My Other Life (41 page)

But it was wrong to think about it. I was a writer. An actor—a performer—was the opposite of a writer. Any writer who tried this was doomed. Sam Shepard was a less interesting writer after you saw his face all over the screen. How could you take the writer Harold Pinter seriously after you saw Harold Pinter the actor hamming it up. Jerzy Kosinski had appeared in
Reds.
Kosinski had committed suicide.

I could not work the following day. Though Alison called from work about a BBC party we had been invited to, I said nothing to her about this offer of a part in a movie. It was another of my secrets, but not a very big one, because my mind was made up. I looked at my China notebooks, grew tired in anticipation, and told myself I was uninspired. I needed an idea—a thought, a phrase, a word, anything. I decided to take the day off and go to Cambridge, to see Chinese paintings depicting foreigners in the Fitzwilliam Museum, for my China book. What did we look like to the Chinese? Even if I did not find the big-nosed, red-haired foreign devils, it was worth the trip from Liverpool Street. Solitary train journeys, even short ones, calmed me and gave me ideas.

And I looked up Anton. We met at a pub near his college, Clare. When he asked me how my China book was coming along, I found myself telling him about the movie offer rather than about the book. Was I thinking that someone his age—twenty—seemed to be closer to a knowledge and experience of the public taste, particularly where movies were concerned?

Anton said, "That is so cool. I wish someone would ask me to be in a movie."

"Would you say yes?"

"Not half!"

Then he got embarrassed in advance for me—for himself.

"But you're not going to do it, are you?"

I stuck out my jaw and pouted. '"Go ahead, make my day.'"

He frowned, shook his head, and glanced around to see whether anyone had heard me, then leaned over to me and said, "You're not acting. You're indicating."

It was the unexpected word "indicating" that made me pause.

"Pretending. Going through the motions," he said, and tapped his chest. "It's not in here."

"Don't worry, I hate acting," I said. "I hate watching people do it. I don't want to observe it. It's embarrassing."

"There's such a thing as great acting, though."

"I hate great acting more than any other kind of acting. 'My kingdom for a horse.' I'd rather watch amateurs or improvisers—those Mike Leigh people."

I thought of the loud, shouting, stamping people on the London stage. I had gotten little pleasure from all the hours I had spent at the theater. I did not believe actors any more than I believed in puppets. But there were movies that had gripped me by the throat and left me gasping with admiration.

We always talked like father and son, but today I was the son, and Anton's face was pale and paternal and studying mine as he hid his uncertainty, his apprehension that I was in danger of making a fool of myself. It had been a mistake to raise the subject; I had not told him enough.

Pondering this on the train back from Cambridge, finding the rain-flattened fields restful, I was grateful for Anton's giving me the word "indicating." There was a kind of writing that was indicating, too—just tentatively sketching. Ever since Ariel had called to offer me this acting part, I had stopped writing and begun indicating.

What I resented about many actors was that they were being paid and praised for doing something I knew I could do better. You could see them acting. There was such a thing as an actor's face, an actor's hair style, an actor's laugh. Actors did not even walk like real people; they were slow and self-conscious. It was so much better when a person was doing the human thing, reacting, as in the old sixties movies that had influenced me, particularly Fellini's, where he had used amateurs. Such people had real faces and real voices. I thought: The very idea of hating actors is probably a good start. In this role I would not act at all. I would deal with it as I dealt with my writing, existing in every word I wrote, in every character.

I woke the next day to good writing weather—cool, a stillness in the air, in the muted light a sense of harmless gloom, a low London sky full of gray tumbled stuffings. I sat, but I could not write; and there was nothing to distract me in the mail. Perhaps the script had been held up by British customs, as sometimes happened with business documents in this suspicious bureaucracy.

The guy's a writer. That's the wholepoint.
Ariel had insisted on that. Only a writer knew about writing, which was why I had never felt at a disadvantage in being interviewed on television—had never
been nervous. There was nothing that anyone could ask me about my work that I could not answer, no question about my life that I had not already mulled over. My books were the visible part of my mind. And I could not separate my writing from who I was. It was not work I performed, it was a process of my life.

The clouds became obscured in a shower of rain, spattering like crystal beads against the back garden and sluicing the slate roofs of the smaller house next door. I watched the gutters fill and run over, drenching the bricks; and the leaves being torn from the trees and falling in heaps, thickened like wet rags; and a cat compressing itself under a bush. The windows were pelted with heavy raindrops and water ran down the glass panes. Dramatic weather thrilled me and made me restless. I was now too excited to write.

I watched it and thought how writing was all I had ever done. It had protected me, kept me from having to get a job, insulated me, insured me against ever having to work in an office, liberated me from the servitude of a salary, emancipated me and made me sane. I had no boss. I did not need permission to write. But all actors had to wait for their cue. I had no employees. I was free. What actor could say that?

Only a writer knew these things, and only a writer could act the part of a writer. I was being asked to consider the part of the American writer in this British movie. That suited me. Because that was who I was, an American writer in London. Living in London was more a science than an art. It was an acquired taste, and you got better at it as time went on. I had developed those skills—not Anglophilia but tolerance and lowered expectations. I was a spectator, a witness. The more I thought of it, the more I was convinced that Ariel had made an inspired choice in asking me to accept the role.

Another few days passed. I still could not work on my China book. I did research instead. I wandered the stacks of the London Library, searching the indexes of travel books for the names of the obscure towns where I had stayed in China, looking for inspiration. I made notes and tried to be busy.

Another wonderful story, told to me by a woman in New York City, was about a woman friend of hers who had met a man on a plane. The man was dark, perhaps Middle Eastern. They swapped telephone numbers, and within a day the man called to invite her to dinner. The woman said she was busy—she was going away for a week. When she returned, she found that a large potted plant had been delivered to her. A few days later there was a basket of gourmet food, and not long afterwards a messenger arrived with a bracelet. All the presents were from the man she had met on the plane.

The presents seemed so odd, so premature, that she called the man to tell him to stop. He had changed his telephone number. She could not find him. And he did not stop. He sent her a new refrigerator, and it was filled with bottles of expensive Chablis. He sent her a king-sized bed. Then a CD player and many discs. And there was more. It got so that the woman was hesitant to go home in the evening, so fearful was she of what she might find waiting for her. Now there was a present every day. They arrived in such profusion that it became a physical impossibility for the woman to send them back. Yet she did not have room for them in her small apartment.

A dog was delivered. And then a motorcycle. By now the woman had called the police, but they did not take the complaint seriously—giving someone presents was not a crime, and it was hardly a nuisance. Yet for the woman it was worse than theft, she was half out of her mind with worry, the intrusion of all these unwanted presents was like the worst hostility—valuable jewelry, a Finnish sauna in a crate, a new car. She could not sleep. She lay awake expecting the doorbell to ring with another delivery. She lost her appetite and became depressed. And where was the man? He was hiding and relentlessly sending her presents. Now she hated him, and the onslaught proved to her that he wanted to drive her crazy.

She went to see a psychiatrist, who after a few sessions simply advised her to move. And so she did, changed her job, relocated, and hid, her whole life changed by this chance encounter, almost destroyed by the gifts.

But, "I never did find out what happened to her," the woman in New York told me when I quizzed her. This was the very thing you wanted to know. Unanswered questions always made me think that I was dealing with an invention—probe further and there was emptiness. Perhaps the woman on the plane did not exist. Perhaps the events had never happened. And it was not only that the man had been persistent; would the woman really have been so demoralized by the presents?

The word "story" always made me smile. What's his story? Just
a story. A likely story. "Story" suggested an insubstantial invention, a wobbly vehicle for an unconvincing proposition. Ask too many questions and it collapsed.

I was waiting for the script—so I could not work. Then, at last, when the script came I could not work, because I was reading the script. It was called Mystery
Man,
a tide I hated and wanted to change. It was a love story. The lovers were English. The male lead had a friend, called the Writer in the script—no name—who loaned his apartment to the male lead so that he could have an assignation with the woman. Therefore, I was the key man. I got the plot rolling. In the novel I was the narrator, an American writer. The novel was a reminiscence of my English friends.

Most of my lines were in the opening scene:

Writer: You lucky dog. I'll bet she's beautiful.

Jack: She's only twenty.

I could almost believe that this older Englishman might find happiness with a dreamy twenty-year-old, even if the happiness was not long-lasting. But what about Heather (as she was named in the script)? The story needed cynicism, selfishness, manipulation.

Jack: Don't you want to see her?
Writer: Curiously, no.

Wrong,
I scribbled. Americans did not say, "Curiously, no." This was English writing, the slightly pompous, sniffy, weighty way of urbane Englishmen. If you knew them, you knew that it was an insufferable affectation; if you did not, it was just baffling or else mildly threatening.

I did not have much dialogue, the script was childishly spelled ("sizzors" for scissors, "miniscule"). I was described walking around my flat in Chelsea (more believable in Battersea or Islington, I thought), showing my friend my gadgets—coffeemaker, Jacuzzi, cable TV, video camera, all the items that figured later in the plot. I did not describe them. I showed him how they worked. That was simple enough acting.

But would an American writer own such things in London? I made a list in the margins of the script of all the things I actually did own: a rowing machine, a working samovar, a wind-up gramophone with an old 78 of Heifetz playing Handel's
Largo.

After I had finished reading the script, I flipped through it and saw that I had scribbled so many notes on the pages it looked like one of my own rough drafts. I wanted to discuss the changes. And then I remembered that it was a script that had been sent for me to consider playing the role of the Writer. Peter, the director, was not looking for a script doctor to fix the lines, just an actor to say them—an actor to walk around, to be directed. Idly, wanting to respond, I dialed Ariel's number, but put the phone down before there was a ring. Surely they would call me. They did not want any actor; they wanted a writer.

The following day I reread the script and, instead of working on my China book, learned the Writer's lines. They were few but significant. I had made some changes, improved them—Americanized them. It was not presumptuous. They would be grateful for the changes. I looked over my China notes, but with one ear cocked for the phone—Ariel's call. There was no call.

At the BBC party, several people asked me what I was doing. I had not been working. I had been away from my book for a week. I noticed that these partygoers, all BBC producers and editors, spoke in exaggerated American accents whenever they used certain words or phrases. They mockingly said, "You're welcome," and "It figures," and "You gotta be kidding," and it struck me that the English were at their most comfortable hiding behind accents. His mustache wet with wine, one small, balding man named Meyer began to monopolize Alison's attention with his many accents, a different one for each sentence, like a man speaking in tongues, a kind of glossolalia certain English people were prone to when they were nervous. Not acting, but indicating.

I turned away from them and lit a woman's cigarette.

"That was nicely done."

I was so surprised by the compliment I could not think of a reply, and then she too asked me what I had been writing. It was my usual superstitious reflex that made me deny that I was writing anything. But I realized that it was the truth. I had not been able to get back into my China book. All I did was stare at my notebooks. I wanted to confide in her and say I've just been offered a part in a movie. What would she say to that?

On the way home from the party, I said to Alison, "Remember Ariel Draper, that casting director?"

"That calls up at the oddest hours? Yes, I remember her."

"She offered me a part in a movie."

"You're joking."

"No."

Then she went silent.

"So what do you think?"

She said, "I'm trying to think of something clever like, Is it another installment of
Planet of the Apes?
"

"I know. It's ridiculous. I just thought you'd be interested."