I walked into the living room. It was huge and luxurious. There were white sofas scattered with cushions, and brass tables with glass tops. There were boldly patterned, swagged curtains tied with ribbons, and photos everywhere in silver frames. It was not quite as vulgar as I had expected; she must have had an interior designer in to help her.
I went over to the windows. The view was breathtaking. Manhattan rose below me, cliffs of buildings knife-sharp in sunshine and shadow. The city was laid out at my feet. I had never seen it as a whole until now. Downtown rose sky-scrapers, tall and slender and thin-skinned in glittering glass; some were tinted dark and some rose in spires, reflecting the sun. The AT&T building was the colour of bleached liver, its top was carved in a niche, like a piece of Chippendale. Across the park stood the sandy-blonde apartment buildings of the Upper East Side, topped with bushes and copper-green roofs. Beyond them rose up block after block of buildings, growing hazy in the distance. Smoke gently steamed from their roofs. Unknown to its inhabitants below, the whole city was breathing.
I turned round. Fidelia had put on her coat; she was waiting to leave.
‘How often do you come here?’ I asked.
‘I come each morning from nine o’clock to noon,’ she said.
‘Why don’t you take the rest of the week off?’ I said.
She stared at me. ‘But . . .’
I smiled at her. ‘I’m fine by myself,’ I said. ‘I’ll manage.’
‘But what will Miss Dune –?’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’ll call and tell her.’
So began the most extraordinary week of my life. Looking back, I can’t remember what I did for the first day or so, except walk from room to room. I seldom went out, except to take the dog and his accompanying pooper-scooper to the Park. At night I slept in Lila’s bed, under satin sheets that smelt of her perfume. Her bedroom was decorated in a French Provençal theme, all ruched drapes and little flowery cushions. She had a walk-in closet the size of my bedroom back in London; it was filled with jogging suits and spangled evening dresses. She had a pink marble bathroom with gold taps and a sunken jacuzzi. I explored everything, of course. I opened the bathroom cabinet and inspected her many medicaments – she was even more of a hypochondriac than I had suspected. I sniffed her bath gels and rubbed her moisturiser into my shins. I pulled open the drawers in her bedroom, while Orson darted at my heels with little playful nips. Her maid had kept things outwardly tidy, but Lila was sluttish. I had guessed that. In her dressing-table drawer I found a hairbrush choked with hairs and a powdery sediment of half-squeezed make-up tubes. In another drawer lay a charnel-house of used plastic razors. Repelled and yet fascinated, I sifted through the debris.
She had masses and masses of underwear; silk, lace and even plain stretchy cotton. I opened the closet and felt her rows of dresses; I stroked her sable coat. From the walls her face gazed at me; in the bedroom, nearly all the photos featured herself at various stages of her career, it was a shrine to her narcissism. There were framed publicity stills – Lila with Walter Matthau, Lila with Johnny Carson. There was a poolside snapshot of her with an unknown, muscular man, maybe one of her husbands. There was a blurred photo of her as a little girl, standing outside a trailer-home. She looked like me, when I was young; she really did.
I leafed through her correspondence, promising myself a more thorough inspection of that later. There were a couple of shelves of books, mainly the kind that people leave behind in hotels: Danielle Steele, Judith Krantz, Women Who Always Say ‘No’, or maybe it was Women Who Always Say ‘Yes’, I can’t remember. Victoria Principal’s Workout Book. A set of leatherbound Giants of Russian Literature, inscribed ‘With love and respect, Craig’ and obviously never opened.
There was another bedroom, decorated in blue. In the corner was an unused-looking exercise bike. There was another marble bathroom. There was a huge, country-style kitchen with shiny wooden counters; they looked unused, too. There was a freezer crammed with Häagen-Dazs ice-cream and a fridge full of vitamin pills, apricot kernels and suppositories. At the bottom was a forgotten bag of salad; it had rotted into blackened slime. I flung it into the garbage. There was a glass-fronted cabinet crammed with brand-new electrical appliances: a soda-stream, a waffle-maker. Like many New Yorkers, she obviously never cooked.
Wrapped in her bathrobe I sat eating breakfast whilst the TV babbled and the ice-maker periodically grumbled in the bowels of the fridge and haemorrhaged ice-cubes. For a few hours Lila had slipped into my life; now I had slipped into hers. For a week I could live the pampered life of a film star. IMAGINE, said the plaque. Imagine being Lila. I swallowed some of her vitamin C pills and made myself some redwood-blossom tea. I smelt her opened packets of cranky infusions. Her junk food was hidden away, like pornography. In a cupboard under the counter I found her hoard of M&Ms, Snicker bars, Marshmallow Puffs and Chocolate Pinwheels.
In the evenings, when it grew dark, I fixed myself a drink and wrapped myself up in her sable. I sat on the balcony, next to her rusting barbecue, and gazed at the fairytale view. Lila couldn’t possibly have appreciated it the way I did. The Citicorp building breathed out frosty white light; the skyscrapers were topped with winking red beacons as if they were sending secret messages. Turrets and façades were dramatically spotlit, like the backdrop to some gigantic opera. The neon sign on the Hitachi building said TODAY’S WEATHER: COLD. I heard the clackety-clack of helicopters and the faint hooting of the traffic far below. I trained my binoculars on the penthouse windows of my rich neighbours in the sky, watching shapes moving across rooms and switching on TVs. They were oblivious to me, but I could see their faces as they talked.
I felt curiously blank, those first few days. It was like the period between reading a script and beginning rehearsals; I was empty, and waiting to start filling out my role. I felt utterly detached from everything. I remember dragging the dog out onto the balcony one day, and showing him the cabs down in the street. They scurried like beetles.
‘Your namesake in The Third Man, know what he said?’ I lifted him up by the loose skin of his neck and pointed him down at the street. ‘He said would you feel any pity if one of those dots stopped for ever?’ Orson whimpered. ‘You’ve never heard of The Third Man, have you? Wonder if your mistress has.’
And each night I lay in Lila’s bed, touching myself under her sheets.
After a couple of days I reckoned that Trev would be back in London. Lying in an Eau de Jonquil bubble bath I phoned him, but all I got was the answerphone. In my huskiest voice I left a message.
‘I’m having a jacuzzi, honey, in my million-dollar penthouse here on Central Park. I’m soaping myself oh so slowly, I wish you could join me. Sweetheart, I’m up on the thirty-first floor and I have two bedrooms with ensuite bathrooms and a lounge the size of a ballroom. It’s so neat!’
When I put the phone down I thought: why should he believe me? After all I was always lying to him on the phone, spinning him a fantasy. It was one of our games.
Hearing my own voice gave me a jolt. With no maid around, the only creature I had spoken to was the surly and unresponsive Orson who lay, a white ball of fluff, on his mistress’s bed for most of the day. The only way I could get him to jump off was by feeding him M&Ms; he had a passion for the yellow ones. He gobbled them down, slobberingly, glaring at me from under his shaggy eyebrows.
After my bath I dried myself, then I sat at Lila’s dressing table. It was a sumptuous altar, loaded with bottles. The mirror was surrounded by theatrical lights. I started making up my face, dabbing on Lila’s blusher and outlining my lips into a thick curve. Behind me the TV babbled; it was some 24-hour cable chat-show, and a teenager was delivering a homily about his crack-abuse. ‘Like, it made me a different person,’ he droned. ‘I felt, like, I was capable of anything.’
I pinned back my hair and took down her wig from its stand. It was a long, blonde wig, identical to her own hair. She’d told me that she wore it sometimes when her own
hair was out of condition. I put it on. I swirled my head from side to side, watching the blonde hair swing against my cheek. ‘I felt I was these two persons,’ said the TV.
I felt a shiver of stage-fright. I was sitting in my dressing room; at last they had called me to go on stage. Hushed in the darkness, my audience was waiting.
I went to the closet and chose myself one of Lila’s most glamorous dresses – a red, sequinned Bill Blass. Slowly I unsheathed it from its dry-cleaning bag. I stepped into it and zipped it up; it held me like a skin. I had already put on her underwear and stockings, I forgot to tell you that. For an actress, the appropriate underwear is very important; it makes you move differently, it makes you become one with your character. Shoes help, too. Bette Davis said: ‘I think upwards from my feet.’
Wriggling my hips, I wandered around the apartment. I tossed my hair, and came to a halt in front of one of her innumerable mirrors.
My breath stopped. It was Lila, standing there. Lush, pouty lips; sooty eyes. I watched myself as she twined a strand of hair around her finger; Lila often did that when she was perplexed.
‘Holy shit, is that a zit?’ she asked, frowning at her face in the glass. She wrinkled her nose. ‘Am I failing to relate to men on account of my father fixation? Why can I only get it together with assholes, who increase my low self-esteem? It’s so goddam self-destructive.’ There was a pack of Salems in the inlaid cigarette box. She took one out of its pack and lit it with her silver table-lighter, inscribed affectionately from Mike Ovitz. She blew menthol smoke out of her nostrils. ‘I’m feeling kinda insecure. Shall I crack open a bottle of bourbon or call my analyst?’ Lila sighed. ‘That Jules, now she has taste. She’s real cultivated. Like, I buy books by the yard but she reads the damn things. What she’s got you can’t purchase. I’m talking class, I’m talking intelligence. Sometimes I’m so damn jealous I want to strangle her. Maybe I should call my analyst after all.’
Suddenly the phone rang. I jumped.
It was Lila. ‘How are you, honey?’ she said, her voice faint and crackling. ‘How d’you like the apartment? Is everything OK?’
I pulled off the wig guiltily. ‘It’s lovely,’ I said. ‘Just beautiful.’ I rubbed off my lipstick with the back of my hand – God knows why, it was only lipstick. ‘I’m having a wonderful time.’
She sounded in terrific spirits. It was go per cent humidity, she’d got a heat rash, but the project they were working on, this new picture, it was real exciting, and somebody wanted her to endorse a new brand of spaghetti sauce.
‘Listen kid,’ she said. ‘Can you do me a favour? It’s my Mom’s birthday tomorrow and I haven’t done a damn thing about it. In my desk I have the number of this flower store on Columbus, could you get the number and I’ll get some sent to her?’
I sat there on the bed, gazing at the phone – it was one of those fiddly white-and-brass reproduction jobs, the sort of phone people have in Totteridge. I paused, and then I said, ‘Why don’t I take them to her? Then I can give her your love, in person.’
It was simple curiosity, I guess. Just a jaunt. It would get me out of New York City, I could see New Jersey. I could see where Lila came from. It wasn’t so strange, was it?
I bought some flowers, charging them to Lila, and hired a car from a Hertz place near the Lincoln Center. Singing lustily, I negotiated my way through the traffic, crossing Amsterdam Avenue and heading for the West Side Highway. I’ve always loved driving. The English Jules had pottered around in a Renault and campaigned for the reduction of noxious emissions. But there was another Jules waiting to be released. America had released me, just as Trev had released me all those months before, opening me up in the dark. We all have doubles, the voices inside us which dare to say the unsayable, which shout out swearwords in church. We have our own stuntmen, who boldly perform our fantasies for us, heedless of danger; who shoplift from department stores and fuck strange people in hotel rooms. I once knew a woman who picked up messages from Neptune through the fillings in her teeth. She had ended up in a locked ward in the Maudsley, poor cow. Didn’t she understand? Our voices don’t come from outer space, they are much more interesting than that. They come from the movie running in our heads, parallel to our own disappointing lives; any time we can switch it on and become as macho as Mel Gibson or as seductive as Lila Dune. They are inside us, waiting to be activated. There was a Lila Dune inside me; over the past months I had come to know her well. She was tackier and prettier than me; she was more vulgar and sexy. Scratch the surface and she was there, like the mess inside Lila’s dressing table. She was simpler, too; more generous and impulsive. And now I was going to visit her mother.
I drove through the Holland Tunnel and emerged on the New Jersey Turnpike, blinking in the sunshine.
‘. . . here is the news, sponsored by First Investors Fund for Income . . . handgun conviction appeal quashed . . . hostage in Lebanon . . .’
I wound down the window; my hair whipped the side of my face, stinging my cheek as I drove. I put my foot down, speeding past Interstate Exit signs, past an out-of-town shopping mall marooned in a sea of parked cars. I felt exhilarated, driving into the heartland of America, into Lila’s past. I felt like a detective.
‘. . . come visit our Savings Adventure!’ urged the radio.
For the first time in weeks I thought about my mother. Since coming to New York I had phoned her, once, but we really lost contact long ago. Like a local radio station she had gradually grown fainter and fainter, until I was no longer within her transmission area. We had never had much in common, and since my father’s death we had even less. After someone dies, or leaves, their partner reverts to type, as if for all those years they had been holding themselves back. She had become even pettier, if that were possible, wittering on about how she must remember to take her library books back, and where did she leave the Baby Bio? It’s extraordinary, the amount of things a really boring person can find to talk about. You would think they would run out, at some point. Her prattle was as seamless and exhausting as the disc jockey on my radio, a loop cyclically returning again and again to the First Investors Fund, the weather and the unchanged trauma of the news. My mother understood nothing about my dreams and aspirations, and if she herself had any, there was too much babbling interference for me to hear.
I had driven twenty miles. I passed trailer parks and roadside diners, gas stations and ‘Krazy Vin’s Nite Spot’, marooned in a parking lot. There were no villages, no towns, nowhere you could call home. Where did Americans come from? As time passed I had the sensation that I was simply driving between two rows of studio scenery: the passing façades of furniture stores and clapboard houses were propped up beside the road, and behind them was nothingness. I have since discovered that most of the States is like this, but at the time I felt airy and disorientated. Who was Lila? Was she born out of nothingness, like a genie out of a bottle? Was she just a collection of movies, wigs and a closet full of clothes?
‘. . . so lightly carbonated you can shake it without taking a bath . . .’
Lila had given instructions. I took the exit at Ortho Pharmaceuticals, a long factory ranged behind swelling lawns. The manufacturers of my diaphragm, I realised, as I drove past its bushes nestling between its landscaped, breasty curves . . .
‘. . . you want any Pontiac, anywhere? Look in the Nynex Yellow pages . . .’
I thought of my own past, my own unborn possibilities. The children I had never had, the roles I had never played. I switched off the radio. Lila’s own past was a collection of interviews and clippings which I had found stuffed into a filing cabinet back in her apartment. Accounts of her early life were somewhat confused. According to MS, she was brought up in Plainfield, NJ. According to Star Secrets it was Plainville, Conn. Her father’s original Polish name was variously misspelt, ranging from Dunnacovicva through to Dunacovika. One clipping gave her a baby brother and another gave her four ex-husbands instead of two. Most agreed that she was born in rural poverty,
a Steinbeckian poor white scenario which featured a trailer home, struggling mother and a truck-driver father conspicuous by his absence. According to People magazine: ‘Lila Dune, smouldering siren of hit pictures Touch and Go, Prime Heat and formerly Jade in CBS’s long-running TV weepie Beverly Boulevard, grew up under the spell of her father, a charismatic haulage contractor who first idolised then abandoned his doting daughter.’ According to a yellowing clipping from the Detroit Examiner, ‘Teenage sizzler Lila Dune worked at her local Howard Johnsons to support her mother, and attended dance classes in the evenings.’ The National Enquirer, however, had it that she worked as a sales clerk at J.C. Penneys whilst posing for pin-ups on her days off. It added: ‘Mauled by killer pit bulls at age sixteen, budding beauty Lila Dune would have grown up scarred for life were it not for the bravery of her neighbor, gutsy retiree Karl Sudenberg.’ But as this item was flanked by one story about a headless ghost spotted in a police patrol car and another about a woman with three breasts I couldn’t vouch for its accuracy. An eighteen-year-old newspaper clipping hinted at a whole cupboardful of skeletons in her past. ‘Rising young starlet Lila “Beverly Boulevard” Dune’s husband Vince, sueing for divorce, is claiming substantial alimony checks, or else threatens kiss’n’tell revelations concerning her steamy off-set affairs, her spells in the ‘nut house’, and secrets from her scandalous teenage years.’ This first husband, Vince, was variously depicted as a high-school drop-out, a local hero, a minor felon and a drag-car racer. Perhaps all of them.
No doubt these confusions stemmed from journalists’ casual relationship with the truth, surpassed only by Lila’s own somewhat shaky hold on reality. After all, she had been reinvented so often. Like learning her lines, she could re-read her own myths and start to believe whatever past she had been assigned. Even I had constructed a past for her, in Chez Hortense, and look how our visiting fan had lapped it up, decapitated dolls and all. I could construct a past for myself, complete with stage triumphs and stormy affairs with famous leading men. What is the past, after all, but our own shifting wishes and interpretations? It is a series of line drawings, waiting to be coloured in with whatever crayons we have to hand. We needn’t even make up new events; we can just pick and choose – a shading here, a highlight there, a few judicious rubbings-out.
The Stand-In Page 16
