And Sometimes Why

by Rebecca Johnson

  “Oh, my God,” Ruth said. “Boys! Out. Now.”

  “That’s not possible,” Harry said, “these fish don’t bite.”

  “Ruth,” Catherine said, “I am so sorry. Will you bring them again when we get this mess sorted out?”

  “Of course!” She kissed Catherine on the cheek and put a hand on the back of each boy’s head, without waiting for them to change out of their wet bathing suits. Harry watched her ass as she left.

  “Well done, Harry,” Catherine said sarcastically.

  “Is there a reason you have turned into such a hellacious bitch?” Harry asked.

  “Who’s the bitch, Harry? You’re the one who doesn’t have the balls to confront the people who fired you.”

  “I’m not fired. I’m on a mental-health leave.”

  “Hello?” Catherine laughed. “Earth to Harry. Everyone and his brother has auditioned for your job since the accident. It’s all over the Internet.”

  “There is a lot of misinformation on the Internet.”

  “Have you asked Aaron?”

  Harry tried to think of some way to contradict her, but every thing did seem to be pointing in the direction of her argument. Harry closed his eyes. In his earlier life, rejection at the job had been a constant refrain and he had learned not to take it personally. When he was let go from The Fire Within, the executive producer, a sallow, thin-faced man with an intermittent tic and a wardrobe of polka-dot bow ties, had stammered, “This is my least favorite part of my job.” Harry stopped him right there.

  “Jesus, Harry,” the man said afterward. “I wish every one was as easy to fire.”

  But this was different. Harry had truly believed that he and Would You Rather? were inextricably bound. One and the same. He hadn’t asked Aaron because a part of him preferred the illusion that he was still employed, but maybe Catherine was right. Ignoring reality was making him Aaron’s bitch.

  “Okay,” he said, opening his eyes. “I’ll go talk to him.”

  In the elevator, Harry could feel the eyes of a well-dressed middle-aged woman on his face. He knew from the way she glanced at him, looked away, and then glanced back, that she was trying to place him. It was rare for someone to have trouble remembering his face. Even the people who never watched Would You Rather? had seen commercials for it during other prime-time television shows. Had he dropped from the radar that quickly? After the woman got off the elevator, Harry studied his reflection in the chrome of the elevator door. It was the hair. For years, he’d been having it lightened to a creamy butter yellow every two weeks. The day after the accident his colorist had come to the house for their usual appointment, but had been scared off by the reporters who swarmed her Audi, demanding information about Harry’s “state of mind.” When she called later to apologize, he told her to forget it. Until they started taping again, there was no need for the chemicals that made his eyes itch and head ache. Within a week, he’d been surprised by the quarter inch of brown hair that had grown out of his skull. Now, it was a full inch and a half with streaks of gray running through it like an agate geode. The remaining blond hair had acquired a greenish tone from all the chlorine in the pool. No wonder the woman hadn’t been able to place him.

  The receptionist at Aaron’s office smiled coldly at Harry. He knew her type. The rest of America saw Hollywood as a babe magnet sucking the country’s beauties west with the promise of stardom. There was truth in the cliché—park yourself on Sunset Boulevard on a Saturday night and you could easily believe the world was populated by preternaturally toned young blondes with pneumatic bosoms and eyes hardened by the reality of beauty for sale. But for every one of those girls, there were three like the appraising receptionist. Bright, ambitious, well educated, they came to Hollywood because the maleness of Wall Street turned them off, publishing paid nothing, Silicon Valley was too geeky, nonprofits were depressing, and universities weren’t hiring. Entertainment was one of the few industries where women could rise to the top, and unlike the arrogant young men who began with them, they had no problem starting as assistants who picked up dry cleaning and answered phones. If the boss needed her birth-control prescription filled or her kid picked up from a playdate? Not a problem. On weekends, they read scripts, wrote “coverage” on them, and went out drinking with their peers. If they were any good, in two years they could count on a development job with an expense account and a job title sufficient to impress their parents back in New Jersey. As long as they hadn’t passed on the next Star Wars, from there, it was on to a studio job, a house in the hills, and if they were lucky—the man shortage was a constant refrain—a husband, kids, and a full-time nanny.

  In general, they did not date the “talent” but Harry had gone out with a few early in his career. Always, the dates went the same. She showed up looking good in a short black dress, no stockings, high heels, hair slicked back in a ponytail both girlish and mannish. Over dinner (broiled fish, no butter), she drank a lot of white wine, “split” a dessert, talked mostly business gossip, let Harry pay the check, invited him in for “a nightcap,” had vigorous sex with him, and then asked if he wouldn’t mind leaving, since she had an early meeting. At first, Harry thought the women liked him. Why else would they initiate sex like that? Without asking himself whether he actually liked them back, he’d call the next day. He didn’t want to be like those shmucks who made his mother cry. If the women were high up enough to have assistants, someone would take a message that was never returned. Sometimes he saw their names on top of projects for which he was being considered. He never did get those jobs.

  Some details had changed in the intervening years. The ponytails were gone, replaced by a long, shaggy haircut. Short skirts had been replaced by pants cut low on the hip and high heels with pointy toes, but the receptionist giving Harry a cold eye was definitely one of them. No question.

  “Hallo, Mr. Harlow,” she said, “what time is Mr. Kramer expecting you?”

  “He’s not, actually. I wanted to surprise him.” Was that the newest thing, Harry wondered, a phony English accent?

  “Lovely,” she answered. “If you’ll have a seat, I’ll let him know you’re here.” She waited until he was seated, just out of earshot, to make the phone call. He picked up the latest copy of Variety on the coffee table and, out of habit, went straight to the back, where auditions were announced.

  Hispanic male 24–26, attractive, for Tostitos commercial.

  Hip kids, 8–10, for cereal commercial.

  Tap dancers who can sing, under 30.

  No ads for a forty-five-year-old game show host with gray-green hair, but one did catch his eye:

  Tired of acting in dreck? Need to revitalize your career? Consider Shakespeare. The role of a lifetime. Renowned English director now casting Hamlet. GREAT SHOWCASE POTENTIAL. Males, 20–60. Female, 25. Any ethnicity.

  Shakespeare. Harry had never bothered. On The Fire Within, he used to make fun of the pretentious East Coast actors who talked about the “bard” they’d done in New York. Barf was more like it. Now, however, something in him stirred at the idea. He was a big success, wasn’t he? Why not stretch a little at the height of his powers? He coughed loudly as he ripped the ad from the page. The receptionist smiled vaguely in his direction, mimicking sympathy.

  “Harry!” He looked up to find Aaron’s assistant, Emmy, looming over him. He stood and let himself be enfolded in a cloud of green tea and baby powder.

  When she pulled back, Harry saw she was wearing a telephone ear-and mouthpiece like a Secret Service agent or an old-fashioned telephone operator. “How are you?” she asked, pushing aside the mouthpiece.

  “Fine,” he said, with a shrug. “I’m not the one who was hurt.”

  Emmy nodded, never taking her brown eyes off him. “I know, but just being there, that can be hard, too.”

  Harry nodded. “Well, thanks, Emmy. I appreciate your taking…notice.”

  “Of course.” She squeezed his arm. Emmy wasn’t like the hard-eyed girl behind the d
esk. She was sweet, a little plump, and would make somebody a very good wife, but she wasn’t the kind of girl Hollywood dickheads wanted to date. Aaron once told him she spent a lot of time in the bathroom crying.

  “Is Aaron around?” Harry asked.

  Emmy shook her head, as if saddened by something. “He’s on the set with a client. He’ll be so sorry he missed you.”

  “Oh.” Harry nodded. “Tell him I dropped by, will you?”

  “Of course!” Emmy nodded her head.

  Together, they walked toward the exit. When Emmy used her employee ID card to open the door leading to the inner offices, Harry put a hand on the door, holding it open for her. He saw fear in her eyes.

  “Thank you, Harry.”

  “Not at all.” He pointed down the hall in the opposite direction from her office. “I’m just going to use the little boys’ room.”

  “Okay.” She smiled, and glanced nervously toward Aaron’s office.

  In the bathroom, Harry pissed, washed his hands, splashed water on his face, and tried to pretend his heart was not racing.

  When Emmy saw Harry walking toward her desk, her eyes widened in terror. “Harry,” she whispered.

  “Relax, Emmy, I’m not going to shoot you.”

  In his office, Aaron was calmly staring out the window, as if he’d been waiting for Harry.

  “When were you going to tell me?” Harry asked, sitting across from him in a leather club chair from the 1920s that supposedly was owned by Fatty Arbuckle.

  “It’s on my list of things to do, right under getting a colonoscopy.”

  “Why?”

  “You know what they say. There are four stages of life in this town: Harry who? Get me Harry. Get me a young Harry. And, Harry who?”

  “I thought I was ‘Get me Harry.’”

  “You were. But then you had a high-profile accident when your contract was up for renewal. A show gets too associated with one host, that’s not good for business. You might get greedy. You might die. Who knows? The network saw an opportunity.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “We had a good run. That’s all you can ask for. Remember when I found you? You couldn’t even buy lunch. Besides, you told Boyd you didn’t even like the job.”

  “Isn’t that, like, privileged information?”

  “He works for the show.”

  “Can’t we fight them?”

  Aaron made a steeple with his fingers and pressed them against his forehead. “Sometimes, things are done that can be undone. But not in this case.”

  Harry looked out the window. On the street, the light had been flat and oppressive, the sky the color of wet cement, but in Aaron’s office, the room glowed with the golden light of a wine commercial, an effect produced by a special uv filter made of finely spun fourteen-carat gold. “You don’t want to know what it cost,” Aaron had once told him, his voice swollen with pride.

  “Are you going to continue to represent me?” Harry asked.

  “How can you ask?”

  Harry shrugged. How could he not? Aaron started to chew on a hanging cuticle.

  “What do I do now?” Harry asked.

  “Nothing. I’m trying to hammer out as big a severance package as I can.” It wasn’t what Harry meant.

  “Maybe this is a good thing. I’ve been thinking I ought to stretch my wings. Maybe do a little Shakespeare.”

  Aaron smiled. “I am sure there are people who would pay to see that.”

  “The problem is, I’m not a very good actor.”

  “For a man without talent, you’ve done very well. That’s something.”

  Harry had a sudden urge to smash his fist into Aaron’s smug face.

  By the time Harry got back to his car and paid the parking garage, rush-hour traffic had begun. He slowly eased his car out of the garage exit but sat frozen, waiting for someone in the line of cars crawling down the street to let him enter. Before the accident, he would have nosed his car into the mass, forcing someone to let him in. Behind him, an asshole in aviator glasses beeped. Harry went back to concentrating on the traffic. A gap appeared. Heart thumping, he turned on his signal and slowly merged.

  When he got home, the house was dark. Catherine had left a note. “Out for the evening. Dinner in oven. Heat 450, 10 mins. C.” He lifted the tin foil. Vegetarian pizza. When they were first married, Catherine insisted he go every where with her but now she went out without even asking if he wanted to go along. It occurred to him that maybe Catherine was getting ready to leave. He let the novelty of the idea settle into him, waiting for some kind of reaction. Wounded pride. Loneliness. But there was only relief. Not for the first time, he found himself wondering if he was even capable of love. Every time he thought he’d found it, the feeling would always fade. Sometimes sooner. Sometimes later. But, eventually, it always died. When it came to love, he had a black thumb.

  He decided to go swimming. Emptying his pockets, he came across the page he’d ripped out of Aaron’s Variety. Tired of acting in dreck? Need to revitalize your career? He walked over to the full-length mirror in their closet.

  “To be or not to be?” he asked his reflection, one eyebrow arching. Even he could see it was all wrong. More like a parody of a snooty waiter.

  He tried again. This time, he wiped all inflection out of his voice. “To be or not to be?” he asked in a monotone. But that was wrong, too. He seemed depressed. Like a hollow man.

  He took off all his clothes, wrapped a towel around his waist, went outside, and lowered himself slowly into the warm water of the Jacuzzi next to the pool. Tiny bubbles clung to the hair on his thighs. His prick looked small and shriveled in the aqua blue water. He’d been reassured on several occasions that he didn’t need to worry in the size department, but how could he trust what any woman said? They were all so damn eager to please. Until they weren’t. And then they turned so mean. Or sad. Even his own mother. As often as he had offered to come visit her when she complained about her loneliness, he’d always been secretly relieved when she’d said no.

  One thing was certain, he wasn’t going to try out for that play or any other. As of that night, Harry decided to give up being an actor once and for all. He was sick of trying to do something he wasn’t good at. He’d been around enough talent to understand that the people who could make you believe without feeling embarrassed for them, the ones who mysteriously blossomed in front of a crowd, were naturals. They weren’t smarter or funnier or happier or better-looking than Harry. Usually, they were pretty miserable sons of bitches or just barely sane women, but they had something Harry did not. Talent.

  Having made the decision, Harry felt suddenly unburdened. Lighter. Freer. Like he could run a mile in a minute. He climbed out of the Jacuzzi and went to the edge of the pool. In the dark, the fish seemed to be executing an elaborately choreographed ballet of intertwining chains of flesh, their silver skin twinkling like Mylar in the wind. Harry eased his body into the water. On his first lap, the fish gave him a wide berth. On the second lap, he felt something hard touch his left leg. What the fuck? He looked down into the water but could see nothing. Something nipped him on the back. Harry lunged for the stairs, gripped by a sudden atavistic fear of dark water. He turned on a light in the pool house and looked at his calf. There, above his ankle, were two tiny red marks. The kid was right. The fish were biting.

  The next morning, Harry left an angry message on Joe Fisher’s voice mail. “I guess you forgot to tell me the fish bite. Call me.”

  Half an hour later, he watched Joe Fisher’s van pull into the driveway. He knew he ought to go outside and confront him. Instead, he went to the kitchen and took his time brewing a cup of cappuccino. Normally, he found the ritual of grinding coffee beans, monitoring the water level of the steam valve, waiting for every thing to reach the boiling point tedious at best. Today, he took his time with each step, glad for an excuse to avoid confronting Fisher. He knew he ought to be angry. The problem was, he liked the fish. It made him happy to see th
em swimming in the pool, reclaiming the water as their own, redeeming the vainglorious scoop of concrete and water. But Harry also liked to swim. How, he wondered, did people in Europe manage it? He took a sip of the cappuccino, scalding his tongue on the too-hot liquid. He looked up when Catherine appeared in the doorway. Usually she wore sweatpants or stretchy leggings around the house but today she was wearing a fitted shirt and pants that looked uncharacteristically grown up, as if she were getting ready for a job interview.

  “We need to talk,” she said, lowering her herself onto one of the bar stools that lined their counter. The chairs were Shaker-style, webbed with bright yellow and red cotton. She bought them with the help of an interior designer whose bill for services was twice the cost of the actual chairs. Harry watched as she took a deep breath and looked down at the folded hands on her lap. When he’d worked on the soap opera, he’d seen a million bad actresses do the exact same thing right before delivering bad news. Take a breath. Look at hands. Confess infidelity. Take a breath. Look at hands. Announce you have cancer, had sex with your brother-in-law, spent the household expenses on cocaine. What, he wondered, accounted for the sameness? Had all women watched so many of the same movies that they unconsciously absorbed the behavior, or was it something deeper, more atavistic? Look at your hands in readiness for a fight, take a breath in preparation for flight?

  “I want a divorce,” she said.

  Harry held his burned tongue against the roof of his mouth. He remembered a similar morning only a few years ago when Catherine had worn the same pinched expression, as if she were wearing shoes that didn’t fit. “My family wants you to sign a pre-nup,” she’d said, “but I trust you and I don’t need that.” In fact, he had often thought of that morning as he wrote checks for the clothing bills or the massage therapist or the hair cutter or the shrink or the new car, or all the other things he paid for in Catherine’s life.

  “Okay,” he answered, “have your lawyer talk to mine.”