Domestic Arrangements

by Norma Klein

  “Like a daisy.”

  “When’s your plane?”

  “I’ll make it . . .”

  I looked at him longingly. “I wish I could fly back with you. Should I?”

  “No, look, they’ve got it all set up. You’ll have fun.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “Well, don’t have too much fun,” he said.

  “I’ll think of you all the time, every second.”

  Down in the lobby Kelly Neff smiled when she saw me. “I hope you had time to rest a little, Tatiana,” she said. “I’m sorry it had to be so rushed.”

  “Oh, no, it was fine,” I said. “There was plenty of time.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  The first interview was a talk show. Felix was on it with me. “How was it working with Tatiana?” the host asked. “Did you two develop a working rapport?”

  Felix grinned at me. “Definitely . . . wouldn’t you say, Rusty?”

  I tried to be serious. “Well, Felix had done much more acting than me, so he helped me a lot with how I should say my lines.”

  “You’d never done any cinematic work, though, had you, Felix?” asked the host. His name was Myron Downs.

  “I’ve been in four movies,” Felix said. “I was a cowboy in The Electric Horseman, a freaky teenager in Foxes, and I ended up on the cutting-room floor in Fame.”

  “Do you contemplate working together in the future?”

  “Well, I’ll probably be playing Laertes in Hamlet this summer,” Felix said. “Shakespeare in the Park.”

  “Shakespeare’s quite a change of pace after Domestic Arrangements, isn’t it?”

  “I might be in Shakespeare, too,” I said. “My father’s directing The Tempest and he wants me to be Ariel.”

  Myron smiled. “That’ll be an interesting experience for you, Rusty, won’t it? Being directed by your father? Do you think that will work out?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess I’m a little scared about doing Shakespeare, though.”

  “What do you think, Felix? Do you think Rusty can handle Ariel?”

  “Rusty can handle anything,” Felix said.

  Afterward I said, “Felix, it makes me nervous when you do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Kid around that way.”

  “Sweetie, otherwise I’d go bonkers . . . They keep asking the same questions.”

  “I know.”

  “And I hate TV.”

  “Do you? I don’t.”

  “You’re gorgeous . . . gorgeous people are fine on TV.”

  I looked at him. Felix is thin with blue eyes and blond hair. “I think you’re handsome,” I said, sincerely.

  “Let’s face it, I’m not Burt Reynolds.”

  “Ugh! You’re a million times better looking than him.”

  “Bless you.”

  “You know who you look like in a way?” I said, regarding him closely. “That person that was in Gone with the Wind.”

  Felix looked surprised. “Clark Gable?”

  “No, the other one . . . the one she was in love with.”

  “Leslie Howard? The limp sensitive type? Well, thanks, sweetie.”

  “He wasn’t limp!” I think Felix has an inferiority complex.

  “So, when’s our next debacle?” he said to Kelly.

  “Dinner . . . it’s an interview with the local press.”

  “I don’t know if I have anything more to say,” I said, worried.

  “You don’t have to say anything more,” Kelly said. “You were just fine.”

  “But can I just say the same things over and over?”

  “Look,” Felix said, “if they can’t think of anything but the same questions to ask us over and over, why should we think up new answers?”

  “The point is,” Kelly said, “they haven’t heard those answers before so it’s new to them. You just say whatever makes you feel comfortable.”

  I frowned. “I don’t want to sound stupid.”

  “You don’t . . . believe me, Tatiana. I’ve seen actresses with lots more experience than you get all frozen and uptight and do terribly.”

  Even thinking about that made me nervous. “Would that make the picture do badly . . . if I acted like that?”

  “No . . . Look, there’s no direct correlation. But if the public likes you as a personality, it gives us that much more to work with.”

  I kept thinking how Joshua would hate that, how he would think I was selling myself or something. I wondered where he was now, if he was on the plane already, flying home. My underpants were wet. I guess some of the sperm or whatever take a while to come out of you. I hoped I didn’t smell funny or anything.

  “Don’t worry about a thing,” Kelly said. “Listen, I’ll pick up those sandwiches now. Just stay put.”

  Felix looked at me. “Where does she think we’ll go?”

  I smiled. “I don’t know. She’s really nice, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah, well, they have this strange experiment they perform out here. They take Barbie dolls and wave a magic wand over them and lo and behold they become waitresses, publicity girls . . .”

  I giggled. “That’s mean.”

  “Did you see? Her joints are still a little stiff.”

  “Felix? Does it bother you, all the questions and stuff?”

  “You mean, am I nervous? Sure . . . but it’s all part of the game. If you don’t learn to hit the ball back over the net, no one’s going to ask you to play anymore.”

  “Yeah.” I never thought of it that way. I hesitated. “How is it with Marvin?”

  “Don’t ask, kid.”

  “Okay.”

  “No, what can I say? Marvin is just . . . Marvin is not rising to this particular occasion, to put it mildly. He’s jealous as a hornet and just as nasty.”

  “I had a terrible fight with my boyfriend,” I said, hoping that might make him feel better.

  Felix sighed understandingly. “Did you make it up, or are you still—”

  I looked at him. “Well . . .” I told him how Joshua had flown out with me and how we’d done it in the half hour I was supposed to be resting.

  Felix looked at me appraisingly. “You look well rested,” he said.

  “Don’t tell her, okay?” I said nervously.

  “Not a word . . . So, he spent three hundred dollars just to—”

  “Two fifty-eight . . . but it wasn’t just for that.” I blushed. “He said it was worth it.”

  Felix laughed. “I bet it was.”

  “What’s this?” Kelly said, coming back with our sandwiches and seeing Felix laughing. She does look a little like a Barbie doll, now that I think of it.

  I opened my sandwich. Felix smiled at me.

  “Oh, Tatiana,” Kelly said. “I wondered if you’d mind . . . since nothing special is scheduled for this afternoon, I thought I’d take you around to our beauty shop and they might work on your hair a little.”

  “Work on it?”

  “Well, you have such lovely hair, dear, just magnificent, but it’s a little . . . I thought if we had it styled just a bit . . .”

  “Not cut!”

  “Oh no, we’d never cut it . . . that would spoil that look. But maybe just a touch of makeup.”

  “How about me?” Felix said, pretending to sulk. “Aren’t I going to get the star treatment?”

  “We decided you were perfect as you are, Felix,” Kelly said crisply.

  Felix shrugged. “What can I say? So, see you both at six?”

  “Make it five thirty, could you?”

  Kelly took me to this very small, quiet place where a man washed my hair in a special avocado shampoo, which he said was good for redheads. He said he would just trim a hundredth of an inch. Then he wanted to braid it into lots of thin braids like Bo Derek. I looked at Kelly. “I think that might look kind of weird,” I said.

  “Listen, try it,” she said. “What can you lose? You can always let it loose if it looks lousy. You can trust Pierre. He wou
ldn’t suggest it if he didn’t think it was right for you.”

  I was feeling a little sleepy, so I closed my eyes while he braided my hair. When I opened them, I couldn’t believe it. I had around nine million braids all over my head, each one knotted and fastened with a little wooden thing at the end. I looked horrible!

  “Sensational!” Pierre said. “Will you look at the difference?”

  “It really is lovely,” Kelly said, smiling at me. “Don’t you love it, Tatiana? It’s a whole new you.”

  Frankly, I liked the old me a lot better, but I didn’t want to hurt their feelings. “Well, it’s interesting,” I said, faintly. “But I—”

  “It’s sophisticated, but young . . . a little polish, a little insouciance . . .”

  I’m so glad this show won’t be seen in the East. Joshua would vomit if he saw me like this. “I’m not sure I want to keep it this way,” I said to Kelly when we got out.

  “Well, let’s just see how it goes over tonight,” she said. “It’s going to photograph just beautifully. That’s why I always take people to Pierre. He has a wonderful sense of what photographs well.”

  I went back to my room to lie down before dinner. It was really uncomfortable with all those braids. Every time I moved, they’d flop from side to side and the little wooden things would konk against me.

  I wore this Greek dress Mom got for me a year ago on a trip. It’s white cotton and I think over there it’s a wedding dress, though it doesn’t come to the ground. It laces up the front, but it looks ladylike. Mom calls it a “first communion dress.”

  “Jesus God, what did they do to you?” Felix said when he saw me.

  “Now, Felix, stop,” Kelly said. “We’re trying out a new look on Tatiana, and everyone who’s seen her thinks she looks enchanting.”

  “Tatiana would look enchanting with her head shaved,” Felix said, “but—”

  “It’s just for tonight,” I said miserably. I already wished I hadn’t let them do it.

  We had our dinner and then over dessert all these photographers and reporters came over and began taking photos of us and asking us questions. One of them asked if my hair was a new look. “Is this a way of saying you think you’re a ‘ten,’ Ms. Engelberg?” one man asked.

  I shook my head.

  “What number would you give to yourself, then?”

  I hesitated. “I don’t think people are numbers,” I said.

  He smiled. “You don’t like the idea of women being graded by men? It seems sexist, is that it?”

  I nodded, though I hadn’t been thinking of that exactly.

  “Is the women’s movement important to you, Ms. Engelberg?” a woman reporter asked.

  “Yes,” I said, “it is . . . It’s important to my mother and sister, too.”

  “In what way?”

  I cleared my throat. “Well, my sister wants to be the first Jewish woman president so she wants everybody not to be prejudiced or they won’t vote for her.”

  “I’m going to vote for Tatiana as the first woman president,” Felix said.

  “You think she could do it?” another reporter asked.

  “Tatiana can do anything,” Felix said. “She scares me at times.”

  “Do you agree with that?” the reporter asked. “Can you do anything, Tatiana?”

  “No!” I said. “There are millions of things I can’t do!”

  “Like what?”

  I thought. “I’m not sure I can act that well . . . yet.”

  “Tell me, Ms. Engelberg,” an older man asked, “do you think acting in Domestic Arrangements came easily to you because you were essentially playing yourself?”

  I shook my head. The braids flopped back and forth.

  They were all looking at me. “Could you expand on that a little?” he said.

  “I wasn’t playing myself,” I said intensely. “People keep saying that, but it’s not true. I’m not like Samantha at all.”

  “Could you tell us in what way you’re not?”

  “Well, like she didn’t have any girl friends that she talked to about things. It was like she just had him—” I pointed to Felix.

  “Whereas for you friendships with girls are important?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So you can talk about boys and clothes and makeup and that kind of thing?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “How about you, Mr. Propper?” another reporter asked. “Were you acting yourself?”

  “A little,” Felix said. “I was kind of shy and awkward at that age, like Warren. But I’m afraid I never had anyone like Tatiana to cheer me up.”

  “Do you wish you had?”

  He smiled. “How can you ask?”

  “How did you find acting with Ms. Engelberg? The two of you seemed to have a great deal of rapport going, even in the scenes where you . . . where there wasn’t that much verbal communication.”

  “Getting along with Tatiana,” Felix said, “wasn’t very difficult. She’s a lovely, warm person.”

  “Would you give Tatiana a ten?”

  Felix hesitated. “I’m afraid I feel that ranking women or people in general lacks class. But, if pressed, definitely.”

  It went on like that, more really dumb questions. I wonder why it’s like that. When you think of all the interesting things they could ask you, but never do. They asked me for the millionth time how it was doing a nude scene.

  “It was okay,” I said warily. “I just got sort of cold because we had to keep shooting it over and over.”

  “But you didn’t feel any moral compunctions about it? Some actresses feel that unless the male members of the cast are willing to display their bodies as well, they won’t.”

  I never thought of that. “Well, but he did,” I said, looking at Felix. “He just had underpants on in one scene, too.”

  Everyone laughed. I felt funny. I didn’t see what was so funny about that.

  “What lies ahead for you, Tatiana?” one reporter asked. “What roles would you like to be playing in the next few years?”

  I thought a minute. “Well, I guess I’d like to act someone really different from me in every way . . . like a soldier or someone who’s crazy or something like that.”

  “Are you thinking of any particular script?”

  “No, but I thought since women are going to be drafted, maybe I could be someone who, like, fights in a war.”

  “You think that’s a good idea, then? Women in combat?”

  “Yeah.”

  The reporter smiled at me. “I think the U.S. may have a secret weapon in you, Ms. Engelberg. With someone like you on the front lines, the army shouldn’t have any trouble with recruiting.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Everybody laughed again. I looked at Felix, puzzled. He smiled in a nice way and reached over and squeezed my hand.

  Finally they let us actually eat our dessert. It was ice cream, but mine had melted practically into soup.

  “Was I okay?” I asked Felix.

  “Honey, you were lovely . . . but, Jesus, where do they find those guys?”

  I finished my ice cream. “I didn’t understand why they laughed. I didn’t think I said anything that funny.”

  Felix was silent a minute. “People have a peculiar sense of humor out here.”

  In a way, doing the one week of publicity was like being in summer camp. I felt like I got to know Felix really well just because I didn’t have anyone else to talk to that much. By the end of the week I felt like we were really good friends, much more than when we made the movie even. He’s a funny person. Sometimes he’d say things and I couldn’t tell how he meant it. He says that’s because he has a dry wit. My drama teacher, Mr. Poleman, is like that too. Anyway, it was good having Felix to do most of the interviews with me because it did get tiring, smiling all the time and having to act poised and relaxed, whether you felt tired or not, and pretending to find the same dumb questions interesting even when you’d answered them a thousand times.


  “I wish I could answer your questions and you could answer my questions,” I said after we’d done our fifth or sixth show.

  “Hey, how about that?” Felix said. “I’ll be Tatiana and you be Felix.”

  “How do you feel about doing nude scenes, Tatiana?” I asked. “Did it give you any problems?”

  Felix smiled and raised his eyebrows. “Honey, when you have a body like mine, why not show it? Spread a little pleasure around.”

  “I suppose you and Mr. Propper were really, er, um . . . intimate after filming this great picture?”

  “Intimate isn’t the word . . . We were, like—hey we’re on the air aren’t we?”

  “Oh, you can be perfectly frank.”

  From then on we always called each other in private by each other’s name. Felix called me Felix and I called him Tatiana. “I love it,” he said. “Why didn’t my parents give me a pretty name? Why didn’t my father teach Shakespeare at Yale? How’d you like to go through life as Felix?”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” I said, “if I was a boy.”

  “To be a real Felix you have to be five feet tall and have a mustache and play the oboe,” Felix said.

  “It’s true,” I said. “You do look more like a Warren, like the guy in the movie. You could grow a mustache.”

  “I could learn to play the oboe . . . but I’ll never be five feet tall.”

  “I don’t think I look like a Tatiana,” I said. “I mean, I think a Tatiana should look like Vanessa Redgrave—tall and willowy with platinum blond hair, imperious, sort of regal.”

  “Right, I get what you mean, Felix. Maybe you should learn to play the oboe.”

  “I do already.”

  “Terrific. And I’m a platinum blonde . . . almost.”

  “Is it natural?”

  “Almost.”

  One thing happened that bothered me, though. It was at the end of the week. I called Joshua’s house and their housekeeper answered. She’s a very nice black woman named Beryl, who’s about sixty years old. “Oh, Joshua’s not here now, hon,” she said.

  “Well, when will he be back?” I said.

  “He’s gone away for the weekend,” she said.

  “Where did he go?”

  “Can you hold a minute? Let’s see . . . He went to a place called Andover.”

  “Oh,” I said. Pam.