by Anna Winger
For years Bodo’s favorite game had been casting the movie version of their lives. He and Walter played it late nights at The Wild West, arguing about which Hollywood stars should play the various important characters (Heike, Bodo’s wife and kids, Klara, the waiters, the Polish chef in the kitchen, the bartender and his girlfriend). There was a certain satisfaction in finding exactly the right fit; as their roster of favorite actors changed, so did their all-star line-up. One night Heike was played by Michelle Pfeiffer circa The Fabulous Baker Boys, another night by Veronica Lake, another by Jennifer Love Hewitt. The chef was always played by Harvey Keitel. The game had only two unspoken rules. One, Bodo and Walter never cast themselves. Two, River Phoenix and Tom Cruise never played anyone else. But a painful realizationnow passed sharply through Walter’s mind. Tom Cruise would play Dave in the movie. They didn’t look alike and there was something morally questionable about his project, but his enthusiasm about it, his blind faith in himself, was all Tom Cruise, much as it frustrated Walter to admit that.
They moved toward Leibnizstrasse in silence and set the tree down again at the stoplight, panting as they waited for it to change. For a Saturday morning, the road was busy with cars, people rushing out to do their Christmas shopping. Only two weekends left. Dave pointed to the Time for Action poster up on the wall across the street. They were everywhere now. The young woman eyed them back, fierce as ever. I Love NY, written with a heart, was scrawled across her cleavage with black spray paint.
“One of ours,” he said. “Nice, huh?”
Walter removed his gloves and rubbed his hands together, relieved to be only about sixty meters from home.
“Hope said you just finished a new Tom Cruise movie. Is it a good one?”
“It’s okay.”
“She wants to see the German version to hear your voice. But I saw some dubbed films myself last summer and I have to say the dialogue sounded weird to me. If I closed my eyes, I could tell immediately that it wasn’t recorded on location. What do you call that?”
“Reverb.”
“The people I work with always tell me that they think American actors sound better in German. Like, Robert De Niro has such a great German voice. That’s kind of funny, don’t you think?”
“Christian Bruckner is a pro,” said Walter. “The best.”
“Who’s that?”
“De Niro.”
“De Niro’s voice, you mean? That is funny. But Woody Allen is the most absurd.”
“Why?”
“A German Woody Allen? I mean, come on. It’s an oxy-moron. It isn’t possible to be Jewish and German at the same time. Not anymore.”
Dave’s proprietary claim on everything that crossed his path (America, Christmas, Woody Allen, Hope) made Walter feel like a drifter, untethered in a dangerous sea.
“How did they choose you, anyway?” Dave asked. “What criteria are involved in becoming the voice of a famous Hollywood star? Is the woman who does Julia Roberts beautiful? Does Jack Nicholson smoke cigars? Is a resemblance even important or is it just a question of good diction?”
“There are many factors. It’s like casting any other role.”
“But in this case you aren’t playing a role, are you? You’re just feeding the lines into a mike somewhere.”
The hair on the back of Walter’s neck bristled.
“It’s a challenge to hit those notes, believe me. I’m not just a glorified translator.” He was raising his voice. “Your culture is encrypted in the language of the movies. Think of me as a diplomat.”
Dave was paying attention, so he continued.
“Woody Allen might be Jewish but he’s an artist. He’s an entertainer. If he doesn’t communicate, he dies. Sixteen percent of American box office comes from German audiences alone, and I am willing to bet that Woody Allen, specifically, sells more tickets here than he does in America. We are the second-biggest market in the world for Hollywood films. You’re a businessman. Do the math.”
“I’m an economist, not a businessman.”
“Have a little respect.”
“Okay, okay. So show me the money.”
“What?”
“Do Tom Cruise for me now. Just a line or two. Something famous.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Come on! Show me the money! I’d love to hear that in German.”
“Uh.”
“I love black people!” Dave shouted.
People on the street looked over.
“I just speak like myself when I do him.”
“What? No special accent? Not even a different pitch?”
“No.”
“So everyone you meet recognizes your voice as his? They think, Hey, that’s Tom Cruise’s voice in another guy’s body? That must be weird for you.”
Walter coughed.
“People don’t recognize my voice as Tom Cruise when they see me in person,” he said. “Only when I’m speaking on the phone.”
“Do you ever do voice-overs?”
Dave pulled one arm across his chest with the other and stretched his shoulder.
“Ad campaigns. Once I did a documentary about Formula One racing, just after Days of Thunder came out.”
“Ever thought about getting into the porn thing?”
“The porn thing?”
“You know, Tom Cruise narrating the action,” said Dave. “I’m thinking out loud here, but there could be a real market in that. You could get some of your colleagues into it, too. Your friend Christian, like you said.”
“Who?”
“The pro. De Niro? And how about Julia Roberts, or George Clooney? Hell, Woody Allen. Why not? You must know the other voices, right?”
Walter slowly pulled his gloves back on.
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m totally serious. Listen, you know what the all-time favorite American movie is in Poland? The one that everybody mentions when I say I’m American? And I am not exaggerating.”
“No idea.”
“Pretty Woman. No joke. A movie about a prostitute.”
“Actually, it’s a movie about shopping.”
“Look, you wouldn’t have to watch the videos yourself. You could just record the voice-over in a studio. The idea has huge potential.”
“Right.”
“Think of it as doing a good deed. You’d be helping people out.”
Finally, the light changed.
“Just think about it.”
Walter grabbed the bottom of the Christmas tree’s trunk and pushed toward home.
Hope opened the door as they came up to the third floor and Dave tripped on the top step so that the tree fell at her feet. She looked down at it without comment for a long time. She was wearing a flannel nightgown that was buttoned up to her neck, a flowing sack that appeared to have swallowed her whole. Walter waited a few steps down from the landing. He could hardly look at her. He could not tell her he had learned about the baby, at least not now, right here, but the information had changed her anyway. He peeked through the pine needles thinking that he could see a glow around the shape of her that gave her small frame depth against the open doorway. When she spoke to Dave she was cold.
“A Christmas tree? What would your parents say?”
Dave dusted off his pants.
“I thought it would be fun to have one this year. I got some decorations too, at the market. We can get some more tonight at Alexanderplatz.”
He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a white paper bag. Walter wanted to keep going on up to the fourth floor, but he was trapped behind the tree.
“How did you get roped into this?”
When she looked at him, he found it difficult to speak. He lifted one shoulder, motioning to the bag of groceries hanging from it.
“I was there.”
“Walter really helped me out,” said Dave, turning to him. “You want to join us for breakfast?”
Hope and Walter both stared at him as if the mere suggestion were ab
surd.
“Or you could come with us to the Christmas market tonight. I’m sure Hope would love it if you came. I’ve heard it’s a lot of fun.”
“Walter lives here, Dave. He’s been to the Christmas market at Alexanderplatz.”
“I have plans tonight.”
“How about breakfast?”
“I really should be getting back to my place,” said Walter.
His eyes met Hope’s for the first time that morning and he tried to smile. Asleep, he thought. He could hardly bear to be standing so far away from her.
When Dave went back to Poland, he would tell her about California immediately. They would start over together there. They could make a new baby together. He would save her from this. He tried to communicate that silently as he placed his end of the tree down on the landing and disentangled himself from its branches. Then he ran up the stairs to his own apartment and lay down on the cool linoleum in his kitchen, to still the rapid beating of his heart.
For the next thirty-six hours he did everything he could to avoid running into her while Dave was in town. He went out early, stayed out late, took the stairs. When he was home, he worked on the map. He had finished more than half of it already, had taped the center back together with invisible tape, but the remaining pink and yellow ragged pieces represented more mysterious sections of the city. He’d had more luck coming up with the eight American states contiguous to Missouri than he did figuring out which section of the city connected to Frohnau, or to Adlershof. Walter moved the whole operation into his living room so as to escape the thought of the couple sleeping right beneath his bed, but found himself pacing the blueprint of Hope’s apartment anyway, tracking her movements in vain. Was that the front door opening? Was that the shower? Why was it so quiet? He had only half listened to Orson’s daily rants about the clash of nations, but he had picked up the gist of it: knowledge was power. His own battles were personal, but still: Dave had given him a secret weapon and Walter intended to use it. He walked from room to room like a sniper plotting his shots. He had already decided to tell Hope all the details of the business in Poland, had mentally prepared a complex presentation for her benefit, complete with florid embellishments (drunk girls running around naked in the countryside, her husband in his underwear with the camera). She would be horrified. She would beg to come with him to California. He could think of nothing else. When he tried to concentrate instead on the image of himself alone, fit and tan, jogging along a sunny Malibu beach with Tom Cruise, he couldn’t do it. He made it to Sunday evening before giving in to the urge to press one ear against floor. Finally he kneeled in his bedroom, but heard only the sound of his own breathing and the muffled crunch of carpet against his cheek.
By the time he woke up late on Monday morning, Walter’s head hurt. He made a strong pot of coffee, sat down at the kitchen table and dropped his face into his hands. Vanilla Sky was finished. Only a week until the premiere. He should have been rehearsing his plaintive but professional pitch for the crucial party afterward, but he could only focus on the next few hours. He waited nervously for Hope to call, and the empty morning gathered around him. When Heike had lived with him, mornings had been his favorite time of day. He didn’t smoke but he had always enjoyed her first cigarette. Her enthusiasm for daily rituals was contagious. Long morning showers, long breakfasts, coffee over the tabloids. In her hands even his emptiest days had taken shape, transformed into a series of significant moments from that first cigarette to sex before bed and three meals in between. Now a Heike-shaped negative space sliced into the trapped air of his kitchen. He fished around in the refrigerator for the ingredients to make himself a Toast Hawaii, her favorite guilty pleasure. He layered a ring of pineapple over ham and the butter and bread, topped off with a slice of cheese. As the cheese melted over all of it in the oven, he eyed the day’s gossip in the tabloids, imagined her reading it aloud, one knee up against the table in an old silk dressing gown, her hair still wet. People of Today: Tom Cruise met with the CIA to see how Mission: Impossible III could help cast the government agency in a positive light.
“A lot of stars have been coming to us,” said the CIA representative. “Post 9⁄11, we’ve gone from being an agency of bogeymen in Hollywood to a force of good.” Goldie Hawn was leading a mission to stop America from gossiping in the aftermath of the September 11 atrocities, it said, with a new campaign called “Words Can Heal.”
“People should not just return to normal now,” said Goldie, “but to a better normal. They should recognize how hurtful unkind words can be.”
Heike would love that one. She took particular glee in pieces about the unlikely political righteousness of Hollywood stars. People of Yesterday had a profile of Anthony Michael Hall, Brat Pack star of The Breakfast Club, now living in suburban Chicago. He was pictured coming out of a supermarket, looking like a beleaguered accountant; he was also losing his hair. When the usual relief passed, Walter felt a stab of pity for him and ran one hand over the smooth spot on his own head, thinking he could just hear Heike’s throaty laugh. Somewhere out there, she was probably reading this article aloud to somebody else. He got up to open a window and turned on the radio for a glimpse of the world. He ate the sweet, sticky toast and wondered when his downtime started feeling so much like work. When he returned abruptly from Los Angeles in 1985, he had meant to take a break from acting, not abandon it altogether. The announcement of his hiatus had been greeted in the German industry by rumors of addiction, depression and rejection. They were all way off, but the saying went in German that to excuse yourself is to accuse yourself, so he’d said nothing, had let the stink of failure linger around him like a cloud of stale smoke, accepting Top Gun as a one-time thing, but then Tom Cruise’s career had just snowballed, carrying Walter’s voice along with it. One after the other, the films were hits. Walter didn’t even try to get the advertising work, he didn’t do anything; money just fell into his lap. He had been lulled into exile, he thought now. Tom Cruise was the kind of gig starving actors only dreamed about. Financial security plus nine months off each year to do other things. The problem was that he never did other things. Orson was probably going over his action-packed schedule of rehearsals with Til Schweiger right at this moment; maybe he really would make it on the outside after all. Bodo had, but only because his American died. The evening they’d learned that River Phoenix overdosed, drinks were on the house at The Wild West and Bodo had insisted the patrons observe a collective moment of silence. Only Walter had noticed the relief that washed across his face, that of a man in a miserable marriage whose wife suddenly leaves him for somebody else.
Walter went into his bedroom to look at the Berlin map again and contemplated the possibility of Tom Cruise’s sudden death. He would most certainly be hungrier. He couldn’t sell detergent to housewives as a ghost. But even with Tom Cruise dead and gone, he would never be free of Hans, with the thick, curly hair and his shit-eating grin, popping up at odd hours of the night, dragging him down like dead weight. Walter moved a stray piece of the city around on the carpet. Marienfelde looked nice, he thought: a lake, a green park, small streets. Where did it belong? Giving in to the steep downward slope on the other side of the caffeine high, he was about to climb under the covers when the suitcase in the corner, still half-packed with summer clothes for winter in Los Angeles, caught his attention. He dropped his underwear and pulled on a tight blue swimsuit that was lying on top. He didn’t own a full-length mirror but he didn’t need one to know that he wasn’t Malibu material; he could hardly see the tight blue of the suit for his stomach. His skin was pale under a light film of chest hair that extended down to his navel over the pregnant swell. A single gray, curly hair poked out near his left nipple. Just as he yanked it out, the doorbell rang. Hope! He pulled on a T-shirt and rushed across the apartment.
“What are you wearing?”
Those were the first words out of Heike’s mouth. The light from his foyer shined on her, so that through the doorway she was illu
minated against the dark backdrop of the landing. She was wearing a black leather coat and jeans. Her long brown hair hung straight around pronounced cheek-bones, like the exaggerated female beauty in a Japanese cartoon.
“It’s December.”
Her light blue eyes looked him up and down. Walter pulled down the edge of his T-shirt.
“Are you going somewhere?” she demanded.
“Maybe.”
“Where? Why haven’t you called me? You could have asked my parents. Or Klara.”
When he didn’t respond, she pushed past him down the hallway into the bedroom. Walter had conjured Heike’s image so many times since she left that her sudden three-dimensional reality took his breath away. If she wanted to see him again, he thought, why had she returned his keys? He looked down at the floor, fighting the desire to folllow her, reach out to her, wrap his arms around her, sniff desperately at the private recesses of her body, lick her face. He couldn’t answer her question because the truth was pitiful. It had never occurred to him to call her; it had never occurred to him to do anything but wait. She came back.
“Where are my clothes?”
“I gave them away.”
“Seriously?”
He shuffled his feet.
“It’s winter, Walter. I need my winter clothes.”
“You should have thought of that when you left.”
She shook her head and looked over at the half-finished city on the floor of the living room.
“What is that?”
“It’s nothing.”
She walked over to examine it.
“Walter Baum’s view of the world,” she said, rolling one hand into a tube, looking up at him through it with one eye. “This big.”
Walter pulled at the bottom of his T-shirt.
“Marienfelde is in the southeast,” she said, picking up the piece he’d been trying to place before she came. “It’s a beautiful neighborhood, actually. Almost like the countryside and only twenty minutes from here. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Because you never leave this apartment.”
