Ladies and Gentlemen (25 page)

“This must be your son,” the woman said.

“It is.”

“You look
exactly
alike,” she told me.

Elsa appeared out of nowhere.

“Thank God you’re here,” she said. “Quick, I think I’ve got it figured out.” She took me by the hand—hers was as dry as snake-skin—and hustled me over to the sign-in sheet. She counted off the names on the list, crossed out one person’s, and rewrote it at the bottom. She had me write mine, then hers, right below it. “Now,” she ordered when we sat down together, “don’t you dare leave my side.”

She was so flustered it was hard to get her to explain what was going on, so instead I asked what the audition was for.

“It’s for Big Red chewing gum. Open your mouth.” I did as told, and she squirted me with Binaca. “We have to kiss.”

You see, Elsa whispered, there were some
ree-ly
gross guys here, and no way was she going to kiss some putrid stranger. “So when in doubt,” she said, “stick to what you know.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“Meaning
you
, douche bag. I
know
you.”

We sat there for a moment. Grateful, she knocked her shoulder to mine. “Plus if you were older, you’d only be half bad.”

I laughed. I was the youngest boy there by far, but Elsa clung to my arm as if we’d been in love since grade school. Our names were finally called, and we entered the room. The casting agent stood behind a video camera and a klieg light, and when we stepped onto the slightly raised platform that functioned as a stage, she told us
that on “three” we were to say our names directly into the lens, then turn to each other. On “action,” we would kiss until she said “cut.”

“And it has to be a passionate kiss,” she emphasized. “The kind that makes me taste the Big Red gum in your mouths.”

Like I said before, I was thirteen years old and on the cusp of many things: regret, for instance; wrong turns; manhood; disappointments galore. But I did something in that room that day that I’ve come to recognize is so rare as to be precious:
I got in the moment
. After we announced our names, the woman told Elsa to let her hair down. Elsa turned to face me and shook out her ponytail, and I watched her unabashedly while she teased it into a mane. The casting agent was only a voice to us, invisible behind that floodlit wall, so it was like being alone anywhere I could imagine, which was nowhere else than where I was right now.

“How do I look?” Elsa asked.

“You look good,” I answered, and stared at her little mouth and then into her eyes.

“I’m warning you,” she said. “No tongue.”

“No tongue,” I repeated, though I had no idea what she meant.

“And not a word of this to Kyle.”

“Not a word,” I agreed.

“So far as I’m concerned,” she said, “this never happened.”

“Right, it never happened.”

But then it
was
happening, my dream suddenly laid out on a platter like John the Baptist’s head.

“Easy squeezie,” she said, trying to calm herself.

“Easy,” I answered. But already edging toward her, I was able to smell her now—my ear bent to the call for action.

The hotel room’s curtains seemed to be burning too brightly at the edges, and Sara cursed when she saw the digital clock next to her bed. Her flight out of Nashville, bound for Los Angeles, left at 7:30; it was 6:49. She’d managed to catch several flights over the years in miraculous fashion, but this would really set the record.

Luck, however, was on her side. A taxi was waiting for her when she arrived in the lobby, traffic was light out to the airport, she stepped right up to the e-ticket kiosk, and the security line moved so efficiently that she even had time to stop at Starbucks, texting her husband while the barista made her café au lait. New Yorkers like her lived for this sort of synchronicity. When the subway arrived the moment you stepped onto the platform or all the lights down Park Avenue switched to green as your cab approached, it felt as if you were somehow being watched over. The Southwest attendant was about to close the door when Sara stepped onto the plane.

She wasn’t surprised to find most of the seats taken. She hated to sit in back, where the turbulence was most acute, and on principle
refused to share her seat with any overlapping parts of a fat person. She certainly wouldn’t sit next to anyone with a baby; she had two sons of her own and had suffered through enough hellish trips with Tanner and Rob to make her sympathetic, but only from afar. Her supreme pet peeve, however, was a middle seat, and the attendant in back, already buckled in, was pointing to one that also happened to be in the last row. Mr. Window, hidden behind his newspaper, was clearly very tall, and Miss Aisle was Hispanic, in her early twenties, and already fast asleep.

As if sensing her preference, Mr. Window lowered his paper and offered Sara his seat the moment she appeared. He was getting off in St. Louis, he said, but “they’re full all the way to Los Angeles.” The man was Gumby-thin and broad-shouldered. He didn’t stand so much as unfold, broadening and elongating like one of her son’s Transformers. Their exchange, followed by his help jamming her bag into the overhead bin, momentarily woke Miss Aisle, who stared at them uncomprehendingly, until Mr. Window, in another pleasant surprise, said,
“Disculpe, señora. Le voy a dar mi silla.”

“De nada,”
she answered, and got up.

The plane backed out of the gate the moment Sara got settled and, in keeping with this morning’s magical timing, made a beeline for the runway and took off without delay.

Her elation rose as the plane climbed. She was headed to LA to meet a man, Thom McKnight, whom she’d kissed in college nearly two decades ago and hadn’t seen since, until yesterday, though she’d thought about him with an odd frequency over the years. She remembered very few things about him: two years older, a lacrosse player, a preposterously bad singer in a punk band. What she
did
recall with a nearly breathless vividness—it recurrently haunted
her dreams—was an evening that ended with Thom helping her climb the outer walls of the campus’s ancient observatory. In the moonlight he slid back a segment of the clamshell dome, dropped into the dark void, and called up to her, his disembodied voice urging her to trust him, to grab the edge and then hang down. She lowered herself into that blackness, dangling for several harrowing seconds until Thom’s hands firmly gripped her knees, tracing the shape of her thighs and waist, and she released her grip, touching the floor as softly as a ballerina set down by her partner. Afterward they kissed for hours, and it was so singularly for its own sake and so blissfully erotic that she would’ve been content to keep doing it until daybreak. But Thom had other ideas, and they left for her room. The night might’ve ended differently if her roommate hadn’t also gotten lucky, which she and Thom soon discovered. He lived in an apartment on the other side of the campus and was exhausted, he claimed, so she simply said good night, confident that another tryst was inevitable. But the next time they met he was both remote
and
with a girlfriend, and thus their immediate future ended and the long haunting began.

Sara, a freelance writer for several national magazines, was in Nashville for
Vanity Fair
to interview Reese Witherspoon, who was in the new Martin Scorsese movie,
Cell
, about a rogue federal marshal, played by George Clooney, who oversees a group of relocated, high-profile witnesses. The program is organized into cells so none of the handlers could compromise its security, but Clooney’s character suffers from a God complex. His charges are desperate for news from family and friends, and he violates every protocol by exchanging this for money and, in Witherspoon’s case, sex. Like all Scorsese’s films, this was a redemption story, almost
Old Testament in its dimensions, since Clooney portrays a father at once protective and terrible. When his reckless behavior tips off the Mob to his cell’s location, he must reject his sinful nature in order to protect his own newfound family.

Sara was sure the film would mark Witherspoon’s return to A-list stature. It was also a great get. She’d interviewed her before, found her whip smart, charming, and, most important, forthcoming. They’d enjoyed a long, productive lunch yesterday, and afterward Sara visited the set, where she was shocked to run into Thom. It turned out he was the film’s assistant director, and as he gave her a quick tour they giddily caught up. He was extremely busy—married too—but one thing led to another and he asked her to dinner, an invitation she enthusiastically accepted. They ate at Ruth’s Chris Steak House, right next to her hotel, and their conversation was nearly as breathless as their kissing had been twenty years ago. Dale, her husband, called during dessert. So did Thom’s wife. “Working late,” each said. “I’ll call in the morning. Love you.” She felt like a swimmer at Set. “You haven’t changed at all,” she told Thom, who looked absurdly young. It’s all in the genes, he claimed; his grandparents on both sides had lived past a hundred. As for her, “Well,” he said, “you’ve become something entirely more dangerous.” She excused herself to go to the bathroom and, alone for a moment, checked her teeth in the mirror (
that fucking spinach
) and took a long, hard look.

She would follow this man right now, anywhere, no questions asked, though her reasons—she promptly listed them—were more complicated and manifold than her desire.

She was thirty-nine, though she occasionally felt fifty. She’d chosen a profession that condemned her permanently to homework
and consequently was never
not
working. She looked forward to traveling alone because on the road she could bathe in peace, without the sound effects of her family. Away from them, finally, she felt bereft. Meanwhile, private school ran thirty-six thousand dollars a year, times two. Yesterday she was breast-feeding Rob and now he was six. Tanner, her first great love since her husband, used to live for the sight of her, but these days cared mostly about his father and Rafael Nadal. She wanted another child, if only to have a baby to hold again, to which suggestion Dale replied: “I’d like to retire with dignity.” This was reasonable, of course, yet she was heartbroken. She thought the planet was self-immolating. She missed her husband desperately, in spite of the fact he was
right there
, or possibly because of it. She occasionally glimpsed his naked body and realized she felt nothing. She’d catch him staring at hers in the mirror, suspecting that he felt the same thing. She couldn’t remember what she did the day before, though each went something as follows: get the boys ready for school; clean up the study enough to concentrate; conduct multiple phone interviews; do notebook dumps and transcription; return or delete e-mails; eat her meals standing up; have
no
exercise whatsoever; attend editorial meetings uptown, midtown, or downtown; arrive home to prepare Dale’s dinner and
not
spit at him while he pours himself a drink, turns on the television, and promises to do the dishes so she can “be with the kids” (i.e., help them with their homework); put the boys to bed; wash her face and brush her teeth; burn with rage that she hasn’t had a single moment to herself in eons. Understand, as she now did in this bathroom, that she had a year, perhaps two, in which she might still consider herself young.

Take something for yourself, she thought, while you still can.

Thom, waiting at the restroom door, took her in his arms and kissed her. There
is
such a thing as a time machine. They pressed their foreheads together and made plans. He had dailies to review but could get to her room by eleven. Though he was leaving for LA around lunchtime the following day, the whole morning was free and clear. “Then I’ll hang the
DO
NOT
DISTURB
sign on the door,” she said.

Back at the hotel, she fired her husband a text, knowing he’d be asleep.
Early meeting. Flight pushed back. Will call in the afternoon
. She showered, put on makeup, brushed her teeth twice, and waited.

But Thom didn’t show. Just past midnight, he texted her:
Hung up. Complete cluster fuck. Here’s a long shot: Come to LA tomorrow?

It occurred to Sara that the corollary to her memories of their long-ago night together was a promise that if in some implausible future a rendezvous like the one they were planning presented itself—with agreed-upon limits, a thing both enduring and self-canceling—then it would be an abiding and nurturing secret she could always tell herself. Sinning, she’d be redeemed, because she would’ve wholly given herself to an experience and closed a circle that had remained open. What she’d never seriously imagined was that she could enjoy the consummation of this fantasy with its progenitor.

Yes
, she wrote, then immediately made the arrangements. And in the morning, she unwittingly left the
DO
NOT
DISTURB
sign dangling on the door.

About a half hour into the flight, Mr. Window gently touched her wrist and mumbled something she couldn’t hear.