The Stand-In

by Deborah Moggach

  What a blissfully easy solution for both of them! What did they take me for – some kind of idiot?

  ‘You feeling all right?’

  Roly’s voice startled me. He was looking at me anxiously. The audience was applauding, and the house lights coming up.

  ‘Fine,’ I replied.

  He squeezed my hand. ‘Enjoy the show?’

  ‘Lovely,’ I said. ‘Especially the suicide.’

  Afterwards there was a party. It was given by the producers in a private room at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. I drank a lot of champagne. This waiter, carrying a tray of glasses, kept reappearing like a rerun videotape. When I closed my eyes I pictured him being rewound – marching backwards like clockwork into the crowd – and then coming forward again. It made me giggle.

  I clung to Roly. He was shorter than me, and I imagined squashing his balding head against my breasts. I speculated with drunken, idle curiosity. In my bronze dress I was playing out my fantasy: the simpering starlet. It aroused me. My dress was slashed to the thigh; I remembered exposing myself, in the cubicle, to those two unknown Arabs. This made me giggle, too.

  I’m sure the party was full of famous people, but I didn’t recognise many of them. There were gay young actors wearing poloneck jumpers – powder-blue, pink and yellow. There were ageing, vivacious women with wonderful bone-structure. (‘The only thing you can rely on not to let you down,’ according to my great-aunt.) I heard Elaine Strich’s gravelly voice but I couldn’t see her. Nobody seemed to be drinking much, except me. Coral Browne was there, with her husband Vincent Price. He was immensely tall and benign; he was dressed in an immaculate tweed jacket like a Sunningdale colonel. I seemed to be standing beside him. His feet were so large that they made me giggle, all over again. He told me that they were size thirteen. Or maybe he was telling someone else.

  People kept trying to take Roly away but he kept my arm tucked into his, and introduced me. I suddenly felt absurdly bound to him; it must have been the effect of all those strange faces. Everyone seemed to know everyone else; the New York theatre community is small enough anyway, but the devastation of AIDS had drawn it in on itself, even closer.

  ‘The devastation of AIDS,’ I intoned to myself solemnly, trying not to grin; trying to get the words right. My tongue lolled in my mouth.

  People talked about Marsha and Ted and how somebody was flying in tomorrow from Paris. An elderly man nodded and smiled at me, as if he knew me; he had a lipstick print on his cheek.

  ‘Scott’s writing his memoirs,’ said somebody. ‘The chutzpah!’

  ‘She’s gone into the hospital, the poor sweetie,’ said somebody else. ‘For more tests.’

  A small woman, dressed in black like a crow, asked me about Mrs Thatcher and I must have gibbered a reply. Somebody else seemed to be talking to me about Kenneth Branagh, but I said that I had never met him. Had I? I couldn’t remember. Somebody asked Roly what Lila was doing.

  ‘They finish principal photography next week,’ he replied. ‘She’ll be back mid-March.’ Even in my drunken state, her name jolted me. For an hour or so – what was the time? I couldn’t be bothered to lift my wrist. For a while, anyway, I had forgotten all about her. In fact I couldn’t remember where I was. What were these embossed walls and chandeliers? I knew I should have eaten something, in fact I vaguely remembered Roly pressing a plate of food on me, but God knows where I had left it.

  A woman’s face loomed up. She wore glasses. ‘When I saw you in the theatre,’ she said, ‘I thought it was Lila.’

  The waiter reappeared. I put my empty glass very, very carefully on his tray. I felt weightless; the faces swam in front of me. It suddenly seemed as if Roly was the only person I knew in the world; I gripped his arm, as if I were drowning.

  That night I seduced Roly. Well, half-seduced him. The trouble is, I can’t remember much about it. I hadn’t been so drunk since I was a student. Later, I realised I had dosed myself up on purpose, to fortify myself. I couldn’t have managed it otherwise.

  I had decided to seduce him, you see, that first day at lunch. It was lust and loneliness and curiosity. It was that same compulsion I had felt when I’d picked up that man in the Warwick bar. I wanted to explore Roly’s strange, smooth flesh with my fingers. I wanted to have power over him, to control him. He fascinated me, and I sensed how I could use him. He was my only link to Lila. Early on, I had guessed that he was sexually inadequate; there was something about his limp hand-shake, something soft and unused about his body. And I knew that if I managed to arouse him, he would be mine.

  I could start to manipulate him then. I had planned it all.

  I can’t remember getting into the car that evening, or anything about the drive. I presume he was going to take me back to my apartment, but I must have got to work on him in the back seat because we ended up at his place. Maybe he just thought I was too drunk to look after myself; maybe he was just being gentlemanly.

  I can’t remember anything about the lobby or the elevator; we could have flown to this apartment, for all I knew. I was hardly conscious. I can’t remember if he undressed me or if I undressed myself, though I remember now that he made me a cup of hot milk. There was something heavy on the bed, which I presume was his cat. I later found out that she always slept on his bed; he adored her. The sheets were crisp and the mattress so soft that I sank into the blackness. The fluid in my brain rocked to and fro. Even when I lay still, it rocked. If I moved, I would fall through space. He wore silk pyjamas; I think he kept them on throughout.

  During my deepest slumber something damp and intimate happened. I think I started it, though I can’t be sure. I think he resisted at first; but something did happen, because I remember his small, wet cock in my hand. It’s always a surprise, isn’t it, to touch that for the first time? Even when you’re drunk, you remember how it felt.

  I woke in the morning with a monumental hangover. I remembered Lila’s obliterating binges. She too had woken up next to unknown men in alien bedrooms. My skull felt as if it would split.

  ‘You ever done this with Lila?’ I asked Roly. He was putting two eggs into a saucepan of boiling water. He had his back to me; he wore a striped, velvet bathrobe.

  He didn’t reply; he just shook his head. The eggs rattled against the spoon as he lowered them into the pan.

  So Roly and I started an affair, though ‘affair’ was hardly an accurate term for our series of furtive, sweaty manoeuvres in the dark that were never mentioned during the daylight hours. Over the next few weeks we often met for lunch at his usual restaurant. He was the ordinary Roly, then; the recognisable, daytime one: a small, ugly, amusing and powerful man with a fund of fascinating anecdotes. He had been in the business for thirty years. I learnt a lot about the hierarchies at the TV networks, the shifting, volatile power struggles in Hollywood and the way the entertainment industry was changing. I heard some delicious gossip about famous people, which I repeat in this place to anyone who might be interested – some are, but not as many as you would think.

  Most important of all, he told me about Lila. He was my lifeline to her, my secret link. I cracked my melba toast in half with assumed indifference as he told me things about her past which I hoarded up for future use. He kept me in touch with her current activities, because most days he spoke to her on the phone. I felt like a spy, toying with my salmon steak and pumping him with ostensibly innocent questions.

  ‘She’s completed shooting,’ he said. ‘She’s back in town. Trevor’s with her, he’s buying himself some real estate. That guy, does he move fast!’

  With the fee from Jane Eyre and the advance from another project – maybe a contribution from Lila, too – Trev was buying an apartment a few blocks from hers, on the Upper West Side. I was both enraged and cheered by this – enraged because he was raking it in, and cheered because it seemed that even Lila couldn’t get him to live with her.

  I wondered if Lila knew that I had joined BCM, her own agency. Maybe Roly hadn’t told her. Maybe
she didn’t even know that I was still in New York City. I didn’t want to meet either her or Trev – it would have been too painful – but I had a compulsion to hear about them. I felt like a muslim at Muharram, whipping myself with their news until my back was flayed and bleeding.

  At the end of March Roly told me that Lila was forming her own production company, with Trevor as her partner.

  ‘Sure I’m happy for her. Why not? Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, they all do it. Jessica Lange. Used to be quilting bees, now it’s production companies. I see three women in a supermarket and I think – hey, they’re forming a production company!’

  We had stopped, on the way back from lunch, to buy some vitamin tablets. Roly was a compulsive hypochondriac, in a city of hypochondriacs, and thought he had a cold coming on.

  ‘Did Lassie have a production company?’ he asked. ‘Sure!’

  We left the pharmacy and walked along the pavement.

  ‘What’s happened to what’s-his-name’s apartment?’ I asked casually. ‘Trevor’s?’

  ‘He’s moving in next week. Some Thai decorator’s doing it up, really fancy. He should’ve asked me, I know this fantastic guy, he owes me a favour, he did up Daryl Hannah’s place. I could’ve fixed it for him, a really good price, but you know Trevor.’

  ‘Hardly,’ I said. ‘I hardly know him at all.’

  Blowing his nose, Roly hailed me a cab. He pressed a ten-dollar bill into my hand for the fare – he was unfailingly generous – kissed me on the cheek and headed towards his office a couple of blocks away. The cab stopped at the lights and I watched him with surprising fondness – a portly, fur-coated little man who knotted his scarf more tightly around his neck and who walked with short, fussy steps. Phones were ringing for him in his house of deals – he once told me he had over a hundred calls a day. Million-dollar contracts awaited his signature. Studio executives grovelled to negotiate with him.

  There he went, one of the most important men in the business. And my sexual slave.

  He worshipped me, you see, because I humiliated him. During our twice-weekly, night-time sessions I grew to understand this other, secret Lester Rollins. His own sexuality was deeply shameful – his mother had repeatedly told him so. The more I chastised him, the more aroused he became. As time passed I learned more about him. He grew up in a household of women – his family came from Latvia and his father died when he was young – and his mother spanked him once when she found him masturbating. This had a profound effect on him. His mother’s suffocating love disturbed him and he grew up locked into an unhealthily erotic relationship with her that had rendered him almost impotent with other women. They couldn’t respond to his needs, which were admittedly rather specialised. I guessed that they had been alarmed by him; maybe they had tried to laugh him out of it. Worse still, perhaps they had tried to help him. He didn’t want that, he wanted contempt. So, in the past, when occasionally visited by lust, he had simply used the services of high-class call girls.

  And then along I came. At the beginning my motives were manipulative ones, but I grew fascinated by his soft flesh and his whimpering vulnerability. I know it sounds hard to believe, but it’s true. Powerless for so long, I blossomed as a sexual dictator. I found it arousing too. He loved some high-heeled leather boots I had bought at Charles Jourdan. Wearing them, I straddled his pale and curiously female body; I rode his little cock until his body was slippery with sweat and he cried out with spasms of pleasure. Having been humiliated myself – boy, did I enjoy humiliating someone else! As I worked on his spreadeagled bulk I thought: this one for that bitch Lila, this one for that shit Trevor. That he was Lila’s agent gave me a keener frisson. I don’t know why. I didn’t want to think why. But it did.

  Frustrated as an actress for so long, I used my imagination to invent more baroque and adventurous games for us. A good whore is a good actress, after all, so why not vice versa? During my night-time visits I became the woman I had fantasised about, performing for her customers, exposing herself in shop cubicles, arousing a camera crew and an audience of millions. Inflamed, I watched myself. Sometimes I pretended to be Jane Fonda in Klute, tenderly pleasuring her elderly client. At last I was a successful actress, a true professional!

  What he liked best was dressing up in his mother’s clothes. She’d had exceptionally dowdy taste. Secretly I giggled, that a man could be in thrall to a woman who wore outsize Crimplene shirtwaisters. In the back of his wardrobe he had stored various ample, matronly garments. They were lovingly pressed and folded, and locked away in a suitcase so his maid couldn’t find them.

  He needed to go through certain routines. I had to get them right or he became distressed and frustrated. First I had to stop him opening the suitcase.

  ‘Lester!’ I said. ‘I’ve told you not to do that!’

  The more angry I became, the more excited he grew. Then he would switch off the light – thank goodness for that, because once he was dressed up like Charley’s Aunt it was wiser not to see him. He wore some high-heeled shoes, too, which I guessed hadn’t belonged to his mother, they were far too smart. He must have bought them specially.

  He liked me to touch him under his skirt. ‘You’ve been a bad boy, haven’t you,’ I murmured. ‘A dirty, bad boy.’ As I chastised him, his breathing quickened. In my hand, his cock grew stiffer. Never that stiff, but stiffer. He liked to draw out these proceedings for as long as possible, so I made up little scenarios.

  ‘Just because I’m in the kitchen, cooking your dinner, think I didn’t know what you were doing? I heard you going into my bedroom; I heard my closet opening. So I turned off the radio, Lester, and I listened. How could you do something like that? . . .’ Once I knew what he wanted, the words rolled off my tongue. It was like doing improvisations in drama class. Having a strong fantasy life myself, I could join him without great difficulty in his. Sometimes he simply tied on his mother’s apron; naked except for her pinny, he played with himself whilst I spoke to him in the dark. I murmured to him until he was near breaking point, and then I pulled him roughly onto the bed and told him what I wanted him to do to me. He loved me bossing him around, and using him for my own pleasure.

  Once or twice, when the mood slipped, I got it wrong. I suddenly lost concentration. One night he wanted me to spank him. He had smooth, surprisingly youthful buttocks. I didn’t enjoy spanking him, it just seemed silly. He lay on top of me, weighing me down; my hand lay on his nylon-skirted rump, idly stroking it. I heard the crackle of static. My mind wandered and I remembered Trev’s beautiful hard back. Suddenly I missed him painfully. What the hell was I doing here?

  Disgusted with myself, I pushed Roly off and told him to hurt me. ‘Seen the scar on my hand?’ I muttered. ‘I like it, I like being hurt. Scratch me! Make me bleed!’ This confused him. Disconcerted, he withered.

  He didn’t say anything about it afterwards. In fact, he never mentioned our erotic activities once they were over. To some extent we are all sexually split – I certainly am – but in Roly’s case his needs were so cut-off from the rest of his life that he refused to recognise them once they were satisfied.

  He would take me out to dinner, maybe once a week, or he would pick me up at my apartment after he had been to some business function. We were seldom seen together in public. He was very discreet – he couldn’t be seen canoodling with a client – and this suited me. I’ve always thrived on secrecy and I found it arousing, to be his night-time whore. Besides, it embarrassed me to be seen on the arm of such a small, fat, ugly man. Every relationship is a trading process, and showbusiness in particular throws up dramatic visual evidence of this – hideous old producers with young starlets, raddled old film stars with toyboys. I didn’t want to be seen as yet another example of this coarse equation. It hurt my pride, and anyway my feelings for Roly were more complex than this.

  The most important reason, however, was Lila. I didn’t want Roly to mention me to her, and I guessed that he didn’t. He had scores of clients on his books; I was jus
t one amongst many, and he had probably forgotten my earlier connection with her. She certainly wouldn’t ask, she was far too self-absorbed. Her life was busy and they had plenty of other things to talk about. Now I was Roly’s mistress I was his secret.

  So he would collect me in his hired limo and we would go back to his apartment. He lived in Beekman Place, a highly respectable street near the East River. A lot of theatre people lived in the neighbourhood because it was within walking distance of Broadway.

  ‘Irving Berlin lived here,’ he said. ‘His parents, they were like my parents. They were so poor, know what they did? They sold the samovar for the price of the brass. That’s how poor.’

  Like Berlin, Roly had flourished in the land of opportunity and he was now extremely rich. Beekman Place was hushed, and shaded by trees. Some of its apartment houses were built in the medieval style; they had gothic lobbies and stone carvings. I loved it there; it had the heavy, brooding atmosphere of serious money.

  He would take me up to his apartment and pour me champagne, which he bought for me specially because he didn’t drink. His refrigerator was like his fellow-hypochondriac Lila’s, full of pills, suppositories and refills for his asthma inhaler. Plus his beloved cakes and pastries. He worried that I was too thin; like a Jewish mother he fed me up, watching me eat with anxious solicitude.

  ‘Finish it up, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Every crumb.’

  His apartment was formal. There were stiff, brocaded curtains and a reproduction Wedgwood mantelpiece. In contrast to Trev’s place, it was always spotlessly clean. There were Chinese vases; there was his bloated, pampered cat, which resented me, curled up in the best armchair. It was stuffy; he never opened the windows in case he caught a chill. It resembled the flat of a spinster aunt with a large private income. He had travelled a lot in the East, and had a collection of Javanese shadow-puppets displayed in a glass-fronted cabinet. He was a connoisseur, a collector; he treated me tenderly, as if I were a precious object that he was lucky enough to have found after decades of searching.