A month before, she had done a face-cream ad that was running in the women’s magazines. They had asked her because she was visible again, working. It was an over-thirty-five-type ad and doing it had proved to be a good idea because in it she looked smooth and sleek and sexy. She had given the photographer a face she associated with Rosalind in As You Like It, whom she had played at twenty-three in New Haven.
Lu Anne looked into the mirror at her Rosalind face, stared into her own eyes. There were people, she thought, who must be studying the magazine ad, looking into the eyes.
There would be nothing compromising there. Rosalind was nothing if not sane. Lee Verger loved her above all women.
Rosalind in the looking glass smiled, a tiny curve of the lip on one side. I am Rosalind who can strike you lame with reasons and be mad without any.
Lee Verger smiled back into her mirror. A circus taste bubbled up in her mouth. She thought of a voice but never heard it, only imagined what the voice might say. She closed her eyes and made a fist and rested her forehead on it.
When Lionel came out of the bathroom she straightened up. He had dressed after his shower in white duck trousers and a Filipino wedding shirt; he glowed. He stood beside her again, just where he had stood before, combing his sparse red-blond hair, humming “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”
“How are you?” he asked after a minute.
“I’m all right,” she said, smiling for him. “Mostly tired, I guess. Those period clothes, poof …” She shook her head. “It makes you feel for those women back then. The stays. The pins.”
“Have you stopped taking your medication?”
“Oh, honey,” she said, “please don’t.”
“I’m very sorry,” Lionel said. “Truly I’m sorry to press you. But I must know.”
“Did you count them?”
He hesitated. “I had a quick look.”
Aware of his displeasure and his eyes on her, she bent her head in shame. Presently, he reached out a hand and began to massage the back of her neck. She could not relax. His touch, the strong fingers kneading the base of her skull, seemed perfunctory and unloving, a fidget.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said.
“No. Look,” he said softly, “you were acting guilty.” He pursed his lips, embarrassed. “If you feel guilty it can mean something’s wrong.”
“You don’t know what it’s like to try and work behind the fucking things. Your eyes hurt, you can’t use them. Your head weighs a ton.”
Lionel took his hand away. “Really, I wish we’d had this out earlier.”
“Lionel,” Lu Anne said, “I want to try something. I’m finding the drug very hard to work behind and I want to try cutting it for a while.”
She looked up at him but his gaze was fixed on some place behind her. He was avoiding her pleas, her sickness. He wanted it simple, done with pills. She supposed she could hardly blame him.
“When did you stop?”
“A week ago,” she said. “More than a week.”
“And you feel all right?”
“Yes.”
“You haven’t been hallucinating?”
“Oh, Lionel,” she said. She affected a dismissive shudder and a condescending smile.
“Don’t bullshit me,” he said fiercely.
“I’m not. I’ve been fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” she said.
“If you stop taking your medication,” Lionel told her, “I can’t go.”
Lu Anne took a deep breath, looked in the mirror and covered her eyes.
“Are you hallucinating now?”
“No,” she said.
“Look at me!”
She was staring at the tiled floor. Suddenly she raised her head and looked him in the eye.
“What do you expect to see?” she asked him coldly. “Do you expect to see it?”
Lionel removed his glasses and wiped them on a Sightsaver. He rubbed his eyes.
“As though,” she said, “it soiled my eyes. And I should avert them from the doctor’s godlike gaze.”
“I’m very sorry,” Lionel said. “Sometimes I get so frightened I can’t function.”
She watched him turn away confounded and her heart filled with pity for him and with love.
“It’s my enemy,” he said, and she thought she heard a throttled sob in his voice. He was looking at her. He was dry-eyed. “It frightens me. I hate it.”
She walked up to him and took his right hand and kissed the knuckle of his forefinger, which was callused where he chewed it in his terrors and rages. They were endured, she thought, for her.
“You are my hero beyond fear,” she told him. “My knight.”
“I’ve finally come to think of it as evil,” Lionel said. “That’s a term I’ve always resisted.”
“As unscientific,” Lu Anne suggested with faint malice.
“As meaningless. As a word belonging to false consciousness.”
“It doesn’t have a moral. This … condition. Not of the kind you’re comfortable with.”
“Evil,” Lionel agreed, “is not the sort of term I’m comfortable with.” He raised his spectacles toward the overhead light and inspected their surfaces. “How extraordinary that the thing should be metabolic. Like gout.”
“An undigested bit of beef,” Lu Anne said, “like Jacob Marley’s ghost. An underdone potato.”
Lionel slapped the back of his neck so savagely that Lu Anne started.
“Here I am, see, a specialist in medical practice. In my specialty there are two, maybe three basic pathological conditions. For Christ’s sake,” he cried, “maybe just one. I can’t heal it. I can barely treat it. I don’t even have a fucking insight into it.” He released his neck and stared wildly into the mirror. “I should go about with a bowl of leeches. I should have become a bloody palmist.”
She went to him and touched his cheek. “To each his doctor,” she declared. “This is mine.” She felt him fighting off tears; somehow he always succeeded. She herself had begun to cry.
Wise as he was, he could not cure her. A part of her rejoiced in that as freedom; the part, she had no doubt, that was mad, bad and dangerous to know. It rejoiced in refuge from his mastery, his shrewdness and compassion. There was a wood through which he could not pursue her with healing arrows and a dark tower of retreat.
“So,” he said after a moment, “I’m supposed to leave in the middle of a picture while you go off your medication. What happens then?”
“I’ll hassle it.”
“Will you indeed?”
“Lionel,” she told him, “it’s like trying to work behind any drug — grass, Valium, cocaine. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re like.” His heavy-browed stare did not seem unsympathetic. “I mean,” she went on, “I can’t use my eyes. I feel like a droid. It might be neat for having tea with Alan Cranston, but as for work — well, why hire me? They could have anyone. Plenty of people can give a lousy performance without the use of drugs.”
“I see your point,” he said impatiently.
“What about tardive dyskinesia? Have we talked about that?”
“Lu,” Lionel said, “don’t worry about tardive fucking dyskinesia.
Worry about flipping out. Worry about a second Vancouver.” He stood up and paced the bungalow. “I mean, actual straitjackets, right? Actual padded cells. Want to try it Mexican style?”
“I want to stop,” she said wearily. “I want to go to work like a normal human actress. I would like to try a little cautious experiment along the lines of … trying to do without it … for a little while.”
“I can’t let you do it while I’m away,” Lionel said. “The risks are too high. We’re away from home. You could have a very bad experience.”