My Other Life (42 page)

"What did you tell her?"

"That I had a book to write."

Yet I saw this movie more clearly than I did my book. The car arriving at my house each morning to take me to the studio outside London, probably Pinewood, the one at Iver, in Buckinghamshire. Lunches at the studio restaurant. Chitchat with the actors. I knew from experience that there would be a great deal of rehearsal and repetition and that I would have a lot of time to kill. I could work on my book then. And I was the only American on the set. I would be a little exotic for that reason, and because I was not an actor, I caught myself feeling a little superior to all the rest of them, and corrected myself. I imagined the others' insecurities, their slighting remarks, the misunderstandings. The flirtations. And the meals with the director and producer—a time perhaps for pitching projects of my own. Using the notes I had made, I might become involved in rewriting the script.

Sometimes these reveries maddened and embarrassed me, sometimes they were a consolation.

In my reveries I did not win an Oscar, I was not nominated; but my performance was remarked upon, and I was asked to play in other movies. Because acting was out-of-date and formal and self-conscious, the thing was to have real people in these parts. I was noticed because I was not an actor. I was real. I was the writer Paul Theroux.

And yet, even as this thought occurred to me, I knew I had done no writing lately. I disliked my indicating, my rationalizing, my ridiculous patience, my new alertness to the ring of the telephone. Waiting—I thought of myself as hanging—not able to work, I was asked to write a story about Sicily for a travel magazine.

"I can't," I said, because I was waiting for the call. I was sure the
telephones were terrible in Sicily, and I did not want to be there when the call came. I said I was busy. This happened several times—travel offers. Each time I thought: I'D do it after the movie.

Alison said, "Are you all right?"

My gloom was not from writing. It was from not writing—not writer's block but a sort of block from not being able to live and believe in myself. The thought of a part in a movie had rid my mind of all other thoughts.

"I'm fine," I said, and kept my secret to myself until I found it so hard to bear that I called the studio.

"
Mystery Man.
"

I asked to speak to Peter.

"Who shall I say is calling?"

I lost my nerve and hung up.

Not being able to work, I walked the streets. I went to more movies and, examining actors' performances, became convinced that I had a career. It made me secretive and self-regarding. I looked at myself in plate-glass windows, in mirrors. I dressed carelessly, as though I did not want anyone to recognize me. When people glanced at me, I turned away.

I had always suspected that I did not belong in London, but contemplating this part in the movie I became convinced of it. I was encouraged by the discovery. These feelings made me think I could give the movie credibility. I felt restless here. The writer in
Mystery Man
was like me, a witness, someone watching the rain come down, waiting to go home.

These empty days and my nonworking gave me the feeling I associated with actors. It was easier, I felt sustained, as a nonworking actor rather than a nonworking writer. Waiting, not working, made me feel I had turned into an actor. No one could challenge me, and yet I knew there had been a change in my mood. I was tormented by the calls for work, more frequent now, as though I sat there waiting to be summoned.

Alison said, "I'd love to read some of your China book."

"Most of it's provisional—I'm still scribbling."

There was no more of my China book.

Resolute, grimmer than I wanted to be, hating the submissive way I sat there dialing the number, I called Ariel in Los Angeles.

The message on her answering machine was obviously designed
to discourage actors looking for work. "
I'm away from my desk this week—traveling,
" her voice said. No indication where she was or when she would be back. "
If you want to leave a message, you can call
..." and she gave the number of her secretary.
Get in line
was the implication.
Don't bother me—there are a million people like you.
There was no way of leaving a message on this line.

"Rats."

Eventually, to take my mind off my part in the movie, I started working on my travel book again. I could not leave it unfinished; I would have to complete this book about China in order to be available for the movie. That was the story I told myself, to give myself the heart to go on. I labored at my desk, I listened to Chinese music—the Red Guards singing "Dong Fang Hong," "The East Is Red"—and I looked at maps and my notes, and slowly, my chair creaking as I shifted in it, hesitating, I resumed my travel narrative.

And then, somehow, I knew the part was not going to happen. I was sure of it. How was it possible? I had heard nothing. Shooting was about to begin. The Writer was a key part. I had been a fool for ever thinking it would have been possible.

And I felt more than ever like an alien—someone who will never belong, like the man in the movie. An American in England knew so much about broken promises.

So, one day, I woke up and did not want to get out of bed and begin waiting. I lay there, deciding what to do, and in seconds I sat up and rejected the movie. I began to rebuff their attention, turning them down, not angrily but in a tetchy preoccupied way, interrupting their appeals. It seemed like another reason to leave England. I wanted to take a long trip. I wanted to be unobtainable.

Please, Paul.

Sorry. I'm much too busy. It's not my line of work.

And I realized that I had already had this conversation, on the first day.

"
Are you joking, Ariel?
"

"
Absolutely not. It's not a big part, but you'd be perfect.
"

"
I've never acted in a movie.
"

"
No problem.
"

"
Ariel, don't send me the script. I could never be in a movie.
"

"
Why not?
"

"
I'm not an actor. I don't know the first thing about it.
"

"
That's what directors are for.
"

"
I don't want to learn. I'm a writer.
"

"
The guy's a writer. That's the whole point.
"

"
I can't do it. I have to get back to work.
"

I hated Ariel. She was not a tease, she was the devil, offering me the earth and then skipping off.

Even so, hardened as I thought I had become, I was excited when she finally called me a month or so later. I listened, breathing in a shallow, nervous way. She was gabbing. Was this a lead-up to the explanation of my part in the movie? No. She began talking about coming to London.

"Auditions?"

"No, just a vacation."

I risked the question. "Whatever happened to that part you offered me?"

"The Writer? Oh, Peter got someone really good. He was considering you, though, for a while. Do you think you would have done it?"

For a moment then, all life left my body and I was rigid, wooden, holding the phone in my hollow hand, and then, as though I had sneezed out my soul and been blessed, my spirit reentered me and I felt ashamed and tricked.

"No," I said.

"I've got a story for you."

"Yes?"

"The other night, Dickie Bellford's underwear party," Ariel said. "It was the usual thing, people had to come in their underwear or they weren't admitted. We all knew what was going on, so we were prepared. But some people tried to crash it, and that's where it got interesting. First were these hotshots from out of town. They stopped laughing as soon as they reached the door. Two huge black bouncers with wire coat hangers grabbed them. Take your clothes off or get out.' They got out. Then a really rich Italian executive came with his date—the girl was already in her underwear. The Italian didn't think the rule applied to men. The two black guys came up to him with the wire hangers. Take your clothes off.' You should have seen him in his boxer shorts, and his hairy chest and skinny legs, looking like some guy that was totally lost. What do you think?"

"It's good."

"You think it's stupid."

It was unusual and diverting, but did it bear any relation to anything I wrote? It seemed to me unusable, like the other stories—of the Dutch couple, and the gift victim. Perhaps the reason I was so ready to listen to them was because they convinced me of the reality of my writing. I was always greedy for more, as though the stories had an accidental significance, and I would see their meaning afterwards, like parables I had to live through to understand.

T
HE WAY
that people, interviewers especially, sit down is usually a good indicator of how long they are planning to stay. Miss Erril Jinkins—the name was apparently correct—lowered herself slowly into the leather armchair in the sitting room of my suite at the Regent of Sydney, going silent as she sank. She was tall and symmetrical, and she shifted her weight and crossed her legs as though locking her body onto the cushion and sealing herself there. The chair itself responded to her—flexed and hesitated and seemed to steady itself with an abrupt chairlike grunt of acceptance.

Miss Jinkins had seemed primly and rather prettily dressed, but when she sat down her prim clothes sort of winked and surprised me with teasing illusion. Her dark blouse was translucent and created a shadow play of the curves beneath it; and her skirt was split to her hip, showing me the entire shapely length of her slender leg.

There was something about her name, about so many of these Australian names, that made me think of a criminal or a convict. She was an elegant woman, but "Erril Jinkins" had an old, crude misspelled strength and suggested to me a hint of wickedness.

"I've interrupted you," she said. "Writing home?"

Her alertness alarmed me. So she had seen the letter I had begun, which lay on the desk across the room with the stamped envelope.

"Yes, I've been away too long."

"Didn't I read somewhere that you're divorced?"

"You may have read it, but it's not true. "I am very happily married," I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth I regretted them for their self-congratulation. Superstitiously I thought: Who heard that?

Erril Jinkins took out her tape recorder. She held it like a small sandwich, then set it on the table between us. She smiled, she peered forward without seeing much, she batted her eyelashes. I was appalled by her slowness and her patience.

Her smile made me uneasy, too. She seemed to be warning me of an awkward question.

"Mind if I use your facilities?"

I hated that—hated her asking, hated the phrase—and why hadn't she asked me before she so ceremoniously sat down in the chair?

"Just through there," I said as she slowly rose to her feet. The curtains of her skirt closed on her thigh as she stood and started away. What is it about the click of a woman's heels on a polished floor that is so arousing?

I went to the far window, where a telescope on a tripod was trained on the opera house. I shortened the focus, from the opera house to the harbor to the bustle at Circular Quay, and watched the people buying tickets, boarding ferries, relaxing. A man sat on a bench in the sunshine, a sandwich in one hand, a paperback in the other. He munched and he read. I was thinking, I want to be that contented solitary man, and I wondered what I was in for with this woman.

***

Now and then an interviewer, while asking something predictable and dull, lets drop a fact that stops me cold.

The journalist in San Diego whose husband got her a big blond surfer for the night as a present for her fortieth birthday. The tiny and rather plain spinster who profiled me in Denver and who said she had taken every drug I could name. "And I still drop acid now and then." The thirtyish woman reporter in Houston who told me how, early in her marriage, their coke parties frequently turned into orgies, and how she had often ended up with two men in her bed, one of them her husband. "But nowadays life is pretty quiet. I mean, we have kids and a mortgage." The broadcaster who was
leaving his wife and three children to live in Tucson with another man. The Chicagoan who divorced her lawyer husband after he decided to become a plumber. The radio journalist in Baltimore who had abandoned her husband and three children to follow a fat Indian herbalist-guru to Canada. The smirking girl in Kansas City who told me how her brother, nicknamed "Butter," had made love to a mother and daughter at the same time, and when I frowned, wondering how, she added, "Tag team."

"But this interview is supposed to be about you," they say, and they laugh and change the subject. I comply, because the sooner I answer their questions, the sooner it is over and I am free to sit on a bench in the sunshine and eat a sandwich and read a book.

"I'm sure you've been asked all these questions before," the interviewer says at some point, and I always protest: No, no—I find yours interesting! It hardly matters. I am on autopilot, answering the same questions I have been asked for the past twenty years. Why did I go to Africa? What is so special about trains? Do I use a word processor? Which is my favorite of my own books? Who are my favorite writers? If I could go anywhere in the world, which country would I choose? Have I ever, in traveling, been in fear of losing my life? Was the hero of this book or that based on anyone in particular? What do I think of the nasty piece about my book in last Sunday's book review?

One interviewer is eighteen and a bit giggly, just out of school and still living with her folks, and really wants to tell me about her baby sister. Another is elderly and nervous, quite unlike the young interviewer who just left the room wearing an Elvis button. Many are unremarkable-looking women who startle me by mentioning drugs or multiple divorces or the sudden throwaway, "Well, I happen to know that because I was sexually abused myself as a child."