore a leather jacket, and just then he turned around. Under the lit canopy I could see his face quite clearly.
It was Trev.
LOS ANGELES
One
I HAD LOST weight. I noticed it, with fleeting surprise, when I was lying beside the pool. My skin was greyish-white, it looked grubby in the sunshine, and my hip-bones jutted up. Over the past month I had stopped taking care of my body; it was simply something that had to be fed and washed. It was like an invalid’s body; it ached all over. Maybe I was still in shock.
The hairs had grown on my legs, too. I supposed I ought to do something about that, now I was in the land of bronzed pulchritude. I was starting work the next day. But where could I find a razor? Where could you find anything in Los Angeles, without driving twenty miles along the freeway?
I lay there, my fingertips smudgy from leafing through the Los Angeles Times Sunday edition. It had arrived, a massive weight; now it lay spread around on the concrete, slabs of it, like some rifled tomb. I hadn’t been able to read a book for weeks; I hadn’t the concentration.
I had been looking at the Real Estate section. It was full of homes in Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades and Brentwood. They had maids’ rooms and libraries and spas and pools; they had gated security. If you were rich here, you lived in a fortress too; just like New York. They were built in the Dutch style, or Georgian style, or Classic Spanish. I scanned the columns. Bel Air . . . Pasadena. My heart jumped whenever I saw the words Beverly Hills. Lila lived in Beverly Hills. I knew the address. I had even bought a map – $1.50 from a slot machine in the lobby. But I had only arrived the day before and I hadn’t got a car.
You can’t get anywhere in LA without a car. There was another film crew staying at the hotel; I had seen their equipment stacked in the corridor. In the elevator I had spoken to a tubby little guy who said he was a juicer; in LA crewspeak that’s a sparks. I said I was new here and he said the same two things everybody says: that LA’s got no centre, it’s just 100 square miles of suburbs. And that it takes an hour to drive anywhere.
‘Just arrived in Tinseltown?’ he asked. He said he was here to make a made-for-video picture. ‘It’s a whore movie.’
‘A whore movie?’
‘A horror movie.’ I hadn’t understood his pronunciation.
He said it was about a man who had screwdrivers for hands. ‘He goes round fixing up divorcées’ homes and then he mutilates them.’
I lay beside the pool. The hotel was built around it, three sides of white walkways and railings like an ocean liner. The fourth side was a fence, lined with bougainvillaea bushes and oleanders, and something else I didn’t recognise, in terracotta pots. Beyond that was the parking lot. Every few minutes the air would fill with exhaust fumes as somebody revved up their car; then they would drive off, pausing to put their token into the machine. People went on leading their lives, this was the curious thing. All over the world they drove around in their cars, they behaved as if nothing had happened.
Was it Colonial, her house? Did it have a butler’s pantry, hardwood floors and a security system? Was it Mediterranean-style, with 180-degree views of mountain and ocean? I flung aside the Real Estate and leafed through the Entertainment Section. MGM/United Artists was shooting a musical tale: ‘A prematurely deceased German shepherd dog checks out of heaven and, hoping to find the pit bull who had him murdered, returns to the jazzy canine underworld of 40s New Orleans.’
Pit bull meant Lila. Hadn’t she been nearly torn to pieces by one, long ago? Beverly Hills meant Lila. Even West Hollywood meant Lila, because my map showed that it was the adjoining residential area. An advertisement for Acorn Inns meant Lila, because she had a pair of gold, acorn earrings. Everything I read or touched r
eminded me of her. Have you ever been jealous? So jealous that you feel ill with it, nauseous all the time? An obsession that grips you clammily, worse than sexual desire? It feels like something solid and curdled, lodged in your stomach. It blocks your lungs; sometimes you can hardly breathe. When. I pictured her I felt winded, as if I had been punched in the belly. I felt hot and feverish, all the time. Oh, I can hardly start to describe it. However obscure the connection, I made it. The word Paramount gave me a sick jolt, because she had made pictures for them; Nick Nolts, because she had worked with him. Richard Gere because she had nearly worked with him once – maybe she had never even met him, it didn’t make any difference. Now I was in the heart of the film industry, every sentence in the newspaper was a minefield.
It didn’t even have to be about movies. An ad for Salems, the mention of Oscar de la Renta in a gossip column. Lancôme because she used their make-up. Revlon because she didn’t. Even the sun was tainted, up there in the eternally summery January sky, because an hour’s drive away she was warmed by its rays too. She hadn’t just taken Trev away from me, she had stolen my world.
No, not stolen, exactly. Tainted. Everything had her festering inside it like a cancer. She had seeped into my landscape like some noxious chemical leaking into the water-system; wherever I looked, the trees were starting to turn brown.
I hadn’t seen her, or Trev, since the month before when I had spotted them outside her apartment building. The day my life had collapsed.
Maybe you understand what I went through. Maybe it has happened to you. First the shock. Then the slow, sick realisation . . .
I can’t describe it. Not just now. I’ll tell you another time, when I’m feeling better.
I’ll tell you about the phone call I received, the next day. I had lain awake all night, dry-eyed, as cold as lead. I had slept a little in the morning, and at midday the phone woke me up. It was Lila. She sounded breathlessly excited; I had never heard her so happy. She babbled on for a bit about her new project and how they’d had problems with the script. How they needed a British angle, seeing as it was Jane Eyre.
The Stand-In Page 18