After Annie (9781468300116)

by Tucker, Michael

  “Why don’t you wait until after my audition and I’ll play with you?” offers Olive, unaware of the erotic frenzy on the other end of the phone.

  “No, this isn’t a day trip. This is a falling-off-the-edge-ofthe-world trip.”

  “Oh. Kind of a golf/suicide thing?”

  He laughs.

  “How’s it been going?” she asks.

  “Bad. It’s going bad. I can’t stay in my apartment anymore. Everything in there that used to make me happy now makes me sad. I think going away is the right thing.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “At a bar, having a bite.”

  “Come over to my bar. I’ll feed you.”

  “You’re working?”

  “Yeah, but it’s slow. You’d almost be the only one here.”

  “What happens if you get the job? You’ll have to quit the bar.”

  “It’s my uncle’s bar. He’ll take me back. Come over; I want to see you.”

  Herbie pays up and grabs a cab to the East Side. Olive’s bar has maybe a half dozen people talking and drinking and he heads up to his usual place—Siberia—where it’s empty and dark. He watches her work for a while, notices her notice him, a little color coming into her face while she pours his vodka rocks.

  “She’s insecure is what it is,” she says, putting down the drink. “She thinks people like her only because she’s beautiful— not because of who she is. So she plays the role she thinks they expect her to play. She clowns and performs and… you know … tap-dances… to cover her insecurity, her fear—to cover that she doesn’t know who she is either.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  And she’s off again, back to the other end of the bar to get a beer for somebody. Then another couple comes in; they take their coats off, settle on the stools and order. It’s a good ten minutes before she gets back to Siberia.

  “And maybe that’s the place where she and I come together, you know? I could definitely see myself that way sometimes.”

  “Uh-huh.” He can see she’s really into it now. “So what do you have to do for the audition? Read scenes?”

  “Yeah, two scenes. I’m learning them so I won’t have to look down at the script, you know? I’m just drilling them whenever I can.”

  “Maybe that’s not a good idea.”

  She wrinkles up her forehead, a gesture that Herbie finds powerfully attractive.

  “You can kill it that way. You’re alone, looking in the mirror or walking around your bedroom, saying the lines over and over, repeating the same line readings and the whole thing turns into cement. You’re frozen. By the time you walk in there, you won’t be a human being at all.”

  “So I shouldn’t learn the lines? I shouldn’t work on it?”

  “No, you work on it. But in a different way. Take her for a walk; take her shopping. See how she chooses a dress. Have her bartend for you tonight—see how she does it differently from you.” “I thought you said I should look for how we’re the same.”

  “Yeah, that, too. Both.”

  “And I really shouldn’t learn the lines?”

  “You shouldn’t decide how you’re going to say them. That’s the trap. If you’re the person, then it doesn’t matter how you say the lines. If you’re her, however you say them is right. You could say a line six different ways on six different days and they’d all be the right way. Because you’re her. I never learn the lines for an audition. Some people do. Some people do a whole, finished performance when they audition. I think that’s jumping the gun. You’re not ready to perform the role yet. You just started. It’ll be weeks before it’s time to make those kinds of choices. I think, anyway.”

  “So what do you do? When you audition?”

  “I wing it. I go in with the script in my hand; I look at the guy or the girl I’m reading with—usually some assistant casting person—and I connect with him. Then I look down to see what I say next; I take my time; then I look up and try something— whatever pops to mind. But I’m really talking to that person in front of me—not to myself in my bedroom somewhere.”

  “So you just wing it.”

  “Yeah. Like I would do in rehearsal. Not jump to some performance before I know who I am and what I’m doing.”

  “Wow.”

  Herbie takes a long swallow of his vodka. “Of course, you should keep in mind that I never get work from auditions. I’m probably the worst auditioner in the history of the theater. If I got two jobs from auditions in the entire forty years I’ve been in the business, I’d be surprised. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. A big grain.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE NEXT DAY HE’S IN THE CAR, DRIVING SOUTH. ONCE he clears the Lincoln Tunnel and the oil refineries on the Jersey Turnpike, he opens the windows and the mid-March air hits his head like a leaf blower, blasting away all the dead and decayed shit he’s been carrying around. Just moving, he thinks, is good. When he crosses the Delaware Memorial Bridge into Maryland, he can feel the tug of Baltimore, city of his birth, clotted with the memories of his dead parents, his troubled father, his troubling mother. He decides to take the beltway and skirt it.

  His cell phone rings with that annoying jingle the phone company foisted on him. He’s got to change that sometime, he thinks.

  “Hello?” He says this in a whimper, as if to say please don’t beat me. He hates the phone and all it brings.

  “Where are you?” It’s Jeffrey.

  “I’m driving. This is dangerous. You know I can’t do two things at the same time.”

  “Where?”

  “What’s the difference? I’m going seventy-five miles an hour; I can’t talk on the phone right now.”

  “Did you tell Olive not to work on her audition?”

  “What? No. Jesus Christ, I’m sure she didn’t tell you that. That is not what she said, believe me.” He sighs. “You have misunderstood something that you have no right to get into anyway. This is about acting. You are about business. Stay on your side.”

  “I just got off the phone with her and she said you told her not to learn the lines.”

  “Stay out of it, Jeffrey. She’ll be fine. You just find out when her appointment is, and where. That’s your job. Jesus Christ.”

  “All right. Just drive carefully, will you? You’re not going to try to get all the way there in one day, are you?”

  “No, I’ll stop in Virginia somewhere. When’s the audition?”

  “Tomorrow at five thirty.”

  “So she’ll have to sit around and get tense all day?”

  “Do you want me to find a place for you to stay in Virginia? I’ll go online and call you back?

  Herbie smiles. This is Jeffrey. The worrier. The fixer. “I’m okay, darling. Call me when she gets the part.”

  Every exit on the Baltimore Beltway is a memory—Falls Road, Stevenson Road, Reisterstown Road—and he’s surprised that the memories are not all bad. When he gets to Liberty Road, he takes the exit and heads to his old neighborhood. What the hell, he thinks. Let’s see if I can find the golf course. The car seems to know the way—a few one-way signs that weren’t there before, but he finds his old house without a wrong turn.

  It’s a sad fucking house, he thinks, looking at it. A sterile brick box sitting on a tiny lot next to another brick box. Two bedrooms upstairs, sharing one little bathroom. The diningroom table downstairs, where once a month, after the dinner dishes were cleared away, his dad sat and paid the bills. He had it all laid out—his check ledger, his good pen, and a mountain of bills. From the living room Herbie watched his dad gnaw at his lower lip, his eyes cast down. And Herbie’s mother baiting him, belittling him: “You couldn’t have a shop of your own, could you? Because you’re too afraid to try. My father had a shop—of his own. His own shop with his name on it. But you’re too scared, little boy—little scared boy, shitting in his pants.” His father never answered.

  Herbie was her golden boy. He could make her laugh. He was her actor, even then. She enticed him
with her attention just as she was humiliating his father. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t turn on him, too—and when she turned she went low; she tried to cut his heart out. Herbie never knew which mother he was going to get. He knew she had a sickness. She couldn’t help it. She died in a diaper, chanting nonsense syllables.

  He sits in the car, looking at the house, and he fills his pipe and takes his patented one hit. Then he locks the car and walks down the street, past where Butch used to live, to the golf course, the playing fields of his youth.

  The course is closed. There are no flags in the holes. There are some patches of snow here and there and the ground is still frozen. The old clubhouse shacks have long been torn down and replaced by a municipal-looking building, muddy yellow brick and dark green shutters. He stands on the first tee and thinks two hundred and thirteen yards, par three. Amazing that I can remember that, he thinks, given that I can barely remember how to tie my fucking shoes in the morning. He walks down the fairway to the green, thinking this was a hard shot for a kid—two hundred and thirteen yards is a long way for a kid to hit the ball. The second hole is across the street, so Herbie, nicely stoned at this point, takes his time and looks both ways before going over. Four hundred and ten yards, all uphill; par four. Another tough hole, he says out loud as he strides up the windy hill.

  Annie was the only person he ever saw who could back his mother down. One time they were in Baltimore for a wedding and Herbie’s mother was on her broomstick—she never handled parties well. They went to pick her up at her apartment and she wouldn’t come down—something about how a friend of hers hadn’t been invited to the wedding—some person they had never heard of—and she was in a fury. When Herbie finally got her in the car, she started ranting like a bag lady right in Candy’s face. Candy was around seven or eight years old at the time and had never seen anything like it. Annie, her mother-lion instinct taking over, grabbed Herbie’s mother by the shoulders and hauled off and belted her. Right across the chops. Herbie was shocked. But damned if his mother didn’t calm down and start to behave herself. She always looked at Annie funny after that.

  The second green is the highest point on the golf course. He stands there and surveys the whole course—except the part that goes into the woods on the tenth hole and comes out again at fifteen. Why, he thinks, would he keep this information in his head all these years? He has little enough storage as it is. Why does he still carry around a map of this place?

  He walks back to his car, still stoned, and sits there staring at the house. He remembers how he used to hide in the coat closet downstairs—way in the back where no one could find him. He stood there perfectly still, taking in the smells of his father’s topcoat and his mother’s perfume. He waited there until he heard his mother calling for him. And he didn’t move.

  He starts the car and pulls out, makes a left at the golf course and heads toward Gwynn Oak Avenue. When it doesn’t show up after a couple of blocks, he thinks maybe he passed it. It should have been here already, he thinks. I need to make a left and go down to Rogers Avenue—if I can find the fucking street that gets me there. He makes a left into a street that deadends a block later. He turns the car around and heads back but now he can’t find the street he was on before. Just take a left, he thinks—any left will get you there. He’s pissed at himself now and he pulls over. Take it easy, big boy, you’ll find the street; you’re fine. He sits there and waits for the panic to subside. By the time he gets back to the beltway the sun has set and everyone’s headlights have come on. He gets onto 95 South, tucks in behind a station wagon going around fifty-five and takes it easy for a while. He never should have gone back, he thinks. He left when he was seventeen and that was the right move. His breath is coming normally now and he lets the miles drift by.

  Herbie pulls off the highway south of Richmond and finds one of those cheap chain motels, beautifully situated across the parking lot from a bar with a piano player tonight. He checks in and showers. Then he calls Candy, who was worried about him driving. He tells her that he’s off the road and safe and she thanks him. Then she tells him that she still can’t figure out why he wants to play golf and he pretends to listen for a couple of minutes.

  The bar is packed with Virginians, who seem to be relatively civilized people, and he finds a bar stool as far away from them as possible. He orders a sandwich and a double Maker’s Mark over ice, being in the South and all. The whisky’s good and he has some more. It reminds him how tired he is and exactly where he hurts. And it loosens up some memories.

  He never worked in Virginia, but Annie did. She did a movie that kept her away for eleven weeks and the first three were in Virginia. He visited her on her day off and he knew the second he saw her that she was fucking around. She looked all lit up in that way that only good sex can make a girl look. They didn’t talk about it then; he had his two-day visit with her and then he went back to New York for another eight weeks without her, knowing she was with another guy. Years later she told him about it. It was the camera operator. The guy had his eye glued to the camera lens and day in, day out he was gazing at her perfect face in close-up. Annie had the kind of beauty that deepened the more you studied it. He loved to look and she loved to be looked at—it didn’t take long for it to go the next step. They did it in the camera truck during the lunch break. Herbie was never able to look at another camera truck without a huge sadness sucking him down—like a lead fucking weight hanging on his heart. “Fuck Virginia,” he says as he polishes his drink, “and the horse it rode in on.”

  After three more whiskeys and the steak sandwich with fries, he makes his way across the parking lot and up to his room. When the phone rings two hours later, he could be on the moon for all he knows.

  “Did I wake you?”

  He fumbles for the light. “It’s two thirty in the morning, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

  Herbie thinks about that and nods his head silently. He doesn’t mind. “What’s up?”

  “Yelena tended bar for me tonight.” Olive’s voice is excited. “It was like you said—once I’m her I can do anything. I mean things were coming out of my mouth—I don’t know where they came from. I don’t talk like that.”

  “This is good.”

  “I got hit on like a hundred times. It was unbelievable. Girls, guys, the fry chef in the kitchen—Yelena’s a trip.”

  “Doesn’t Olive always get hit on?”

  “Not really. Guys are usually pretty respectful.”

  “Because you’re too pretty. It’s intimidating.”

  “You’re the only one I can think of, actually, who hit on me straight away.” He can tell she’s smiling.

  “Really,” he says, drily.

  “Anyway, I more than doubled my tips tonight.”

  “You should split it with her.”

  “And it was Yelena who called and woke you up, not me. I never would have done that.”

  “Tell her she has to be careful with an old man. No sudden moves or surprises.”

  “Don’t give me that old man crap.”

  “Who says? You or her?”

  “Me.”

  He props his pillow up and leans against it, getting comfortable. “So, tomorrow at five thirty. What are you going to do all day?”

  “I’ll go shopping with Yelena, I think. Except that she’ll be extravagant. She’s a spender, definitely.”

  “You going to work on the scenes?”

  “I’ll go over them some. I’ll be ready. I feel good about this.”

  Herbie smiles on the other end.

  “What about you? Are you very lonely?”

  Lonely? It’s like he’s falling, endlessly, in a place with no light and no air. He has no idea if he’s falling up or down. It’s just panic and hopelessness and dread.

  “I just keep thinking she’s in the other room, brushing her teeth or something. And I’ll look up and there she’ll be.”

  “Hang in there, c
oach,” she says, softly.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HERBIE HITS MYRTLE BEACH AT THE APEX OF A TRIPARTITE convergence—spring break, St. Patrick’s Day, and the annual National Shag Dancing Competition, all happening together, all happening today.

  “This is why you should check with a travel agent,” he mutters as he inches his car through legions of half-naked, drunken college students with green plastic shamrocks on their heads. “There go the bars,” he says out loud. “Fucking amateur hour.” He makes his way to his hotel, which is really more like a golf resort, with three separate courses—all named for celebrity golfers—a golf school, restaurants, and shops. It’s called St. Andrews, which gives you an idea of how pretentious it is. He drives up to the ornate reception area—a third-rate version of a Vegas hotel—and there’s a place to drop off his golf bag so they can take it down to the golf area and he won’t have to put it in his room. They frown on golf clubs in the room. He pops his trunk and an eager young fellow takes the bag out of the trunk. He has a bit of a sneer on his face as he lifts Herbie’s canvas golf bag with its motley set of clubs and sets it on a rack next to a dozen hefty leather bags with gleaming matched irons and fluffily head-covered woods.

  “They’re collectibles,” he tells the kid. “Be careful, they’re worth a fortune.”

  “Yes sir. Polish ‘em up for you?”

  “No, no. They look just the way they’re supposed to look.”

  After he checks in, he follows another tanned young fellow through endless corridors to his Golf Package Suite. He tips him and as the kid lets himself out, the click of the closing door hits Herbie like a brick. How many fucking hotels, he thinks. On location in some half-assed city, shooting some dreary fucking film, away from Annie, away from my life. The only thing to do on location was to find someone to have sex with as soon as possible—some actress or, more probably, her stand-in. Someone who likes to drink, preferably. It’s not adultery on location, as the old saying goes. Annie had her flings, too. Not as many—just three—that cameraman in Virginia and two actors. But when she had them, they were doozies, with feelings and emotions—unlike Herbie, who would have done it with a goldfish if that’s who was around.