Some Nerve

by Jane Heller

  “My parents must have been so wracked with guilt that they swept Lily under the rug, kept her a deep, dark secret.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, beginning to understand even more clearly why Malcolm had such a difficult time trusting anybody. After he became an actor, it was his father who stole his money and his mother who sold him out, but they both kept the secret of his sister, and he called that the most painful betrayal of all.

  “I started acting in college,” he said, his mood brightening when he turned to the early days of his career. “I had no business even being there, because I was such a lousy student, but the drama department saved me. I did everything from Shakespeare to Oklahoma! while I was there.”

  I laughed. “Somehow I can’t picture you singing ‘The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.’”

  He laughed too. “I sounded like a cat in heat. No voice whatsoever. But my Shakespearean roles were beyond bad.” He had me giggling when he delivered a line from Twelfth Night in the loopy, over-the-top, overeager style he’d adopted back then.

  I’d never witnessed this self-effacing side of him, and I enjoyed it, enjoyed his mimicry of a young actor who hadn’t yet learned his craft. He even joked about his postcollege auditions, which inevitably ended in rejection, and the numerous jobs he’d taken to pay his rent, the worst being a ditch digger for a cemetery on First Avenue. He told me all this with surprising wit, and it occurred to me that despite his success as a dramatic actor, he might actually have a flair for comedy. Yes, this same guy who’d never given any indication that he had a sense of humor was making me laugh, and I found myself being stupidly charmed by him.

  His big break, he said, was the part of a rookie cop in a thriller that was shot in New York and directed by Sidney Lumet. It led to more movie roles and his eventual relocation to Los Angeles. All old news and fully documented. But what captivated me were his thumbnail sketches (again, often funny) of the legendary directors and actors with whom he’d worked. He did impressions of them, recounted anecdotes about them, served up the ways in which each had had an impact on his life and his art. He swept me away with his descriptions of the exotic locations where some of his movies had been filmed and explained how he prepared for each role, studying specific periods of history if the story warranted it, working with speech coaches to perfect accents and dialects, training with stunt coordinators to be able to take on action sequences without a double. He threw himself into acting, he said, because each role represented the opportunity to lose himself in that character, to put himself in another person’s shoes, to escape his own emptiness. He repeated over and over how much he loved being an actor. What he didn’t love was being a movie star. It was when he used the phrase “evil media parasites” that I shifted in my seat and tried to steer him back to more pleasant topics. But here, again, he surprised me. He said that his brush with death had given him a new perspective on the media; that he understood now that having to put up with interview questions, idiotic and intrusive as they might be, was much less onerous than having a serious medical condition; and that if he ever escaped from Heartland General, he would lighten up with reporters and resign himself to their demands. Needless to say, his declaration was even more motivation for me to run home, write up his story, and e-mail it to Harvey. I wasn’t about to lose the big get now that he was willing to talk to Famous or even Up My Ass Weekly.

  He seemed to tire at one point, and I assumed he was finally out of gas. But then he spotted an airplane out the window and became rapturous on the subject of flying—from recounting the day he earned his pilot’s license to chronicling his first solo trip in the Cessna.

  “Flying is all about freedom for me,” he said.

  “It’s all about fear for me,” I said. Of course if he’d remembered me from L.A., he would have known that.

  “Someday I’ll take you up in my plane and show you there’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, almost protectively.

  Promises, promises, I thought, reminding myself that timing was everything in life.

  It was during his account of a flight to Colorado that I noticed how his face was perspiring. I reached over to feel his head, which was hot from the fever. As he kept talking, I got up and went to his bathroom, ran a washcloth under cold water, and came back and laid it across his forehead

  “You’re very sweet,” he said, gazing up at me. “You’re a straight shooter but you’ve got a tender side too.”

  “Just lie still,” I said as I made sure the compress didn’t drip all over his pillow.

  He smiled. “What’s the matter? Can’t take a compliment?”

  “Of course I can.” What I couldn’t take at that moment was being so close to Malcolm. Every time I was within inches of him, going back to the night we’d been nose to nose at Spago, I seemed to lose my sense of balance, my ability to concentrate on anything but my proximity to him. It was odd and distracting and made me extremely uncomfortable.

  “You must be wondering,” he said, touching the washcloth and, by extension, my hand.

  “About what?” I said.

  “The hair, the eyes. What my deal is.”

  “Your deal?” I said as if I didn’t know. I did wonder when or if he’d get around to explaining why he wore the contacts and the hairpiece.

  “Hollywood’s a tough town,” he said. “There’s a law against being old or ugly.”

  “You’re hardly either of those, Malcolm.”

  “No. I was young, in my late twenties, when my hairline started going the route of Ron Howard. I was fine with it, didn’t even think about hiding it under a baseball cap. But in the Sidney Lumet film I did, the character I was playing had a full head of hair, so I wore a piece. The movie was a hit. I got noticed big-time. My agent suggested I keep wearing it. I was impressionable in those days. I did what I was told. Same with the eyes. It was in the script: The character had piercing blue ones. What I’m saying is that my career clicked with that picture and I didn’t want to jinx it. It must sound bizarre to someone who’s not in the business, but being a good actor isn’t enough in Hollywood. You have to look the part of a star. If you don’t, you’re demoted, from leading man to best friend.”

  He wasn’t overstating it, sadly. A few wrinkles, a bad face-lift, a balding head. Career over.

  “I feel like a fraud a lot of the time,” he said. “An impostor. Maybe that’s why I never wanted to be interviewed. But as I told you, I love acting, so I thought it was a decent trade-off—if I wore the contacts and the hairpiece, I’d get the good scripts. Actually, I took my cue from Sean Connery and his amazing career. He had to wear a rug when he played James Bond and it kept him working for a long, long time.”

  “But now? Will you continue to wear it?”

  He shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  I turned the washcloth over and placed its cooler side back on his forehead. “I bet your audience is loyal enough to handle a few cosmetic changes.”

  “It would be liberating to be myself, whoever that is.”

  “I think you know exactly who that is,” I said. “It has nothing to do with appearance and everything to do with perseverance.”

  His smile widened. “Is Nurse Ratchet paying me a compliment now?”

  “She might be.”

  While we sat together in silence as he let the cool cloth soothe him, I replayed all the stories he’d just told me and realized that a theme had emerged—the theme of a man who took risks and succeeded on his own, without the support of his parents or the security of a group of close friends. I was impressed by his determination, his grit. If I’d clawed and scraped to become an actor the way he had, I would have hung on to the blue eyes and the wavy hair too, plus anything else that would have allowed me to keep the dream going. I knew where he was coming from. All too well.

  “Hey, enough about me,” he said, taking off the compress and picking his head up to look at me. “I’ve gone on way too long. Tell me more about you.”

  “Oh, like my s
tories will be as interesting as yours? I don’t think so.”

  “Please? I want to hear what it was like growing up in Middletown, Missouri.”

  I laughed even though he seemed quite serious. “Well, there are only five thousand residents of Middletown,” I said. “When you get a postcard in the mail, about four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine people will have read it before you do.”

  He smiled, settling back onto the bed. “What else?”

  I told him that vacations consisted of trips to Six Flags; that everybody thought deer season was a national holiday; and that if someone had out of-town guests, their names made the local paper. “And nobody’s ever met a celebrity,” I said. “You picked the right place when you decided to get sick in Middletown. They wouldn’t recognize you around here even if you did wear the hairpiece and the lenses.”

  He looked at me almost adoringly, as if I were the most wholesome, genuine, real person in the world. “Tell me more about your family,” he urged. “You’re an only child and your father died. Are you close to your mother?”

  “Actually, I am,” I said, thinking that despite our long-distance relationship over the past five years, we’d spoken on the phone several times a week, always treated each other with affection, never had the kind of mother-daughter power struggles that were all too common among women and girls. “I’ve been living with her since I”—whoops, I almost gave myself away—“started doing construction on my own place. I’m putting in a new bathroom.”

  “What’s it been like moving back in with her?”

  “Noisy,” I said with a laugh. “My aunt and grandmother live in the house too, and they can’t agree on much. But I’m lucky. What they do agree on is that they care about me and want what’s best for me.”

  “I’m envious.”

  “Well, I didn’t mean to make it sound like we’re a Leave It to Beaver family. We’re hardly that.”

  “But you’re there for each other,” he said. “I wish I had that in my life, that kind of unconditional love.” He sighed. “Maybe I should have grown up in Middletown instead of Manhattan.”

  I smiled. “It’s not the most exciting spot, but people here do tend to pull together. After my father died, everybody rushed in to help out. Of course, the only thing I wanted was for one of them to bring him back.”

  Again, Malcolm gazed at me with a tenderness I’d never believed he was capable of. He was about to speak when there was a knock on the door.

  “Hello? It’s just me, Mr. Sykes,” said Rolanda as she bustled into the room. “Time to check vitals and all that good stuff.”

  Not a moment too soon, I thought with relief. If she hadn’t come along when she did, I might have blabbed something totally maudlin, not to mention incriminating, to Malcolm. I couldn’t blow my cover any more than he didn’t want me to blow his.

  “I should go,” I told him as Rolanda was fiddling with his IV. “I’ll come see you again if you want to talk some more.” I’d finally gotten what I needed for the story, but I couldn’t just leave him in the lurch. I was all he had. He’d said so. He depended on me.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” He rolled his eyes at the bags of medicine hanging from the pole.

  I stood at the foot of his bed and patted his feet. “Get some rest and fight this infection, okay?”

  “Hey, Ann?” he said as I’d started for the door. “I’ve decided you’re not Nurse Ratchet after all.”

  “No?” I said, giving no sign that I’d understood the reference in the first place.

  “No. I’m thinking you’re more like the heroine of another classic movie you’ve probably never seen. It’s called Coming Home and it was one of the best antiwar movies of the seventies.”

  One of my favorite love stories too. But why was he bringing it up now?

  “Jane Fonda played a volunteer at a veterans’ hospital and Jon Voight played an angry, pain-in-the-ass patient,” he said. “It was her compassion, her willingness to listen, that pulled him through.”

  I didn’t react at first. I was too flustered. Jane Fonda was willing to listen to Jon Voight because she was hot for the guy as well as compassionate toward him. I was willing to listen to Malcolm Goddard because I was memorizing every word for a magazine piece—a piece I was about to run home and write. Big difference. On the other hand, I’d been there for him when no one else was, regardless of whether I had an ulterior motive. The visit had been a win-win for both of us.

  I WALKED INTO the house, kissed everyone, begged off dinner claiming I’d stuffed myself with cafeteria food and couldn’t eat another bite, and disappeared into my room for the rest of the night, practically chaining myself to my laptop.

  My first draft of the story was rough—basically, just a transcript of the conversation as I remembered it. By the second draft, I was starting to shape the story, to give it a beginning, middle, and end. And by the third, I was cutting and pasting and punching it up, editing it into a crisply written profile of a man who’d overcome a rocky childhood to become one of Hollywood’s most gifted stars.

  I smiled as I reread my handiwork. It was damn good, if I said so myself. It had all the elements Harvey looked for in a story. Demanded in a story. Well, everything except a heavy dose of dish about the subject’s sex life. Malcolm did touch on the fact that he’d had numerous relationships since he’d moved to L.A., and admitted to being leery of commitment, even as he claimed to want the kind of solid, unshakable marriage his parents lacked. But he didn’t utter a single syllable about Rebecca Truit, not a word, which led me to believe that they had broken up and that her sound bite on Access Hollywood had only been the usual Hollywood bullshit. If they’d been engaged or living together, he would surely have included her in his delirious ramblings, wouldn’t he? Not that I ever thought she was right for him. She was beautiful, sure, and spoke with an aristocratic British accent, but she was one of those skinny, brittle types with a little-boy body and a little-boy haircut, and I couldn’t picture her as the woman who would be on his arm when he finally took the walk down the aisle. Of course, I didn’t care if he married her or not. Not from a personal standpoint. Why would I? It was none of my business whether he ever married anybody. I was only interested from a professional perspective, naturally.

  God, Harvey will be thrilled when he gets this, I thought as I gave the piece one more read, attached the document to the e-mail message I’d already typed out, and moved the whole thing to my Drafts folder.

  Yes, the Drafts folder. I didn’t send the story right that second. I wanted to let it sit and marinate awhile. I would read it again over the next few days and make any necessary changes. That’s how I always worked.

  Oh, hell. I’ll be honest. There was also the matter of my suddenly conflicted emotions. After all my plotting and planning, I was now officially ambivalent about whether I should go through with the story. Yes, yes, it was my ticket back to Famous and I really thought it was a valentine to Malcolm, who came off as both vulnerable and dynamic. But something else kept me from hitting Send Now on that computer, and I couldn’t identify it.

  Did I have feelings for him that went beyond writer and subject and were they inhibiting me from sending it? Had his gradual personality changes turned my head? Was I starting to—

  Ridiculous. I detested the guy. Okay, “detested” was no longer accurate. But I certainly wasn’t interested in him romantically. How could I be? He was the man who’d cost me my job. What’s more, I had a No Actors rule when it came to boyfriends.

  No, the “something” was just a case of nerves, I decided. The kind of butterflies you get when you’re on the brink of getting what you think you really want.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  On Tuesday, Malcolm’s fever was still slightly elevated, but he was in good spirits. Better than good. He spoke to me with affection, as if his confessional a few days before had cemented some sort of bond with me. He said he was happy to see me and told me I looked pretty and asked if I could
stay and chat. When I agreed to hang around for a while, he actually beamed. I had never seen Malcolm Goddard beam.

  Was he so chipper because he liked me? Liked me as a woman as opposed to me as a volunteer whose job ran the gamut from getting vomited on to giving tongue lashings? Had he thought about me at night with the same intensity that I’d thought about him? And I had thought about him. Forget about sleeping. I’d spent hours tossing and turning and stressing about whether I should or shouldn’t send the story to Harvey. In fact, maybe my lack of sleep was making me delusional. Maybe Malcolm wasn’t beaming because he had feelings for me. Maybe he was just mellow from the medications they were pumping into him.

  But then we were in the middle of discussing his health when he begged me to tell him more stories of life in Middletown.

  “Please,” I protested. “I’ve already told you enough. My life isn’t nearly as glamorous as yours.”

  “Did I say I wanted glamour?”

  When I realized that Malcolm was not to be refused, I sat down and talked about my early memories of screen doors slamming and men hand-washing their cars and everybody gathering on the porch on a hot summer afternoon to watch a thunderstorm. “Although my aunt Toni’s afraid of lightning,” I added, then gave him the short version of her split with Uncle Mike.

  “He married Claire? Our Claire?” said Malcolm after I mentioned that she was a volunteer. “The short one who bounces in here offering me two-year-old issues of American Heritage?”

  I nodded. “We’re one big happy group.”

  Again, he looked at me as if I were wearing a halo. He seemed to be as charmed by my homespun stories as I’d been charmed by his glittery ones. “How about you, Ann,” he said, leaning over to tap the arm of my chair. “Are you happy here?”

  I was totally caught off guard by the question. “Me? Of course. Wouldn’t live anywhere else,” I said, hoping I was convincing.

  “You’re in your—what?—thirties, I’m guessing. You said you’re between jobs. What sort of job did you have?”