The Stand-In (2 page)

Bran wrote down the fake number Desmond gave him with a genuine smile. “Not Jennett House, Des?”

Jennett House was where he used to tell Bran he was going to live when he had it made and went back to England. Bastard! Lousy bastard! “No, not Jennett House.”

Then Bran hurried through the big room as if he had a million big deals on, as if a million people were watching him! The waiter in the white jacket opened the door Bran had come through and Desmond saw that inside was a smallish room which had three tables set in a U-shape, covered with white tablecloths, naturally, waited on by waiters, naturally. Although Coral Reid's back was toward him he spotted her right off. Directly opposite her was an empty chair, and that, he knew, would be for Mr. Ossian, who must have gone somewhere for something. A producer-director was God's busiest man. (Rushing off, Bran had been trying to give that impression himself.) The empty place was still set, so Ossian would be back and he'd give him the keys then.

He had walked into the V.I.P. dining room and up behind her.
(Why?)
He started to talk to the back of her head. (Why? What for?) “Miss Reid?”

The back of her head said, “Yes?”

Couldn't even be bothered to turn her head. He even saw her put some more meat on her fork.

“Yes?”

When a girl is in all your daydreams, when she's in your bloodstream and she forks up stuff and won't even turn her head to look at you—it must have been that. No. It was because of the bird he knew, because the bird did look like her, younger, and when you came down to it, maybe even prettier. Only look-alikes were nothing, like being a double was nothing. It wasn't what Coral Reid looked like he wanted, it was what she was. Because the bird he knew was nothing, no better really than good old Daph.

It was that thought which hit him. That even if he got his with the pretty bird, he'd still be nobody with nothing in his arms. That was what made him forget to place his voice. (As he had made himself see himself in the mirror, now he made himself hear himself with the high voice.) “Miss Reid,” he had said, “it's, it's
(it's—it's—it's)
it's about a job as your stand-in.”

He must have said something like that, because without turning her head she said, “My stand-in? You'll have to ask Mr. Ossian.”

That was when the bastards at the table who faced him started snickering and she stopped eating and looked up, staring at the snickerers.

“If you want to be my stand-in, you'll have to see Mr. Ossian. I have nothing to do with casting.”

What was wrong with them, she was wondering? It was true, wasn't it? What did she have to do with casting? But now they were haw-hawing and busting out all over, so she turned around finally and saw him.

If she had—not even apologized—if she had even tried—but, the cunt, the bitch, she just broke up! She broke up and laughed in his face and pointed her goddamn finger at him so then the whole room broke up, too, the biggest laugh in a hundred years! And by tonight, everybody from Ossian down would have had a laugh. Desmond felt the griping, grinding pain in his gut and doubled up. If only he hadn't run! If he had stood there and in the new voice told them what the doctor had told him, that larynx control could be a tricky thing and that if it got screwed up to start with, that didn't mean a guy was a eunuch!

But he had run and now all he could hear was his feet pounding that dirty wooden floor and her laughing. Jesus, he knew her laugh like the Star-Spangled Banner! He could laugh her laugh. Like a tin can tied to a dog's tail, he had dragged that laugh the length of the big room where, open mouth or chewing, the rest of the nobodies gawked because they hadn't heard the joke
yet
. Inside himself, he had laughed her laugh at himself all across that wooden floor and down the three flights of wooden stairs, and you couldn't take it laughing that way at yourself. He was still bent over with the griping in his gut, pressing down on old Daph's knickers. You had to stop taking it; you had to start handing it out.

He thought how by now Bran would be laughing at him, too.

He would kill her. He would kill her. He knew the space between her breasts. He knew her nipples. He knew every expression in her eyes. He knew her one-sided smile, the way her eyelids fell. He knew the way she held her head. He knew the way she used her hands. He knew that finger she had pointed at him. Like a safecracker he had memorized the combination which made her walk. (He knew if he got the chance he could open that safe!)

The My-Oh-My Club in New Orleans wouldn't have happened if not for her. If he hadn't been able to “do” Coral Reid, his mother would never have latched on to the idea making him a female impersonator at the My-Oh-My Club, so
that
was Coral's fault, and everything he had had to take at the Club was, in a way, her fault.

He looked at himself in the mirror again, in drag again, and knew he had to hand it out to her somehow. The pain in his gut stopped as the old message came across: Guts or pain in the gut. Dish it out, or else. He was going to shove that belly laugh back where it came from.

He reached back both arms to unhook Daph's falsies and then froze in the awkward position. Now he saw that there couldn't have been a better place to come than to Daph's place. (Not that he'd known it until this minute.) He had only come here because it was close to St. Andrews and because he felt pretty sure he might run into the pretty bird in his own neighborhood and he couldn't take her yet. Or ever. Didn't want to. Never.

His arms were beginning to ache from holding them up behind him, and Desmond stretched them both in front of him, rubbing them, thinking it out. This time the wig and the make-up weren't going to put him down! This time they were the way he could give it to her!

He went to the wardrobe where old Daph kept her clean uniforms and chose one and found her cupcake nurse's cap. He put the uniform on and fastened the cupcake on the wig the way old Daph did. Then he remembered the white stockings, which needed girdle garters, and pulling off the lacy panties, he found a garter belt. He folded the damned panties so they looked the neat way they had been. He picked up his own clothes and hung them in the wardrobe out of sight with his shoes underneath. He found Daph's rather misshapen white oxfords and stuck his feet into them. All right, so they fitted, too. It wasn't big feet that made you a man. (He remembered, shuddering, the high-heeled pumps all of them had worn at the My-Oh-My Club.)

Afterwards he would return Daph's uniform and stuff and neither she nor anyone else would connect them with what was going to happen and therefore not connect him with it, either. And you know what was going to happen? What was going to happen was that dressed as a nurse he would be able not only to get past the guards at St. Andrews with no notice taken but to go anywhere inside. Nobody noticed a nurse; nobody dared stop a nurse in a hospital. And head nurse of a ward was somebody, too, don't forget. When Daph was in uniform, she wasn't just a good old cow. Besides, in hospitals people were used to doing what nurses told them to.

Of course he would wait until they were setting up a shot and then he'd tell Coral she was wanted in matron's office and take her upstairs to the empty old wing. He snapped his fingers and went into the bathroom and took old Daph's adhesive tape and stuck it into the uniform pocket. On the same shelf he saw the small round cardboard box of sleeping pills and opened it. Old Daph talked big about how she couldn't sleep when he wasn't there, but she'd only taken one, since the top said fifteen Barbitone and there were fourteen left. Desmond thought about the pills but put the round box back because he wanted Coral Reid awake. (Like old Daph?) He wanted her to know what was happening. He took Daph's short blue cape, too. It was June, but God knows cold enough here in London for it. He fingered the thick wool and thought how, if he couldn't hold Coral Reid still long enough to use the tape, he would wrap the cape over her head and stuff one end into her yap so she couldn't scream.

He would wait until they were setting up a shot and then, with a British accent, ask Miss Reid to follow him, please.

Desmond had to admit that he kept shifting between the desire to make her like it with him (“You're wizard! You're super!” Daph said) and the need to make her take it because he couldn't live in a world with her laugh echoing. First he wanted the face he always saw when he told himself that one of these days he'd show her what love was (“You're wizard! You're super!”), and then he wanted her eyes rolled up with the whites showing and her head to one side as if her neck was broken. Where did that come from? It was a shot from an Italian picture with Sophia Loren, when she and a young girl both got raped in an empty church.

Because that Victorian house in Stoke Newington was empty like the church where Sophia Loren was raped, he took the keys off the dressing table and stuck them in the uniform pocket. Now he had the keys to a mansion that had been chosen because it was far enough from other houses to guarantee privacy. He took all the money in his wallet, six pounds ten shillings, and stuffed it into Daph's pocket. He didn't know how he'd get Coral Reid to Stoke Newington if he needed to, but what the hell, there were plenty dark empty rooms in the old wing of St. Andrews. How about the same one with the double doors on the third floor where she had laughed at him? How about throwing her on one of the tables there? (He closed Daph's door and took her key, too.) But if he needed an empty red brick Victorian monstrosity set in God knows how many empty acres and hidden by a high brick wall, he had it.

2

Switching from raping Coral to kidnapping her kid came to him later. When he had been at St. Andrews earlier, he had noticed the big canvas tent Mr. Ossian had set up in the grass courtyard. The extras and crew waited there so that they wouldn't get in the way of the shooting; with a climate like this, with all the rain, people couldn't wait outside. On impulse, when Desmond passed the tent this time, he went inside. They had finished for the day; British labor unions? It was almost five.

When you've been in movies you know that lighting makes as much mood as music, and inside the tent the strung-up electric bulbs made deep pockets of dark and threw skinny, snaky shadows on the patched canvas. Faded canvas chairs were scattered over the grass, which was littered with paper cups. (The British were slobs!) There was a wooden table with two big tea urns on one side. The shadows, the lighting, something made it like a dream, and then he saw the kid like in a dream.

Even if she hadn't looked so much like her mother, he would have known her because she was getting the full treatment and he knew the whole baby star bit from way back. Except for two men in Victorian costume sitting on canvas chairs using a third chair for a table and playing cards, and one old guy in a Church of England bishop's outfit reading a paper,
everybody
was sucking up to the kid, making out they were hanging around because she was such a dear little kiddie. (
“Isn't she a dear little kiddie? What a sweet little kiddie!”
) The bastards wouldn't have noticed a dear little kiddie who wasn't Coral Reid's kid if they fell over her! Didn't he know that better than anyone?

He looked around the shadowy tent for the poor kid who would be Coral Reid's kid's stand-in but didn't see her. She could be outside sitting on a pile of dynamite. She could blow up, who cared? She was just “the other little girl.”

“The other little boy” they used to call him. “Where's the other little boy? Get the other little boy. Tell the other little boy to climb out on that window ledge.” Joe Pannerick, the director on that first picture,
The Hard Way
, saw him every day during the shooting, but he never learned his name. After
Hard Way
, Desmond knew where he stood, but that first time was a shocker.
Nobody
learned his name. They would never learn his name. He had been as dear a little kiddie as Bran Collier. After all, that was why his mother had caught the movie bug in the first place when he was seven and she had seen young Bran Collier in his first picture, right here in London. And right after seeing that picture she had grabbed whatever his old man had socked away and got herself and her dear little kiddie passports to Hollywood, U.S.A.

He noticed a smallish woman who wasn't in costume squatting in front of the Reid kid, like on her knees. Now, that one might very well be the little stand-in's mother. Her own kid might be outside on a pile of dynamite, but that wouldn't stop her from squatting there sucking up to Coral Reid's kid with the rest of them. Didn't he know? Oh, Jesus, didn't he know!

That had been the lousiest part, his own mother sucking up to Bran Collier. No kid should be “the other little boy” for his own mother, but from the day they told her he didn't come across on camera, wasn't star material like Bran Collier, Skip Homeier, Freddie Bartholomew, except for the fact that his mother knew his name, she was like all the rest of them.

From then on, all he was good for was bringing in the dough. She had taken him away from his old man. She had screwed up his education because she had him working his ass off. You might say it was all moonlighting and no sunlight in all his years in sunny California. His mother knew more ways of getting round the law about compulsory schooling than any other mother in Hollywood. He had always been just the other little boy, but he got plenty of work and if his mother hadn't been up to her ass in daisies, she had it a lot better than she ever had in Stepney and he was the one got it for her. (Her guys got it away from her.)

She wasn't the only mother living on her kid. Bran Collier's mother did, too, but if Bran's voice hadn't changed when the time came, would Bran's mother not have done anything about it because with the high voice he could still squeeze into kid parts? (And on Sundays still sing in Holy Martyr Church, don't forget that!)