Her voice wavered, and she looked as if she might burst into tears. She put a hand to her mouth. "He never had a chance to because—" her voice broke "—because when he took his eyes off the road to look at me, the car … it drifted over into the other lane, and—" She shook her head violently, refusing to tell or even remember the rest. The movement tossed her hair aside and streaked her scarred cheek with tears.
"And you crashed," Ryan finished, in a near-whisper. She nodded just once, almost imperceptibly. Then she closed her eyes, as if trying to shut out some stark picture of that moment, one that she had carried around with her all these years.
Chapter 27
A week went by, then two, and no police showed up at their door. Ryan thought about calling Burton's office to see where they stood, but he kept putting it off. If Mr. Kurz was taking some kind of legal action against the investigator, Ryan didn't want to get caught in the crossfire.
And then school started, and he was too busy to think of anything else. He knew that if he hoped to get into an arts school next year, he was going to have to work hard to bring his grades up. But he also needed to do some work work; there was no way they could make ends meet on just the Mothers' Allowance.
At night and on weekends, he auditioned for anything and everything, but theater budgets were so tight, they were doing mostly small-cast shows. At a cattle-call for a new repertory company, he found himself once again preceded by Daniel Shue, the skinny kid he'd shooed from the stage during the auditions for Les Miz. Apparently, Shue hadn't made the cut, either, or he wouldn't be here.
It was too bad. Ryan hadn't noticed before how talented the kid was. He did an impressive job with "Maria," which wasn't easy to sing. But about a minute into his monologue, the kid had one of those dreaded moments where the words just won't come. He stood frozen in place, trying not to look desperate, until the director said, "Thank you, Daniel. Next, please."
They met in the wings; the boy was practically in tears. Ryan surprised both Daniel and himself by giving him a comradely pat on the back. "Hey, it happens to all of us, man. Don't let it get you down, okay? There'll be other shows and other parts, and you'll nail one of them. You're good."
The kid blinked at him in astonishment. "You … you think so?"
"I know so."
Daniel Shue smiled shakily. "Thanks."
"You're welcome."
"Ryan Waite?" said the director's voice. "You're on."
"You better get out there," said Daniel Shue.
Ryan shrugged. "Let 'em wait." He swatted the boy's thin arm. "See you at the next one, okay, champ?" Had he really said champ?
"Okay."
Now, why had he done that, exactly? Daniel Shue was his competition. He shouldn't be encouraging the kid. It was just that he knew how it felt. He'd never actually frozen up that totally on stage; he always managed to cover. But after his ordeal in Halifax, he knew what it was like to be stuck in the spotlight with no idea what to say next, and no one to bail him out.
That unfamiliar feeling had come over him again. Empathy.
Now that he'd identified it, maybe he could inject some of it into his performances. On some level, he'd always understood that this was what acting was all about—being able to put yourself inside the skin of another person. He'd just never worked very hard at it. He relied mostly on charm and stage presence and the ability to mimic other actors, and it had always worked well enough; it had even gotten him some good reviews.
He'd played real life the same way. He never worked very hard at it; he never worried much about other people's feelings, or even about his own. And again, he'd gotten by okay. But maybe you reached a point where just getting by wasn't good enough.
"Ryan Waite!" called the director.
"Sorry!" he said, as he hustled onstage. "I thought for a minute there I was going to have to throw up." Not quite the truth, but close enough.
After school one day, Ryan's old agent rang him up. A year or so earlier, when the tv gigs started slacking off, the guy had dumped him. But, he said, a producer at an ad agency had just contacted him, looking for a good-looking, engaging young actor to do spots for a sporting goods company, and he'd immediately thought of Ryan.
The next day, Ryan left school early and still barely made it to North York in time for his appointment. The producer, whose name was Phil, looked over his resumé and head shots and then stared at him so intently that it made him a little uncomfortable. "What?" said Ryan, with a laugh.
"You aren't by any chance related to Michael Waite?"
Ryan was speechless for a second. "Um … that was my dad's name."
"Did he work in advertising?"
"I … I think so. I don't know that much about him. He left when I was just little. Wait a minute … you mean … he worked here?"
Phil nodded. "We were good friends, in fact. You know, you look a lot like him."
"No, I didn't know. Mom didn't keep any pictures of him."
"No kidding? She must really be nursing a grudge. I don't know why. Mike was a great guy." He shook his head ruefully. "I was really sorry to see him leave. He didn't give any reason; one day, he just didn't show up."
"He was in a car accident."
"Wow. I never knew that. Was he hurt badly?"
"I don't think so. My mom never said."
"Well, if you ever hear from him, have him call me, will you?"
"Yeah. Sure."
The conversation put Ryan badly off balance, but he recovered enough to do a reasonably good audition. Phil promised to call him within a day or two. As he headed for the bus stop, he remembered that when he called Burton's office from Nova Scotia, he'd noticed that it was a North York exchange; it might just be somewhere in this neighborhood. He went back inside, borrowed a phone book, and wrote down the address of Burton Investigative Services. "Do you know where Allness Street is?" he asked the receptionist.
It was a bit of a hike, but he needed the walk, anyway; he was still feeling a little spacey. He found the place easily enough, a drab one-story office building next to a decaying strip mall. Well, it wasn't surrounded by cop cars; that was a good sign.
In the lobby was a display board with the names and office numbers of the tenants. Two of them were printed on scraps of paper, Scotch-taped to the board. Burton's info was in plastic letters, but evidently V's were in short supply; it read: 112 burton inuestigative seruices.
The office was surprisingly neat and well-decorated; Ryan suspected Burton's secretary was responsible for that, not the man himself. There was no sign of either the secretary or her boss, only an empty desk. Then Ryan noticed the door marked Private. When he knocked on it, a familiar gruff voice said, "Yeah, come on in."
Ryan opened the door. Burton sat behind a massive, slightly beat-up oak desk with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a glass of either water or vodka—vodka was Ryan's guess—in the other. "You found me," he said.
"It wasn't too hard. Where's your secretary?"
"I had to let her go. Too bad; she was very efficient."
"So, I guess business isn't exactly booming."
"No." Burton tossed the papers aside and took a sip from the glass. "I was going to call you. I've just been waiting to hear from Kurz."
Though Burton hadn't offered him a seat, Ryan took one. "And did you?"
Burton gave his trademark brusque nod.
"Is he okay? His heart, I mean."
"Yeah, yeah, he's fine. He's not going to press charges, but he does want his money back—most of it, anyway. I pointed out that I did find Allen—the real Allen—and he's letting me keep the retainer—the money he paid me up front."
"Great. So I guess I get nothing, right?"
He shrugged. "You did the job I hired you for. It wasn't your fault that things got screwed up."
"So what are you saying?"
"I'm saying I'll pay you what I can afford to, which is a thousand dollars."
"That's a far cry from thirteen thousand."
&nbs
p; "Sorry. It's actually more than I can afford at this point, but what the hell. You earned it."
"I earned a lot more than that." Ryan leaned back in his chair and casually propped one foot on his knee—body language that projected confidence. "You know, I was going to come here and give you all kinds of grief about how you lied to me and everything, but what's the point? Anyway, I've got something else I want to discuss. As Monty Hall would say, let's make a deal."
"A deal? What kind of deal?"
"You give me the thousand, and you make up the rest by providing your services at no charge."
He gave a hoarse laugh. "Are you saying you want to hire me?"
"Sort of. Except I'm not going to pay you."
Burton shook his head. "You've got a lot of nerve, kid, I'll give you that." He took another swig of the presumed vodka. "What exactly do you expect me to do?"
"I want you to find my father."
Ryan didn't bother to tell his mother about the deal with Burton. He just flashed the thousand-dollar check, which she, typically, saw as a cause for celebration. Never mind that it was a fraction of what he'd been promised; it was still a thousand dollars more than they'd had the day before. It did Ryan no good to point out that, knowing Burton, the check might well bounce. She insisted that they treat themselves to dinner at a nice restaurant.
While she changed into what she called her "classy" dress—she had only one that fit the description, and it was at least five years old—she chatted with Ryan through the flimsy bedroom door. "So, this Kurz fellow, he's not going to sue you or have you arrested or anything?"
"Apparently not. He got his son back, and most of his money, so I guess he's satisfied."
"Did his son—what was his name?"
Ryan sighed. He'd been trying not to think about Allen. "It's Allen."
"Did Allen go visit his father?"
"He's going to, I guess. Burton says Mr. Kurz is pretty psyched about it. I'll bet Ollie is, too."
"But you said—"
"I'm kidding, Mom, okay? She'll probably have his plane hijacked." Ryan wondered how Allen and Kelley would hit it off. Would she tell him all the things she'd told Ryan, about how she wanted to be a writer, about how she admired Madonna? Would they play tennis together, and ride the horses down to the river? No doubt Allen was better than Ryan at staying in the saddle. He could probably discuss literary stuff with her, too. But Ryan was willing to bet that he couldn't play boogie-woogie.
His mother emerged from the bedroom in a knee-length flowered dress, her hair brushed carefully forward to hide the scars. "Aren't you going to change?"
"Believe me, I have," said Ryan.
She looked him up and down. "No, you haven't."
"Oh, you mean my clothes."
"What did you mean?"
"Nothing. Just a little joke. Yeah, I guess if we're going to celebrate, I should put on my classy outfit." He headed for his room, then turned back. "Oh, by the way—"
"Yes?" she prompted.
Ryan cleared his throat. "You … ah … you look really nice."
She stared at him a moment, as if unsure she'd heard him properly, as if wondering whether this was the Ryan she knew, or some imposter who said unexpected and uncharacteristic things. "Well," she said. "Thank you."
Ryan gave an awkward, embarrassed shrug. "Hey," he said, "it happens to be true."
Interview with Gary Blackwood
First, a fairly obvious question: what drew you to write about a boy who gets involved in this kind of deception?
Normally, I don't use real people much as a basis for characters (except for physical traits, sometimes). But at the time I wrote The Imposter, my preteen son was having some issues with lying and getting into minor trouble because of it. I started to think about a story situation in which a similar character would find himself in major trouble. I think I've always been interested, though, in the concept of lying, and when it's okay to lie and when it's not. Acting and novel writing are both forms of lying, for example, but they're considered acceptable.
In this and other stories, you have demonstrated your personal interest in the theater and acting. Where did that interest come from?
It's hard to say, just as it's hard to say where my interest in writing came from. I had no exposure to theater when I was growing up, aside from the yearly Junior and Senior plays at our very small high school (which could just as easily have put me off theater altogether). And yet the drama bug bit me hard. I did a lot of amateur acting throughout my twenties and thirties, and then discovered how much more satisfying it is to be on the other side of the spotlight, writing and directing plays.
This is a story that you have been working on for many years. How has it changed during that time?
It's more a case, I think, of how much I've changed as a writer during that time. When I did my first draft of The Imposter, way back in 1992 or so, my top priority was probably plot. That's still crucial for me, but I've gotten more interested in character and theme—which, of course, are the things that really drive the plot. I also find that, with each book I write, I demand more of myself, and I've written at least seven novels since then, each a little more complex than the last, so it was a real challenge to go back to something I'd written twenty years earlier and try to bring it up to my own stricter standards.
You set this story in the 1990s. If it had been set in the present day, what would have been different about the circumstances of the story?
When I did this latest rewrite, I thought about moving it forward in time, but so many elements of the plot hinge on what the technology of the 1990s was like, I couldn't see a way of making it work. Information is so accessible to us now, it would be much easier for Mr. Kurz to find his son; probably all he'd have to do is search Facebook! And I would think it'd be very difficult to pass yourself off as someone else these days; it's just too easy for the victim to check the accuracy of your story.
Empathy is a trait that Ryan lacks at the beginning of the story—and he has to learn about it under a lot of pressure. You clearly think that it's a quality that's needed not just in the acting profession but in real life. Is that one of the objectives you had in telling this story?
Not at the beginning. I didn't really develop the theme of empathy in my first version of the novel. I just had Ryan learning about the perils of lying. When I revised the novel about five years later (at the request of an editor who ended up not publishing it), the ability to see things from someone else's point of view became the most important lesson that Ryan learns, and I think it adds a lot to the character and to the novel.
Not long ago, you moved from the United States to live in Nova Scotia. This also meant that you moved the locale of this story from the U.S. to Canada. Is changing the setting of a story about more than just substituting one place name for another?
When I realized I was going to have to change the setting, I thought, "Hey, no problem." Little did I know how complicated it would be. Since I had only been in Canada for five years or so, I didn't know much of the country, so it was hard even to decide on specific locations. I chose Toronto because it was the only city with a really thriving theater scene at the time; I set the second half in the Halifax area because it was close to home and I could easily check out locations in person—or ask faithful friends in the city to check them out for me.
The real challenge, though, was painting a detailed, accurate picture of what everyday life was like twenty years ago. It's recent enough that it's not written about much, but long enough ago that people's memories aren't really reliable. The residents of Windsor couldn't have been more helpful and obliging, but when I asked where the bus stop was located in 1990, I got five different opinions!
Ryan is a teenager who scrapes together a modest living through being an actor. How common is it for young people today to have lives with this kind of focus?
Most of the teens I work with in theater productions and writing workshops are very focused and have a pretty fi
rm idea of what they want to do with their lives and how to go about it. I don't know whether they're the exception or the rule.
In light of contemporary realities in the arts, what advice do you have for young writers today?
Carving out a career in the arts is always dicey, at best. In my experience, the ones who make it are the ones who can't imagine doing anything else with their lives, and so they pursue it even though they know the odds are against them. You can make the odds a little better by learning the craft thoroughly—writing regularly, of course, but also reading voraciously so you learn what good writing is and what the competition is, and taking workshops that teach you the basics of good storytelling.
Thank you, Gary.
The Imposter Page 14
