by Bruce Wagner
In those twelve years of practice, Kit Lightfoot, the celebrity, was often the People’s Choice. He’d finally been snagged by James Lipton (Hoffman and Nicholson were among the remaining holdouts) and photographed in Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue with the simple caption “The Man.” He even won Best Supporting for a remarkable, artfully thrown away performance in a fluky, borderline indie lark filmed just before the death of his Buddhist teacher, Gil Weiskopf Roshi. After the fact, it seemed so perfect. It was Gil who had said: Throw it all away.
• • •
IT WAS THANKSGIVING time, and a whore was at his Benedict Canyon home. That used to be his thing, but he hadn’t been with a whore since the early nineties. And he’d never cheated on Viv.
They were coked up in the living room, and he laughed as she held the dog’s head between her legs. It kept trying to break free, and that made the whore laugh too. “Jus’ like his master,” she said. “Real picky.” She laughed again and released him, then stood to pee. When the whore came back, she knelt by the Buddha at the fireplace and lit a cigarette. There were flowers and incense and tiny photos of enlightened men. She asked about the altar, and Kit said reflectively that it was a gift from Stevie Nicks. Then he gave her a little flash-card intro—Zen 101. Stillness. Sitting. The Power of Now.
“You meditate every day?” she said.
“Every day. For fifteen years.”
A Star Is Born
BECCA WAS PART of Metropolis, a modest theater company that leased space on Delongpre. The roof was undergoing repair, having been damaged in the rains, so the class was temporarily on Hillhurst at the home of one of its founders. Becca thought Cyrus was a wonderful teacher and a good director too. He was for sure an amazing promoter. Aside from agent and exec heavies, he always managed to get people like Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins to show up at openings.
For two weeks, she’d been working with Annie on a scene from a Strindberg play. She had never even heard of Strindberg until she met Cyrus but had to admit she loved Tennessee Williams more. She loved Tennessee’s letters and poems and short stories—everything he wrote was so sad and beautiful yet filled with such tenderness. His women were at once tough and unbearably fragile, just as Becca imagined herself. She’d seen all the films made from his plays and liked This Property Is Condemned best. In real life, Natalie Wood was sad and beautiful too and just as tragic as anything. August Strindberg was brilliant and ruthlessly true to human nature, but sometimes he scared her, leaving her cold. She preferred Ibsen and Chekhov.
After rehearsal, they went to a coffee shop on Vermont.
“Did I suck?”
“No!” said Annie. “You were great. Why? Did you think you sucked?”
“I always think I suck.”
“You so don’t. You’re always amazing. Cyrus loves what you do.”
“You think?”
“Totally. He so totally does.”
“You mean he loves the one line per play he sees fit for me to declaim.”
“You’ll get there,” said Annie. “Anyway, do you see me majorly treading the boards? Do you, Miss Declaimerhead?”
Becca laughed. “I’m just so freaked out—about everything. Ohmygod, did I tell you Sadge might be going to Tasmania for this reality show?”
“No! What is it?”
“I don’t even know.”
“Where’s Tasmania? Is that, like, near Transylvania?”
“Maybe Czechoslovakia?”
“I so want to go to Prague. You should go, Becca! You should go with him and use his hotel as a base. You could do absinthe. Like Marilyn Manson! It would be so rad.”
“I don’t think so, Annie.”
“But won’t it be good, though? I mean, weren’t you saying you needed space?”
“Yeah. But it’ll be weird suddenly being alone.”
“Can’t you not have a boyfriend for one minute?”
“It’s pilot season, and I haven’t gone up for anything.”
“That’s why you’re freaked out,” Annie said knowingly.
“I guess.”
“But you saw that casting woman.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What did she say?”
“That I could be a ‘comedienne.’ ”
Annie scrunched her nose the way Becca loved. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea.”
“You should do open-mike night at the Improv,” said Annie. “You could be the next Margaret Cho.”
“I could waitress at the Cheesecake Factory and after work do open-mike at the Laugh Factory.”
Annie laughed then said, “I think that rocks.”
• • •
ONE OF THE Metropolis ensemble players who guested on Six Feet Under got sick with the flu and gave Annie his tickets to the show’s season premiere at the El Capitan. Becca splurged on a dress from Agnès B.
They lingered in the lobby, getting free drinks and popcorn before going in. Stars like Ed Begley Jr. and Brooke Shields were milling around. The air was electric with showbiz bonhomie.
When they entered the theater, the girls were led to a special roped-off area to sit among the luminaries. They were just an arm’s length from Jeff Goldblum, Kathy Bates, and Pee-Wee Herman. The head of the network got up and said they had all made history and that the cast was the greatest ever assembled. He said the creator of the show was a dark, special kind of genius who had written a drama that was ostensibly about death but actually turned out to be profoundly about life. Then the creator, the ubiquitous Alan, a handsomely nerdy, sweet-faced man, took the stage to a tumult of applause. He comically prostrated himself, saying “Thank God for HBO!” and this time there was a thunder of laughter along with the applause. Becca had never been to the premiere of a television show and was confused when he began to speechify like it was the Academy Awards. He acknowledged this person and that, occasionally interjecting “Thank God for HBO!” and everyone laughed, hooted, and clapped their hands. The audience seemed so happy, healthy, and rich, and ebullient men were kissing each other on the cheeks and mouth. She felt like part of them, like part of the HBO family—she was among the roped off after all, and the same men smiled back at her whenever Becca caught their eyes, as if it were a given that she was one of their own. They were kind and open and not cliquish even though they had every right to be.
The “after-party” was across the street in the building where they held the Oscars. It was fun walking the short distance because there were lots of photographers and police, and pedestrians straining their eyes to watch the privileged make their crosswalk pilgrimage. They passed the Chinese Theater, and for little micromoments Becca pretended she was famous. It gave her goose bumps.
While Annie was in the rest room, a woman approached and asked if she was an actress. She was casting for a show and gave Becca her card.
When Annie came back, Becca giddily marched her friend to a corner before uncrumpling it from her sweaty hand to examine:
THE LOOK-ALIKE SHOPPE PRODUCTIONS
ELAINE JORDACHE, FOUNDER/CREATOR
HOLLYWOOD, CA
The Great Plains
LISANNE TREATED HERSELF to a deluxe bedroom on the Amtrak. It was such an intense relief not to be getting on a plane that she found herself almost sensuously relaxed as they left Union Station. She would keep in touch with her father’s caretakers by cell phone and with the office as well, fielding any questions the temp might have. Getting to Chicago took two days. Lisanne would change trains there, arriving in Albany within twenty-four hours.
She kept to her room, hunkering down with a paperback filled with transcribed tapes from the recovered black boxes of crashed airplanes. She laughed a little at her own morbidity—it was so Addams Family-bedtime-story of her—yet each time she dipped into the book, her decision to take the rails was sustained anew. Oh God, thought Lisanne. My fears are completely justified.
One of the transcripts was particularly harrowing. An Alaska Airlines je
t on its way from Puerto Vallarta to San Francisco had plunged into the Pacific. It was clear from the dialogue that the captain knew they weren’t going to make it. But what haunted Lisanne was his intercom announcement to the passengers. He said Los Angeles was off to the right and that he didn’t anticipate any problems once he got “a couple of subsystems on the line”—this, after the plane had shakily recovered from a nosedive. Anticipated arrival to LAX, he said, was under half an hour. Lisanne presumed that, by the time of his speech, the doomed passengers, many no doubt injured from the free fall, would have been in a state of shock. For months, she read the account over and over, thinking of Flight 261 as a kind of ghost ship, its wayward souls’ eighty-eight sets of eyes (the book’s favored term, each airborne drama typically ending with “all souls aboard were lost”) forever fixated on Los Angeles, condemned to circle a destination at which they’d never arrive. The moment the captain directed their attention toward L.A.—“off to the right there”—Lisanne imagined the last thoughts and wishes of the passengers focused upon the sprawling city with an incomprehensible, laserlike force, a desperate longing that may ultimately have outlived their physical bodies. (Maybe that was just her father talking. It was the kind of impassioned, fanciful theory he would have advanced over the dinner table, spookily transcendent, darkly romantic; the sort of argument that intimidated her mother and made her feel small.) Our intention, said the pilot to the control tower, is to land at Los Angeles.
On trains, one ate communally, but Lisanne didn’t have the energy for small talk or passing personal histories so she took meals in her cabin. Once in a while, to break the monotony, she had coffee in the observation car. The tracks were dicey, and the cars shimmied and shook. Her body shook too, but Lisanne didn’t feel self-conscious because so many people on the train were fat—L.A. wasn’t the way Americans looked, this was how Americans looked. Cushy and invisible, safe from wind shear, she clicked into cozy “observer” mode. . . . A family threaded its way through the shifting aisle. The studious-looking little girl said to the others, “Now, if you hold on as you go, you’ll be just fine.” Such a darling, so distinctly American: the budding caretaker. She reminded Lisanne of herself. A young man with a shaved head passed by, wearing a T-shirt that read PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY. She saw a hermit-looking fellow staring out the window, with a heavy slab resting in his lap. She thought it was a food tray before getting a closer look—he’d been whittling a finely detailed memorial to the police and firemen of September 11. “How beautiful,” she said. She really did think it an extraordinary example of folk art. The hermit thanked her indifferently, never averting his eyes from the mysterious panorama of the Kansan plains. So American too, this eccentric! Americans all.
One thing Lisanne thought strange: They had traveled hundreds of miles through small and midsize towns, but she rarely saw a human being. The locomotive whooshed, clattered, or lumbered past clapboard houses, some abandoned, others half built, many clearly lived in, yet Lisanne never saw anyone in the yards or driveways—no scavengers or children, idlers or train watchers, no one working in the yard, or even seen through windows, baking, yelling, reading or restive, writing or resigned. She searched her mind, but there was no way to account for it. She thought of Alaska Airlines again—of ghost ships and ghost trains, ghost moms and dads on a ghostly plain. What was that movie she saw on pay-per-view and liked so much? Ghost World. That just about said it all.
The porter, a slow black girl, brought dinner. Lisanne fastidiously arranged the food on the metal tray that dropped down from the cold window of her private compartment. It was pleasurable to eat in solitude with the sun dipping and the scenic world moving by. Had she flown, she would have arrived long since.
Just before sleep, Lisanne thought of the family she’d read about in The New York Times who had perished in France, in a fire aboard a high-speed train. Only those in the deluxe sleeper car had died. The same thing happened in the States some years ago, but she couldn’t get it up to care. Phobias were like that—either you had one or you didn’t. Bed down, tucked beneath the requisition threadbare pink blankets, Lisanne felt safe and secure, certain she’d survive any old little fire or derailment that came her way.
• • •
JUST BEFORE ARRIVING in Chicago, Lisanne showered in the closet-size bathroom. The water was nice and warm, and she smiled at the comic absurdity of hosing herself down in the upright plastic coffin of a train toilet. Looking at the big white folds of skin, she felt like an animal at the county fair. She laughed when imagining herself stuck in the stall, the dull-witted porter having to pry her out.
She had four hours to kill and went to Marshall Field’s for lunch. The grandiose dining room was shopworn and depressing, so she ate lunch in an ill-lit, pretentious chain-boutique hotel with giant, ludicrously stylized chairs and lamps. After the meal, she strolled to the Sears Tower. It was windy, and her mind imbecilically repeated: The Windy City, the Windy City, the Windy City. She tried calling her aunt but couldn’t get through.
It was good to get back on the train. She saw herself traveling like this forever, city to city, station to station, coast to coast, working for Amtrak incognito as a secret inspector in quality control, a plus-size spinster who kept to herself and legendarily took meals in sequestration. She thought seriously about changing her return ticket so that instead of coming through Chicago again she could take the southern route to Jacksonville then over to New Orleans.
By the time she got to Albany, her father was dead.
The Benefit
HE FLIPPED THROUGH the paper. Viv was still getting ready. The driver waited outside to take them to the benefit.
Kit was always looking through articles in the Times for movie ideas. Maybe there would be something to develop that he could direct. Shit, his friend Clooney had done it. Nic Cage and Sean, Denzel and Kevin—name the film and the chances were that some actor had “helmed.” There was an item about a woman accused of feeding her young daughter sleeping pills and shaving her head in an effort to convince the community she had leukemia and was worthy of multiple fund-raisers. She even put the kid in counseling, to prepare her for death. Another told of two Wichita brothers who broke into a town house and forced a bunch of twentysomething friends to have sex with each other before staging executions on a snowy soccer field. At the bottom of the page was the story of a pole vaulter who had freakishly crashed to the ground and died during his run. The last thing he said before jogging to his death was, “This is my day, Dad.”
“What’s this thing we’re going to?” Kit asked as Viv strode in, cocky and perfect-looking. He could smell the hair on her arms.
“A benefit for Char Riordan,” she said. “She’s a casting agent—so great. I love her.”
“Television?”
She nodded.
Viv Wembley was as famous as her boyfriend but in a different way. She was one of the stars of Together, the long-running, high-rated sitcom.
“She cast me in my first play and my first TV movie. I was bridesmaid at her wedding on the Vineyard.”
“So what’s wrong with her?”
“Scleroderma.”
“Gesundheit.”
“Very funny.”
“Sclerowhat?”
“Scleroderma.”
“What is that?”
“I don’t even know! It’s in the tissues or something. She looks kind of like a monster—like she’s rotting away.”
“Always attractive.”
“If I ever get anything like that, promise to shoot me.”
“After I fuck you. Or maybe during.”
She swatted at him as they got into the Town Car. When it pulled up to the hotel, the photographers shouted their names in a frenzy. Alf Lanier, a younger movie star in his own right and a friend of both, nudged his way over, doing jester shtick as the trio posed in a seizure of strobes.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” asked Kit, playfully sotto.
“I
sn’t this the Michael J. Fox thing?” said Alf.
“You are such an asshole,” said Viv, with a scampish smile.
“You stupid cunt,” said Kit to Alf, whispering in his ear to be heard above the vulturazzi. “Didn’t you know this was the Lymphoma Costume Ball?”
“You guys better shut up!” said Viv, enjoying their banter.
Alf looked outraged and shot back to Kit: “This is the cystic fibrosis-autism thing, you insensitive prick.”
“Oh shit,” said the superstar, contritely. “I fucked up. But are you sure this isn’t the bipolar Lou Gehrig tit cancer monkeypox telethon?”
They went on like that as Viv dragged them into the ballroom.
Fisticuffs
THE OFFICE OF the Look-Alike Shoppe Productions was on Willoughby, not far from where Metropolis had its theater. It was Saturday when Becca came in. Before taking the stairs, she noticed the dented Lexus with the customized plate:
Elaine Jordache, a hard fifty with jet-black, dandruffy hair, had predatory eyes that somehow still welcomed. She sucked from a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf cup festooned with lipstick. Glossies of actors covered every available wall space; Xeroxes and boilerplate contracts littered floor and desk in a parody of industry. She rid a chair of papers and bade Becca sit amid the shitstorm. If the phone rang, Elaine said she would have to take it—her assistant was out sick, and she was expecting an important call from Denmark. As it happened, she said, the Look-Alike Shoppe did a ton of business with Denmark.
“What did you think of the show?” she asked.