Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (43 page)

L
aura couldn’t help it: The car seemed to drive there by itself. She didn’t tell anyone where she was going, and didn’t even know it herself until she found the nose of her car at the front gate of Gardner Brothers.

The studio was larger now than it had been, having taken over the neighboring Triumph after Ginger’s exit. She’d gone to the hairdresser and put on a smart-looking dark suit, the kind of thing she might have worn to a funeral, which was what it felt like. The guard at the gate recognized her and pointed toward the employee lot.

As her heels clicked down the alley in between Louis Gardner’s office and the building that had once housed her dressing room, Laura felt short of breath—it was too much, being back and alone. She should have convinced Ginger to come along, or Junior, though she didn’t want to put him in a stressful situation. It felt like walking back onto the set after decades away, as if she were playing the part of Laura Lamont in a film that had taken her entire life to write. She was a character! That made it easy to walk quickly, to ignore the stares from the older crew members and the ignorance of the young ones. Stage twenty-seven was one of the largest, and deep inside the belly of the studio.

The soundstage was overflowing. It reminded Laura of a swap meet, an endless yard sale, only the yard was full of costumes, of furniture, of things that had spent a moment on the silver screen. Some
lots were labeled (
Sled used in Susie and Johnny’s
Holiday on the Slopes!!) and some were not, just slumped over the back of a chair like a load of dirty laundry. Laura slowly made her way through the vast room. Where was Louis Gardner? She hadn’t heard anything in years, and suddenly wondered whether she’d missed his death. No, that wasn’t possible. He was probably old and weak, no longer able to run his own body, let alone an entire studio. Laura knew how that felt.

Other people milled around in between the large lots—the furniture, the flattened backdrops and hollow pillars—and the small ones, encased in glass and put on small velvet cushions like the royal jewels. Laura kept her eyes down. There was Dolores Dee’s red dress, cut so low her bosom had nearly spilled out in every scene of
The Devil’s Mistress
. There was Robert Hunter’s tuxedo and top hat. There were filing cabinets in the corner, and Laura climbed over a small hill of children’s costumes to reach them. She pulled open the first one—scripts, some of them marked up in Irving’s hand. She rifled through, incredulous. What were they auctioning off? Didn’t they understand? It was in the second filing cabinet that Laura found the script for
Farewell, My Sister
. Irving’s notes were to her; they were to her!
LL: more of a pause here, remember to face left, otherwise we lose the line.
Laura sat down on the closest chair, a lion tamer’s stand from a circus film, and read. All around her, people dug through clothes and papers and looked at the listed prices and laughed, but Laura didn’t move until she was finished reading the entire script. She’d forgotten the details: It was the nun’s dead sister whom the man really loved, not the nun herself. At the time, Laura had thought it was a love story between the nun and her suitor, but now she realized that the strongest love on the page was between the nun and the sister she’d lost. That love was so steadfast, so immutable, that the nun truly thought
she would be able to give up God for her sister’s happiness. It was a trade, a bargain out of O. Henry.

Laura could remember the need to leave Door County, and the desire to see herself on the screen. Rather, she remembered
Elsa’s
need for those things. Elsa Emerson: She’d been so quick to throw it all away, to swim inside a new body and a new name. It was true that she had always loved to act, loved to pretend, but it was Hildy whose face should have been on the screen, her cheekbones projected, her beauty marks copied. It had always been for Laura’s sister, this slipshod career. Elsa had done everything for Hildy, until Elsa got so lost inside the machinery that she could no longer speak. Laura sat still, afraid that if she moved, her entire body would break apart and scatter on the ground, just another thousand souvenirs. She stayed until the light outside began to change, until the bidding closed, having neither placed a bid nor returned the script to the cabinet, but instead tucking it inside her bag, knowing that no one would ever miss it.

A
fter so many years on hiatus, Jimmy was glad to be put back to work for Laura. A producer in New York was mounting a Broadway production of
The Royal Family,
and was delighted to hear that Laura Lamont was interested in the theater. The pay was standard union, the conditions standard Broadway: eight shows a week, with Mondays dark. It was to be a limited run, only twelve weeks.

“Which part?” Laura asked. There was only one right answer.

Laura heard Jimmy rustling through his notes on the other end of the phone. “Fanny Cavendish,” he said. “Isn’t that what you said you wanted?”

She didn’t hesitate for more than a split second, long enough for her chest to expand, and to speak the word
yes
.

The producers set Laura up in an apartment near the theater, walking distance from Central Park. She arrived at the airport at seven in the morning, and a waiting car took her straight to the building, which was taller than most buildings in downtown Los Angeles, unapologetically big and white, with air conditioners dotting every other window. The apartment itself was a one-bedroom on the twenty-second floor, clean and anonymous, and the smallest place Laura had lived since she was pregnant with Clara. The pullout sofa was for Florence, or Junior, or for anyone who wanted it, but the bedroom was just for Laura. Now that he was on medication, Laura didn’t feel anxious about leaving her son alone. His sisters checked up on him every day, his own personal fleet of nurses. He was in no better care when she was at home. Laura unpacked her small suitcase—she’d had Jimmy send some boxes ahead, with heavier things like sweaters and coats, so that she wouldn’t have to struggle with all those cases in the airport.

As Laura stood at the window and looked out at the busy city, she realized a number of things in quick succession. It was the first time Laura had been to New York City in nearly forty years, after a brief press tour for
Farewell, My Sister
. It was also the first time she’d ever lived alone. Not only did she not have a husband, she didn’t even have one of her children to keep her company. Laura thought about calling Ginger or Harriet, but it was only five o’clock in the morning at home in California, and neither of them woke up that early. And so Laura simply stood at the window, with her forehead pressed against the glass, and stared down at the street. The yellow taxicabs flooded the roads, zipping and jerking their way across the avenue. People walked their dogs and their children and one another. Laura was afraid that she would get lost if she tried to walk anywhere by
herself. Central Park was in the distance, a few blocks north and a few blocks east, but she wasn’t sure she could find it by herself from the street. Laura took out a map that Florence had given her at the airport and unfolded it on the small kitchen table. Manhattan was a grid, not like Los Angeles, which curled and waved like a dancer, its long streets full of their own ideas of where they should lead. It was nine blocks total to the park—at home she would have driven. Laura washed her face in the small sink and looked at herself in the mirror. Her skin looked so pale against her dark hair, the rich chocolate color of which seemed more and more of a fallacy every day. The director of the show wanted it to be gray; Jimmy had told her that later, after she’d already agreed.
Gray hair
. At first, Laura didn’t even understand what he meant—a wig? Some baby powder, like schoolchildren used? But no, of course not. The director wanted Laura to look her age, all sixty years of it. She would have to have the color stripped out, and see what was left behind. Jimmy, nervous about this part of the contract, had stuttered out, “W-well, you can always d-dye it back,” but Laura knew an opportunity when she saw one. The hairs growing along her part had been gray for many years, a decade, even.

It was late September, and outside, the world couldn’t decide whether to be summer or fall. Laura had been warm in the taxi on the way in from the airport, but the people-dots below her were wearing coats and scarves. Florence had helped her pack, and there was a sweater in there somewhere. Laura slipped her arms into the sleeves, wrote down her new address on a slip of paper, and tucked it into her sweater pocket in case she got lost and needed to ask for directions.

It was true what people said about New York City. Even Ginger claimed that she could walk down Broadway without being mobbed, that the ordinary people left the famous people alone. Laura wore her big sunglasses and wrapped a scarf around her head, and no one batted an eye at her for all nine blocks. At first, Laura nervously watched
the sidewalk whenever she passed anyone old enough to recognize her, but the closer she got to the park, the bolder she felt. By the time she reached the park, with a line of horse-drawn carriages across its southern edge, Laura felt so light, so
independent
, that she practically danced through Columbus Circle, despite the fast-walking students and cluster of panhandlers. It was the longest walk she’d taken by herself since she was Elsa Emerson, and no one cared one way or the other what she was up to. When she hit the east side of the park, she kept walking, until she finally looked at her watch and realized she’d been out for nearly four hours. It was only when she stopped walking that Laura noticed her shoes had begun to pinch, and so she hopped into a taxicab, suddenly flushed and exhausted, and went home.

A
reporter from the newspaper met Laura at the theater for an interview. It was
human interest
; that was how Jimmy described it. No one had cared about Laura for so long that somehow she was a story again. The reporter was a young man with blue jeans and a necktie. They sat in the last row, with cups of tea from backstage fetched by one of the helpful young things who always seemed to be running across the stage like mice, duct tape attached to their belts, clipboards cradled in their armpits.

“I understand that your parents ran a theater in northern Wisconsin. Is this your first time onstage since you were a child?” The reporter was a child himself, no more than twenty-five years old. He was wearing glasses with thick black frames, similar to the ones Irving had worn decades ago. Laura wondered whether he’d ever interviewed anyone before, but then decided that that was awfully rude of her, and that she should take him more seriously.

“It is my first time onstage since I was a teenager, yes,” Laura said.
She loved being in the theater during the daytime, when she could see the worn spots on the velvet chairs, the dust gathered along the baseboards. Even the most beautiful theater in New York City was always crumbling a bit—that was what made it so lovely. Laura wouldn’t have wanted to be in a new theater, like some of the shows down the way, with gleaming aisles. There was something powerful in the layers of performance preceding her. “It was this play, actually.” She laughed. “I was acting a different role, of course.”

This got the young man excited. “Really? And what seems different about this staging?”

Laura laughed again, more loudly. Onstage, two young actors were rehearsing, and one of them shot a look her way, softening when she saw where the sound was coming from. Laura had forgotten that about people in the theater—no one in the movies was ever deferential, not unless you were the one signing their checks.

“Well, I don’t plan to marry my costar. My father isn’t directing. There are quite a number of differences, I’d say.”

“Oh, really?” The boy checked his notes, and scribbled some more. “So, then, um, what do you think your second husband, Irving Green, would have to say about this, your return to the stage?” The boy didn’t know enough to feel shy about asking.

Laura paused. It was funny to think about Gordon and Irving being on equal footing, two marriages, as if anything were that simple.