Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  But I was the only one who felt so. Maggie Sumner spoke at me through my telephone in high-pitched gushes, promising to line up more work. The reviews from the crew at Gomp’s were over-the-top, but no less genuine for their enthusiasm.

  I was not at all prepared for the pointed attention to my existence. My mouth, teeth, cheekbone structure, eyes and my body generally were suddenly the subject of a fanfare I had great difficulty taking seriously. The backs of my legs. My ankles. The arch of my foot as I leaned into the mirror and licked foam off of lips that I had always accepted as slightly misshapen and doughy, but that were suddenly luscious and full and classic. The breasts that I had always bemoaned as wrongly apportioned for my frame were suddenly exquisite and quintessential and heavenly.

  I told my family nothing of the commercial, telling myself that I wanted to see if they noticed on their own and wouldn’t that be fun when, one day flipping mindlessly through the channels, or before turning off the Columbus Nightly News, suddenly there was little Tilly brushing her teeth.

  But, as entertaining as that thought might have been, the real reason for the secrecy was a deeper ambivalence for what I had done and for the jarring quality of the spectacle my parents might witness in the very living room in which, as an eight year old, I was scolded for watching James Bond on television – a character my father insisted was not intended for young children. Fourteen years later I was no longer little Tilly, and brushing my teeth was the very least of what I would be doing on their television. It was the possibility that my family would never even recognize me that I hoped for the most.

  But they did recognize me. My mother called one night in a froth. I can’t believe it Tilly, she kept saying, more to herself than to me. I can’t believe it. She had that over-saturated tone that works equally well at both ends of the emotional spectrum and I could not tell at first whether she was euphoric or distraught.

  “Ben and I were folding laundry and I looked up... I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought it was you at first, and then I just thought I was seeing things but then Ben started to point and do his dance and so I knew it was you, but… Tilly why didn’t you tell us?”

  “Mom...”

  “I’m no prude. It’s a sexy commercial. There’s more to that commercial than just brushing teeth, that’s for certain. You knew that when you were making it, didn’t you? That it has a sexual sort of theme to it?”

  “Mom...”

  “That’s not a bad thing, it’s just so… well, I don’t know, so revealing. For television, I mean. I wonder what people are thinking? Maybe they won’t even recognize you. Have you told any of our friends? I wonder if I should call people. Oh, I should call David. Your father hasn’t seen it yet. God only knows what he’ll think about it.”

  It was my mother’s way of saying that she knew exactly what my father would think about it. It was two weeks later before I got the call breaking the news that, after all the rumors, he had finally seen the spectacle for himself.

  “Well, he was upset. He had plenty of things to say about it. Got up and walked out of the room. He’s downstairs locked in that study. He’s from a different age, Tilly. He doesn’t accept change like we do. He has issues with Sex. Sexual sorts of things.”

  “Yeah, well, look mom…”

  “It was his mother. God, it was all of them. But she raised him that way. We don’t have sex at all anymore. There’s not much physical affection of any kind, really, but certainly no sex. I’d like to think I can still satisfy him. I’m no prude with sexual things, Tilly. I don’t know if you know that. He’s much more reserved than I am. It’s just been awhile. The last time we had sexual…”

  “Mom, please…”

  “What?”

  “The commercial. Mom. The… commercial.”

  “Well, he just thinks he can control everything, but he can’t. He thinks he can control me and you and David and the rest of the world, but he can’t and he can’t accept that he can’t. I think that’s why he drinks so much. It has gotten pretty bad, Tilly. This is a difficult place to live sometimes. He’s never violent or rough or anything like that, he’s just very… cold. And then at times like tonight, when he saw your commercial, he’s just so angry. Like waving-his-arms-around-and-shouting angry.”

  “Let me guess,” I interrupted, suddenly thinking of Orin Twill and little Rosalie and of his prediction, “he felt betrayed. He feels like I’ve betrayed him.”

  “Yes! How did you know? That’s exactly what he said. That he felt betrayed.”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “He just thinks it’s the wrong path for you, honey. He doesn’t see this, like we do, as a stepping-stone to greater things, like acting on television or in the movies. He likes to think of himself as better than television and the movies. He’s not really above it, he just likes… that’s how he sees himself. You know what I mean? He thinks you’re selling yourself short. He really does believe in you, Tilly. He really does.”

  “Christ…”

  “Don’t let it bother you. The anger is for me, not you.”

  “You? What’d you ever do to make him angry?”

  “I know him too well. Maybe we all do. He hates that.”

  It’s not as though my father and I had much of a relationship before I started selling orgasmic dental hygiene. It was a rare occasion that we ever spoke to each other and even then it was because he sometimes had the bad judgment to answer the telephone when I called. But after the commercial was released and after it became common knowledge in my family that I was seriously considering some sort of career in show business or commercial acting, my father made a point of dropping all pretense of a relationship with me. Oh… Hi, Tilly. Let me get your mother, was the most I recall him saying to me during those years.

  Many years later, after I was nominated for my role as Katie Finn in Peppermint Grove, and before I had started on The Lion Tree, my mother threw a party in my honor, inviting a number of their oldest friends to the house for dinner. I participated briefly by telephone, not because I couldn’t actually be there, but because the very thought of exchanging sentences with my father – of dealing with his disapproval and my own unresolved feelings about him – was so unsettling that I made up an excuse.

  The party is a surreal memory for me, even now at this considerable distance, both because I was not actually present for the celebration and because my father and I exchanged more words that evening than we had in all the five years preceding it put together. He tried mightily that night to show his friends how proud he was of me, and how supportive he was of my choices in life. He should have been nominated for an award himself.

  There were moments that night when even I believed him. Moments like when he sang out my name and asked his friends to raise their glasses in my honor. Brief and fleeting moments, when I wished I had made the trip home; when homesickness wrenched my heart and I wished I had attended that perfectly ridiculous party in person. I listened to his voice and imagined that he was happy. Not just happy, but happy specifically for me, his only daughter. And for those scattered moments I could feel the sun on my face, probably due as much to my own sublimated desire to believe in an undying paternal love as to any sincerity on his part.

  And yet, the moments were there, just the same, gleaming like little islands in the dark sea between us.

  That dark and quiet sea stretched from a time well before my inauspicious open-kimonoed introduction to the public eye, to well beyond my Sundance nomination. It was as though a part of him had died. Or, at least, as though the part of him that was my father had developed an immunity to my presence in the world. As though he no longer cared to hear my voice over the distance, leaving me no choice but to boil that black expanse with my offensiveness. His convulsive disapprobation was the only sign of life I could identify; the only ripple in the dark that connected us.

  Perhaps that, as much as anything else, explains why I so willingly parlayed the debasement of my media debut into a string o
f like-toned commercials for chewing gum and mouthwash. I imagined that the sight of my magnified, over-made face on the television – chewing and swishing and spitting for all the boys – would irritate my father to the point of disgust, giving new life to the disapproval of my adolescence.

  It is impossible to maintain an indifference to that which we hate and that to judge, even harshly, is to care. And as I chewed and swished and spit and bent at the waist in my underthings, I imagined that he cared.

  My service in the commercial wars against gingivitis and halitosis did not go unrewarded. A friend of a friend introduced me to the casting agent for a network crime drama called L.A. Knights. The auditions, believe it or not, were easier than they had been for the toothpaste ad and did not require that I make unflattering faces. On the other hand, the L.A. Knights roles called for a bit less enthusiasm. I played, in three successive seasons, a hooker strangled to death with her own pantyhose, a rich socialite bludgeoned and drowned in the bathtub by her lover accountant, and a college student raped by her professor and thrown from a speeding car. The last of these roles also involved acting comatose and testifying in a hoarse whisper from a hospital bed in lots of makeup and a thigh-length, not-so-standard issue hospital gown. The L.A. Knights got their man. I got more attention.

  I was not long in that narrow spotlight before Rufus Einemann tracked me down and flattered me into his spasmodically successful run as a director of cheap, over-the-top thrillers. Rufus was a fifty-something German Jew with a towering frame and twinkling eyes and far too much charm for his own good. He liked to call me T.J. and told me I was the next Kathleen Turner. He insisted that hawking hygiene products and sexing up hospital beds was a shameful waste of my inestimable talents.

  “I have an eye for the genuine gift, Ms. Johns,” he said to me in the back parking lot of Gomp’s, very late on the evening of our introduction.

  His face was made of strong bones and his hair was outrageous, like a sculpture of wet sand. We stood in a rectangular splash of yellow light stretching along the pavement from the kitchen door that had been propped open so the others could listen to us talk as they pretended to work. It was the moment of which each of them had dreamt.

  “I have the eye and you, my dear, have the gift. I can show you how to begin to open that gift. I suspect it will be long and glorious in the unwrapping, but it can start with me. I can pay you more money than you have ever made in your young life and the world will know more about you than what you look like brushing your teeth.”

  His own teeth gleamed in the moonlight when he said this and I could not help but remember Orin Twill and the beast in the shadows he predicted would, sooner or later, be calling my name. With Rufus Einemann, formal introductions had been made.

  Within a week, I had quit my job, picked up my SAG card, fired Maggie Sumner, hired Milton Chenowith, and signed a contract for my first motion picture, an urban thriller called The Geisha of 82nd Street.

  Geisha was the first of three films I would do for Rufus, all opening within two years. There was little in the way of variety to the roles. All of my characters shared a penchant for exhibition, sexual compulsiveness, and a tragically short lifespan. If Brian DePalma was a second-rate Hitchcock, then Rufus Einemann – may he rest in peace – was a third or fourth rate DePalma. His movies tended towards an unsettling blend of violence and sexual camp all expertly marketed and presented in a slickly polished imitative style that tricked you into thinking you were watching something much better than he actually had to offer. Like most every other aspect of The Great Einemann, as he liked to call himself, his films left you feeling persuaded against your better instincts, cheapened and just a little sick. None of them made much at the box office.

  Rufus chewed the scenery of his own life with such unapologetic relish and bombast that the media, especially the infotainment tabloid media, loved him. I was an inevitable sideshow to the Rufus Einemann publicity circus, in which filmmaking was almost incidental. We did not have a sexual relationship as was widely reported by the tabloids; or, at least, not at the time they reported it. The relationship was casually and irresponsibly inferred from a photograph of Rufus and I laughing outside of his Westwood home. It looked like we were arguing and the lover’s quarrel headlines seemed to write themselves. I had foolishly entertained hopes of keeping people from believing that I was sleeping with my director, a man nearly thirty years my senior. But such hopes were quickly snuffed between the thumb and forefinger of the Hollywood paparazzi, who thereafter regularly reported our “relationship” as a casual background appetizer pretending to give Rufus an extra bit of dimension. Suddenly, the caption beneath my photo was Tilly Johns, Rufus Einemann’s leading lady on and off the set or the decidedly less coy, Tilly Johns, the latest Einemann plaything.

  The sexual relationship did come eventually, although it was short-lived, lasting just six months while we were shooting the last of the three films, Whispering Darkly. It was, as much as anything, a tribute to the power of suggestion that reality ended up following common assumption.

  It was only after many years of reflection that I realized the role of my parents in making the rumor a reality. My mother began calling me almost non-stop as the tabloids found their way into the homes of people she knew, and as they began appearing in the news racks of the same grocery store at which David and I had whined for sugared, prize-bearing cereal when we were children. All of my mother’s excitement for the promise of my career was instantly channeled into a grave and unrelenting concern for my reputation, and for what people who knew her, my mother, would think about our family and about her parenting skills, and all sorts of other collateral damage that was all the more terrifying to her for being undefined.

  She was right, of course, and I assured her the stories were false and that there was really nothing I could do. I guess we’re going to have to get used to this sort of thing, became the mantra that always fell far short of genuine consolation. I asked her how my father was taking it. Oh, you know him, she said with a tone that betrayed a rolling of eyes, he tells me that I’m over-reacting. None of this is serious to him.

  That conversation marked the first time that I began to consider Rufus in a new light. Like magic, the tabloid gossip began to coalesce in my mind as poorly written, photo-documented prescience. The six-month dalliance began roughly two weeks later.

  It was a completely surreal experience. Our public appearances were, to me, exhilaratingly taboo, but were nothing particularly noteworthy to a media and public who had made the affair old news before it had begun. The irony was that the relationship got far less attention when it was for real than when it had only been imagined.

  The sex itself was surprisingly infrequent and lackluster. Rufus seemed to like to talk about it far more than he cared to actually do it. I had had boyfriends before, most of them forgettable except the ones that were truly awful. So it was not as though the experience suffered by some unfavorable comparison. I had never had a lover before Rufus; certainly not anyone with a lot of money and charisma; certainly no one who was indifferent to the exclusivity and intended durability of a romance. At least, that is what I thought I was getting with Rufus.

  I broke things off when The Great Einemann had a small heart attack that sent him to the hospital for a weekend. He emerged from his paper gown, suddenly mawkish with life. He indulged in private weep fests in which he lamented his long estrangement from true and committed love. He had never loved; really loved. Just as he had never been loved. Time was so short and he had never committed himself to anyone. And so on. It was the wet, cloying looks of need and hope for the future that sent me packing.

  The hurt and shock of my sudden reversal were greater for him than I ever expected. He wrapped Whispering Darkly with a sullen, awkward insecurity wholly at odds with his public image and I felt responsible – actually guilty – for the castration of his personality.

  But I like to think that if I was a source of rejection and pain for Rufu
s, then I was also an unwitting vehicle for his enlightenment. Within two years, Rufus had abandoned heterosexuality altogether. He began making comedies about Mid-western suburban angst, and adopted a grandfatherly, emotionally stable, persona.

  If Rufus Einemann was a mistake in my life, as many have suggested, it was not for professional reasons. Paying dues in the acting business can get a lot worse than Rufus Einemann. I certainly learned something about the craft of acting. Blair Gaines told me once that he initially picked me for The Lion Tree as much for my work in the Einemann films as for my role as Katie Finn in Peppermint Grove. This perplexed me greatly, for I had no illusions about the quality of the Einemann movies. He told me that good films make for bad proving grounds. Too much support – a talented cast, a great director, a terrific script – makes it hard to see the raw talent. Difficult to focus on the qualities of a single flower in a lush garden of color.

  “If you want to see the real guts of an actor, Tillyjohn,” Blair said to me lying naked on the floor gripping a bottle of red wine, “make her the lead in a shabby movie and see what she can do with it; see how far she can drag the dead weight of the bloody thing through the muck of bad writing and crappy production all on her own.”

  Something in me shone through those horrible films and Blair had picked up on it. Professionally, Rufus was not a mistake.

  The more interesting question is whether Rufus was a mistake for me personally. But I cannot evaluate inevitability in terms of mistake and success; terms which assume a degree of choice I simply did not have in the matter. Rufus was inevitable. He was a scheduled stop on a bus route running from my father to Blair Gaines to Angus Mann. Rufus, or someone like him, was preordained from the time I wanted fish as a little girl and came up disappointed.

  * * *

  There was a commotion behind me, near the corner of the observatory. I turned in time to see four teen-aged boys pretending to examine the trunk of a nearby tree. One of them was looking inexplicably into a flowering bush. They were all trying hard not to laugh and were elbowing each other as they worked on their inconspicuousness. I had developed a sense of when it was time to move on. Soon there would be others, bolder and with lots of questions and things for me to sign.