The Stand-In

by Deborah Moggach

  ‘Remember that guy in London? You took me to see his play? So, well, I call him and he comes over to do the re-writes! Where did you find this guy? He’s fabulous! Boy, does he understand women. You remember that terrific scene where she, like, needs him to dominate her? Well, he’s bringing that into this script, that quality.’ She paused for breath. ‘Hon, I’m so grateful. If you hadn’t taken me to see that play . . .’

  She had babbled on. My heart was hammering. For a few minutes I thought, wildly, that this was purely a professional relationship. Then I thought: what the hell was Trev doing, going into her apartment?

  Besides, there was something in the tone of her voice. I knew, before she told me. ‘It’s all happened so fast,’ she said, her voice confiding. ‘It’s, like, it’s never been like this before. And know something? He’s Scorpio – that’s my complimentary alignment! Isn’t that neat? You’ve got to come over, we’re gonna take you out to dinner.’

  I had managed to mutter something polite, and put down the phone. Then I had packed my things, gone to the airport and taken the first flight back to England.

  He hadn’t told her. She didn’t know. She thought he was just a friend of mine.

  The shit. The bastard. The shit.

  My flat in Belsize Park had been left surprisingly tidy – no doubt he had cleaned it up, out of guilt. He had even asked the woman downstairs to water my plants. He had left no note, nothing. The bastard.

  I had spent Christmas in Arundel with my mother and my brother, whose hair had receded another two inches. I had behaved perfectly normally – in fact, my mother commented on how well I looked. ‘Svelte and slim,’ she said. I told them amusing anecdotes about the New York film community, dropping famous names because she enjoyed that. I made most of it up, of course. She thought I was having a marvellous time. I used my acting skills to the full; I couldn’t let them know the truth and start to feel sorry for me, that would have been insupportable. My mother would have smothered me in sympathy; she was anxious to please, to be of use. She was so suffocatingly kind. She was the sort of woman who asks the Jehovah’s Witnesses in for tea.

  On Boxing Day Trev had phoned me. I was back in my flat, lying on the bed with the curtains drawn.

  ‘Jules?’ he said. ‘Listen, hon, I want to explain what’s happened –’

  I slammed the phone down. He didn’t phone again.

  As there was nothing for me in England – no job, no man, nothing – I had flown out to Los Angeles.

  Why the hell shouldn’t I come? Was he going to steal away my expenses-paid trip to California and my $800-a-week job too, on top of everything else? Like hell he was.

  By the time I arrived, on January 5th, I was still in the early stages of grief, loss and fury. I hadn’t worked anything out, yet. I had no plan. I just felt utterly empty, and seething. Of course I should have forgotten all about it, washed my hands of the whole sordid affair and stayed in England. I know that now.

  But I had to come. I needed to be near them. With horrified fascination I had been drawn to the West Coast, irresistibly.

  Round and round my head went the same old questions, blunted with endless reuse. How could he have betrayed me? How long had it been going on? Why didn’t he tell her about our relationship? How could anybody, even Trev, be such a bastard? Or had he told her, and she didn’t care?

  I lay there in the sunshine, frying in my own fury. I lit a cigarette; I was smoking heavily, too, and I cursed them for damaging my lungs. Next to me, a man sat talking into a portable phone. His back was felted with black hairs. He even had tufts of hair on his shoulders.

  ‘If we’re talking Michelle Pfeiffer,’ he said, ‘we’re talking Alice in fucking Wonderland.’

  How could she do this to me, a woman who had everything? She had beauty, money, fame, success. She had the whole bloody world at her feet. She had a million-dollar apartment in New York and a house in Beverly Hills. I hadn’t minded about thinks like that until recently – in fact, I had despised them. But now I minded, desperately. She had everything the world desired, and on top of that, the bitch had to have Trev too.

  I pictured them in bed. It played endlessly in my mind, like a pornographic TV channel. Sometimes I couldn’t switch it off; I was paralysed. I couldn’t move. I watched their limbs moving together; I watched Lila’s lush, bruised lips parting as Trev slid his tongue into her mouth.

  ‘When I get to the office,’ said the man nearby, ‘this mother’s using my phone. He’s sitting in my desk, waiting for his calls to be returned. I say to my secretary, who the fuck does he think he is? Ray fucking Stark?’

  They were fucking like rabbits. Trev drew back from her, sitting up straight, grinning down at her just as he had grinned down at me. I knew all his tricks. He rocked teasingly from side to side, his cock locked into the wrong woman. He ran his fingertips over her spread, fuller breasts. Was he touching her in the same places, opening her up like a flower?

  Disgusted, I swung my legs over the sunlounger and got up. There were only a few people around the pool. They were unmistakably film people – you can always recognise film people – but I didn’t know if any of them were attached to my project. A group was sitting around a table, which was spread with papers; a couple of men in shorts were making phone calls. Despite their minimal attire they all looked hard at work. In fact, as I was to discover, movie people in LA work all the time. Even when they are sitting around a pool they’re talking business. If they’re not doing deals together they are either on the phone or driving their cars – frequently both at the same time. Phones are clamped to their ears like a fungus.

  Pasty and English, I felt utterly alien. I had no idea I could feel so lonely amongst people who, after all, spoke my language. When I walked past the tables nobody looked at me. I was just a stand-in, a nothing. In the movie I was invisible. I glanced at the men. They had a sleek, polished look; their faces were handsome but somehow uninhabited, as if they were listening to invisible Walkmen. I noticed this more, as time passed. People here looked like suntanned Mormons. Or maybe it was just my own emptiness in their faces. I don’t know.

  I stood still, breathing in a scent. It reminded me of Lila’s perfume. I was gazing at a bush, weighed down with blooms. A hibiscus, or something. Its blooms were dewy, deep-red trumpets; their throats were velvety and yet moist, too.

  ‘Call Elliott,’ said somebody, ‘and check on her availability.’

  How available was her cunt, moist and welcoming! It opened up for him, when she parted her legs. How he loved to yank my legs up, wrapping them around his neck!

  Somebody was staring at me; I must have been standing there for a long time. It was a Mexican gardener, in dark-green overalls. He had paused, in the middle of sweeping up fallen petals.

  I went up to my room, got dressed, and went out into the street. The hotel was just off Santa Monica Boulevard, in a nowhere place of palm trees, telegraph poles and scattered buildings. Like most of LA, nothing distinguished it from anywhere else. It was 3.30 in the afternoon, and very humid. Beyond the buildings I could see the smog lying, a brown smudgy layer that looked solid enough to touch.

  Cars whizzed past me along the six-lane highway. Beyond was the fainter hum of the freeway, and the wailing of a police siren. Funnily enough, despite the huge sky, I felt more trapped here than I had ever felt in New York. There was no sign of human life. Walking up the road, jet-lagged and benumbed, I started to feel like the only living person on earth. New York had assaulted and excited me – a loud jostle of humanity. Now, in this nowhere place, I had been deserted not only by Trev but by the whole human race.

  I walked past a Travelodge motel, swamped in its acres of cars. Looking for a pharmacy, I walked another block and passed a courtyard apartment block, built around a tropical grotto of foliage and a dried-up fountain. I passed a closed Chinese restaurant. I passed another apartment building and heard the jabber of TVs, but saw no sign of life. My legs were aching. I passed a Car Wash and a
huge plastic sign saying Hickory Hut. I paused at intersections, waiting for the bleeping WALK signal. Nobody else waited beside me. Lila had emptied my world; she had sucked it into her and left me dry and gasping.

  I passed a liquor store, barred and fortified. Finally, after six more blocks I arrived at a small shopping mall. It was an L-shaped courtyard of shabby buildings dwarfed by its plastic signs: RAIFA REAL ESTATE. COCKTAILS. KEYS, SCISSORS SHARPENED. I negotiated my way through the parked cars. KODAK COLOR STUDIO. ACUPUNCTURE. NAIL SALON.

  Hot and exhausted, I finally gave up. The sun was sinking. In London I would have just been waking up – or was it the middle of the night? The air was clogged with exhaust fumes. Cars were streaming past; it must be the rush hour. When the signals changed to red the traffic stopped and in a moment the street was jammed with BMWs, Jeeps and battered Nissans. The sun flamed against their windows; their radios thumped pop music and Spanish babble. A black girl sat in an open Corvette, tapping the dashboard while Carly Simon belted out You’re so vain. How many millions of people lived here? What if Lila passed – or he did – and saw me all alone? PALM READINGS. CABARET, DANCING, GO-GO GIRLS. Above, the sky was stained red as the sun went down.

  If only I had told her about Trev, that day in the changing room at Saks. If I had told her, none of this would have happened. She would never have stolen him from me purposefully – surely?

  I walked wearily back the way I had come, pausing at the newspaper machines. One sold the Wall Street Journal, the next sold Singles: America’s Most Respected Publication for Singles. They stood there in a row, ready to excrete newsprint in exchange for quarters. If I put in my money I could discover ‘How to Hire a Porn Star for Your Party’.

  Night fell swiftly. I walked the streets, dazzled by headlights. A couple of cars slowed down, but then they revved up and drove on again. Maybe I looked strange. Maybe I was talking to myself. I can’t remember now. Who knows, if I don’t? I saw one other human being, an enormously fat woman dressed in rags. She was rummaging in the garbage bins outside McDonalds, and muttering to herself.

  ‘Gross, gross, gross . . .’ she was saying, as she stuffed something into her mouth. She was an old film star, talking percentages. She was Lila, grown vast.

  It took me an hour to reach my hotel. In reception I found that my call sheet had been delivered, for the next day. At 7a.m. a car would take me to the location.

  I sat down in the coffee shop. There was nobody else there; all the other guests had obviously found somewhere better to eat. I lifted the plastic menu; it was shaped like an avocado and printed with alien names: Parrilladas, Enchilladas, Tex-Mex Salsaburgers with melted Swiss Cheese, Empanadas Chaperoned with French Fries. A thousand years ago I had been sitting in Belsize Park, eating at my own kitchen table. My throat felt fuzzy; was it breakfast time or what? I remembered my first morning in New York: the swollen glands, the fevered dislocation. But the hope, too.

  To stop looking lonely I pulled out another section of the LA Times. A column printed TV soap updates. Pushing some iceberg lettuce around my plate I learnt that, in General Hospital, Victor choked on a heart-shaped jewel and died. Across the room the waiter was speaking Spanish into a phone. Outside the traffic hummed past. I sat there with my new companions Thorne and Stacey . . . Ridge and Marge . . . Jerry, who drowned after he jumped off the Capwell yacht.

  Later I went up to my room. It was on the fourth floor, and overlooked the parking lot. Beyond that rose up a multi-storey car park: five floors of concrete spaces, lit by fluorescent lights. The cars looked tethered to their meters; their radiator grilles grinned like teeth. As time passed the cars were driven away, one by one, until the place was empty. I leant out of the open window. I heard the eternal hum of the traffic, flowing like blood through the veins of this alarming, alienating, endless suburb. Down below, some insect scraped in the bushes.

  What were they up to now? Were they wining and dining at Morton’s, prior to a night of tempestuous lovemaking? I could hardly even form the words, they hurt so much. Lila was filming tomorrow; she had told me she always dosed herself into oblivion with sleeping pills and had an early night. Would she be asking Trev to hear her lines and tuck her up? The thought of them being companionable was suddenly, unbearably, painful. Worse than the sex.

  I sat down heavily on the bed; its sateen cover sighed. I felt sick with loss. I missed her, you see. I realised it, that night. She had not only stolen Trev; he had stolen her. He had stolen my friend, my surrogate sister, my glamorous alter ego. However much I resented Lila, I was bound to her. It was like some grotesque soap, more grotesque than anything dreamed up by the makers of Guiding Lights or One Life To Live. Talented struggling actress Jules has discovered that her toyboy Trevor has been two-timing her with beautiful film star Lila Dune. Murderously, Jules plots her revenge . . .’

  Except she couldn’t even buy a bloody razor to slit his throat. Or her own. Or both. Or shave her legs. She couldn’t do a bloody thing.

  Two

  THERE HAD BEEN several attempts to re-make Jane Eyre, the most popular love story of all time. After all, why should only Joan Fontaine collect on the residuals? This particular version had gone through four or five metamorphoses.

  It had begun some years earlier, in the mid-eighties, when a producer called Monty Leach had had the bright idea of updating it into a dance movie. Flashdance had grossed $95 million in 1983, and everyone was trying to cash in. Leach had developed a script with a couple of writers who had come to him with a pitch for another story but who had ended up writing a scenario where Mr Rochester was an old movie star, a virtual recluse, who lived in a Long Island mansion (they were going to use the Great Gatsby locations). His wife was a former starlet who had been disfigured in a motor accident and had locked herself away. Jane Eyre was a young dance teacher who had been brought in to train the young Adèle and the movie would be punctuated with dance numbers, including one where Jane, wearing a leotard, sang to Mr Rochester’s answering machine: ‘Call me Jane, call me plain, call me anything but call me again.’

  This project got the green light – in fact, it started shooting. But on the first day, one of Mr Rochester’s Rottweilers went berserk and attacked Jane Eyre, practically chewing off her leg. Filming was stopped and the studio plunged into a $50 million lawsuit.

  Another pair of producers picked up on the idea. They put into development a story where Jane Eyre is an au pair who has an affair with her boss, a New York bond broker. This was during the spate of Wall Street movies; Mr Rochester was holed up in a Park Avenue apartment with a mad ex-wife in the penthouse, and the whole block finally went up in flames. Tom Selleck was slated as the star; Three Men and a Baby, one of 1987’s sleeper hits, had suddenly made him the nation’s favourite caring father and this version of Jane Eyre was to end with the birth of his and Jane’s baby.

  At first draft stage, however, one of the writers had a mental breakdown, the producers were ousted in a studio coup and the project foundered. As independents, the producers moved to a new studio with another package. In this one, Jane Eyre was black. The movie was developed as a hard-hitting costume drama set in a nineteenth-century Virginia plantation. Jane, the daughter of a cotton-picker, worked as a maid in Mr Rochester’s mansion. The producers had recently released a controversial rape picture, and in Jane Eyre Mr Rochester enjoyed droit de seigneur sexual relations with his servant. However, after being blinded by the Ku Klux Klan (a case of mistaken identity) he was rendered helplessly dependent; in a triumphant reversal, Jane nursed him and taught him how to become a warm and caring person. ‘When you got no eyes’, she said, ‘all folks is the same colour.’ The marketing line went, ‘He lost his sight but found his heart,’ and Whoopi Goldberg and Jack Nicholson were suggested for the starring roles. But that project, too, came to grief when the producers were arrested on a cocaine charge and all the studios dropped them.

  I learnt this from reading Variety and Screen International. Over the past six mo
nths I had learnt a great deal about films. I had read every interview with Lila, of course. I had scanned the trades as eagerly as I had once scanned the Guardian. I had changed. Even my vocabulary had started to change. My past life seemed grubby, penurious and amateurish. What was the point of freezing rehearsal rooms, the Equity minimum and plays full of integrity that nobody came to see? What was the point of it all? For Christ’s sake, where had integrity got me?

  You slave your guts out at the Soho Poly, playing an incest victim in some obscure Czech drama to an audience of three, two of whom have just come in out of the rain. You agonise over interpretation, you slave over rehearsals, you get behind with your mortgage repayments and what happens? The chute opens and you’re tipped into the garbage.

  If this were a movie I’d have my comeuppance. If this were Jane Eyre I would win him round in the end. I would be Jane – quiet, mousy and subservient, but burning with hidden passion. As invisible as a stand-in, I would watch the glittering Lilas coming and going, bathed in the spotlight. I would bide my time, and I would get him in the end.

  But life’s not like that. That’s why we go to the movies.

  I was driven to the shoot, early the next morning. The driver wore Ray-Ban shades but he still looked about sixteen. He said he was writing a film script. He said the guy who serviced the limo fleet was writing a film script. He said everyone in LA was writing a film script.

  Including Trev. Why the hell would anyone sign him up? I’d had diarrhoea that morning; I was damp with sweat. Would he be on the set? Would I see him? Would he try to avoid me – or, worse than that, much worse, would he just not bother?