The Last Dreamer

by Barbara Solomon Josselsohn

  “And here I thought we were friends! Let’s change the subject. What else is doing in the big world of journalism? Interview anyone interesting lately?”

  “I did go to a cocktail party recently,” she answered. It was the only out-of-the-ordinary thing she had done. She realized that in answering his question, she was back to twisting the truth. She knew the magazine was still a long shot, but she desperately hoped it would work out and she’d soon be able to stop all the lying. “Spoke to someone from one of the big Broadway casting offices. I thought I might get a scoop about Hugh Jackman in talks about a new Broadway show. But she wouldn’t confirm it.”

  “That’s too bad. But don’t be discouraged. Go back and butter her up. Or better yet, hound her until you get what you want. That’s what I do.”

  “Somehow I don’t buy that. You were quite smooth with the Bloomingdale’s crowd, as I remember,” she said.

  He grinned. “Guess you’re right about that.”

  “But it wouldn’t help anyway,” she said. “She’s leaving her job. To move with her fiancé. To Cleveland.”

  “Sounds like you don’t approve,” he said. “Got something against Cleveland?”

  “What I’ve got something against is her abandoning this great career. Women always think they have plenty of time and they can switch things up later, but it’s not always so easy. They get caught up in the day-to-day, letting their calendar get filled up with chores, knowing the months and years are passing by but not doing anything to . . .” She looked up and saw him watching her. “What? Did I say something stupid?”

  He leaned back in the booth, clapped his hands, and laughed. “Just burst my bubble is all. Never again will I think of journalists as open-minded and nonjudgmental.”

  “I didn’t insult you, did I? I mean, your wife works; you told me that, didn’t you?”

  “Catherine? She’s practically my boss. I wouldn’t have a business without her. But don’t worry, I like that you have strong feelings. Hey, I have lots to show you today. I’ll be crushed if I don’t get at least a few strong reactions.”

  He got up, took his wallet from his back pocket, and pushed her shoulder playfully as he walked toward the cash register. “Come on, stop being embarrassed and let’s get going. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

  Outside, he zipped his jacket all the way up, bracing himself against the cold. “That’s my car,” he said, nodding toward a blue, older-model BMW in the parking lot. “The house is only about ten minutes away, but there are a lot of turns. So you can follow me.

  “Oh, and one more thing,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket. “Here’s something to inspire you. Or make you curious. Either one.”

  He took out a small photograph and extended his arm to give it to her. The wind suddenly kicked in, blasting against her back, but she grabbed the picture just before it could blow away, and took a long look. It was a picture of the Dreamers, one of the earliest, if not the earliest, she had ever seen. The boys all looked young, not much older than Matthew, and their heads were tilted upward, as though they were watching someone on a high platform right in front of them. Terry was sitting on a stool, his curls falling into his eyes, and Jeff and the other two boys stood behind him. They all looked somber, as though they had gotten mixed up in something they weren’t sure they wanted. Jeff’s mouth was open, with the bottom tip of one of his top teeth showing.

  “You look scared,” she said.

  Jeff looked over her shoulder, blocking her from the wind, hands in the front pockets of his jeans. “No, not scared,” he said. “Just full of . . . astonishment, I guess. It was our first day on the set. And I was about to take off on the ride of a lifetime. See how we’re all looking up?”

  She nodded, looking behind her at him.

  “We were looking at the crew. They were all around, on ladders, on scaffolds. There were literally dozens of them. And their only job was to make us soar.”

  In the car, Iliana followed Jeff out of the parking lot and onto a long, two-lane stretch of road. Eventually he made a few turns that led through a small town, and then they came to a residential neighborhood with split-level houses and a concrete sidewalk. Iliana assumed they were just passing through, but soon Jeff slowed and parked near the curb. Iliana pulled in behind him and watched him get out of his car, wondering why they were stopping. Did he need to tell her something?

  She rolled down her window and he leaned down toward her. “Welcome to the headquarters of Downs Textiles,” he said with a laugh. His breath came out as steam. “Pretty corporate, huh?”

  She turned from him and dipped her head to see the whole house through the opposite window. Was it some kind of a joke? She knew there were some very expensive areas in this part of the county, and she’d been expecting something much more impressive—a sprawling estate with a tennis court and a pool, maybe a round marble fountain with cascading jets of water, a huge front portico. After all, he had to have made a ton of money from the TV show, hadn’t he? Instead, they were parked beside the kind of modest house she saw advertised in the paper every day: four bedrooms, eat-in kitchen, family room, maybe a fireplace. He had never described his home, but she had come here with expectations she hadn’t even realized she had.

  “Surprised?” he said. “I know. Pretty small and basic. But I gotta tell you, after all the glitz of Hollywood, Catherine and I wanted something scaled way back. And we’ve never regretted it. I was tired of the high life.”

  She opened her door and stepped out of the car, wondering if it could be true that he really preferred a basic split-level. Or did he just want her to think that? Suddenly she wondered if he had been working all along to manipulate her impressions of him. How badly did he want this article she was hoping to publish? All his reluctance to talk about the Dreamers, and there he was waiting for her at the coffee shop, holding a photo to whet her appetite. Had he always been hoping for a full-length feature about himself? Had he been waiting to find a reporter he could charm into telling his story the way he wanted it told—and was that why he was always so nice and friendly to her?

  “I just need to check the mail real fast,” he said, and she followed him up two concrete steps, through the front door, and into a small, red-tiled entranceway. There was a stairway to the right, with a basic tan carpet. To her left was the living room, with a white leather sofa, a square glass coffee table, and two club chairs. Ahead she could see one wall of the kitchen. The white countertop held the normal supplies of suburban living, a coffeemaker, a toaster, a mixer. It didn’t seem that anyone else was around, and she started to feel uncomfortable. Where were his employees? She didn’t think she’d been alone in a house with a man other than Marc since she was single. It made her wonder if maybe she had misjudged his intentions when he invited her here. Had he actually brought her here to try to sleep with her?

  He picked up some envelopes on a small glass table and shuffled through them, and she instinctively moved several steps away from him and closer to the door. To her right was a ledge with a few framed photographs, and she leaned in to examine them. The one in front, a five-by-seven, showed three teenage girls leaning back on a wooden fence, a turquoise ocean behind them. Iliana assumed they were the daughters he had told her about at the restaurant. The older two, in halter tops and shorts that couldn’t have been any tinier, looked bored, their long hair in their faces, their shoulders slumped, their mouths slightly smirking. The youngest, a chubby girl with a large, fleshy face, was in a black midriff with spaghetti straps, her baby fat flopping over the waist of her too-tight jeans. She looked defiantly into the camera, as if daring the photographer to go ahead and shoot.

  More relaxed now that Jeff was paying attention to the mail, Iliana thought about why Jeff and his wife had put this picture in the front hallway. Was this the best vacation picture they had? Was their perception so warped by years of living with sullen, moody te
enagers that they actually thought the girls looked happy? She had imagined Jeff’s life so differently. Maybe she had idealized him too much. After all, she had spent years knowing only what she saw on TV—an incredibly cute guy with great hair and a winning smile, playing the role of a boy who is liked by everyone and always gets the girl. She was the one who liked to figure out what made people tick. Maybe she should have realized that his real life would be more complicated than his on-screen one.

  It made her wonder even more what else she might learn today.

  Jeff tapped the stack of mail on the palm of one hand. Iliana could tell he was uncomfortable, too. “Okay, done. Now we can get started. The office is behind the house. This way.”

  She followed him outside and down a path on the side of the house. Beyond the back lawn was a structure that looked like a small barn. “This whole area used to be one big estate, and when they subdivided it, they left some carriage houses,” he said. “We were lucky our property came with one. We thought it was a good idea to decentralize our operation—you know, focus the showroom completely on sales and marketing, without all the distracting administrative functions in the way.”

  He led her up two small wooden steps and held open a painted green door. There was a small, dark entranceway that led directly to a steep wooden stairway. He gestured ahead, and she began climbing, aware of how closely her pants hugged her body. She wished Jeff would turn around and go back downstairs so she could, too, because it felt wrong to be alone in this dark stairwell with him. But she could hear his footsteps, clop, clop, clop, closing in on her.

  She reached the top step and felt a tingle of relief trickle through her body. The large attic room was entirely businesslike. It reminded her of the small lofts in old buildings in Soho where graphic artists she had sometimes hired for Business Times worked. There was a wood floor and slanting wood beams on the ceiling, with tall, old windows lining the walls. Two tables with computer monitors were in the center of the room. A man and a woman were staring at one.

  Jeff seemed more at ease now, too. “Hey, guys, here’s the reporter I told you about,” he called as he took her coat. “You online with Stefano?”

  The two nodded, the man holding up a finger to indicate that they were in the middle of a critical step. “We’re waiting to hear if he’ll do it.”

  Jeff kept his eyes on his employees as he explained to her what was going on. “We’re creating this whole new category,” he said. “A lightweight, real upscale comforter—organic cotton, super-high thread count, all the bells and whistles. Perfect for expensive beach homes—the Hamptons, Fire Island, those kinds of places. We got a lead on this amazing Italian designer and we’re hoping to convince him to do some ultra-sophisticated prints for us. We’ve got a small shop in East Hampton that would do the launch, and if it takes off, we’ll roll it out to other high-end markets.”

  The two people pulled back from the computer, smiling. “Perfect!” the man said. “He’ll do it. Man, this product’s going to be awesome.”

  Jeff congratulated his employees for locking Stefano in and then introduced them to Iliana.

  “We’re going to overnight some fabric samples to the factory and get something to eat,” the woman said. “See you later, Jeff. Nice meeting you, Iliana.”

  The two of them headed downstairs, and she and Jeff were now alone again. The room was quiet—as quiet as the house had been when they were alone there together. Iliana started to feel nervous again, but Jeff looked totally relaxed as he sat down in a modern, leather office chair behind a large executive desk made of dark wood.

  He motioned to Iliana to sit opposite him. “Okay, Ms. Fisher,” he said, leaning back and putting his hands behind his head. “The ball’s in your court. What exactly would you like from me?”

  They were words she would have given her right arm to hear when she was in middle school. And back then, she would have answered Love me! Be with me! Make me special! Today she had a different answer. But in a way, she realized, it was still the same.

  She reached in her bag and double-checked that her phone’s volume was turned up, so she’d hear it if Matthew or Dara called. Then she took out the small digital recorder she used for her local stories, flipped it on, and set it on his desk. She didn’t know if she’d actually get an assignment and need his quotes, but she wanted to record them anyway. She wanted to hold on to his story forever.

  “Are you okay with this?” she asked.

  He shrugged good-naturedly. “You’re the boss.”

  “Then tell me your story,” she said. “I want to know everything. I want to know how you became a star, and how it felt to be one. I want to know what you liked, and what you didn’t like, and how being a star was better or worse than what people would expect it to be. And I want to know how it felt when everything ended, and how it feels now, when it’s all behind you. I want to hear it all. ”

  Her interest clearly delighted him, as he looked like a man who had just drawn a winning poker hand. “Okay,” he said. “Here we go.”

  Chapter 11

  “It all comes down to the music,” he began. “The first day on the set, they told me they didn’t need me to play. They had studio musicians lined up. But I took out my guitar and started performing this song I wrote, and their mouths dropped open. Even the top guy, Stan Shore, did a double take. ‘Waddayaknow?’ he said. ‘The kid’s got a sound.’ And then—”

  “Wait, wait,” Iliana said. “Start at the beginning. The very beginning. How did it all happen, how did they find you?”

  “From the jeans commercial.”

  “And how did you get that? Did you go to an audition?”

  “Yes. Well, no. No, what happened is . . .” He sighed and rolled his eyes. “Okay, if you must know, Ms. Fisher, it starts a year earlier with this community theater thing that is just too embarrassing to talk about.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said. “You promised me great stories. And remember, I told you my M&M’s story. As you said, we’re friends now.”

  He folded his arms on his desk. “Pretty shrewd, to use my own words against me. Okay, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll give you. But I reserve the right to cut this part out of the finished article, got it?”

  She laughed. “We’ll discuss what goes in and out of the article later,” she said. “Let’s just start. No holding back.”

  He leaned his chin on the palm of his hand. “Okay, then I guess I’d have to say that it really starts when I’m sixteen,” he said. “Living at home, bored at school, hating my parents, desperate to lose my virginity—a typical teenage boy, right? But then everything changes when this new family moves next door. The guy, he’s nice and all, but it’s his wife, Wendy, who gets me crazy. Man, she was hot. Long, honey-colored hair and pink lipstick, golden-tanned legs that go on forever. And they had these two little kids, and I just loved that. It meant that she actually had sex! Yes!”

  He pumped his fist, and Iliana forced a smile. She didn’t like to think of Jeff examining Wendy’s legs or imagining Wendy in bed. Her daydreams of him when she was young had always been G-rated.

  “And she’s part of this community theater group, and one day she tells my mom they need a teenage boy to play one of the roles,” he said. “All this kid has to do is sit on the couch pretending to watch TV, and at one point say, ‘Hey, shut up, I’m trying to watch!’ So my mom asks me, and Wendy tells me she’s in the cast, too, and I say, ‘Oh, yeah!’ You see, I didn’t have much to do with girls before then. My friends and I, we just hung around at the mall or behind the school, getting high. But now, I’m spending all this time in rehearsals with Wendy—and even though the play sucks, I’m in goddamned heaven.”

  Again, Iliana found herself slightly put off. She hated to think that Jeff was just like all the potheads she remembered from school who gathered in the afternoons, swarming the building like termites. “So wa
s it only about this woman?” she said. “Or did you like being onstage? What did you want to come of this? Were you thinking the play could lead to something big?”

  He shook his head. “Wish I could say I had big, important goals for myself, but hey, it was all about Wendy. What can I tell you? I was just a kid. So opening night comes, and I’m backstage, and suddenly I notice a couple in a corner, in this intense lip-lock—yup—it’s Wendy, with one of the idiot lighting guys. I don’t know if I was more upset for myself or the poor schmuck she was married to, but I just want to punch someone. And then the stage manager yells, ‘Places!’ So I’m onstage and I have nothing to do but watch an imaginary television and listen to the other actors say these stupid words I’ve heard a million times, and you can tell that the audience hates the show, they’re coughing and talking and barely paying attention. But me, I keep seeing that damn kiss over and over in my head, and it’s killing me. And finally it’s time for me to speak and I shout, ‘SHUT UP ALREADY, I’M TRYING TO WATCH!’

  “And don’t you know, I brought the house down! I stole the show. I guess the audience recognized in me every teenager they had ever encountered, and they thought it was hysterical. They laughed and clapped for almost a full minute!”

  “That’s wild,” Iliana said. This was the story she wanted to hear. She loved the chance meeting of passion and good timing. Of course, she didn’t like the hints of egotism emerging as he told his story. She hoped they were simply an indication of inexperience. As he told her, he hadn’t talked about himself to a reporter in a long time. Maybe he didn’t remember how easy it was to sound arrogant.

  “And as it turns out, there’s this casting agent in the audience—a chunky lady with electric-blue eye makeup, and she tells my parents that she could get me work. I had never even thought about doing more acting, but Wendy walks over and I scream, ‘Yes!’ as if this is my life’s dream. And Wendy looks disappointed, I guess because she was hoping this would be her big break. But the agent barely acknowledges her. So much for Wendy—she could have her husband and her babies and her little backstage indulgences. This whiny teenage boy was going to be a star!”