The Missing Person (15 page)

Like all couples who have stayed together despite violent temperamental differences, the Cairnses liked to hear about the marital intentions of their friends. Their intermittent clucks and
mys
were signs of their understanding, their superiority to the usual cautions of more conventional auditors, and their pleasure at being the recipients of such a startling piece of news.

Arnold had almost finished his short saga of Franny and himself when the lights in the Persian Room were dimmed. A spotlight moved slowly across the heads of the patrons to the piano, where it hovered for a moment, and then stopped. Diners reached for their coffee cups and dessert plates and pulled them closer, seeming to fear that in the darkness which accompanied the entertainment they might be separated from their sustenance.

In the bright circular light there appeared a woman of uncertain age, her harsh dyed hair glittering, the rough texture of her face unavailable to disguise. She appeared to have been pressed into youthful lines without being young. When she had taken her place in the exact center of the light her name was called, like an incantation, from all the corners of the room. The applause was loud and rhythmic: “Helena! Helena!”

Annoyed by the interruption, Arnold stopped talking to listen to the singer. Helena went through her repertory of blues songs, all alike in their wailing lyrics. Her voice had long since disappeared under the weight of her affected delivery, her arms followed a pattern well known to her audience. Like a snake charmer evoking a cobra, she raised their enthusiasm to a pitch far beyond their first delight at her appearance. They seemed to sway toward her as she embraced herself with her familiar floury arms.

Arnold's attention wandered during Helena's performance. Unlike the other listeners, he felt no nostalgia for the aging Helena. His youth had been spent in less elegant places, his ears were tutored by more natural sounds:
Josh White and Leadbelly are more my style
. He played with his empty water glass, making overlapping circles with its wet bottom on the table cloth. Like Arnold, the Cairnses, too, had already used up their quotient of interest and had begun to think of other things. They never noticed the singer throw her arms above her head in a vast, self-congratulatory gesture. It was her signal to her admirers of the end of her act.

The chanteuse gone, the lights back on, Arnold and the Cairnses were freed from forced attention, able now to talk to each other. The cheers and applause gradually died down.

“Depressing, wasn't it?” said Mollie. “She's getting on.”

“That's the nice thing about show business, though,” said Patrick. “People look at a used-up performer and see her as she once was and love her and behave as though she hadn't changed in the least.”

Arnold said: “I suppose.”

Patrick could tell he was worrying about Franny upstairs. He said, “Go on up. We'll take care of the damage.”

“Not at all. Let me.” Arnold took the check, signed it, and wrote Franny Fuller's suite number on it.

“Thank you. Very nice of you,” said Mollie. “Why don't you and Miss Fuller come down to the Atelier tomorrow?” It was her effort to equalize Arnold's assumption of the check.

“I'll ask her. You never can tell with her. She might like that. I'll suggest it to her. And thank you for your patient listening. I'm afraid I did run on.”

“Not at all,” said Mollie. “I enjoyed it.”

“Thanks for the feed,” said Patrick.”

Arnold told her to wear something plain. In the taxi he looked closely at her for the first time and saw she was wearing a sheer black, sleeveless dress cut to her cleavage and clinging close to her hips and upper thighs. Over her arm was a thin, gauzy scarf.

“Did you think the color would make you less visible?” he asked, amused at her innocence but vaguely irked at the target for all eyes she would present.

“It's all I have, Arnie, that's plain like you said.”

“Well, yes, plain, I suppose. But there just isn't much of it.”

She made a gesture of helplessness and threw the black shawl around her shoulders, obscuring her bosom. At the door of the Atelier, Arnie could tell by the slowness with which she climbed out of the cab that she was searching desperately for reasons not to go in. He decided to give her no chance for escape. Taking her arm, he moved her gently in front of him and opened the door to the old townhouse.

The Cairnses were waiting for them. They came at once from a back room, full of polite, welcoming gestures and vapid talk. Arnold introduced Franny to them. “This is Franny,” he said proudly, forgetting to give her their names. Mollie said, “I'm Mollie Cairns,” and then smiled at the futility of having to be told who
she
was. Patrick mumbled his name, staring at Franny, trying not to look at the expanse of breasts that was visible under the scarf.

As they walked toward the rehearsal hall Mollie caught glimpses of the famous profile. Opposed to the movies as an art form, she had never seen her in a film but she knew her face well from newspapers and the framed still shots in front of movie theaters. Mollie felt disturbed by Franny's beauty. She belonged to the school of the theater trained to distrust flagrant good looks, believing that a handsome actor was likely to be a poor actor. She could not accept Franny Fuller for anything more than she appeared to be, a magnificently endowed young woman whose fortune was her face and her breasts, her hips and fiddle-shaped backside, all blown up to eight times human size and moved by a machine across a giant screen, a lavish vision—but hardly an actress. Looking at Franny made her remember the skinny, odd-looking little actresses in Dublin, physically hampered by too little chin or too much nose, who had overcome those defects or hidden them completely in superb performances.

None of that
, she thought. She led Arnold and Franny Fuller into the hall where a group of students was seated around a large, bare table. Patrick brought a chair for her. Arnold found his own. The Cairnses sat with them, a little behind the students. Patrick introduced them all around. After the first curious, surreptitious glances at Franny, the students turned their attention away from her and Arnold and back to the discussion of their scripts.

“They're working on their version of a play of Arnie's,
Survival of the Unfit,”
Patrick whispered to Franny. “During these first few days of rehearsal they talk the roles out until they begin to understand them, to get the feeling they're moving inside the characters. Then later they will begin to incorporate action, expecting they'll know better how to move and walk and sit after these preliminary talks. They try to work from the inside, from some kind of interior understanding of everything concerning the character, how he clenches his muscles when he's mad, the way her body tenses when she's afraid, his attitude, no, well, rather, his stance when he hears something he likes or doesn't like. That sort of thing.”

Franny nodded.
They work from the inside
, she thought.
What in hell does that mean?
What
inside?

Mollie had been listening to Patrick's
sotto voce
to Franny. When he stopped she said in a low voice: “But there's more to it than that. Once their understanding of the character is as complete as possible, then they need to
be
, not just portray, but to be, to feel at that moment on the stage as if they
were
, that person. In other words, you are not showing emotion as you think it might be, but you are, you see, feeling it, being yourself moved by it, before the eyes of a live audience.”

Franny said, almost timidly, “But then it's not acting really, is it?”

“The best acting, actually,” said Patrick. “Because it isn't acting except in the broadest sense.”

Franny stared at the students in front of her. Engrossed in their study, they paid no attention to their teachers or the visitors, did not even seem to be aware of themselves. One boyish-looking actor, pointing to the script before him on the table, burst out in a constricted voice: “But I hate this guy. Really despise him. What do I do with that? How do I handle that?”

The instructor, who looked the same age as the students, said, “Keep remembering how much you dislike him. It will help you in the part. Especially if you believe, as somebody else just said, that he hates himself. Right, Mr. Franklin?”

Arnold scraped his chair forward. “You're quite right,” he said, the pedantic tone of his youth creeping into his voice. His hands moved with swift gestures, his eyes flashed behind his glasses, lighting on student after student and stopping at the instructor. He sketched out in fluent sentences his concept of the character. Then he began to talk knowingly about the character's father. The students switched around in their chairs to look at him. The boyish-looking actor, still on his feet, stared down at the playwright. At one point he broke in upon him to ask a question. Arnold was all understanding, all patience. He stood up to make an abrupt, cutting motion with the side of his left hand against his thigh, to show what the self-hating character might do at a moment of tension in the play.

“I'd like to hear what
you
think now,” Arnold said, gesturing toward the students. He moved his chair so far forward that he was now in their circle. Tumbling over each other in their eagerness to speak to him, to test their insights on the creator of the character, they interrupted each other to offer one opinion after another, the women in stage-accented, controlled voices from which all trace of regional origin had been studiously erased, the men in smooth, low-register tones. In their efforts to establish the precedence of their views they grew heated, even angry, with those who disagreed with them, as if they had been discussing a person related to them by blood.

By the time Patrick Cairns entered the circle to make a suggestion, they all appeared to have forgotten that the father of the character did not appear, was not even referred to, in the play. Patrick was pleased at this obedience to his dictum that it was important to create a whole childhood for a character one was to play, complete with friends, homes, fears, grandparents, toys, games, etc., and then, “from this unnecessary welter,” he said to them now, “raise up the character.” They all listened with respect to what he said, couched as it was in his authoritative, carefully maintained, Anglo-Irish accent.

Mollie had been impelled by her interest in what everyone was saying into moving her chair into the area of discussion, leaving Franny alone on the periphery, beyond the waving arms, animated faces, sparkling eyes, and colliding opinions, beyond all the evidence, astonishing to her, of heated minds at work on a purely imaginary project. She did not move closer. She said nothing.

The boyish-looking actor insisted with great force that when
his
character walked he was sure he pounded his heels. “It is essential to my concept,” he said, pounding his fists rhythmically on the table to simulate the action of feet. “Does he crack his knuckles, do you think?” asked a girl with long, dark hair and an impish twist to her lips. “And if he does,” said a boy with hair cut in close, caplike fashion, “does he usually do it sitting down or standing up?” The class laughed at the little joke. The young actor sat down, looking somewhat miffed.

During the rest of the afternoon, until the Cairnses invited Franny and Arnold to tea in their office, the two of them attended three rehearsals, a dramatic reading, a class in movement and dance, and one in eurhythmics. They watched a young director block out a scene from
Richard III
. At four thirty, after tea, Patrick asked Franny if she would like to talk to a group of students interested in the techniques of screen acting.

“Oh no.
No.”

“Informally, of course. They're all admirers of motion pictures. Would you do it?”

Franny appeared frozen at the thought. She shook her head again. She refused to go back to watching a group work once the idea of talking to them had been suggested to her, countering Patrick's suggestion with one of her own.

“But I might like to come back some time and … go to some classes in acting or something as, well, a student, you know. Could I do that?”

Mollie answered before Patrick could.
“Delighted
, Miss Fuller. We can arrange it any time. You could attend for any space of time that would fit into your schedule. A few days, a week, a month, anytime at all. We'd be
so
pleased.”

Mollie wasn't being polite. Her enthusiasm for the project was genuine. As she spoke she was silently stage-managing Franny Fuller's attendance at the Atelier, choosing a photographer to take many informal shots of the famous movie star having lessons, listening to Pat's lectures on the Way Theory of Acting, participating in improvisations with the young students, perhaps even taking a part (small: after all, she
was
a novice in the theater!) in a play. Mollie could visualize a new edition of the Atelier catalogue. Among the action photographs of students at work, a clear one of Franny Fuller herself, being instructed.…

Patrick, whose visions, without consultation, often paralleled Mollie's, said: “What would you like to do most? What sort of class, Miss Fuller? We could easily arrange it so that it would be scheduled for you.”

Franny said she thought “the talking through of character.” She repeated the clause that seemed to have impressed her: “how you work from the inside.” Her whisper filled the little office. Arnold laughed, embarrassed at the idea of this voluptuous beauty, overflowing her insufficient, vulgar dress, the woman he loved in spite of himself and all the difficulties raised by her fame and her ignorance, working seriously to learn acting. He covered his lapse by a display of enthusiasm for the project:

“It would be fine for you, Franny. It is a different approach from … films,” (he hesitated over the words, trying to stay on this side of politeness) “you can see that.”