Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (37 page)

J
immy was right: There were no offers, zero, zip, zilch. But sometimes the casting calls were for smaller parts, played by older women. Laura didn’t ask Jimmy whether it was a good idea; she just went. Sometimes there were crowds of ladies waiting at the gate, a gabby mob, and sometimes there were crowds of ladies standing around a large room, as if waiting for a doctor’s appointment or a tardy bus. When it was the former, Laura kept her sunglasses on and stood still, ignoring the chatting around her. Inevitably one woman would recognize her, and then the game of telephone would begin, until all Laura could hear was her own name whispered over and over again. Eventually the chatter would stop, and everyone would turn their bodies slightly so that they had a better look. Laura often thought that she could have taken a job as a statue in any park in the city, so practiced was she at being the object of someone else’s gaze.

The auditions were the kind she remembered from her youth:
One by one, or in groups of three, the women would file into a room with casting directors seated at a table, not unlike the banquet table at Clara’s wedding. Each of the auditioning women would slide her headshot and personal information across the table, and the casting directors would look her up and down, barely making eye contact. Laura hated the moment before she slid her picture over most of all, because as soon as the casting director saw Laura’s name, his features would contort in confusion.
It couldn’t be
, he would think, and yet it was. He would look up and see her face, and Laura had to smile at his wrinkled brow, his sorry expression. The worst of all was when the casting directors let slip a whoop of a laugh, a sound wholly made of surprise.

“No,” one man said, holding the photo of Laura in both hands. “Really?”

Laura curtsied and backed up a few feet. The casting director and his friends were still laughing when she began to read her lines. That was the easy part, once she opened her mouth and began to speak; when that happened, Laura was far, far away, and only her body was still in the room. She had read a book about astral projection, and acting seemed like a version of that—one could travel anywhere, to Egypt, or the cherry orchards of Wisconsin, or back in time; she had only to believe it. When they called later to offer her the part (a shop owner with three scenes and a fake mole), Laura pretended to be surprised. She wasn’t happy to audition, but she was happy for the work—the other women were sad for her, felt sorry for all that she had been through. The brave ones even said so. But to Laura, auditions were a humiliation with promise—if the right person saw her, he would hire her, and if the right person hired her, then she could act again, over and over again, until she could pay all of her bills, and until the world woke up and saw what it had been missing.

S
elling the house was the only thing to do. Laura wept as she walked the real estate agent through room after room, pointing out details that Irving had insisted upon: the glass doors that led out onto the yard, the chandelier he’d ordered from France, the damask wallpaper designed by someone important whose name Laura could never remember. Harriet cried too, although she’d already found another live-in job as a nanny for a television actress with blond curls and a smile like a jackal’s. They held on to each other’s elbows, pointing out the few pieces of furniture and fixtures that Laura would take with her. The real estate agent made sharp notes on a pad of paper, and Laura was terrified to think of what she was writing down. The house was beautiful, but perhaps it seemed old-fashioned now. All the young stars wanted houses made of hard angles and shag rugs, somewhere James Bond could roll around in bed with a woman wearing full makeup but no clothes. Just thinking about being without clothes made Laura begin to sob, and she buried her face in Harriet’s shoulder, but the familiar smell of her shampoo
and face cream only made her cry harder. The agent stalked her way around the two women, avoiding them as well as she could, her high heels like ice picks through Laura’s heart.

The bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel was already paid for—it had been one of Irving’s investments from before they were married, though he’d essentially used it as a place to stash stars in mid-divorce or to host executives visiting from New York. It was a large bungalow, as bungalows went, two bedrooms and a small sitting area with a reduced kitchen. Laura had to pay a monthly fee, for the maids and the gardener and the linens and the wash, but it was far less than the house, and so they were moving. Florence took one bedroom, Junior took the other, and Laura herself would sleep on the pullout sofa in the living room when both children were in residence. It was rather a step down, but no one from the lifestyle magazines was knocking on her door to take photographs of her nonexistent dinner parties anyway.

The first night, the three of them sat in silence on the sofa, their hips all touching, unsure of how to proceed. Junior was twenty, and should have been in college, Laura wanted so badly for him to be, but he’d proved less studious than he’d seemed as a boy. He loved to read, and often carried around a bent paperback book in his pocket, but Junior couldn’t seem to concentrate on more than one subject at a time. Laura understood—it was hard for her to be more than one thing at a time; why should she expect more of Junior? The only class he’d ever enjoyed was a costume design course in high school, where he helped make dresses for the actresses in the school play. He would never bring home a girl; Laura had known that for years. She loved her son desperately, and would have been happy if he’d brought home anyone, but he never would. There were boys, from the neighborhood and from the school, boys who seemed never to go home. Each one would be at the house every day for a month and then vanish.
Laura tried to learn their names, but was always making mistakes. When she called one by another’s name, Junior sank so far into the recesses of his bedroom that she was sure he’d never forgive her. She never saw him kiss one of the other boys, not even give one of them a soft touch that might imply that they were touching more when the door was closed, but she imagined that was what was happening. The boys were usually polite, and always quiet as mice when they saw her. Some of them came over because of her; Laura knew that, and so did Junior. It was harder for him than it had been for the girls. When Clara and Florence were in school, people had heard only good things about their mother. It was different for Junior; there was more of a story there. Despite moving across the country, and choosing a wildly different life for herself, Laura had ended up with exactly the same fate as her mother: no longer a wife, with only one of her three children acting the way she’d expected. She supposed it served her right for thinking that she deserved more, that her fate would be any different.

Florence came and went. After spending most of her twenties in and out of the classroom—she’d been an art major, a poet, pre-med—Florence was finally a full-time student at UCLA, and loved sitting alone at the university library, her spine hunched over a book. She often slept at Clara’s house, where there was an extra bedroom, taking the bus the short distance back and forth to the hotel if Clara or Jimmy didn’t have the time to drive her. Laura had traded in her Packard for an even smaller model, and the car felt flimsy, as if she were driving down the road in an oversize soup can. But most of the time she didn’t drive anywhere at all. During the day, Laura moved around the hotel—from the pool to the breakfast bar to the Polo Lounge and back to the pool. The waiters were patient with her once they understood that she wasn’t going to order more than hot tea and toast. If she kept her sunglasses on outside, everyone ignored
her, which Laura thought was lovely and polite, though it occurred to her late at night, curled up on the sofa bed, that they might not have said anything because they hadn’t recognized her in the first place.

J
immy called with great excitement, and for the first time in several years it had nothing to do with the children. Someone—Christos Contogenis, Laura had read his name in the papers—was interested in funding a project. He’d called Jimmy, who had long since moved out of the home office and into a small but clean office space on Wilshire Boulevard. Before she’d had her two children, Roy and Leslie, sweet towheaded kids who would have fit in on any farm in Wisconsin, Clara had worked as his secretary and office manager, but it had been years since she’d done anything but stay at home with the kids, making lunches and occasionally sneaking pieces of their candy when she thought no one was looking. Luckily Jimmy had other clients: the actor who played the captain of a boat that never went anywhere on a television show, a female comedian even older than Laura who cackled and spit her way through game shows, a trained gorilla.

There were many things that Laura missed about working regularly, so many things that she could hardly do anything else all day long except miss parts of her life that were gone. Laura missed having a dressing room more than she missed having a bedroom, in particular the lightbulbs that surrounded her face and made her skin glow. She missed learning her lines, speaking the same words over and over again until they formed pathways in her brain so deep that they couldn’t be knocked loose. Laura missed the camaraderie of players,
the kinship she had known her entire life. Actors were different from other people, more acutely sensitive to words and gestures, always absorbing new emotional landscapes. Why would anyone do anything else? Laura didn’t know how. She was always ready to go into Jimmy’s office, always prepared to meet with anyone. She wore sunglasses half the size of her face, and wound a scarf around her shoulders. Her arms weren’t as thin as they had been, and other parts of her body had started to lean slightly out, as if testing the boundaries of her flesh, but when she had to, she could still look like Laura Lamont. In April she would be fifty years old. It was always a surprise to Laura, the number. It just kept rising, no matter what she did or didn’t do in any given year. One year, Laura told Florence that all she wanted was a button she could push to pause her age, just for a little while, a few years, while she got used to the idea. Florence had thrown her head back and laughed, and Laura gamely tried to laugh along, though she hadn’t been joking.

Jimmy was waiting for Laura in the hall, as he always did. She wondered whether that was what he thought of her, that she was so prematurely dotty that she might get lost, despite having been to his office dozens of times before. He was a good son-in-law, and the only one she thought she’d ever have. Florence was no closer to getting married at twenty-nine than she had been at twenty-five, and seemed content being single. She was better at school than her siblings, and was working toward a degree in psychology, that mysterious study of the mind. Florence was going to be a doctor, she said, the good kind who never gave you shots but always asked what was wrong. It would have made her father weep with pride, Irving having had nothing more than a tenth-grade formal education.

“Hiya, Mom,” Jimmy said. He lightly held on to Laura’s arm and kissed her on the cheek. She liked that he called her his mother—
Jimmy’s parents, like Mary, had never gotten over his decision to be a part of the Hollywood galaxy. Laura was sure that they had never liked Clara, that they would swap the whole family for a normal one, if they could. “How was the drive over?”

Though Laura didn’t think of Jimmy as her son—the bonds were different, conditional on marriage, which she knew didn’t last forever—she did love him as much as she loved her other children, and she did lump him in with the motley group. Jimmy was her Josephine, her steadiest ally. Clara bored easily and was always wandering off in the middle of conversations, and Florence picked everything apart. Junior either kept his mouth shut or never stopped talking, making it nearly impossible to get a word in edgewise, talking so fast it was hard to follow what he was on about, but Jimmy would talk to Laura for hours on end about the movies. He’d seen everything, almost as devoted to the industry as Irving had been, rabid in his enthusiasm. Laura liked to ask what he’d seen lately, which felt like winding up a toy and watching it careen across the room. Out of all her children, Jimmy was the only one who seemed to care that Laura was an actress,
was still an actress
, that she wasn’t finished yet. Maybe it was that Jimmy had come from somewhere else, out of another woman’s body, that made it possible for him to view her as a woman in addition to his mother-in-law. Laura wasn’t through, and Jimmy knew it.