The Stand-In

by Deborah Moggach

  ‘I hear what you’re saying,’ he said.

  When I came out of the hotel, it was raining. The rain drummed like a war tattoo on the leathery leaves as I walked to my car. All over the city I sensed the plants opening up and drinking.

  I too was gasping for life. This nowhere city had tried to rub out my existence but I was fighting back. I had argued not for Jane, but for myself. And I was going to bloody win.

  There was trouble ahead, I knew that. I knew I was behaving dangerously, but wouldn’t you? I remember that night so clearly. I ate in the hotel coffee shop; it was too wet to seek out somewhere else. Afterwards I hurried across the courtyard. The pool was goosepimpled with raindrops; the scent of damp concrete gave me a lurch of homesickness for England.

  I went upstairs and scuttled along the walkway to my room. I hadn’t seen the altered, ponytailed Trev for days; absence had hardened him into my enemy. I could hardly catch up with myself. For two years I had festered with imagined jealousies, but now it had become true, in this most unlikely, banner-headline manner. I couldn’t entirely believe it. I suppose I was suffering from delayed shock. When my father died, it was weeks before it truly hit me. Even his funeral had passed in a glazed way which I couldn’t connect to the real person. It was only later that I was poleaxed by his loss.

  That night I stood under the shower and turned the water scalding hot. I still couldn’t quite believe it, that Trev had left me. At odd moments, I still expected him to walk through the door. Whistling, he would saunter around the room, jangling his van keys and flipping through my magazines. He would lean against the bathroom doorway and grin at me as I stood in the shower. His eyebrows were raised, his eyes were running up and down my body. I wouldn’t know if he found me hilarious or deeply desirable. Then he would lunge forward and kiss me, licking my face like a dog, getting his shoulders soaked. I would drop the soap and we would struggle, dragging the shower curtain with us, stumbling against the lavatory . . . giggling at first and then suddenly, blindingly, serious . . . Oh his mouth, his hands.

  The atmosphere on the set was growing more tense, day by day. Trev didn’t appear; he was probably avoiding me. Lila didn’t speak to me. There were rumours that she was having problems with the part, and making things difficult for Hutt. I heard her shout, ‘I’m not wearing these goddam glasses! They make me look like a fucking professor!’ She spent a lot of time in her dressing room. One day a scene had to be abandoned because, she said she was hyperventilating, and we lost half a day’s filming. The next day the producers appeared and met with Hutt. Maybe she was going to have another of her nervous breakdowns; she’d had enough of them in the past. After all, she was a highly unstable woman. How Trev put up with her, Christ knew. He should have stayed with somebody strong and intelligent like me. Maybe she was going to start hitting the bottle again. Maybe she would go AWOL and wake up in a Ramada Inn in Indianapolis. They’d lock her up in a loony bin, which was where she should have been all along.

  I inspected my face in the bathroom mirror. I looked gaunt; my lips looked thinner. My tan had faded, from three weeks indoors on the sound stage. She didn’t look like me any more; what glittering eyes she had! Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? Shakily, I spread lipstick around my mouth, until it was smeared crimson.

  The weather had turned colder. At night I walked for miles, briskly, humming tunes from the sixties. At the hotel I chatted to the night captain. We were friendly; he had seen me come and go a lot, these past evenings.

  ‘So how’re your kids doing?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine,’ I replied. I’d told him that I had got two children back in London, a little boy and a little girl. It gave me a buzz, to talk about them. We’d discussed what gifts I should bring them back, from LA.

  ‘Big day tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We’re shooting the mad scene.’

  ‘Mad scene?’

  ‘Where Mr Rochester shows Jane his crazy wife.’ I grinned. ‘Can’t wait.’

  Nine

  THAT NIGHT THE earth didn’t just move for Trev and Lila. There was a tremor, too, north of Los Angeles. It was just a minor one, some low number on the Richter Scale. Merely a windowpane-rattler.

  I heard about it on the radio as I drove to the studio. Each morning I crossed the hills to Burbank. Sunset . . . Laurel . . . Mulholland. Houses hung crazily over the canyons; film stars’ hideaways teetered on the edge of the precipices. Wooden ranches and Moorish bungalows . . . high-tech glass boxes with their jutting sun decks . . . did they really believe they were safe? One two three . . . a big breath . . . I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow them all down.

  Below the smog line the sands would shift, the freeways crack. The dry hills would shift and crash bang wallop! Too bad, folks!

  The sky was a hazy blue, as it is today. I’m sitting here in the sunshine, trying to remember that morning as I drove past the flimsy dwellings of that flimsy city. Non-city. Nowhere place. Raymond Chandler said it had no more soul than a paper cup. It’s dissolved now; I can’t grasp it. I couldn’t grasp it then; it slipped through my fingers.

  Everyone was jumpy, that morning. I presumed it was because of the earth tremor, Californians’ regular but unpredictable brush with mortality. They were all scared stiff of the Big One: their own Apocalypse that was, so far, locked away in the rock, geology’s best-kept secret. Even the laid-back Hutt looked nervous.

  Lila was in wardrobe, having her wedding dress fitted. We were shooting the climax of the movie where Jane, in her wedding dress, is dragged upstairs by Mr Rochester and confronted with his first wife, a gibbering, psychotic junkie.

  I ate a bagel with the standby chippie. ‘Lila’s raising hell this morning,’ he said. ‘Must be the weather. She’s been bawling out Hutt.’

  He said he had been at a bar, the night before, when he had heard the news of the tremor. He said the bar was run by Dean Martin’s old double. Or was it Robert Mitchum’s? I can’t remember now. The guy was an ageing alcoholic, I do remember that. Stuntmen, doubles, stand-ins – they all seemed to end up ageing alcoholics.

  They had set up the shot, but nothing seemed to be happening. Mrs Rochester’s room was furnished like a clinic – all white walls and an institutional bed. The actress who played her sat on the bed. Her hair was black and matted. She looked like the Wild Woman of Borneo.

  Tempers were short. Hutt had disappeared somewhere. My stomach ached, for some reason, and when I poured myself a coffee my hand was trembling. Maybe it’s another tremor, I thought. Maybe it’s me who is perfectly sane, perfectly steady, and it’s the rest of the world that’s collapsing.

  I lit a cigarette. Trev was around. I had seen his car in the parking lot. He must be in Lila’s dressing room.

  The minutes ticked by. Something was wrong. Even Bruce, one of the more Neanderthal grips, asked, ‘Where the fuck is everybody?’ The actress who played Grace Poole inspected her watch impatiently, like a staff nurse. She wore a starchy white uniform.

  By 9.30 neither Hutt nor Lila had appeared. The atmosphere was edgy and yet oppressive. I suddenly had to get outside and breathe some fresh air. I hurried to the door.

  Lila stood outside, arguing with Hutt. She wore an ivory satin wedding dress, but she had pulled off the veil.

  ‘I don’t give a flying fuck,’ she said. ‘I’m not working with that fruit any more.’

  I dodged behind a truck, and listened.

  ‘She’s off her head,’ hissed Lila. ‘She’s a fucking psychotic! Why don’t they lock her up someplace?’

  Just for a moment I thought she was talking about the mad Mrs Rochester, that she was psyching herself up for the scene and improvising some lines. I crouched behind the truck, trying to catch her words. Hutt was arguing with her, in a low voice, but I couldn’t hear because a helicopter clattered overhead.

  ‘. . . she scares the shit out of me . . . she acts so weird . . .’

  The noise was so loud it seemed the sky was breaking. I leant agains
t the door handle.

  ‘. . . you notice, she never speaks to me now?’ said Lila. ‘We used to be pals, we used to have fun together.’

  The clatters faded away. I heard her quite clearly now.

  ‘You’ve seen what she’s been doing, showing me up in front of everybody. What’s gotten into her? This is the most important performance of my career and it’s going down the goddam toilet! What’s she trying to do, take over my goddam part? They all get too big for their boots, that’s the problem . . .’

  Hutt said something. I couldn’t hear.

  Lila was speaking. ‘Tee says you’ve got to get her off the picture. He says she’s damaging me – Hutt, I’m cracking up –’

  ‘But Lila –’

  ‘Last night he had to call the cops!’

  ‘The cops?’ said Hutt.

  I felt dizzy. I pressed against the door, my eyes squeezed shut. I smelt the warm metal.

  ‘She’s been parking her car outside my house,’ said Lila. ‘Three times – Tee’s seen her. She drives up at night and turns off the engine. She just sits there, in the dark. I’ve gone to bed by then but Tee’s seen her. Hutt, it gives me the heebie-jeebies!’

  ‘What happened last night?’

  ‘When the cops arrived, she’d gone. What the hell’s she think she’s doing?’

  There was a pause. The sun had come out; it beat down on my face. I hardly dared breathe.

  How come he’d seen me? I hadn’t seen him. Just lights in the windows; sometimes a shadow moving. That insect, scraping away in the bushes. The faint sound of a TV.

  Hutt took Lila away. I only realised this, because there was a silence. I peered out from the truck and saw them hurrying towards the production office, a low building fringed with palm trees.

  I didn’t tell you, did I? That I had been driving there and parking outside her house? Well, why should I?

  Anyway, it didn’t seem worth mentioning.

  At school, long ago, I stole some money from another girl’s locker. They never found me out, but I remember the days passing, and how I waited for the headmistress’s footsteps.

  I didn’t have to wait long, that February morning. At 10.35 I was chatting to Mr Rochester, who like everybody else had been hanging about for hours. We were discussing Jamie Lee Curtis, who was starring in some TV cop show. I’m glad to say that I was behaving perfectly normally.

  I sensed Chelsea coming in, before I saw her. Then she was beside me, and whispering into my ear. ‘Jules, could you go to the production office?’

  How glazed and unreal it all seems now! I’m pretending it’s a movie.

  It’s not quite right, of course. If it were a film, they would have re-scripted that part. The showdown would have exploded during the climax of the mad scene. Lila is suddenly grappling not with the mad Mrs Rochester but with her stand-in. You’ve been spying on me! She’s clawing her hair and screaming at her. The stand-in punches back and starts screaming back You’ve stolen my boyfriend! Two blonde women are fighting like cats, spitting and shouting in front of a speechless crew. Hutt strides over. Clear the set! he shouts, his commands echoing through the ranks like a jungle call. Clear the set! . . . fainter and fainter. We’re finally torn apart. We sit back, panting, our breasts heaving. We’re sweating like Raquel Welch in that thing where she wore the suede bikini . . . slippery cleavage, tousled hair . . .

  I told you that they wanted to film my story, didn’t I? CBS, I think. Well, that’s the way they’ll film it. I’ll tell them it happened that way; it’s more filmic, isn’t it.

  Life’s not like that. But it’s just as unreal. I remember the walk to the production office. The joints in my legs felt loose. I passed the rows of blinding cars, oh so many cars, everywhere rows and rows of them. I passed a hedge of oleanders, eternally in blossom. I stepped over a low fence and crossed the plasticky, woven grass. Here and there were little puddles, where it had been hosed. The door of the production office was open.

  Walton, the production manager, was alone. He wore a crimson t-shirt with some lettering on it that I couldn’t read. He didn’t meet my eye; instead, he addressed the framed movie posters on the wall.

  ‘. . . deeply regret . . . must let you go . . .’

  I remember some of his words. Not all of them. I was sitting in an armchair, running my fingers over its ribbed wool.

  ‘. . . it’s not my decision, but you must appreciate . . . Miss Dune is our number one priority . . .’

  He was talking to a poster of Al Pacino, who gazed back, droopy-lidded.

  ‘. . . she feels threatened and insecure . . . we can’t take that risk . . . she may be making a mistake, but without her there’s no movie . . . you have real talent, there’s a real future for you, but . . .’

  His eyes shifted to Bruce Willis, a poor likeness. We both looked at the twin barrels of his rifle.

  ‘. . . financial arrangements . . . reimbursed in full . . . call you tomorrow . . .’

  So I was kicked off the picture. Mercedes, Hutt’s blonde secretary, took over my place as Lila’s stand-in, and in two days I was on a Continental Airlines plane, flying back to New York.

  NEW YORK

  One

  CHANCES ARE, YOU’VE met a murderer. Maybe just briefly, in a swing door or in a queue at a check-out. Maybe you’ve sat next to one in the bus. Statistically you must have passed several in the street, during your lifetime. You didn’t recognise them, did you? Their breath doesn’t smell differently. They look just like you or me, in fact. I’m the same as you, just driven one stage further, to breaking point. I’ve met plenty of murderers. Pitiful specimens, most of them. But they’ve only killed once. Women don’t make a habit of it, you see. They don’t go into McDonalds and spatter the place with machine-gun fire, grinning like Manson as the skittle-bodies fall.

  You think I behaved oddly, on occasion? No more oddly than you, if you look into your hearts. It’s only hindsight that makes you glimpse a pattern and draw your own hasty and smug conclusions. You shape up a person’s life to make sense of it all. I have plenty of time for hindsight now. It’s my own private entertainment channel, non-subscription, and I can re-run it in my head as frequently as I like. Which is often. Pretty continuously, actually.

  Those early weeks in February I didn’t know who I hated more: Lila or Trev. Lila had stolen my lover, she had played earthquakes and collapsed my world. More than that, she had stolen something in me, and was too damn self-absorbed to notice. Film stars are egomaniacs, and Lila was a film star down to her painted, slightly-chipped fingernails. She hadn’t even thanked me for visiting her bloody mother; she didn’t even know anything about me. I was as irrelevant to her as a piece of india-rubber.

  But then it was Trev who had persuaded her to get me thrown off the movie. It was Trev who had jilted me; who had blown his nose on me and thrown me away like an old tissue. Worst of all – worse than anything – he really didn’t seem to care. He and Lila were two of a kind. They were instant amnesiacs. They lived for the moment, like beasts.

  I sub-leased an apartment in New York. Hutt, probably prompted by guilt, had given me the number of his sister who was out of town and who needed someone to rent her place. It was down near the Village, on 14th Street and 6th: a huge, shabby apartment building with rusting windows and jutting air-conditioners. It seemed a suitable enough place to go crazy. New York is a place that drives you to extremes. If you’re happy, it drives you ecstatic. If you’re depressed, it drives you suicidal. If you’re crazy – why, it drives you crazier!

  You thought I would go back to England? Nope, siree! Not me. I lay on my bed, brooding. Way down below I heard the wailing police sirens. New York City sucked me in, all over again. I lay immobile for hours, like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, planning and plotting my revenge. The apartment was just a single room with a pull-down bed. A fat, old-fashioned radiator squatted under the window. It was my only companion. Occasionally it gargled, and at night it rattled as if it had bronchitis
. My room was sweltering, but outside my window a thousand smoke-signals rose from the skyscrapers, from the Chippendale cleft of the AT&T building, from manholes in the icy streets.

  I went out, some nights. You wouldn’t believe some of the interesting people I met. One woman loomed up out of the dark. Her hair was threaded with bits of kitchen foil. She smiled at me and said, ‘I’m an accident waiting to happen.’

  Sometimes I took a bus. I didn’t know where they were going, but then nor did most New Yorkers. The city teemed with mysterious buses from rogue bus companies; their windows were tinted black and they took routes of their own devising, steaming through the streets and suddenly halting at unknown bus-stops. But at least they were warm and I was on the move. My spirits lifted, then. Most of the passengers seemed to be deranged.

  ‘You talking to me, lady?’ a man asked me, once.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘What’s this guy Trev?’

  I looked out of the window, concentrating on the neon lights. The man went on staring at me. Why did everybody behave so strangely?

  I’ll tell you where I liked to go. Atriums. Those glassed-in plazas. They were nice and warm, for one thing. The same temperature as LA. The same plants, too. I had three favourites: the IBM, the Citicorp and the Park Avenue. Anyone could go and sit in them for the whole day if they liked, as long as they didn’t act weird. Well, really weird.

  They were public spaces, you see. The property developers had to donate them to the city in return for building a socking great skyscraper on top of them. I liked to take my lunch to the IBM Plaza. I’d buy a kebab, at a stand in the street. There was an open space nearby, between the buildings. Frail, leafless saplings were planted there, against a concrete waterfall. It was a whole wall, running with water; it seemed like the building was crying. But it was too cold to sit on one of the spindly wire chairs and I would push through the revolving doors into the huge, hushed IBM.