The Understudy: A Novel

by David Nicholls

  “No, don’t be silly, they’re yours,” and he managed, with some difficulty, to press the flowers back into her hand. After some resistance, she took them.

  “By the way, it’s pronounced vayse,” she said, with a smile.

  “‘Vayse.’ I’ll try and remember.”

  “As in tomayto.”

  “NOR-A!” projected Josh from the bottom of the stairs.

  “Hey. I should go,” said Nora, pulling on her coat. “Josh is taking me out to some insanely expensive Japanese restaurant, then we’ve got to go home and pull up all the floorboards, in case his award’s under there or something. Honestly, the way he goes on, anyone would think they’d kidnapped a child. But I just wanted to say it was nice to meet you properly. So. See you around, yeah?”

  “Hope so,” said Stephen.

  “Bye, then.”

  “Bye.”

  “Nora! I’m waiting, sweetheart,” called Josh, from the bottom of the stairs.

  “He’s worried his sushi will get cold,” said Nora. “See ya.”

  “Bye.”

  She smiled once more, and closed the door, and it occurred to Stephen that he would almost certainly never see her again—not properly, anyway—maybe just a brief, formal good-bye at the last-night party. He felt all the air go out of his body, and slumped down in his chair.

  “But, listen—” said Nora, appearing once again in the doorway—“we should meet for coffee sometime. Josh is getting his teeth whitened or his dimples syringed or his head shrunk or something, so I’m by myself most days.”

  “We could go to the movies one afternoon.”

  “Movies in the afternoon. I love that. I’ll get your number from Josh and give you a call.”

  “Here you are!” said Josh, appearing in the doorway behind, scooping his arms around her waist, just beneath her breasts, pressing his cheek next to hers. “Come on, love, we’ll be late.”

  “Hey, maybe Stephen could join us!” said Nora, without much conviction.

  “Not tonight—I want you all to myself,” and he tightened his grip, lifting her slightly into the air. Nora twisted her head around and kissed him, a please-put-me-down-now kiss, then they both stood and turned back to Stephen, both grinning, as if standing on a red carpet waiting to have their photograph taken.

  A moment. Then—

  “So. See you, mate,” said Josh.

  “See you, Josh.”

  “Bye, Steve,” said Nora.

  “Bye, Nora.”

  And they were gone.

  Stephen waited briefly, then silently followed them out, standing on the landing with his back to the door in silence, listening to the sound of their kissing and their voices echoing in the stairwell.

  “So, what were you two talking about?” he heard Josh say.

  “About you, my love…” The sound of another kiss, then: “We only ever talk about you.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know, I know…”

  “Come here,” said Josh, then something muffled, that Stephen presumed was “I love you.”

  “You too, sweetheart. I love you too.”…And Stephen stood silently, listening to them leave, hoping very hard that he wasn’t about to fall in love with Nora Harper.

  New York, New York

  Nora Schulz was seven years into her career as a professional waitress when Josh Harper snapped his fingers at her for the first, and last, time.

  Much is said and written about the perils of achieving success too early, but Nora couldn’t help feeling that early failure was no great shakes either. After their assault on the lower reaches of the Billboard chart, Nora Schulz and the New Barbarians took a different direction to harder-edged, more experimental material, which in turn led in the direction of the bargain bins, internal wrangling and an acrimonious breakup. Taking comfort from the fact that she was still only twenty-three, Nora had picked herself up, swallowed her pride and pragmatically decided to look for a restaurant job, just for a few months, just to tide her over while she wrote new material and found a new record deal.

  Her first job was in Raw!, a terrifying eat-as-much-as-you-can sushi restaurant in the West Village, with a kitchen that smelled like a rock pool, and a chef who somehow managed to make tuna actually taste like the chicken of the sea. Then came Dolce Vita, a chic Italian-restaurant-cum-money-laundering-operation where she’d stared, nightly, over a tundra of empty white tablecloths. This was followed by a fanatical macrobiotic vegan place called Radish—less a restaurant, more a brutal totalitarian regime—where music, alcohol, saltcellars and pleasure were all strictly proscribed, and pallid, sick-looking customers picked silently over their beetroot carpaccio before leaving, too weak to tip. This was followed by eighteen morbidly unhappy months in an upscale midtown cigar bar, Old Havana, where she’d been ogled nightly by boozy young executives in identical Banana Republic high-waisted pleated trousers, pulled up snug against their crotches by wide, gaudy suspenders. Although incredibly lucrative, revolution came to Old Havana when she punched a customer for trying to slide a twenty-dollar bill down her blouse. The cigar he’d been smoking at the time had exploded gratifyingly over his face, exactly as in a Warner Brothers cartoon, but the brief feeling of elation was swiftly followed by redundancy and burned knuckles.

  A short spell working as a masseuse in Central Park came to an end after people complained that she pressed way too hard, and a short, desperate period of unemployment had followed. Her music career, the reason she’d moved to Manhattan in the first place, had diminished to little more than a hobby—a Sunday-night residence, accompanied on guitar by the nicest of the New Barbarians, in an arty West Village bar, where customers competed to shout over their unusual, acoustic jazz version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” By now, Nora was seriously contemplating admitting defeat and returning to live with her divorced mother and two younger brothers in their small apartment under the Newark flight path.

  Then, at the last moment, she landed a job at Bobs, an unpretentious neighborhood bar and restaurant in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, and had fallen in love with the place, moving to the area to be nearer her work. It was everything a restaurant job could be. The food was good and reasonably priced, and customers tipped accordingly. The owner, Bob, was charming and benign, the cooks were clean and friendly, washed their hands after going to the toilet, and were relatively drug free. No one stormed out halfway through their shift, no one hurled abuse or bread rolls at her in the kitchen, no one locked her in the meat fridge as a practical joke, no one stole from her locker. Shifts were flexible, allowing her to do the occasional gig elsewhere if, and when, she got the chance. People remembered each other’s birthdays. As waitressing jobs go, it was the Holy Grail. And that was the problem. It was all too easy.

  Because the rest of her life was a disaster. Her most recent boyfriend, Owen, an almost catatonically slothful and bitter wannabe screenwriter she had met at the restaurant, had become writer-in-residence on her futon. There he’d lie, fully clothed, all day, with food debris in his scrappy beard, reading and rereading a book, Screenwriting Made Simple, over and over again, with no apparent outward sign of it being made simple. His days were broken up with occasional raiding expeditions on Nora’s fridge, or to the local video store, where he rented movies solely so that he could eat vast quantities of salty snacks and give a long, tooth-numbing commentary: “…This is what they call the inciting incident…conflict, conflict…ah—the B-story begins!…Hey, here comes that Second-Act Confrontation…”

  But if, as Screenwriting Made Simple claimed, character really was action, then Owen was someone with virtually no character at all. The relationship had become sexless, loveless, almost entirely without affection, and was sustained solely by Owen’s inability to pay his own rent, and Nora’s morbid fear of being alone. Her doctor had prescribed her Prozac, which she’d started taking somewhat reluctantly, her guilt and anxiety about being on medication fighting with the advertised sense of contentment. T
he months sloped by, and turned to years, and nothing changed. She started to drink more, to comfort-eat and put on weight, to smoke too much of the dope she bought off the busboys. She turned thirty, and for her birthday Owen bought her a DVD box set of the Alien movies and some disconcertingly crude lingerie in the wrong size, a lurid tangle of elastic and scarlet PVC straps and buckles, the kind of thing more usually worn by women who dance in cages. Nora was not a cage-dancing kind of girl, and she had hurriedly stashed the thing in the back of her drawer. Sexual activity had petered out some months before, anyway, and most nights were now spent lying awake on the futon that had started to smell indelibly of Owen, her head woolly after too much red wine and Tylenol PM, woozily contemplating whether to stave his skull in with his laptop, or strangle him with the lingerie.

  Her own career, always a long shot at the best of times, had started to seem fanciful and futile. New York was bulging with attractive women with pleasant jazz-folk voices and bossa nova versions of “Big Yellow Taxi.” It wasn’t even as if she could dance or act; in a city where almost every waitress was a so-called triple threat, Nora was merely a single threat, and not a particularly threatening one at that. At twenty-three she’d been a singer who did some occasional waitressing; then, at twenty-seven, a waitress who did some occasional singing; and, finally, at thirty, a fully fledged waitress. Ambition and self-confidence had started to leach away, replaced by envy and self-pity, and more and more she’d started to avoid going home in the evenings. Owen would be there, in the small overheated room, deconstructing an action movie through a mouthful of pistachios, and she’d get sarcastic, and snipe at him, and they’d argue, and she’d feel angry, and ashamed at herself for not telling him just to get out.

  In search of some other creative outlet, she picked up his copy of Screenwriting Made Simple, read it, digested it, and started to sit up late, smoking and making tentative notes—dialogue she’d heard from the guys in the restaurant, stories from her days in the band, bits of family mythology, pages and pages of it, all scrawled in a woozy longhand in the early hours of the morning. Reading these back the next day, straining to be objective, she began to suspect that maybe they weren’t so bad, and maybe there was something else she could do after all. Then the next time she tried to write, the page would remain resolutely blank, and this new ambition would suddenly seem as impractical and futile as all the others.

  That long, cold winter, waking up late in the morning with another hangover, and the warm pretzel-scented breath on her face of a man she’d long since ceased to care for, it had become clear to Nora that she was numb with loneliness. Her luck would have to change. Something good would have to happen, and it would have to happen soon.

  Then, in April, Josh Harper walked into her restaurant and ordered the club sandwich.

  The Man of the Year Awards

  He had come to America after his big break, playing Clarence, the terminally ill, mentally handicapped, disabled hero of Seize the Day, a TV movie that got an unexpected cinema release, confirmed his potential, toured the festivals and won him his BAFTA. The reviews had been glowing, superlative, and the TV, film and theater offers had been pouring in. He had put in the hours too, flirting ruthlessly with journalists in hotel bars, and had had any number of weak-kneed articles written about him as a result—crude passes disguised as journalism: those amazing eyes, that lopsided smile, the down-to-earth unaffected charm, the sex appeal that he apparently oozed without intending to. He had modeled the new season men’s suits in the weekend supplements, and got to keep them afterward. He’d invested in property. He’d been invited to a magazine’s Man of the Year awards, and though he hadn’t actually been named the Man of the Year, he’d at least met the Man of the Year, and snorted coke with him, ironically enough, in the disabled toilets. Suddenly, he had acquired two agents and a manager, a publicist, an architect, an accountant, a financial adviser; he had People. He was a person who needed People.

  Offbeat, ultraviolent transvestite gangster drama Stiletto followed, then the raffish antihero in a BBC costume drama in which, according to the Radio Times, he “set the ladies’ hearts a-racing.” Seeking to broaden his range and appeal, he had accepted the second lead in TomorrowCrime, a big American commercial movie, in which he was to give his portrayal of Otto Dax, a Wisecracking Rookie Cop with Principles at War with the Corrupt Authorities in Megapolis 4, a role he referred to either as “just a bit of fun” or “the most appalling sellout,” depending on who he was talking to. Best of all, on the flight over to LA, he’d flown first class—no, not even first class, premiere class, “first” in French, courtesy of the studio. As he accepted his third glass of complimentary champagne from the air hostess (noticeably prettier than those in economy), and surveyed the vast, indecent savannahs of almost empty space from his reclining chair, it felt as if some wonderful mistake had been made. Better still, on opening the in-flight magazine, he discovered an article, “Mad about the Boy; Why Hollywood’s Going Crazy for Josh Harper.” No wonder people were staring. He lifted the glass of champagne to his lips, and saw that the air hostess had written a phone number on his coaster. The flight from London to Los Angeles takes twelve hours and, for Josh, it wasn’t nearly long enough.

  After two weeks on the Evian trail in LA, it was back to New York, to see new friends and, in theory, work on his accent for the movie. Coming into Bob’s late one night, drunk and a little stoned, he’d made the potentially mortal error of snapping his fingers to gain his waitress’s attention. The ensuing tirade had been so vituperative, so sharp and funny, that Josh had had no choice but to apologize profusely, to buy her a drink, then another, to stare at her as she tried to work, then tip her ostentatiously. After the place had closed and everyone else had left, he helped her refill the saltcellars and the ketchup bottles, and put the chairs on the table, all the time stealing little glances at her. Then, once everything had been put away, they slid into a booth and talked.

  As was her nature, Nora had been skeptical at first. She didn’t particularly care for English people, especially not the young, supposedly hip ones who came into the bar most evenings and brayed. She disliked the patronizing, superior attitude, the complacent belief that just being English was remarkable enough in itself, as if Shakespeare and the Beatles had done all the work for them. And, no, she did not care for the accent, which always sounded nasal, snide and brittle to her. She hated the political self-righteousness, and their absolute conviction that the English were the only people in the world who could be left wing, or use irony. Nora had been deploying irony to great effect for the last twenty-five years, thank you very much, and didn’t need lessons in it, least of all from a nation that couldn’t even pronounce the word properly. When it first became clear that Josh was not only English, but an English actor, it was all she could do not to tumble bodily through the fire exit. If ever there was a word that set off alarms for Nora, it was “Actor”; only “Juggler” and “Firearms Enthusiast” held more dread.

  But, in this instance, Nora had decided to give Josh the benefit of the doubt, a decision made somewhat easier by the fact that he was, by some considerable way, the most attractive human being she had ever seen in her life. She had to stop herself bursting into laughter, he was so beautiful. He was a walking, talking billboard; absurd blue eyes, full lips and flawless, seemingly poreless skin, as if he’d been air-brushed, but not effeminate, or preening or, God forbid, groomed. Not only was he beautiful, and undeniably sexy, but he was funny and charming too, if a little gauche and puppyish. He listened to her with unnerving attentiveness, a steady, incisive gaze that teetered on the edge of being stagy, perhaps a little overdone. He laughed at her stories, he made all the right encouraging noises about her fumbled singing career while being suitably self-effacing and wry about his own; he seemed genuinely bemused by all that was happening to him, refreshingly modest about what he called his stupid good luck. He was almost absurdly gentleman-like and charming, like something from an old black-an
d-white British movie, yet not at all meek or sexless; quite the opposite, in fact. And yet the charm, the attentiveness, didn’t seem like an act, or if it was an act, it was so accomplished and convincing that she was perfectly happy to accept it as the real thing.

  They discovered that they were from similar backgrounds—boisterous but affectionate upper-working-class families, where you had to shout to make yourself heard. When the bottle of whisky they were draining made them too woozy to talk properly, they switched to coffee, and before they knew it, it was starting to get light outside. So at six in the morning Nora locked up the restaurant, and they walked down to Brooklyn Heights and over the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan. This was exactly the kind of cutesy, self-consciously romantic behavior that Nora usually liked to sneer at, and accordingly she did sneer a little as they crossed the bridge, hand in hand, but without really meaning it this time. It made a change, after all. On her first date with Owen, he had taken her to a Mexican restaurant in the late afternoon, so that they could catch the two-burritos-for-the-price-of-one happy hour, then on to Stomp!, which had given her a migraine. She hadn’t minded at the time, or not too much. Romance embarrassed her, and Owen was just being practical, even if the rest of the evening was a little gassier than a girl looks for on a first date.

  They arrived back at Josh’s hotel, just as the rest of the city was struggling to work. There they’d fallen asleep in T-shirts and underwear on the freshly made bed, curled up facing each other like parentheses. They awoke three hours later, both thick-mouthed and a little self-conscious, and while Josh was in the bathroom, Nora drank a large glass of cold water, then another, then used the hotel phone to call her apartment. Owen was still asleep, only noticing that Nora hadn’t come home when the phone had woken him. It was not a particularly long or tender conversation. Nora simply suggested that he put his pants on, pack his stuff and get the hell out of there, and to take his Alien DVDs with him while he was at it.