Ladies and Gentlemen (22 page)

But Elsa’s collage was different. It was gigantic, filling the whole peg-boarded wall of her bedroom, as big as the mirror in my parents’ dining room but reflecting her desires instead of her image, the elements secured not with glue but with white thumbtacks. There were spaces between the photographs, between the Spence and Princeton pennants, between the snapshots of her other lovely girlfriends set tastefully apart, as if each party picture were itself a perfect memory to be cherished, the
only
party like it, these images and icons organized, so far as I could tell, into four discrete quadrants of parties, places, boys, and goals, each demarcated by the exposed gray pegboard beneath—the X/Y axis of Elsa’s identity. There were no models or movie stars on that wall, though there was one picture that I couldn’t help but dream about, shot down-beach, of Elsa in Barbados, sitting cross-legged on a jetty in a bikini, her head thrown back while the bay’s waves lapped the pilings below, her bleached-blond hair hanging down to touch the top of her inverted heart-shaped ass—her own
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit spread. There was a quote running the length of her wall, right below the crown molding, that she’d written out in red marker:
GO
CONFIDENTLY
IN
THE
DIRECTION
OF
YOUR
DREAMS!
LIVE THE
LIFE
YOU’VE
IMAGINED!
And at the wall’s center, at the intersection of the axes, was a picture of her boyfriend that I can conjure even now: Toby has long, curly brown hair that he’s slicked back
off his forehead, manelike as Elsa’s; he’s tan, his cheeks reddened by sun and reflected river light after a day of rowing crew; he’s wearing a denim shirt with the top four buttons undone to reveal a hairless chest; he’s standing in a circle of friends, laughing so hard that he’s bent from the waist as they spray him with champagne. Elsa is visible in the background, her small mouth open as wide as possible with laughter, her hands and elbows pressed together in a WASP-girl clap.

“What the hell are you doing?” Kyle said.

“Nothing,” I said, hurrying from Elsa’s doorway to his room.

Most of what I knew about Elsa was from these brief glimpses. East Side life at the Duckworths’ was like that: mysterious, private, and, most of all,
roomy
. Kyle had his own room, Elsa hers, as did their younger sister, Kirsti, who was barely pubescent and thus invisible to me. There were three bathrooms and a living room that, so far as I could tell by the pristine condition of the furniture, was never used. It was different from life at my West Side apartment, where I shared a bedroom with my brother that abutted my parents’ bedroom, which abutted the living/dining area that in turn abutted the narrow kitchen. I did my homework in a large walk-in closet off the front hall. In the morning my father would walk around wrapped in a towel and at night (or whenever I had friends over, it seemed) in nothing more than briefs, his Fruit of the Looms bulging with what looked like a huge stem of grapes. If the Duckworths’ apartment was in the shape of an L, ours was an O, and we all filled it like the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop. Not that I perceived myself as deprived, mind you. Nor did I associate Mr. Duckworth’s blue-suited, Wall Street, seven-to-seven workaday life with greater worldly success
than my father’s I-don’t-know-on-Monday-where-I’ll-get-paid-on-Friday freelancer’s life. No, it was simply that in the Duckworths’ world, indifference to one another—even physical avoidance, if necessary—was a spatial possibility, a luxury that was both taken for granted and respected. People in this universe had lives that could remain separate—a fact so remarkable to me that I decided it deserved my full attention. Consequently, I slept over at Kyle’s house every chance I got.

And perhaps because I hung around so often, the day eventually came when I stepped into Elsa’s line of sight.

It was taco night at the Duckworths’ house. Forget what you’ve heard about high-powered career people in New York never spending time with their kids. Without fail, every Friday evening Mr. Duckworth cooked homemade beef tacos, and every time I could finagle it, I was there to eat them. He would mold the tortillas into shape by sautéing them in oil and folding them in half, then he stuffed them himself with chili he’d made from scratch and baked them to crisp perfection. Next he chopped up all the fixings (onions, green chiles, lettuce, tomatoes), grated the cheese and put out the salsa, which he freshened with cilantro that he grew in a box on his windowsill. It was an involved process, so much so that Mr. Duckworth didn’t have time to change out of his work clothes in order to have things ready at a reasonable hour. He just draped his suit coat and tie on a chair, put on his favorite apron
—Inside Trader
, it read—and got to work.

I liked Mr. Duckworth. He sported a military haircut, looked like a tough-guy version of David Byrne, and always seemed to
be squinting like Clint Eastwood, mostly when Kyle spoke. True, Elsa had inherited her small, pursed mouth from him, but on Mr. Duckworth it conferred a look of autocratic determination. Plus he
reeked
—a big word, back then—of authenticity. He’d played college lacrosse for Johns Hopkins. He was very strong and regularly challenged Kyle and me to arm wrestle him at the same time. “I’ll use just two fingers,” he’d say, then pound the backs of our hands into the kitchen table. Plus he knew stuff he quizzed Kyle about during dinner, manly-man trivia we’d need later on. “If you’re shaving,” he asked, “do you rinse your razor with hot or cold water?”

Kyle shrugged. “I don’t know. Hot?”

“Wrong! Cold won’t dull the blade!”

And he stuck up for me. The first night I slept over at Kyle’s house, I called my parents for permission. They wanted to know the address, which I had to ask Kyle for. “You fucking idiot,” he said. “You don’t know my address?”

“Hey, Kyle,” Mr. Duckworth said, “what’s Jacob’s address?”

“I don’t know.”

“You fucking idiot!” he shouted, and then genteelly gave me the number.

He was big into physical labor (you couldn’t get my dad near a shovel, let alone a tennis or soccer ball), and one Saturday morning early that fall he drove me and Kyle out to the three-acre lot he’d bought near Georgica Pond in East Hampton. All of us wore flannel shirts and jeans, and we spent the whole day chopping, piling, and burning weeds, briars, and brush. Toward the end of the afternoon, he took a small charcoal grill from the trunk of
his Jaguar and cooked what seemed like the best burgers I’d ever eaten. On the drive back he did the only inauthentic thing I ever saw him do. We’d crossed the 59th Street Bridge and were headed up Third. Kyle, who could sleep anywhere, was passed out up front, while I sat in the middle of the white-leather backseat. Mr. Duckworth liked to drive very fast, and when a cab came to a sudden stop ahead of us, he checked his rearview mirror and my expression at the same time, then said, “Hold on!” as if it were life or death, and swerved around the obstacle without slowing his pace.

“Wow,” I said. “That was close.”

Mr. Duckworth nodded seriously. “Fucking idiot,” he said.

Of course, I knew a performance when one was delivered, and performers like to impress. That Mr. Duckworth cared made me like him even more.

“Thanks for taking us today, Mr. Duckworth.”

“Thank
you
. You worked very hard.”

“I like working hard,” I said.

Kyle, his head thrown side to side during our near miss, was snoring.

Mr. Duckworth looked at me in the mirror again. “Jacob, I want you to remember something. And I know you will if I tell you. It’s very important. It might not make sense now, but it will someday.”

I waited.

“Getting inside is
everything
,” he said. “When you’re outside, you might not think you’re good enough. Don’t believe it. Just get in there first. Then you’ll figure it out.”

He was staring at me in the mirror again, and I nodded
seriously—he was right, it didn’t make sense—and I said what my father always did when he was given directions. “I’m with you.”

As for Mrs. Duckworth, well, she was another matter entirely. The kids got their blond hair from her Norwegian genes, and their blue eyes too. She always wore pearls and was what my father called “an attractive woman.” Like Mr. D, she worked on Wall Street and possessed the same Brooks Brothers seriousness. But I was convinced she didn’t like me. I’d heard her talking to her husband in the hall one evening, complaining that I used too many towels. She always seemed oddly out of it, which could be unnerving. She caught everything mid-sentence, then bobbled or dropped the ball. Kirsti loved to tell endless, meandering stories at dinner, chock-full of exhaustive detail and labyrinthine digressions, these narratives ending on a punch line only she found funny. An instance of Mrs. Duckworth’s attention proceeded as follows:

Kirsti: “And then Laurel and I went to the nurse’s office to get a Band-Aid and—”

Mrs. D (shifting her attention from the underside of her plate, which she has lifted in the air to examine): “Nurse? When? Were you sick?”

Mr. D: “Edna, listen to the story!”

Kyle: “Yeah, Ma, c’mon!”

Mr. D (to Kyle): “Don’t talk to your mother like that!”

Kirsti: “She broke the Bunsen burner and cut her finger.”

Mrs. D (taking Kirsti’s hands and examining them): “Which finger? Is it infected?”

Elsa (rolling her eyes): “Mork calling Orson.”

Kirsti: “It was
Laurel’s.
”

Mrs. D (waving both hands in the air): “I don’t understand why you two were cutting class.”

And when it came to watching sports, she was terrible. She couldn’t get the terms right, calling a field goal a touchdown, a home run a goal. True, she knew when to celebrate. The Duckworths’ TV room was just off the kitchen, and we’d all jump up together. But the whole family (not including me) would scream, “It’s called a
safety
, Mom.” To which she took a sip of her drink and, still smiling and giddy with cheering, said, “Shush.”

One Friday evening, Kyle and I were sitting on the couch watching the Yankees on Channel 11. Kirsti, the little overachiever, was doing her prealgebra homework at our feet. Mrs. Duckworth was making another round of margaritas. Elsa was talking on the phone to a friend, standing by the stove and indifferently following the game, the cord stretched so taut it had lost its curls. “
Tell
me,” I overheard her say. “I love a good schadenfreude.”

Then my father’s voice came out of the television.

Give
, he intoned,
to the United Negro College Fund. Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste
.

“That’s my dad,” I said to Kyle. To anyone. To the air.

“That black guy?” Kirsti asked.

“No, the voice.”

“Bullshit,” Kyle said.

“Don’t use that language!” Mr. Duckworth said. “And let your friend talk!”

“It is,” I said. “That’s him.”

Elsa pressed the receiver against her chest. “That’s your dad’s voice?”

It was, I explained, it sure was. Watch TV with me sometime, anytime, and you’d hear my dad everywhere.

“Call you back,” Elsa said to her friend.

Dinner conversation that evening centered on me. Even though I’d spent enough nights at the Duckworths’ that I could get up from the table and raid the refrigerator like any of the children, Mr. and Mrs. D had no idea what my parents did for a living or, for that matter, even where they lived. In fact, the sum total of their knowledge of my family was written on a note taped above their secretary’s desk since the first night I’d slept over: Rose, 787-3858.

Given that most of their friends were probably bankers and lawyers, it must have piqued the Duckworths’ curiosity as to how a person actually made a living doing commercial voice-overs, let alone paid their child’s tuition at the Trinity School, and Elsa in particular peppered me with questions. First I explained how a voice-over was recorded, with the actor sitting in a soundstage or studio, sometimes with a screen running the commercial behind him; I described the craft required to narrate a twenty-eight or sixty-second spot, allowing for the copy’s rhythm and speed; I elaborated on the difference between a regional and national commercial, between residual and nonunion pay, even what the letters in SAG and AFTRA stood for.

“This is boring,” Kyle said.

“Oh, really?” Mr. Duckworth said. “Can you explain to Jacob what I do?”

Kyle crossed his arms. “Not exactly.”

“Then shut your trap,” said Mr. Duckworth. “Sorry, Jacob. Please continue.”

In closing, I ran off as many of my father’s commercials as I could remember, all the brand names and brought-to-you-bys he’d tagged with his bass baritone.
York Peppermint Patty
, I said.
Get the Sensation. From Peter Paul
.

“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.