The Stand-In

by Deborah Moggach

  It’s a manufacturing city; people manufacture themselves. The media conspires in this, reinforcing lies and half-truths, colouring up film stars’ childhoods and creating whole new personas. This suited me fine. I shed the past and reinvented myself. For my role as Samantha Seymour they cut and dyed my hair; it swung in a shiny chestnut bob. The weather was hot and we were shooting largely outdoors; I grew firm and tanned. I worked out in a gym and learnt a new vocabulary – ‘Tummy-tucks’, ‘butt-burns’, twist-stretchers’, ‘broomstick twisters’ – as if I were mastering a foreign language. Unknown muscles started to ache. My body felt like a refurbished machine, with a new network of nerves. I punished it.

  I called myself Julie and rented a white Volkswagen Rabbit, like a singles swinger. I was given an apartment on La Brea and Melrose; I greeted the other inhabitants with a bland and sunny smile. I never opened a book; I could no longer read anything demanding, it made me nauseous. I just learnt, by heart, my new script.

  ‘It hurts, Tourmalins,’ I murmured at my new reflection in the mirror. ‘All these years I’ve been hurting. Hiding and hurting.’

  I had been brought in to kill off two characters, my daughter and my ex-lover. This was because the two actors concerned had to leave the show. One was pregnant and the other’s contract was being terminated because of some tax evasion scandal. The Best People’s ratings were at an all-time low and they needed two violent deaths to pick up the figures. So along came Samantha Seymour.

  Are you sitting comfortably? Do you want to hear the story?

  Shall we not bother? I can hardly remember it myself. I was an English tennis coach who had arrived on the West Coast to claim her long-lost daughter, Tourmaline. She was eighteen years old and had grown up unaware of my existence. She thought that her step-mother Liberty was her real mother, until I came along to her home to improve her tennis game.

  ‘My life has been one long lie,’ she said, gazing at me with her blue eyes. We were sitting in the grounds of her parents’ estate. The lawns swelled like breasts, like the lawns at the Ortho contraceptive factory.

  I put my arm around her. ‘I was young then, honey,’ I said. ‘I was aiming to become a champion athlete –’

  ‘Sorry, you guys!’ called the director. ‘We’re still rolling. Take it from the top.’

  We repeated our conversation. ‘I had to work so hard,’ I said. ‘Excellence was all I believed in. I worked on my body, but the one part I forgot was my heart. It was like something was missing inside. And the hurting got worse. I had to come and see you . . .’

  The words slipped from my lips, harmlessly. I spoke like a robot, but then so did everyone else. The other actors were as smooth and shiny and handsome as Thunderbirds puppets, and marginally less expensive. I moved through my scenes in a trance, mouthing my lines and repeating the one bit of business suggested by the director: reflectively running my fingers over the strings of my tennis racquet.

  I was kept thankfully busy; there was no time to think. The pace was frenetic. They had to tape one episode every three days. I didn’t socialise but then neither did anyone else, beyond back-slappings and ‘How’re ya doing?’ They were too exhausted. Once or twice I heard people talking about Lila’s arrest. ‘Think he was screwing around? Think she really shot him?’ When that happened I melted away.

  Nights were the worst. Like Lila I took Seconal to make myself sleep, but it didn’t work. I lay awake for hours, sweating, waiting for the phone to ring. Outside my window the constant hum of the traffic was periodically drowned by police sirens, wailing closer. They were coming to get me; it was only a matter of time.

  Sometimes, half-asleep, I heard the engine of Trev’s van. I recognised its special rattle. He had driven it across the States to find me; he was coming closer, down La Brea. When I drifted into sleep I saw him, slumped in the armchair. The crimson blood had spread over the bathrobe as if it were blotting paper. I tried to turn away but I couldn’t. As I watched him, he opened one eye and winked.

  I dreaded the insomnia, but I dreaded sleep more. Sometimes I was pulled, struggling nervelessly, back into my childhood. One night Lila was in my class at school. She passed a note to the teacher, Miss Hendricks, who looked at me for a moment. Then she lifted the phone that happened to be on her desk. Sure enough, down in the street the sirens started wailing.

  I’d jerk awake, panic-struck. They were coming to get me. But sometimes, when I opened my eyes drowsily in the morning, I truly believed that nothing had happened. Trev was alive. He was living in New York a few blocks from Lila, and she was going to have his baby. Everything was the same. This feeling could last for a surprisingly long time, simply because I was so cut off that there was nothing to remind me of the past. I lay there in my rented apartment, the murmuring traffic out the front and the parking-lot out the back. In that spartan room I lay there numbly, waiting for the sensations to return to my body as one waits for one’s gums to start tingling after a visit to the dentist. Sure enough, it happened. A sick sensation spread through my veins. It corroded me like acid. The feeling was fear. Maybe you have never felt it. I hope, for your sake, you haven’t.

  Roly phoned. ‘How are you, sweetheart? How’s it going? Have I been missing you!’ He tried to tell me about Lila but I didn’t want to hear, it knocked me off-balance. He wanted to fly out to visit but I put him off.

  ‘I’m working flat out,’ I said. ‘I’m shattered. All I do is come home to sleep. Terribly boring.’

  The thought of him made me nervous; I never wanted to see him again. Besides, I had started an affair with an optical effects guy called Lee. He was deeply stupid. He drove a black Trans-Am with flames painted on it. He had tattooed arms and he lived in a guest cottage on Coldwater Canyon. I didn’t know much about him, except that when he was younger he earned a living sabotaging film shoots.

  ‘Like, you hang out with actors,’ he said. ‘You get the location schedules and you set up there before they arrive. Like you’re cutting down trees with a chain-saw, something real noisy.’ He giggled. ‘You say you have to finish the job so they pay you $500 just to get the fuck out.’

  Thank God he wasn’t into conversation; he discovered nothing about me, all those weeks. Such spaced-out self-absorption suited me fine. He was into bodies. We sat on his Navaho rug, the wind tinkling through the brass chimes he had hung up around the room, smoking dope and limbering up for sex. He was lean and small; in fact he physically resembled a West Coast version of Trev. Prior to marathon screwing Trev had recommended scrumpy and, if I remember, speed. Lee recommended Quaaludes, amyl nitrate and marijuana. Like many dope-heads, he listed the optimum intake with the solemn pedantry of a master chef listing the ingredients for his specialité de la maison. He closed his eyes and centred his bodily fluids or something by limb-burns and Ashanti chants. In their own way, his preparations were as dogged as Roly’s.

  I won’t give you what Trev called the grisly details. They are obviously far too boring. But when I climaxed I forgot everything. I forgot Trevor; I forgot my permanent state of terror. Just for a moment, in the exploding darkness, I was released. And if I gazed long enough into the face of this almost-Trev, this weird and coarsened stand-in, Lee, I could feel my memories of the real Trev obscured and vandalised. It was like an old drawing defaced with a crude, child’s crayon. Almost blocked out.

  Once or twice, however, I had a fright. One evening I was sitting with Lee in Citrus. This was a restaurant on Melrose; one of the trendy, calico-umbrella kind. Lee was describing the plot of a picture he had worked on, Bimbo Barbecue or something. Maybe it was Bimbo Bonfire.

  ‘We had this, like, smoke coming out of her eyes,’ he said. ‘It was amazing. Then she sort of collapsed and all this guk came out.’

  Just then the waiter came up with the menus.

  ‘I’d like to share some food notes with you,’ he said, pointing at the evening’s specialities. ‘We have some bluefish, panroasted –’ He stopped. He was staring at me. ‘Hey, it�
��s Jules!’ He smiled. ‘How’re you doing?’

  I gazed back, blankly.

  ‘Your hair,’ he said. ‘I didn’t recognise you.’

  Still I didn’t reply.

  ‘Jane Eyre,’ he said. ‘Remember? I married you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I played the pastor.’

  ‘Oh. Yes.’

  ‘Hey, isn’t it just something? About Lila?’ he turned to Lee. ‘Jules here, she was Lila Dune’s stand-in on that picture.’

  ‘No kidding?’ said Lee, turning to look at me. He almost seemed interested.

  ‘Think she did it?’ hissed the waiter. ‘Think she’ll go down?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. I pushed back my chair and stumbled across to the rest room.

  In the fifth week we shot the murder. Tourmaline, enraged at her father’s deception all those years, drives to his country dub, jumps from her car and rushes at him, brandishing a pistol. As not only her mother but the resident tennis pro I try to stop her, wrestling with her and pulling her away but to no avail! They had to get him off the show.

  It was a heavy, smoggy day. We were filming at the Brentwood Country Club. Tourmaline pushed me aside and strode across to her father. ‘I hate you!’ she shouted. ‘All these years you’ve been deceiving me! You’ve betrayed me and everything I hold dear!’

  She raised the pistol and pulled the trigger. There was the crack of a blank.

  ‘Aargh!’ Her father spluttered and staggered backwards, banging against a concrete urn. His eyes rolled. Finally he crumpled, clutching his chest. Blood (No. 3 Normal Flowing Red Blood) seeped between his fingers. He fell heavily onto the gravel.

  ‘OK! Cut!’ called the director.

  The actor climbed to his feet, dusting himself off. ‘That OK?’

  ‘Fabulous, Jim!’ called the director. ‘I love you! Really convincing.’

  I dreamed I was in my bedsitter in Hampstead, the place I lived in before I bought my flat, but it was larger and echoing. Outside the window was a row of chimney pots. I kept trying not to look at them because I knew somebody was hiding in them. Sure enough, my father’s face rose slowly over the rim, like Ali Baba. He rose as slow and pale as the moon, and he was grinning too.

  The days passed, bland and sunny. Back in London the licence had elapsed on my Renault. My rates were due to be paid. I suddenly remembered things like this, small tweaks from my past like a hand pulling at my skirt. Sometimes it made me panic, that my old life was slipping away. If I couldn’t manage to pay my rates, how on earth did I think I could manage to deal with all this? At other times it comforted me, that I could still remember such small, homely tasks. I thought of phoning my mother, but she would have read the papers by now; she would start asking me questions in her thrilled, wondering voice. ‘Trevor was your young man, wasn’t he? What was he doing with her? Did you know? Are you upset?’

  I thought of phoning my friends, but they would ask the same things. Besides, you haven’t got any friends.

  But Trevor was dead now and his horrible words had died with him. I wasn’t going to think about them. He couldn’t any more, so why should I?

  I didn’t do anything. In a few weeks, I thought, I would be flying back to England for good. I would be making my final escape.

  That was what I thought.

  Roly flew over. I wished he hadn’t; I didn’t want to see him. On the other hand, I had to act normally. I couldn’t risk any questions, anything untoward. I couldn’t risk an emotional showdown. I was like an animal, edging around the danger zones, sniffing and testing the air. I had developed a new set of muscles and reflexes.

  Roly had lost weight. The skin was looser on his face; it made him look older. More tired, too.

  ‘This whole damn business,’ he said, ‘it’s knocked the guts out of all of us.’

  He took me to a dairy restaurant called The Milky Way. It was run by Steven Spielberg’s mother; it was in the Jewish strip, out on Pica, I think. I can’t remember. It was raining.

  Inside it was dark and old-fashioned, with leather banquettes and posters of ET and Indiana Jones on the walls. Roly greeted Spielberg’s mother, Leah, like an old friend, clasping her sorrowfully and kissing her. He had been coming here for years.

  ‘It’s been terrible,’ he said. ‘Terrible.’

  She was a tiny, vivacious woman with cropped hair and white bobbysocks like a schoolgirl. She took our orders; we both asked for fried fish. For some ridiculous reason I suddenly felt safer than I had for weeks. The rain outside, and the rabbis and family groups inside, made me feel as if I were sitting in Golders Green.

  ‘The show’s going fine,’ I said chattily. ‘Dad was shot last week, and on Thursday Tourmaline’s going to die in a car crash.’

  He nodded abstractedly. ‘It’s going to help a whole lot that she’s pregnant.’

  ‘She’s not,’ I said. ‘She’s going to die.’

  ‘Lila, is who I mean.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Ralph assured us of that. What judge is going to look at a beautiful, pregnant woman and not feel some pity?’ He raised his hands helplessly. ‘What judge could do that?’

  I sat there, fiddling with my napkin. Leah came over with some iced tea. I couldn’t ask: Is she pleading not guilty? I couldn’t get the words out. But he was telling me anyway.

  ‘The defence, they’re working on it,’ he said. ‘They’re maybe going to plead extreme emotional disturbance. She did it when the balance of her mind was disturbed. She’s undergoing this whole series of psychiatric tests right now.’

  ‘Poor Lila,’ I said, sipping my tea. ‘We all knew she was off the wall, but this . . .’

  Across the room, ET gazed at me. His goggle eyes were fixed on my face; when I moved, they followed me.

  ‘I still can’t believe it,’ Roly said. ‘She has everything to live for. She loves him, she goes and shoots him? Why would she do such a thing?’

  ‘It does seem crazy.’

  I took another sip of tea. The ice-cubes lay against my lips, freezing them. I gazed at ET over the rim.

  ‘Have they decided a date yet?’ I asked. ‘For the trial?’

  ‘October maybe. If they can fix an early slot.’

  ‘What a shame!’ I said. ‘I’ll be gone by then.’

  He stared at me. ‘Gone?’

  ‘I have to go back to London for a bit. I have some things to sort out.’

  This was a lie. I wasn’t going to go for a bit. I had planned it all. I would go home, and then simply stay there.’

  ‘Only temporarily,’ I said, touching his arm. ‘Then I’ll be back. Don’t worry.’

  ‘I guess you’ll have to stay here, honey,’ he said. ‘In the States.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ll maybe get in touch with you.’

  ‘Me? Why?’

  ‘They may be calling you as a witness.’

  Two

  THEY INTERRUPTED THE TV schedules for the trial. The entire population of New York seemed to be glued to their sets. There had been nothing so sensational since the Nussbaum case, but The People versus Lila Dunnacovicia was a lot more glamorous. A beautiful film star in the dock, accused of her lover’s murder! It was better than any movie; it was real life!

  I had flown back from LA. Thank God I wasn’t called as a witness; they must have decided, quite rightly, that I had no useful information to offer either the prosecution or the defence.

  I was flat-sitting for somebody in an apartment nine floors above my old one. I had been referred there by my ex-landlady, who had by now returned. In New York there is a network of flat-sitters who pay in cash for rent-controlled apartments. It suits everybody. It suited me. I couldn’t have gone back to that place downstairs; I simply couldn’t have stepped through the door. People say that when somebody dies it’s all right if you stay with them; but if you go away and then return it’s almost impossible to look at them again, they have become a corpse.

  It was October 5
and fuggy. I had the air conditioners blowing full blast. This apartment was a fancier affair than the previous one; it had three rooms, uplighters and stippled walls. On the shelves was a bronze sculpture of supplicating hands. It faced the other way, too, away from Central Park. It faced downtown, and had an uninterrupted view of the power towers of Wall Street. They were as hazy as mirages in the smog. Somewhere down there, somewhere in the noise and fumes, somewhere I hadn’t dared go, Lila was sitting in a courtroom. The see-saw had swung; our positions were now reversed. I had risen way up into the sky, safe; I could hardly hear the sirens. The city was laid at my feet, just as it had been laid at Lila’s feet in Central Park West. With my thumb I could squash the pitifully-purposeful dots scurrying in the street below.

  I lowered the blinds to watch the TV; it felt guilt-inducing and unnatural, like watching Wimbledon in the afternoon. The light glowed through, as if I were underwater. I positioned myself in an Eames chair, cigarettes to hand, and switched to Channel 2. Guiding Light was being interrupted for Lila.

  They weren’t transmitting the trial in its entirety, just key segments. The picture bloomed onto the screen. Room 458 of the Criminal Courts was crammed and humming. Spectators filled the public benches, boxed in by blonde wooden partitions as if they were Puritans sitting in church. I was disappointed by the room; it was plain and modern. Next to the judge hung a limp American flag; behind him a marble panel stretched from floor to ceiling. IN GOD WE TRUST, it said. The camera panned round to Lila. Flanked by police officers and lawyers she sat, her face pale and blank as if she had been drugged. Her eyes didn’t move. Her hair was pulled back and she wore a plain green suit that I hadn’t seen before. I could hardly recognise her. It was like the first day on the set of Jane Eyre, when she had startled me with her transformation. In the bright TV lights she was playing a new role: the glazed homicide suspect.