by Ann Beattie
“She was also quite adventurous and beautiful, and she wanted to have a good time. She was always up for things.”
“You’ve ignored all the bad things about her and blown her out of proportion.”
“Well,” he said, sipping his drink. “You know, most women complain that men don’t appreciate them. I think of the two of you as very attractive, interesting, unusual women. I think you should be glad that I feel that way.”
“You keep talking about both of them as if they’re still alive.”
“They’re very real to me, and in that sense they are alive.”
“If they were alive, they’d be different. They were our age years ago, when the world was different.”
“I’m telling you,” he said, “the Plaza hotel is crowded to this day. Brooke Shields goes to Princeton.”
It was so heartfelt that she caught herself before she laughed. She held her breath. She looked at him.
“Zelda was a bitch,” she said.
“Why is it that beautiful women never like other beautiful women?”
“I don’t think that’s true,” she said. “And if somebody’s a bitch, why should anyone like them?”
“I’ve never heard you talk like this.”
She shrugged. “You’re the one who’s always saying that everybody’s so complex,” she said. “According to you, everybody’s stuffed full of complexities, like toys hidden inside a piñata.”
He cocked his head. “What a brilliant simile,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re doing just what she did to him. You’re trying to excite me. There’s something sexual about it, at the same time that it’s cruel.”
“I’m not her,” Lillian said.
“You were playing a trick,” he said. He took a drink and looked out over the railing. The sky was bright: gray-blue, with only a few wisps of clouds. A sprinkler rotating in a wide circle sent jets of water around the lower part of the lawn. A boy pedaled by on a bicycle.
“I met somebody on the plane,” she said.
He jerked his head around and looked at her. “What plane?” he said.
“The plane from Iowa to Boston.”
He continued to look at her.
“I did. I’m sure you’ve met people since you’ve known me that you’ve found attractive.”
“You’re putting me on,” he said.
“I’m not. I mean, I think it’s only normal. I met a man on the plane.”
“Does the story get any better than that?” he said, picking up his drink and taking a sip.
“I just thought I should tell you,” she said.
“Well, now you’ve told me.”
They sat in silence. The woman who had left to make the phone call returned, finally, and sank down in the chair, complaining that the line had been tied up all that time, and that no baby-sitter could possibly be talking on the phone and watching the baby at the same time. The little girl began to talk to her mother about buying a Walkman when they went to Burlington. “Stop nagging,” her father said, “or we’ll leave you with the baby-sitter next time.”
“Shall we go back to the Birches?” Andrew said.
“Why are you talking that way?” she said. “Why did you say, ‘Shall we go back?’ ”
“You now find everything about me questionable?”
“What are you going to do, punish me for being truthful?”
“You’ve had your way. It would be a little late to punish you.”
“Don’t make me feel bad,” she said. “What do you want me to do: hoard all my secrets?”
“Go right ahead,” he said, folding his hands again. “Fire away.”
“I was talking about honesty in general. I don’t have a list to recite, Andrew.”
“As you know,” he said, “I think that only simple people with simple lives have simple secrets. And they’re usually in hospitals, being looked out for. I’m hardly shocked. I just wonder about your motivation.”
“You don’t want me to tell you when I’m confused?”
“As I said: Fire away.”
“I’m not a submarine.”
“You really are quite bright this evening,” he said.
“Maybe you should give me credit for having a brain. Not just for being a stand-in for Zelda Fitzgerald.”
“I do,” he said. “When you act like this, I see exactly what F. Scott Fitzgerald found so painful but so energizing at the same time. If you have any doubts, I can erase them.”
“Order another drink.”
“I’d rather go back.”
“I’m not going to make it a contest of wills,” she said. “If it’s so important to you to go back, we’ll go back. Do you mind getting the bill?”
“You get it,” he said. “Really put me down.”
“For one thing, Andrew, it’s not a put-down in 1984 if a woman picks up the check. You’ll have to think of something better.”
“I can think of something better,” he said. “Let’s go back to the Birches.”
She had a sudden image of the room: the wallpaper, the cherry writing desk with the straight-back chair facing the window. The postcard, envelope, and letter opener in the drawer. The big bed with the white spread, the inappropriately modern goose-neck lamps on the night tables.
“On the way back to Boston, huh? We had a fight, and you met a man on the plane.”
“Stop it,” she said.
“Come on,” he said. “I deserve it. Who am I but some unheard of writer. Don’t you wonder why I think I deserve you?”
“Stop it,” she said. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“I’m the one who should be embarrassed. I’m always telling you what’s going on below the surface, and I conveniently forget that you’re complex, like everybody else.”
She got the waitress’ eye and motioned for the bill.
“Put me down,” he said. “I deserve it. But I want you to know that I can prove myself to you.”
He was back to being F. Scott Fitzgerald, but suddenly it occurred to her that the routine had never quite been what she thought it was; he wanted to pretend that she was a bitch and only a bitch. Simple, like silly Zelda.
22
NICOLE was sitting in the living room of Lucy’s house, discussing the future. Work was important to her. Work kept her centered. That was what she was telling Andrew Steinborn.
“What do you think?” Steinborn asked, moving the conversation away from her to Stephanie Sykes. “Does Stephanie feel a victim—does she realize that she’s living in that house because she’s useful? That in alleviating her suffering, Dr. Cora Cranston has mitigated her own, as well?”
“What does mitigated mean?” Nicole said.
“When something is made less,” Andrew said.
“I don’t really see it that way,” Nicole said. “She got picked up by the doctor, sure, but what does it matter that the doctor ends up happier and she ends up about the same? I guess it depends on whether you think doctors are more important people than the rest of the world, and saving one doctor is more important than saving an alcoholic.”
“But Stephanie Sykes has depth,” Andrew said. “You think her salvation is important, don’t you?”
“I guess so,” Nicole said, “but look—not everybody’s going to be saved.”
Andrew cocked his head.
“I haven’t read anything except the first two scripts,” she said. “I don’t really know how it’ll go this season.”
St. Francis ran down the stairs and stopped at the front door, whining. Nicole got up and took the sock out of his mouth and opened the door. He ran out onto the lawn and turned and barked. When he was sure that he had lost both the sock and Nicole’s attention, he stopped and walked over to his gully by the rhododendrons.
“Chain the dog,” Lucy called from upstairs.
“Excuse me,” Nicole said.
Andrew followed her outside. The d
ay was bright and breezy. The dog raised his snout and sniffed the air. Lillian had decided to sleep late. Andrew sat on the lawn and bumped onto one hip, pulling a piece of grass and chewing it. Nicole came over to where he sat on the lawn and sat down beside him. He thought that he must have challenged her too much with his questions. It was important to let her know that he cared what she thought and that he was not particularly interested in what was scheduled to happen on the program.
“How do you get inside your character?” he said, starting over.
“Oh, that’s not hard,” Nicole said. “She’s young, so she’s pretty easy to figure out.”
“But you’re both fourteen, aren’t you?” Andrew said.
“Yeah, but I mean, she’s young. She hasn’t really hardened into being who she’s going to be, so I sort of approach her thinking that nothing I do can really be wrong, because she’s changeable, right?”
“Can you give me an example?” Andrew said.
“Well, like in the scene where she’s in the bathroom, and Cora Cranston discovers the lump on her breast? I mean, there’s only one way to react if you find a lump, but somebody like Stephanie, just watching, can really do any number of things. So I thought that at that point she’d really harden herself. I’d try to show her getting hard, because she has enough of her own pain, right?”
“So you see her as very self-protective?”
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“Well, how do you get into that? I mean, as an actress, what thoughts go through your mind?”
“That there can’t be two people hogging the camera at the same time. I mean, if I had had more of a reaction than Pauline, I mean Dr. Cranston, that would have scooped her scene, and I didn’t really have the right to have the camera go to me, you know?”
“But leaving aside the technicalities of how the show is filmed: it was a conscious decision to have your character freeze just then?”
“If I hadn’t decided it, Pauline would just have made a scene.”
“Is that what you think about?”
“That’s just manners. I mean, when I’m stumbling blindly around the bathroom, Pauline lets me have that. If she threw herself against the door because she suspected what was going on, that wouldn’t be appropriate, you know? She’d be trying to get the camera during my scene.”
“I see. But leaving aside what seems to be a question of … manners … I mean, leaving aside whose scene it is and all that, what does Stephanie Sykes feel at such a moment?”
“What moment?” Nicole said.
“When you looked out and saw Dr. Cranston open her mouth in horror when she found the lump in her breast.”
“I felt that it was Dr. Cranston’s moment.”
Andrew looked past Nicole, at the heavy clouds blending into each other. He was not communicating well with Nicole.
“I understand that,” he said, “but I’m interested not in the way the scene should be filmed but in what you felt at that moment.”
“You mean what Stephanie Sykes felt?”
A bee buzzed past. Andrew jumped back. The sun disappeared behind the clouds.
“You lose yourself when you’re acting, don’t you?” Andrew said, a little annoyed that she had called his error to his attention.
“What Stephanie Sykes would do doesn’t have a lot to do with the way I’d act,” Nicole said.
“Aha! But as you understand her character …”
“She’s half sloshed all the time. She’s not all there. You know?”
“Yes. Right. But she’s been an abused child, torn between loyalty to her mother and the relief of being taken out of that situation, and suddenly she sees that her new life is threatened. Does this make her feel alone? Sad? Angry?”
“I guess she’s all of those things,” Nicole said.
“And so, in a split second, you decide that she’ll look a particular way, or make a particular gesture.”
“Right.”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out: how you intuit what she’s feeling and translate it.”
“You know,” Nicole said, “I don’t get that many CU’s.”
They seemed deadlocked. Andrew was sure that he was phrasing these questions wrong. Or perhaps she was just being modest, or even unwilling to share with him her deepest feelings. He opened his notebook. “Let me read you something,” he said. “I was talking to Pauline. Dr. Cranston. And she said, for instance, ‘When I touched the lump it was as though all time stopped, all life stopped: my own hand, my own life, was whirling around, the way protons and electrons whirl around the atom. I knew that I had but a second to communicate that sense of a human being relinquishing herself to the ultimate motion of infinity.’ ”
Nicole didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said, “Did she know in advance what question you were going to ask her?”
“No,” he said.
“Well, this is strictly off the record, but Pauline gets a little hyper about things, you know?”
“Yes, yes, but that’s all right. I want to hear about what the people on the show understand that their characters are feeling. That’s the way you can best help me. I’m not interested in the sort of technical dimensions of the scene, but in what you know and how you channel it into action.”
“The other thing is,” Nicole said, “we aren’t just up there doing what we want. There’s a director and a producer, plus the script.”
“At that moment, then, did you feel so restricted that you didn’t introspect about your character, just because it was Pauline’s—Dr. Cranston’s—moment?”
“It’s hard to remember,” Nicole said. “I can’t even remember exactly what I did.”
“Well,” Andrew said, leafing through the notebook again, “for example, Pauline said about that scene that you were perfect; that when Stephanie Sykes, seeing her stepmother’s fingers freeze, realizes that time itself is freezing, and she is being frozen with it, she expresses her resistance by drinking and sliding slowly down against the bathroom door, much the way top-heavy snow slides and spills. It was as natural a gesture as that.”
Nicole shifted on the grass. “I was supposed to get out of camera range so the screen would go black at that point,” Nicole said.
“But that wasn’t what you were reacting to,” Andrew said. “You could have, uh … smashed your fist into the medicine cabinet mirror, or something, and the camera could have focused through that into blackness—”
“The show’s not that arty,” Nicole said. “That’s a good idea, though.”
“And, uh, that’s what you did, with your consciousness. For what reason did you see Stephanie Sykes doing it?”
“Well, I mean, she drinks because she’s not happy. She knows the shit’s hitting the fan again, excuse me, and that’s a drag, so she sinks down in despair.”
“You see her as being in a state of despair.”
“She’s got a lot of problems and she’s an alcoholic, so she just folds up a lot of the time. That’s what she’s supposed to do. I, with my own consciousness, feel that that is what she’d do.”
Andrew was sweating. With the sun behind the clouds, his skin felt itchy as the air cooled. The cassette player clicked off. He reached for it, then thought that he might be intimidating her, even though she had had no objection to being taped. He didn’t turn the tape over. He leaned back on both elbows. She was really just a child, after all; no doubt she felt that people in his position were quizzing her like a teacher, and she would be resistant to that.
“Just tell me some things you’d like me to know about Stephanie Sykes,” he said. “Let’s forget my questions now.”
“I don’t know,” Nicole said. “She’s pretty much the way she’s explained in the press kit.”
“Is it hard to play such a troubled person?” Andrew said.
“No,” Nicole said.
Andrew was looking at her expectantly. She remembered something Piggy had said. “She’s Everyman,” Nicole said. It was her o
wn thought to add that she didn’t mean it as a sexist comment.
“Then, you don’t see her as greatly exaggerated?”
Nicole remembered something else. She wasn’t sure it would apply, but she decided to take a chance. “I see her as Jonah swallowed by the whale,” she said.
Andrew immediately rose to a sitting position. He opened the tape recorder, flipped the tape over, and said, “You see her as Jonah in the whale? What do you see the whale representing?”
“Society,” she said.
“So, uh, you see her as cut off, buried, in effect, a microcosm within the macrocosm, fighting for survival.”
“Right,” Nicole said.
“That’s a very powerful image. Is it hard to play the role of someone you sympathize with so strongly?”
“I couldn’t help her,” Nicole said.
Andrew looked at her.
“I mean me. Nicole. In real life. You can’t go around helping everybody you sympathize with. You can’t help it that you’re on top and the other guy isn’t.”
“You don’t think of her just as a victim of fate, do you?”
What else? Nicole thought. She realized that she wasn’t very good at imagining what people might be, or even what they might be doing, other than what they were and how they were acting at the present moment. She also realized that she was getting into deep water with Andrew Steinborn, and that it was better to try to end this discussion. What she wanted to say to him was that she didn’t look down on anyone, real or imaginary, who kept her from sitting in a chair in school all day long, nine months a year.
“Oh, no,” she said.
Steinborn let the tape run for another few seconds, then reached down and clicked it off.
“Thank you for your time,” he said. “I find it important not to guess about the world, not to transfer my own assumptions, but to remain open enough to ask questions. My novel will be published shortly, and I’ll send you a copy. I very much appreciate your having taken the time to discuss your role with me.”
“Sure,” Nicole said.
As they were walking back toward the house, Nicole looked up at the sky. “It’s not unheard of to have a tornado,” she said. “I wonder if we’re in for a tornado.” She was studying the sky, her face absolutely blank.
