by Alon Preiss
A young, curly-haired man announced that he knew someone who was married to somebody who worked for public television, and he blurted out perhaps a little too quickly that Alice’s film would be perfect for that difficult-to-fill space between shows. Right after he said it, he seemed to realize that he was perhaps over-promising, but, the die cast, the now-nervous and increasingly sweaty young man kept right on promising. Perhaps as the result of what might have been his rigorous and desperate arm twisting, Alice’s little cartoon premiered six months later in the dead-time between documentaries on the Saturday evening schedule of some little weak-signaled PBS station out in Nebraska. This achievement made Alice proud, but it also made her laugh.
One of Alice’s busy office friends called her from work two days after the party. “When I left your home,” she said, “I felt as though I were stepping out of some sort of fairyland, and back into the real world. Like leaving the wardrobe in some Narnia book.” Her voice sounded accusing, although Alice suspected that her friend’s tone was unintentional.
Alice did not want to be tomorrow’s Walt Disney — she was just having a little fun, and testing herself — yet neither could she bear to return exclusively to her evening role as Blake Maurow’s arm-thing. Soon after the completion of her cartoon, she announced to Blake, almost offhandedly, that she intended to be a mystery novelist, and that she had invented a character modeled after herself. She explained the premise: One of Alice’s friends worked in a scientific research organization and had begun to send her messages over the computer. Messages from a few other busy and high-tech friends had begun gradually beeping onto her computer during the day. This had given her an idea; Alice told Blake that the character she envisioned was a bona fide computer genius who solved mysteries using the latest technology. Her book, she told Blake, would be called Murder on the Web, thinking of the name a moment before she said it. “Write two chapters,” Blake said with a smile, “and I will find someone to publish it.” Within two weeks she finished two chapters, which he took to work with him. He called her at three that afternoon to tell her that a prominent New York publisher had made an offer. She found a big-shot agent named Toby Duggins to negotiate the contract. She made a little money. She finished her first book, and, awaiting publication, began a sequel. She thought that she was a pretty good writer, for someone who had never tried it before. Still, it had all come too easily. Like her cartoon’s gala premiere, the publication of her novel was Blake Maurow’s success, a testament to his vast network of business associates and proof of his persuasive charm. She questioned whether she would ever again have an opportunity to succeed or fail on her own and wondered, not for the first time, whether she’d brought this on herself, keeping herself willfully ignorant of Blake’s wealth until they were safely married. Had some part of her sensed his money at first sight? She didn’t know, and she tried to stop speculating. As she fell asleep that night, she yearned for her next big adventure. She hoped deep in her heart that life had another big adventure in store for her.
Some years ago, back when Blake and Alice were planning their wedding, Alice rediscovered her photograph of Ewell’s penis. Now it did not seem such a remarkably interesting penis after all. She marveled that she had not thought of Ewell at all, for so long. Without thinking much of it, Alice ripped the picture into dozens of pieces, cut up the negative, and threw it all into the kitchen trash. A moment later, she felt a tiny tinge of regret; she did not know what it was she regretted. The feeling passed quickly.
As Alice made preparations to marry Maurow, Ewell sat inside a little bar on the other side of the world, watching a snowstorm whip about outside. He was drunk; the part of the country where he lived and studied was in darkness twenty hours a day; Marja, who would one day become his wife, was sitting beside him; his friend, comforting him. He was drinking and drinking, losing sense of time in the dark.
“I feel that right now, Alice is thinking about me,” he said.
“I don’t know how you can know that,” she said.
“Do you think that Alice cares about me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She thought briefly. “But if she cares at all, then obviously, it’s not very much.”
An honest evaluation. He looked at her — her face so sharp, so angular, and thin and bony, almost severe, but a face that seemed honest to a fault. It seemed that not only would Marja never lie to him, she would always be privy to some deeper truth.
“This is something that happens to everyone,” Marja said. “You’re not alone. Even Alice — I’m sure that even Alice has gone through this, Ewell.”
He imagined Alice feeling this much pain. Tears came to Ewell’s eyes.
Marja wondered if Alice knew what she were missing. On his bedroom wall, Ewell had a large picture of Hans Albers in his Müenchhausen get-up, which Ewell said he looked at to help him sleep. He listened to the song Frank Mills over and over again; he had the American version, the French version, the Swedish version. He was the world’s number one — or only — collector of different versions of that song. He didn’t listen to the song when he was studying, because it made him cry.
Marja put her arm around him. He cried into his drink. Not sobs — just a frowny, quiet, motionless kind of crying. She kept her arm there for an hour, and she let him rest his head on her shoulder, quietly crying, unashamed, at the crowded bar, in the middle of perpetual night, back then, a long time ago.
“Do you know Carly Barrows?” Alice asked, and Grace grunted out a “No.” She ran her fingers along Alice’s upper back.
“A lot of knots up here,” she said. “Are you under any stress?”
Alice said no, though she wanted to say yes. Being so happy — well, not happy, exactly, but not unhappy, not angry, not sad, not worried — it all made her feel rather guilty. Grace’s fingers and arms were powerful today. Alice added, “I wish I were under more stress, Grace. Honest.”
Years ago, Grace had been a model, one who could have become famous, but who didn’t. Alice had never seen photographs from Grace’s youth, but she could imagine. In her early twenties, Grace married, and she agreed to move to Paris to live with her husband and to raise their child. She retired from her career, and then she enjoyed, by her own account, a rather peaceful, happy life for more than a decade. When she hit her late thirties, her husband left her. Not for another woman; not for any particular reason. Later her daughter, all grown up, moved out to Los Angeles, and now she spoke with Grace infrequently. Just because that was the way it had turned out; not because they had anything particularly against each other, so far as Grace could tell.
“Does this hurt?”
Alice said yes. “I’m exercising a lot,” she said. “I see a personal trainer three times a week. I run every day. It’s not stress. My muscles are just sore.”
“I don’t think so. I think I can tell the difference.”
“You can read the knots in my back? Like tea leaves?”
“Not like tea leaves. I can read the knots in your back like The New York Times.”
Talk about lousy luck — Grace was blessed with good looks, a beautiful voice, and smarts, but she’d wasted her most productive years on a man who would leave her, who would then become such a deadbeat on alimony that it would have cost her more to track him down across the Atlantic then she ever would have gotten from him. Now a masseuse, Grace had arthritis, and it was growing worse. From time to time, Grace canceled a session with Alice at the last minute. But Alice still made appointments, set aside an hour a couple times a week. Partly, Alice felt pity. But also, when Grace was feeling strong, her hands were magic. When Alice imagined the idea of Grace getting arthritis and giving up massages, she thought of that cellist, the one who was a prodigy at the age of three, but who contracted multiple sclerosis in her twenties and couldn’t perform anymore. The one whose husband left her when she was very sick, and who died some time later. That cellist, whatever her name was. The tragic one who had everything and then had nothin
g, and then died.
“Well, I’m not stressed,” Alice insisted. “Maybe, also, you know, I’ve been working a lot at my word-processor. Maybe that bothers my back.”
Alice sometimes imagined another world, a place where Grace rejected her husband and became a movie star. Then, years later, settled down with her millions and with a man who really loved her. She still looked thirty to Alice, but what did Alice know about such things? It was as though Grace were keeping herself young in case the past caught up with her, swallowed her whole, and gave her another chance.
“Who’s Carly Barrows, and why should I know her?”
Grace kneaded the muscles in Alice’s left leg.
“Carly Barrows is a TV star,” Alice said. “I’m having lunch with her today.”
“Why?”
“She wants to play Andrea in a TV movie.” She laughed. “So I have to have lunch with her. Maybe I’m a little bit nervous about that. Maybe that’s it.”
Grace said nothing.
“Maybe that’s the explanation for why I have all those knots in my muscles,” Alice said, trying to clarify the obvious.
“Maybe,” Grace said.
At noon, a limo pulled up in front of Alice’s apartment building, the doorman called up to her, and a few moments later Alice ran outside into the smoggy sunshine. The car zipped through the Park, then fearlessly darted in and out of traffic. About twenty minutes later, Alice hopped out at Carly’s hotel, dashed across the sidewalk, into the big hotel lobby, took the elevator up, and up, and then up some more, bounced down the gently-carpeted hallway, tapped on the door of Carly’s suite.
The night before, Alice watched Carly’s television show. Blake was out late at a business dinner, and Alice sat alone in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, the only light in the room the television tube. On TV, the twenty-six-year-old Carly Barrows played a teenage high school Lolita named Tiffany Zimmer. Though a straight A student seemingly on course for Harvard, Tiff (as she was sometimes known) had a jones for older men, particularly, it seemed, the fathers of her young friends. This had apparently remained a well-hidden secret from the high school and the community at large throughout the program’s four-year run. During the first commercial break, a young man stood around in very skimpy black briefs, reciting a Shakespeare sonnet in a vapidly breathy voice. The ad was intended to sell underwear, which looked uncomfortable. Alice recognized the boy as the younger brother of a kid she’d gone to high school with. He was completely hairless, which had not been the case back in high school.
Alice fell asleep halfway through the show, even though it was only 9:30. But she got the point. It wasn’t a bad show, all in all. Carly was a pretty sexy teenager, for a grown woman. The show made a lot of money, and a lot of people enjoyed it, and Alice didn’t look down her nose at that.
Inside, in person, the famous Carly Barrows was rather less dimensional than on television. Surrounded by a crowd of hangers-on all drinking mineral water, and smiling a large ultra-white smile that glinted and sparkled and blinded and conveyed every emotion but honest happiness, the slimmer-than-slim young woman strode across the immense suite, her perfectly- and recently-groomed hair dancing around her like an aura from heaven; her arms outstretched, she grabbed Alice by both shoulders and kissed her almost imperceptibly on her left cheek. Carly was dressed in faded blue jeans and a t-shirt, but her t-shirt was as white as her smile, and her jeans a shade of faded blue engineered for royalty. In her manufactured yet impossible radiance, she suggested Princess Diana — someone indestructible, a being who would never die. She spun about and loudly introduced Alice with such overwrought and exaggerated praise that Alice could feel herself blushing a deep crimson. “When I read her book, I thought: I know this girl,” Carly said. “I thought: I am this girl. I mean, she’s smart, she’s resourceful. She’s a fighter. Like me, there’s a little bit of the hard knocks. And she’s learned that she can’t rely on men to save her.” Then, insignificantly: “I’m going to change her name to Tara. I only play characters whose names start with the letter ‘T’.” The crowd of lickspittles seemed to swell, now forming a circle around Alice and cooing appreciatively. Alice stared down at the floor, she shook her head, wishing it would stop.
Carly dispersed her sycophants. One of them was a revoltingly plastic-handsome man with long, beautiful hair and a self-satisfied smirk, who lingered until the crowd was gone, then kissed Carly gently. “Sergio,” she laugh-whispered, still kissing him. “Go.” Once they were alone, Carly beamed at Alice and exclaimed with utterly unconvincing delight, “Now, let’s have some lunch and talk about Andrea!” Her voice shaded with the hint of a sickly-sweet laugh, her smile very very wide, her uvula seemed to swing and sway in the wind.
On the expansive terrace, the hotel management had set up a little table with a checkerboard tablecloth surrounded by potted trees that blocked out much of the view. Two menus from a French restaurant were set atop the table.
“I try to replicate places I would like to go,” Carly explained, as the two women sat. “Restaurants I remember from before my fame. I can pretend that, again, I’m just ordinary.” She craned her long neck and looked around her. “This is a little garden café in the springtime. You know, those restaurants in Greenwich Village that open up their backyard lots when the weather gets nice? If I went to one of those now, everyone would stare at me. People would lean their heads out of their apartment windows and shout at me and wave.”
Alice flipped open the menu. “Why don’t you just face the world?” she asked.
“I can’t.” Even here in the sunlight, Carly seemed extraordinary — pampered, softened and air-brushed. Her face was drawn in hazy lines on velvet, her skin too smooth, her flesh too pink and blotchless, hovering above Alice in the cloudy blue sky, an otherworldly creature. “I cannot set foot outside and retain my privacy. I want to talk about you, about your work, about these exciting plans I have for our project. And I can’t do that if I get mobbed.”
“Mobbed?”
“I get mobbed whenever I go out,” she said.
“Maybe dress down,” Alice said. “Try not to radiate quite so much. Don’t smile so brightly. Try to look like a regular person.”
Carly pretended to consider this, but then answered, too quickly: “For Marilyn Monroe, that was impossible. There was just a certain something. It’s the same for me. Some of us just can’t blend in with mundane people. Marilyn never could. Neither can I.” She caught a thought, then added, “I’d like to maybe play Marilyn in a TV movie. You know? But I would have to change her name to ... Tina.”
Looking out over the city from a sky-high terrace, drinking a glass of fizzy water because Carly Barrows couldn’t drink wine, because Carly Barrows had trouble with alcohol and had recently quit drinking and could not abide the idea of anyone else drinking. Carly also wouldn’t permit Alice to eat any meat in front of her, so Alice ordered grilled vegetables, and Carly crunched away at a salad. She asked Alice all sorts of questions about Andrea that Alice had never considered. When she comes home from work, does she ever take off all her clothes and sit on the couch naked and watch TV? Carly wondered. When she’s walking from the shower to her bedroom, wrapped in a towel, does she make sure the shade is pulled down?
“Just character stuff,” Carly said. “Background stuff. To help me understand.”
“I don’t know.” Alice shrugged. “Look, my books move very quick. Lotta dialogue, lotta action. Andrea’s never taken a shower. She never comes home and sits around the house. She never goes to the drug store to buy tampons. She does that between novels, I guess, or between chapters. When I’m watching her, she’s solving mysteries. Logged into the universe, her computer asking questions to other computers ... faceless, nameless people out there on the Highway. Or running around New York, chasing down the murderer, dodging bullets. That kind of thing.”
Carly nodded. “But she’s you, right? She looks like you. She lives in New York. She walks around in streets that yo
u walk in.”
“Oh.” Alice now was beginning to understand, and becoming a little bit flattered. Carly was watching her every move — watching her eat her vegetables, trying to catch a mannerism or two. She smiled, and without thinking, Alice began as though reciting a list, long-memorized: “Andrea is a little bit younger than me. Seven years, maybe. She lives in a condo high up in the clouds. When she looks out the window, all she sees is sky, so she walks around the apartment naked with all the shades up. She’s really very pretty and young, and secretly she hopes that somebody will see her — but if anyone ever really did, she’d be mortified. She sunbathes topless on foreign beaches, and if she has affairs at all, it’s only in exotic places with foreign men, and she always leaves them in tears.” Her smile faded a bit. “When she gets to be a little older, she won’t anymore. She won’t do any of those things.”