A Thousand Pardons

by Jonathan Dee

  “He’s bombed,” murmured Sara, startling her mother, who hadn’t realized she was right there. “Nice. He’s so hammered he needs two guys to hold him up.”

  But Hamilton, handsome and curious and wincing a bit from the noise, clearly wasn’t bombed, and they weren’t holding him up—their touch was too light for that. While pretending to look elsewhere, the two men—who might have been co-workers of Helen’s at Malloy for all she knew; where else would you drum up people to perform such a task?—were trying their best to shepherd Hamilton into the theater as quickly as possible, to keep his feet moving before some beautiful woman in a gown holding a microphone could step into his path and arrest his attention, which was of course exactly what happened next.

  “Hamilton!” the woman shouted at him. He stopped dead and drew back a little at the sight of her. “Hamilton Barth! What a night! How excited are you to be here?”

  “How excited am I?” Hamilton said, shouting over the screams of those behind the ropes—shouting, it seemed, over the strobe of flashbulbs. He was grinning, a little gamely and a little condescendingly, and crow’s feet ramified handsomely around his eyes like pond ice someone has stepped on a little too soon. “We’re all overexcited, right! Did your mother used to tell you sometimes that you were getting overexcited? Mine did! What’s your name?”

  He brushed his hands through his hair, mostly as a way of getting his elbows out of the palms of his two escorts, who were already visibly worried.

  “Everybody’s here tonight! You must have lots of friends here for your big night!”

  “I don’t really have a lot of industry friends, actually,” Hamilton said ruminatively, as if they were having a serious conversation at the tops of their voices, “because if you have a lot of friends in the industry, then you wind up spending a lot of evenings like this one.”

  “Tell me about this movie,” the woman with the microphone said through her dozens of teeth. “Was it—”

  “Maria,” Hamilton said. “Is it Maria? Not that you look like you would be named Maria, just I suddenly feel like we’ve met before.”

  “Wow!” said the woman who might plausibly have been Maria. “So there’s already Oscar buzz about this movie. What was it like making it?”

  “What is your job?” Hamilton asked her, in the friendliest possible tone. “What do you do?”

  The woman’s openmouthed smile gave way to uncertain laughter. The microphone dropped an inch or two.

  “No, I’m sorry, right, the movie, the movie,” Hamilton said. “Well, look around you, I mean this evening says it all, right? The movie was just like every other movie I have ever made, an exploration of the self and its boundaries, a pathetic, profligate waste of money, an orgy, a journey, a total clusterfuck.”

  “A what?” said Maria.

  “Clusterfuck!” Hamilton repeated into the microphone, at which point the two handlers put their forearms into the small of his back and got his momentum going toward the theater door again.

  “What a tool,” Sara said. “Seriously, with the I’m-too-good-for-this routine. If you don’t like being looked at, don’t spend your whole life in front of cameras.” Helen saw she was texting again.

  “It’s hard to be scrutinized all the time,” Helen said softly. “And watch your language, please. Some actors find it hard just to be themselves. I don’t think this is reflective of who he really is.”

  “How do you know who he really is?” Sara said. “And do not tell that story again. Can we go get some decent seats, please?”

  The theater was already nearly full, though hardly anyone was seated. The lights were still all the way up. The aisles were crowded with people on their phones; Helen saw one woman who was clearly only pretending to talk to someone, then discreetly turning the phone every few seconds to take a picture. She looked around to see who was worth this small subterfuge, but in the front few rows of seats it was hard to recognize anyone, precisely because everyone had that look to them, that look of being someone whom you ought to recognize. “Keep going, keep going,” Sara said to her bewildered mother. “I do not want to get stuck on the side.” Helen pushed gently past five or six standing men, toward what looked like unclaimed space in the interior of one of the center rows. It was impossible to tell which seats were taken and which were not, because no one was willing to compromise his or her view of everyone else by sitting down.

  “Can I help you?” a female voice asked incredulously. Helen looked down and saw a beautiful, dark-eyed, pint-size young woman with a headset and a tiny skirt, staring at Helen and her daughter as if they had just broken into her home. Her right arm was thoroughly, colorfully tattooed from the shoulder down to the forearm, at which point the design dwindled gracefully, like an unfinished chapel ceiling. Her red hair was stylishly, boyishly short, the sort of haircut models in fashion magazines sometimes fooled you into thinking you and your imperfect face could get away with. This woman got away with it completely, and it contributed to her air of almost biological disdain. Her question was of course rhetorical; as Helen was still smiling at her, prefatory to explaining how she could indeed help them, the tiny woman said, “This is the VIP seating and I am going to go ahead and guess you don’t belong here.”

  “Probably not,” Helen said affably. “Can you tell me where we do belong?”

  “Staten Island?” the woman said. “I don’t know. A word of advice, though. Next time you want to try crashing, don’t bring a kid. That’s just shameless.”

  Helen’s smile dropped. “Listen,” she said, feeling herself blush, “there’s no call to get personal. I have just as much right to be here as you do. But if you can just tell me where it’s okay for us to sit, we will go sit there.”

  “How is it my problem where you belong?” From the suddenly wild look in the woman’s eyes, Helen could tell that someone very important was somewhere behind her. “All I can do for you is tell you where you don’t belong. Do I not have enough to deal with? Do you even know how these events work? What, did you win your tickets in a contest or some shit?”

  “Mom,” Sara said urgently and put her hand on her mother’s arm.

  “You need to stop blocking this row immediately,” the woman said.

  “How can I even get out? You are blocking my only way out of this row.”

  “You need to clear this row or I will call security.” She put her fingers to her tiny headset.

  Helen’s shoulders sagged.

  “Mom!” Sara said.

  “Excuse me,” another voice said behind Helen, “they’re with me.” She turned, and there was Hamilton Barth, big as life, in a very elegant-looking dark suede jacket and jeans and cowboy boots. Their proximity to him did not seem quite real. He gave off a sharp smell. He flashed his weathered smile. “Are these my seats? Because these two are with me.”

  No sound came from the woman with the headset. Helen was looking right into Hamilton’s face, and smiling expectantly, and he was smiling back at her, but in a reflexive way that made it clear to her he had no idea at all who she was. Not that he should have been expected to recognize her—someone he kissed at a party thirty years ago. Still, she was let down by the realization that as far as he was concerned he was just doing something impishly chivalrous for two unglamorous strangers.

  “What’s your name, dear?” he said to her.

  “Helen,” she said both pointedly and nervously.

  He looked over her head to the young woman with the headset, whose expression was stony, as if determined to face disaster bravely. “Helen and her daughter are my guests. These are our seats, correct?”

  The young woman nodded. It wasn’t a lie; his saying it made it true.

  “And your name?”

  She swallowed. You could see her thinking that Hamilton Barth asking for her name was either the best or the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She wasn’t some ordinary flack: she had bought into the ruthless values of her flackdom so completely that, just as she had n
ot questioned Helen’s inferiority to her, she stood before this famous person as she would have before a judge. “Bettina,” she said clearly.

  “Thank you for your help, Bettina,” Hamilton said and sat down. He gestured grandly to Helen and dumbstruck Sara, and they sat as well, so that Helen was between the other two. She felt as if she had crossed into some new dimension. She could have made their forearms touch if she wanted to: he was handsome and rumpled and musky and tan and faun-like, but he seemed to radiate some ethereal quality above and apart from all that. From the corner of her eye she could see people surreptitiously shooting pictures of him, pictures in which she would reside forever and invisibly.

  “I hope that’s all right with you,” Hamilton said. “I just can’t stand watching these little martinet bitches treating people like that. A little bit of power, you know?”

  “I do know. Thank you.”

  “And now she can spend the rest of the evening wondering if I’m going to have her fired.”

  “Are you?” Helen asked, idly curious, though it occurred to her that the young woman might even have been a Malloy employee.

  “No,” he laughed. “It’s not her fault, really. She has a dark, dark heart.” His eyes seemed to unfocus for a few seconds; then he turned to Helen again and grinned. “I’m Hamilton, by the way.” He put out his hand, and she took it.

  “Yes, of course I know who you are,” she said. “But not for the reason you think I do.”

  Hamilton squinted. Nearly everyone was seated now, but she could still feel a thousand eyes on them. “Say again?” he said.

  “He doesn’t even remember you?” Sara said behind her, uncomfortably close to her ear. “That is priceless.”

  “Hello?” said an unfamiliar voice in the air around them; it was the film’s director, who began a short introduction, which after two minutes gave no indication of winding up. Helen, impatient, shifted toward Hamilton and reflexively hunched lower in her seat. Hamilton did the same. “I hate these things,” he whispered. “Always the same. Rituals about nothing. Why is it important that I be here? What does it have to do with me?”

  “I can understand why a person would have a few drinks,” Helen said incautiously.

  “That gets exaggerated,” Hamilton said, seeming unoffended, “because when I drink, I do stupid things. What did you say your name was again?”

  She took a deep breath. “My name is Helen Armstead,” she said. “It used to be Helen Roche. You and I were classmates at St. Catherine’s in Malloy, New York, for eight years.”

  She watched his eyes try to resettle on her.

  “We lived on Holcomb Street,” she went on in a low voice. His mouth, like hers, was now below the level of the seat back. “My father was the pharmacist at the prison. I was friends with Erin White, whose sister you went out with, or at least that’s what she said.”

  She felt terrified, as if she were divulging secrets. Hamilton was doing something with his eyes without even moving them. Sara was nudging her mother in the back to try to get her to sit up straight and stop risking the notice of strangers. There was a tepid rain of applause, and the lights in the theater went down.

  “Keep talking,” Hamilton whispered to her. “This is incredible.”

  As she did so, her eyes adjusted to the dark and his face came back into focus. “I was at your first communion,” she whispered to him. “I was part of that group that got drunk behind the Little League field after your confirmation. Remember? I was there watching with you when Jerry Merrill flipped his boat on Sylvia Lake. I was there at Sue Coleman’s graduation party when you fell asleep with a cigarette and burned a hole in their couch.”

  “Yes,” Hamilton whispered in a tone of awe. “That was me.”

  “Sssh!” said someone in the row behind them.

  “I sat behind you in Sister Edna’s French class. I knew your mom from when I would help out my mom at the church flea markets on the last Saturday of every month. I knew your little brother who was in the first Gulf War. I can’t remember his name, though.”

  “Gilbert,” Hamilton said. “Gil. Oh my God. What else?”

  “Would you shut up?” a woman said in the dark above their heads.

  Helen didn’t tell him that they had once made out. She didn’t know why. The movie’s opening credits were ending—there was scattered applause for each above-the-line name—and then she had the strange experience of sitting beside Hamilton as he watched himself act on screen. Gradually the sight of his magnified face seemed to bring him out of the trance into which her litany of childhood memories had lowered him. He fidgeted, and chewed at his thumb, until about a half hour into the film he leaned toward Helen and wrapped his fingers gently around her arm.

  “I need to hit the bathroom,” he said.

  “I hope you don’t feel ambushed,” she whispered. “I didn’t know if I’d get to talk to you at all.”

  “Of course not. Hey, I never asked you what you’re even doing here. Do you work for the studio?”

  “I work at a PR firm,” she said. “Malloy Worldwide, it’s called, if you can believe it. I think you work with them sometimes.”

  “Oh. Sure. Do you have a card or something?”

  It was the polite thing you said to someone you knew you were never going to see again. Dispirited, feeling she had said the wrong thing somewhere, she fumbled in her bag for a business card and handed it to him.

  “Okay,” he said. “Well, listen.” But then he couldn’t seem to think what else to say. He leaned over and kissed Helen on the cheek, and then, remaining in his crouch, he discreetly exited at the other end of the row.

  The movie was about a man who witnesses a killing and has to send his wife and children into hiding while he tries to figure out the murderer’s identity before the murderer figures out his. By the time the lights went up, the on-screen Hamilton had muddied the real but absent one and Helen’s exhilaration had given way to a peculiar, untraceable sadness. She wasn’t particularly surprised that he’d never come back to his seat. She’d upset or offended him somehow. There was a Q and A after the closing credits, but so many people stood and left while it was still going on that Helen took advantage of the general rudeness to leave the theater as well. The street was choked with limos; they had to walk all the way to Madison to find a cab uptown.

  Sara texted furiously in the seat beside her as they rode. Helen leaned her forehead against the cool window, staring into the empty boutiques, bright and unpopulated. “So,” Sara said, without looking up. “There it was, right? Your big reunion. Did you reminisce about your great moment in the closet?”

  “No,” Helen said. “Nothing like that. I don’t know what I thought would happen. He was a nice man, and I’m glad I talked to him, but in a way I’m sorry I told him who I was at all. People don’t really want to go back to their past. They’d probably rather just get further away from it.” But Sara’s earphones were already back in, so this last thought was delivered to no one.

  5

  AFTER A PREMIERE there was always a party. Hamilton tried to remember where it was as he sat on the lid of the toilet in the Ziegfeld bathroom stall. The ordeal of watching his face on screen, like the window to a dead self, was hard to shake, and he was having trouble remembering even the most basic information about himself, much less something as arcane as the location of the party at which he would soon be expected to appear. If indeed he’d ever known it in the first place. That was the kind of thing other people knew for you. And then suddenly it hit him: he jumped up and burst out of the men’s room and stood there on the thick carpet and, looking around to confirm it, realized that his two handlers, those corporate robots attached to him by the studio publicists for the movie, were not there. He’d shaken them when he got up and left in the middle of the show. What do you know, he said to himself with a reflexive pang of satisfaction, I guess they liked the movie.

  He found a door marked Fire Exit and said a little prayer before pushing it open, a
prayer that was heard, because no alarm went off. Just like that, he was outside the bubble, in the unritualized world of some foul-smelling alley on Fifty-fourth Street. He felt a constructive kind of fear. Industry parties were a Catch-22 because even though they were soul-scalding and hateful, at least you knew what would happen there; you knew everything every smarmy asshole was going to say before he opened his mouth and said it. If he could just remember where the party was, he could go there now and have a few drinks while it was still blissfully asshole-free.

  But the party will not start until after the end of the movie, intoned a voice in his head, as conversationally as if it had been speaking all along. No one will be there. Plus it is the first place, maybe the only place, the handlers will think to look for you once they realize you are gone.

  There will be drinks at the party.

  But there are drinks everywhere. This is New York.

  He checked to see if he was carrying any cash with him; then he cursed himself for openly thumbing through the contents of his wallet in some dark New York City alley. His greatest fear was that he was no longer suited for living—real living, without all the armature of fame that sprang up around you and brought you what you needed and tricked you into depending on it. He made his way out to the street and began scanning the signage for bars. He did not have a drinking problem per se, he felt; he just had so many other problems, so many other sensitivities, and they all eventually funneled toward alcohol as the only way, however temporary, of clearing the cache, of resetting himself. The first place he saw was full of young after-work types, but that would have been deadly for him: he’d be recognized on the spot. He could not stand to be alone alone when he felt this way; what he wanted was to be alone in a crowd, to have the same sort of border between him and strangers that those strangers had between one another. Beyond Sixth Avenue there was an ancient-looking, half-full, low-ceilinged dive called Cornerstone’s, and he ducked in there like he was coming in out of a snowstorm.