Ladies and Gentlemen

by Adam Ross

  “No way!” Elsa cried.

  Because steak without A-1 is a mis-steak.

  “Shut up!”

  I couldn’t stop. It was a miracle: My everywhere-heard-but-nowhere-seen father had made me visible to Elsa. Timex. It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

  “I hear your dad all the time,” she said.

  “Me too!” said Kirsti.

  “Who’s this?” asked Mrs. Duckworth.

  Kyle just shook his head.

  But I kept going, moving from my father’s achievements to my own acting career, and quickly narrated my whole résumé on TV, in movies, and on radio.

  “I had to listen to The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto for history class!” Elsa said. “And that was you?”

  It was. I mentioned the national commercial I’d shot for Frosted Mini-Wheats, and how the residuals I’d made on my one line—“But the kid in me likes the frosted side!”—had helped my parents pay for private school.

  Mr. and Mrs. Duckworth looked at each other.

  Elsa turned to her brother. “How come you never told me about this, Kyle?”

  “Why the hell would I tell you anything?”

  “Very funny boy,” Mrs. Duckworth said, spilling some of her drink on her blouse and then shifting all of her attention to dabbing her sweater.

  “Jacob,” Elsa said, “that is really impressive.”

  I’d never thought so until that very moment.

  “And how much,” she asked, “did you say you could make doing this?”

  That night after dinner, Elsa did something I’d never seen her do before: she showed up in Kyle’s room. He and I were shirtless, switching off doing curls in front of his bathroom’s full-length mirror and listening to Emotional Rescue when she appeared at his door.

  “Do you think you could get me in commercials?” she said.

  I was resting from my set while Kyle knocked out his reps, and though he wasn’t very demonstrative, I detected a slight shiver of disgust at her question. I don’t think for a moment that he suspected I desired his sister. I actually doubt he conceived of her as being an object of any affection whatsoever. What bothered him was her invasion of his privacy.

  “Sure,” I said, “call me at home Monday night.” And for the second time in weeks, my father spoke through me again. “We’ll talk about it.”

  Love lives in the future, and by the time Elsa called me that Monday, we’d already taken many long walks together along Georgica Pond (in my fantasies we always seemed to be wearing sweaters), swam together with dolphins in Barbados, and danced away the night at Studio 54, since that nightclub’s name was tacked on the parties’ quadrant of her wall. Love is also a planner, so I’d arranged an appointment for her on Thursday afternoon with my agent, Donovan Chambers.

  “Excellent,” she said once I told her. “What should I wear?”

  I’d leave that up to her, but at Donovan’s request I recommended that she learn a monologue from a dramatic work of her choosing, in case he wanted her to read for him. Elsa could make an entrance, no doubt, but performing was another matter entirely. I had no idea if she had any talent or not, and she expressed as much trepidation about this part of the process as I felt. I told her that I’d be happy to see her beforehand—hinted, even, that it would be a good idea—and coach her, if she was interested, which she was. We agreed to meet at 4:30 on Central Park South, by Columbus Circle. She’d take the bus there after school so we could go over her monologue a few times, then walk to my agent’s office together.

  That Thursday was unseasonably cold. It was late October, very clear, sunny, and windy. Before leaving school, I was seized by a need to present myself to her in some sort of official capacity, so I changed into my soccer uniform, complete with cleats, shin guards, and the little Trinity Tiger paw on the chest of my overlarge sweatshirt, which I wore hood up, looking like a miniature monk. I rode the 104 bus down Broadway and got off in front of the GW Building, the tower funneling the wind mercilessly around the Coliseum and Columbus Circle. Ridiculously early and buffeted by gusts and self-doubt, I retreated into the 59th Street subway entrance and passed the time looking at the comics on the racks of a Bengali’s kiosk, warmed by the metallic blasts rising up from the tunnels. But I was coldly certain that Elsa would discern, as if with X-ray glasses, my black little heart slamming in my chest and, just like her dad with Kyle, would call me out.

  But she didn’t. She was all business, arriving promptly at 4:30. By then I was waiting for her on the corner of Central Park South, nervous to the point of nausea. The crosstown bus she was on kneeled with a hiss and vomited a group of passengers, the last of whom was Elsa. She was dressed for school and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, but she was wearing more makeup than I’d ever seen on her and, like Kyle, had given some personal touches to her outfit. She had on saddle oxfords with white ankle socks and her Spence uniform’s blue, green, and yellow cardigan skirt. On top, she wore a white Ralph Lauren button-down, the happy Polo player riding over the small mound of her breast; underneath that, a green Lacoste shirt, collar up; and underneath this, a white turtleneck with blue stripes that looked so comfortable on her, so warm and worn in, you’d have thought she’d been swaddled in it at birth. Over everything she sported what looked like a man’s-size blue blazer from Brooks Brothers—Toby’s perhaps—with the sleeves rolled up to her wrists, exposing the silky lining beneath. On her shoulder, she carried a red L. L. Bean book bag, and, in her free hand, a large green shopping bag from Benetton.

  “I brought a prop!” she announced. “I hope that’s all right.”

  I couldn’t have spoken even if I’d wanted to, my teeth were chattering so badly from the cold. Instead, like some pervert, I nodded toward the park’s entrance and led her to one of the benches inside. She had fretted for days about the monologue, she confessed, complaining that “a little more notice wouldn’t have sucked” and had pored over all the plays she could get her hands on, Shakespeare and Strindberg and Shaw, arriving finally at her choice. “In the end,” she said somberly, “I had to go with Wilde.” It was a risky piece, but she’d practiced with friends all night over the phone and felt sure she had it down. She got up from the bench, reached into the Benetton bag—“I made this myself,” she explained—and removed the thing inside.

  It was one of those Styrofoam heads people display wigs on, and this one had a wig, a brown, stringy mop of hair that Elsa had fastened with bobby pins and was caked with what looked like ketchup. With black Magic Marker she’d drawn a pair of eyes rolled skyward, over which she’d placed a pair of Groucho Marx glasses, the moustache carefully scissored off, for added effect. Below the nose she’d stuck a pair of bright-red Mr. Potato Head lips. She grabbed the head by the hair, cleared her throat—“Here goes,” she said—then contorted her face disturbingly, assumed a Wicked Witch voice, and began:

  Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit. Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. I said it. Did I not say it? I said it. Ah! I will kiss it now. But wherefore dost thou not look at me, Iokanaan? Thine eyes that were so terrible, so full of rage and scorn, are shut now. Wherefore are they shut? Open thine eyes! Lift up thine eyelids, Iokanaan! Wherefore dost thou not look at me?

  At various points during the monologue, Elsa would flick her little tongue like a snake and rake the air with her free hand. Also disconcerting was how she kept her big blue eyes fixed not on the head, but on me. She ended with that memorable line, “Thou didst bear thyself toward me as to a harlot, as to a woman that is wanton, to me, Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea!” I had no idea what to make of the whole thing. Truth be told, I didn’t understand a word of it. Luckily, the second she finished, a bum walking by stopped to clap. “Encore, beautiful!” he shouted. “Encore!”

  This bought me some time to gather myself, and once collected I managed the appropriate combination of expert’s gravity
with a healthy dose of praise. I advised her to cut down on the tongue stuff, perhaps, and to address herself more to the head than the audience. Elsa took this criticism seriously, chin in one hand, Iokanaan under her other arm. Before her second try, she turned to the bum, who’d decided to watch this rehearsal, and said, “Excuse me, sir, but could you maybe fuck off?” After the third run-through, I had no choice: bone-cold, I clapped as heartily as the bum, told her that she’d nailed it, and then hurried her the three blocks to Donovan’s office on 57th Street.

  Thankfully, Donovan wasn’t interested in having Elsa perform something dramatic. One glance at her all-American good looks and he was pretty much sold. He handed her some commercial sides to read and gave her a couple of minutes to get comfortable with them. When she was ready, he called out, “Action,” and she said, “Freshen Up! The gum that goes … squirt!” about as well as I could’ve hoped. Donovan told her he’d take her on, that she of course needed some head shots ASAP, that the sooner he could send her out on calls, the better.

  “So,” Elsa said, “I got the job?”

  “No,” said Donovan. “But you do have an agent.”

  Elsa clapped her elbows-together clap. “And you’ll just call me and send me out on these things?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then what do I do?”

  “Jacob here can explain that stuff.” Donovan gave her a contract to show her father, whose signature Elsa later forged. “It’s old hat to him.”

  It was dark by the time we left Donovan’s office, and, by now warmed up, I was happy to walk as slowly as possible to Elsa’s bus stop. She was ebullient about the audition, although admittedly disappointed she didn’t get to do her monologue. I had things I wanted to say to her. I just didn’t know what they were.

  “I really appreciate you taking time off from soccer practice to help me with this,” Elsa said. “I really want to make some of my own money, so I don’t have to depend anymore on my bastard father.”

  I told Elsa she didn’t have to worry, that she’d probably make so much money doing commercials that she could pay her way through college.

  “And I’d really be grateful,” she went on, “if you kept coaching me on the whole process. Because I think it helped me up there.”

  Also no problem, I told her. Most of the time, I lied, we’d have auditions at the same places. All she had to do was phone me the night before she had a call, and I’d make sure to meet her beforehand. “You’d do that?” she asked. I would, I told her. We could go over lines and I’d show her the ropes. “That would be so excellent,” she said. Elsa was by then accustomed to men doing anything for her, simply in order to be near her, but this was new territory and, like Kyle, I don’t think she suspected anything, as she would say in SAT-speak, untoward.

  At least not at first.

  During those inaugural weeks of Elsa’s acting career, she phoned me every night before her auditions. “If the commercial’s for Bonjour jeans, but I only have Jordache, does that hurt my chances?” (Possibly, I told her. Perhaps we should go to Bloomingdales and try on a pair?) Or, “If the commercial’s for Burger King and I only eat McDonald’s, do I need to be familiar with the Whopper?” (I’m sure we could find a Burger King somewhere en route.) I’d meet her at the agencies beforehand, she’d sign in and grab the sides, then we’d go off to a corner and practice her lines, if she had any; or, if the commercial called for her to, say, dance, we’d step into a hallway, maybe, where she could show me a couple of her disco moves. (Elsa had perfected a particular white-girl step, right knee and elbow swirling in and out in unison, followed by her left, each half loop accompanied by a crisp finger snap.) This was all innocent and novel to her at first. She was enthusiastic—she really thought I was giving her the inside dope—and even got a couple of callbacks and print jobs, which bolstered my position as a helpmate. It got to the point where I could even call her directly on her private line at home, an act that took tremendous nerve on my part, but which she encouraged, especially if she was trying out for a movie. She would read me my lines, so I could write them down and we could rehearse them.

  “Boogie,” she read, “when we were dating, did you care for me?”

  “Sure I did.”

  “Not because you could do things to me, but because you cared?”

  “Of course, Beth. There were plenty of girls for that, you know, if a guy wanted a pop. But I gotta tell you, you were real good.”

  “I was?”

  “Believe me.”

  I advised that we rehearse such scenes over and over again, hoping for a segue to myself, but never finding one. All I could discuss was technique, and I was as specific as Strasberg. In between our talks and our afternoons together, I was assailed by more fantasies of us becoming a couple, of the two of us walking hand in hand, this time in Central Park (sweaters again), or of me saving her from a mugger, my face ultimately replacing Toby’s on her magnificent Wall of Self. Though what I remember most vividly during this time is my awareness of the gap between my success at getting us alone together and the romantic daydreams this engendered. It wasn’t simply that I didn’t know how to get from point A to point B with Elsa. No, it was a deep-seated recognition that even if I did, it wouldn’t matter. I had knowledge of preordained defeat that it was in my character to ignore until the end.

  Which came pretty soon. Within a month or so, I began to notice a diminishing enthusiasm for our telephone Q & As, until finally one night she explained that her audition tomorrow was for Finesse shampoo and, let’s face it, she didn’t need any help pretending to wash her hair. “Look, Jacob, nothing personal, but I’m acclimated to the process,” she explained.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That I’m not a neophyte.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That you don’t need to meet me at these things anymore.” This I understood.

  But I quickly moved on. It was a stupid crush, after all. A seventh grader’s heart isn’t constant; and truth be told, I was relieved that Kyle hadn’t found out about my subterfuge.

  Except Elsa didn’t let it go. When I did happen to run into her at auditions, I was met with disingenuousness, even contumelies and disparagement at the coincidence.

  “Soooooo,” she said when I went over and said hi to her one afternoon. “What brings you here?” She was sitting next to a good-looking actor, Toby’s age, I guessed, the two of them going over their lines; she elbowed him in the side.

  “Starburst,” I said.

  “Ree-ly,” she smirked. “What did you have to do?”

  “I had to pretend to eat a Starburst and react to the refreshing fruit flavor.”

  “Oh? What was your line?”

  “Wow!” I said brightly, “Mouth-watering orange!”

  “Um hum.” She pursed her little lips.

  “Strawberry too!”

  “My little brother’s friend,” she told the guy, knocking her shoulder against his. “He’s quite the thespian.”

  And then she did something cruel. She exposed me to Kyle, revealing my coaching lessons, our talks on the phone, the arrangements I’d made for us to meet regularly, even the calls to her private line—omitting, along with sympathy, that she’d asked for my help. She was on the lookout for armor against Kyle’s frequent digs at her lapse on the SATs (Princeton had rejected her early), and this was the perfect deflection.

  “Have you been talking with my sister?” he asked me over the phone. “Have you been meeting her after school?”

  To try to explain would have meant admitting to the thing boys scorn most mercilessly in their peers: ambition.

  I said nothing.

  “Rose, you’re such a kike piece of shit. Do me a favor and stay away from her. In fact, stay away from me too.”

  He hung up.

  It was the “kike” thing that sent me to my father.

  The day following my fight with Kyle, my dad and I were recording an episode of The Eternal Ligh
t, a joy because I got to miss school, but a chore because it was a grind. We taped at NBC on 44th and Sixth on a gigantic soundstage designed to accommodate a whole orchestra and then some, with microphones shaped like ears of corn hanging on long wires from high ceilings that were curved and made of rich-looking wood, as if we’d been enclosed in a shell fashioned of mahogany. The far corners of the space were piled with old sound-effects stations, wooden contraptions like miniature lemonade stands to which clown horns, bicycle bells, triangles, and door knockers were attached. There were door frames that creaked intentionally, a police siren you wound with a crank, and an enormous Chinese gong that I was told by the director to never, ever hit lest I blow the speakers in the control room to smithereens, and that I dream of bashing to this day. In the stage’s center, near the two main microphones, was an enormous table, and the cast would gather here to do a read-through of the script together, the director giving us notes and making last-minute edits. After our lunch break we did two back-to-back hour-long recordings of the program straight through, no cuts. For all intents and purposes it was a live performance, so you had to follow the script carefully as the program proceeded in order not to miss your entrance (you’d get up from the table as quietly as possible, cautious not to rustle the pages of your script while tiptoeing to the mike), a lapse that could ruin a whole taping. The mikes were so sensitive they’d pick up a whisper; and because editing capabilities were limited, you couldn’t make a mistake.

  We were doing The Chosen, Chaim Potok’s novel about an Orthodox boy, Reuven Malter, and his brilliant Hasidic friend Danny Saunders. I understood maybe a quarter of it, but I liked it even then, especially the baseball game at the beginning. I had a bit part as Davey Cantor, one of Reuven’s teammates, and my lines were all a variation of “Wait till you see them, Reuven,” referring to the opposing Hasidic team, “they’re murderers.” But my dad was playing Reb Saunders, Danny’s father, and perhaps because I badly needed his advice, I followed the story with interest. From what I could make out at the time, it was about two Jewish kids whose dads had different rules about being Jewish. I liked that after Danny hits a ball into Reuven’s eye during the game, the two of them patch things up; it made me hopeful for Kyle and me. And I admired Danny’s brilliance because it reminded me of Abe, in particular his ability to remember things in stories, and how when we read Shakespeare he could tell you page, act, scene, and line. Most of all, I enjoyed watching my father perform. At home he was often jumpy, distracted. It was hard to keep his attention. His mind wandered. He’d begin to talk and then trail off. If the phone rang (“That’s probably the agency”) he’d get up to take the call, even during dinner. But when he performed, he was a different person. He was focused. He listened to everything and didn’t miss a cue. He possessed an authority that without lines was entirely absent. And when his time came to act he would quietly step to the mike with his script in his right hand, his left free to gesture, and he’d begin to speak as if through a prompter, with that distinct, more knowing voice-within-a-voice. Suddenly he was the deep, wise sound of reason; he was Reb Saunders. It was the oddest thing, but that was his gift: he read aloud and you believed him, even if he couldn’t explain later what it was he’d uttered so eloquently.