Parallel Play

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “Few do,” he went on. “Look at her.”

  He motioned to the actress I had seen him with the time before. Two men were crouched around her waist, making some kind of adjustment to her pants, I couldn't see what, except that she didn't like it. She was frowning, getting pulled and pushed by whatever was going on below.

  “A simple question of wardrobe. But indicative, naturally, of a much more fundamental failure. I blame myself, first and foremost.”

  “I'm Eve,” I said, finally remembering.

  He didn't seem to hear. He looked utterly unmotivated, just sitting, his tiny feet not even touching the ground.

  “She is alone in the city.” He nodded to the girl again. “She has no one and no thing. It is as if she were in hiding. The clothes she chooses make her practically invisible.”

  “I know what you mean,” I risked.

  “And yet the trousers they chose to dress her in for this scene are brand-spanking-new designer jeans.”

  I looked again and saw they were rubbing the legs with sandpaper.

  “Can't you just go out and buy some prewashed ones?”

  “We haven't the time. And what they are doing now only makes it worse. She looks as if she has been mauled by a Bengal tiger.” He shook his head. “But it is more than that. It is not just a question of appearance. It's Jennifer herself. She seems to have lost the vulnerability I once saw in her.”

  We both watched the rag-doll figure of the actress.

  He sighed.

  “Have you ever been rolling along, feeling truly inspired, and then the smallest thing, a matter of no real consequence, derails you completely? Reveals the absolute impossibility of ever attaining your goal?”

  “Before, you said she was going to have a ray of pure sunshine on her features. That she was going to be Saved.”

  He blinked. I think it was the first time he actually noticed I was there.

  “But that happens later, even though it was filmed earlier. In cinema, we shoot out of sequence.”

  “So you already know what happens?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “Wow. Like God, huh?”

  “Yes. I am often mistaken for Him. But even He has off days, when all His creation turns to shit.”

  “I'm sure everything will be OK.”

  “It would have been better if I had never left the Gramercy Park Hotel this morning,” he groaned. “I could be there right now, reveling in the centralized heat.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Using sandpaper isn't going to work. You have to burn them.”

  He didn't get it. He was readjusting himself to my presence. But I got it. I knew what was happening. It was a miracle. My first, in quite a while.

  “You have to burn off the nap. That's how you distress denim. Not by scraping.”

  Everything was fitting together. Luck. After an unbroken string of disasters—falling in love, getting married, having a child—I was finally catching a major break. If I could only manage not to blow it. If I could only show him I had something to offer.

  “See, I took a course at FIT.”

  “FIT?”

  “The Fashion Institute … of Technology,” I added lamely. “There was a class, I forget what it was called, but we learned all about distressing fabrics and aging them and—”

  “Who are you?” he asked, in a completely different tone of voice. “What are you doing here?”

  “I told you, I'm Eve.”

  “Eve who?”

  “Just Eve. I came to see if I could maybe get a—”

  “Jonathon!”

  Everyone on the crew jumped. The one with the clipboard saw me. He sagged, then started trotting over, ready to boot me out again. The others laughed.

  “It's our stalker,” I heard someone say.

  “Forget it,” I muttered, my face turning red.

  I turned the stroller around.

  “One uses a torch, I assume.”

  “What?”

  “One burns off this nap with a torch, yes?”

  “I guess.”

  It suddenly occurred to me that I could be making this all up. It sounded right, but had I actually seen it done? Had the teacher demonstrated it? I couldn't remember.

  “Ma'am.” The assistant reached us. “I'm going to have to ask you again to—”

  But the director had gotten off the bench. He was full of life now. You could feel the change. In compensation for his stillness, he was moving at twice his normal speed.

  “Bring her,” he ordered, and strode past us, back into the group.

  The assistant must have been used to these mood swings. He grabbed my arm as if I might try to get away.

  “I'm fine,” I said, trying to free myself.

  But he wouldn't let go. He acted like I would have trouble finding my way. He led Ann and me past the table with the food, pointing out cables, guiding us through the crew. People were staring.

  “Remember,” he counseled, “the key is to do whatever Mr. C says.”

  “Mr. C?”

  He looked surprised. “Martin Cooper. Haven't you heard of him?”

  We came to the center of the crowd. The change was complete. The little man was giving orders, drawn up to his full minuscule height, looking like a creature from a fairy tale.

  “You will need to disembarrass yourself of that … lovely child,” he said.

  I handed off the stroller to someone who took Ann over to where the muffins were laid out. I could still see her, I consoled myself. And for once she wasn't crying.

  “Wait here.” Martin Cooper went off to get something.

  “We used to have a costumier,” the assistant complained, “up until a few days ago.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “He goes through about three a shoot.”

  I watched Ann from a distance. “Is she going to be OK?”

  “She'll be fine.”

  “Like this?” He returned holding a small propane torch, with the person it belonged to standing behind him.

  “Right,” I answered, feeling increasingly unsure. “But whoever does it should be careful just to burn off the nap, otherwise—”

  “—otherwise the actor herself might be toasted to a crisp, yes?” For the first time, he smiled.

  “Oh, you don't do it while the person is wearing the clothes.”

  “Ideally, no.” He took a big silver watch from his pocket. “But we have been out here for almost four hours, and in a few minutes the crew must take its union-mandated break. A trip to wardrobe, and the expense overtime would entail, is simply not in the cards.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I don't—”

  “I wonder if I could prevail upon you, since you seem afflicted by an almost psychotic propensity for interference, to give us the benefit of your hard-won expertise.”

  It was as if I had lost the ability to understand my own language.

  “I don't get it. You mean you want me to—?”

  “Charlie!” He yelled for people even when they were standing right next to him. They didn't exist until he named them. Then he turned back to me. “And you are?”

  “I told you twice already. Eve.”

  “Yes, but Eve who?”

  “Nothing. Just Eve.”

  A brief flicker of annoyance passed over his features but he was very intent on moving forward.

  “Light this, will you?”

  “Wait—”

  “Sure thing, Mr. C.”

  The equipment man turned the knob up full and pressed one of those electric sparkers until the whole thing exploded. I screamed.

  “Ah, now we are making progress. This way, this way.”

  He was back to his driven self, hurrying us all along. We moved over to where the actress (he kept calling her an actor, though) was standing on a spot of grass no different from any other except it was marked by an X spray-painted right on the ground that kept her there, surrounded by hulking equipment. She stared past u
s, her big blank face completely bored.

  “You see the problem.”

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Those off-the-rack jeans make her look like some kind of tawdry fashion model, whereas I want her to simply be as battered and defeated as the landscape through which she walks.”

  “Martin,” she whined, “how much longer do I have to stand here?”

  “It's quite all right, dear. Now … Evelyn?”

  “Eve!”

  “I want you to, very lightly and delicately, without hurting young Jennifer here in any way, take off the stiffness, the awful coating of newness about her. Can you do that?”

  “With her clothes on? No way. She's got to—”

  “No one's coming near me with that thing,” she said, noticing the torch.

  “Dear, a moment ago you were complaining about the cold. As you see, I have addressed your concern by finding a Certified Fashion Technician—”

  “Oh.” She looked impressed.

  “—who will not only fix this costume problem that has been holding us up but, I imagine, warm you considerably in the process. It's this area here I'm interested in,” he said to me. “Come see.”

  He knelt down, then went on quietly, right in my ear, so no one else could hear, “It doesn't matter if she cries.”

  “What?” I asked.

  He answered even lower, speaking under the propane's roar, turning to face me, so our eyes really met. His were pale blue. I don't usually notice the color of people's eyes, not right away, but there was something about them that reminded me of certain relationships I'd been in with men whose sole aim in life had been to impose their will. It wasn't the color, but the unblinking quality of the stare that allowed you to see the color, really experience it, so it became a dye flowing out and staining your vision, making it a weaker version of their own.

  “If she cried a little, it would actually be a good thing.”

  He raised his eyebrows, implying, You know what I mean, then nodded to the flame, which was still a lazy tongue of white-yellow.

  “You don't get it,” I mouthed back. “I don't know what I'm doing.”

  “Ah, but I think you do.”

  You're wrong, I was about to say. And I was wrong—wrong and crazy—to come here, so find somebody else, when Jennifer, the actor, announced in a pouty, spoiled brat's voice, projecting her speech not at me but into the sky, “If I feel one thing, I'm going to kick her.”

  A few people laughed. I looked up. She was posed there with her knee stuck out. I saw what he meant. She was a mannequin. Stiff. She was also something else, the me of a few years back, shallow and self-absorbed.

  “OK,” I heard a voice that didn't sound like mine answer, as low and calm as his. “I'll try.”

  “I want to be ready as soon as she is done,” he called, getting back up, leaving me there. “Tony! Frank!”

  He started consulting everyone. The spell was broken. There was a jolt of motion. I saw my hand shaking. I reached my other hand out to stop it but instead found the knob and sharpened the flame into a blue cone. It was coming back to me now, not how to do this, specifically, but something more important. I grabbed her inseam.

  “Ow!”

  “Hold still.”

  Luckily, they weren't skin-tight. I pulled as much cotton away from her thigh as I could, then concentrated. Once you got up close, the flame had no real border, didn't begin or end. There was an emptiness where the gas came out, before it burned, and at the other end a wavering edge, the hottest point, where the air around it broke up. I sensed, more than saw, each molecule-thin strand of fiber shrivel, lose its sizing in a puff of vapor. Then I moved on. I moved on before it happened. I anticipated. It wasn't just the air that broke up, but the sequence of events. I swept the flame over each bunch of material in broad, even strokes, never pausing.

  “I'm going to change sides,” I warned, “but you have to stay absolutely still.”

  Like an animal trainer, I let go and watched her obey me while I crept around, still squatting. I was vaguely aware of people gathered in a circle, and of a light that wasn't there before, hot, on the back of my neck. It wasn't natural, not the sun, but a dazzlingly artificial high noon of electricity that picked out everything and made it exist in a way it never had up until now. For a minute, I didn't know what it was. I thought I was having some kind of mystical experience. Then I realized they had turned on the power, the superbright lamps. They were getting ready.

  Costume Design, I remembered. That's what it was called. None of the rich girls had taken it. There was a moment at FIT when you realized it wasn't about fashion at all, about designing clothes that would change people's lives, your own first, then everyone else's. It was about money, either having money to begin with or being so obsessed you would do anything to be admitted into its world of glamour and privilege. That's when you started noticing the types of classes offering preprofessional training. There was Accessories, also known as Bags, Belts, and Shoes; Wholesale Merchandising, which supposedly prepared you to be a buyer for a department store; and Costume Design, for being a costumier, which, I remembered some girls sneering, meant scrabbling around on your hands and knees Scotch-taping the hem of some soap opera actress's dress. Pretty much what I was doing now.

  But you're good at it, I argued. That's what you're feeling again, after eight months of being a total incompetent. A sense of craft.

  It must have jinxed me, allowing myself that one little pat on the back, because I lingered a second too long and raised a tiny blister on the surface of the denim. It was nothing, really, but high up, where it was hard to get separation. Personally, I thought she overreacted.

  “Oh my God!” she screamed. “I'm on fire! Help!”

  “Very good.” He had been standing behind us for I don't know how long. Now he stepped forward and moved me out of the way.

  “Wait,” I said. “I'm not finished.”

  “That's perfectly all right. You have done quite enough. Charlie, if you could disarm Ester, here.”

  “Eve. But don't you see? There's one more spot. Above the pocket.”

  Now that I'd got going, I didn't want to stop. But I no longer existed. He brushed past me to comfort Jennifer.

  “That fucking murderer you called in,” she sobbed. “I thought you said she was certified.”

  “Yes, she turned out to be an absolute sadist,” he agreed.

  He pronounced it sad-ist, like I was a professional sad person.

  “The good news is I think we are ready to begin now. Don't bother cleaning yourself up. You look absolutely stunning. That little accident seems to have helped break through your wall of juvenile reserve.”

  “I didn't do it because you told me to,” I insisted.

  “Are we up to speed? Yes? Good. Everyone!”

  “Make her cry, I mean.”

  “Jonathon!”

  The assistant reappeared and began leading me away.

  “He told me it would be OK if—”

  “Yeah, he tells people a lot of things.”

  He wouldn't let go of my arm again.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don't worry about it.”

  “You mean he lied? He was just using me?”

  A heartrending wail pierced the frigid air. We had left the magic circle of light. I could feel my regular life returning, with a vengeance.

  He looked over to the food table.

  “I think your child needs you.”

  Chapter Five

  The cold got worse. I gave up trying to do anything and just concentrated on surviving. The chill seemed to be coming from inside my bones. I wrapped myself in a million shawls. Harvey couldn't understand. He didn't feel it.

  “And you're better insulated than I am. Women have an extra layer of fat.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “It's basic anatomy. If we were both in freezing water, I would die first.”

  “I can't swim,” I pointed out. “I'd dro
wn before I froze.”

  “I'd hold you up.”

  “Then you'd drown too. I'd pull you under.”

  “Not if I held you from behind. There's a way to do it. I was a lifeguard for a few summers. I'd hook one arm under your shoulder and across your chest. It's like a hammerlock.”

  “And what would you do, once you got me in a hammer-lock?”

  He thought about it. “Drag you to shore.”

  “Kicking and screaming.”

  “In your case, no doubt.”

  “Did you ever really rescue anyone?”

  “I pulled people out of the water. I don't know if they would necessarily have drowned.”

  We were on the phone, having what I called phone sex, what he called the daily check-in. I don't know how he made the time, he sounded so busy at the hospital, but we managed to talk every afternoon.

  “Why are you at Marjorie's?”

  “I have to water the plants.”

  “How long can that take, five minutes?”

  “It's something to do.”

  I watched Ann play on the living room carpet. Marjorie had been gone longer than she planned. Almost a month, now. She'd called twice, apologizing, but not saying why she hadn't come back. Or where she was, it occurred to me later. The second call had been a bad connection, with waves of static rising and falling between us that only I could hear.

  “Is there food left? In the refrigerator, I mean.”

  “No. She left it empty. Which reminds me, what do you want for dinner?”

  We talked more. I liked this, the tangled undergrowth of marriage, conversation that wasn't quite pointless but not directed toward any particular goal, more a mutual repair job on each other's psyche, a reminder of why we were together, that our thoughts, or at least our words, could mesh, even if our bodies and feelings temporarily couldn't.

  “I have to go.”

  “I'll see you tonight.”

  After he hung up, I snooped, more marveling at the organization than looking for clues to what happened. She had left the place in perfect shape. The china was neatly boxed, labeled, and stacked in a corner. It was as if they'd both abandoned the marriage, which was still humming along nicely by itself, without the need for people. I walked through it, fingering wall hangings, picking up figurines. I read the writing underneath, those marks scored on the base.