Выбрать главу

Ron was asking Rudy to let him have the remote transmitter a moment.

"But there were art factors," I said. "Ever try to emote with meat, David?" I looked around. "Any of you? To dispense mustard like you mean it?"

Letterman looked uncomfortable. The audience made odd occasional sounds: they couldn't tell whether to laugh. Ron was beginning to transmit to me in a very calm tone.

"To still look famished on the fifteenth frank?" I said as Letterman smiled and sipped at his mug. I shrugged. "Art all over the place in those commercials, David."

I barely heard Ron's little voice warning me to be aware of the danger of appearing at all defensive. For Letterman appeared suddenly diffident, reluctant about something. He looked stage-left, then at his index card, then at me. "It's just Edilyn I guess a cynic, such as maybe Paul over there" — Shaffer laughed—"might be tempted to ask you… I mean," he said, "with all those assets we just listed together, with you being quote unquote, ah, loaded. . and now this is just something someone like Paul gets curious about, certainly not our business," he felt uncomfortably at his collar; "this question then with all due respect of how any amount of money, even vast amounts, could get a talented, if not great then certainly we'd both agree acclaimed, and above all loaded actress… to emote with meat."

Either Ron or Rudy whispered Oh my God.

"To be famished for that umpteenth frank she's putting all that. . mustard on," Letterman said, his head tilted, looking me in what I distinctly remember as the right eye. "And this is something we'll certainly understand if you don't want to go into, I mean. . am I right Paul?"

He did look uncomfortable. As if he'd been put up to this last-minute. I was looking at him as if he were completely mad. Now that he'd gotten his silly question out I felt as if he and I had been having almost separate conversations since my appearance's start. I genuinely yawned.

"Just be honest," Ron was saying.

"Go ahead and tell him about the back taxes," Rudy whispered.

"Look," I said, smiling, "I think one of us hasn't been making themselves clear, here. So may I just be honest?"

Letterman was looking stage-left as if appealing to someone. I was sure he felt he'd gone too far, and his discomfort had quieted the audience like a death.

I smiled until my silence got his attention. I leaned toward him conspiratorially. After an uncertain pause he leaned over his desk toward me. I looked slowly from side to side. In a stage whisper I said "I did the wiener commercials for nothing."

I worked my eyebrows up and down.

Letterman's jaw dropped.

"For nothing," I said, "but art, fun, a few cases of hot dogs, and the feeling of a craft well plied."

"Oh, now, come now, really," Letterman said, leaning back and grabbing his head. He pretended to appeal to the studio audience: "Ladies and gentlemen…"

"A feeling I'm sure we all know well here." I smiled with my eyes closed. "In fact, I called them. I volunteered. Almost begged. You should have seen it. You should have been there. Not a pretty sight."

"What a kid," Paul Shaffer tossed in, pretending to wipe at an eye under his glasses. Letterman threw his index card at him, and the Sound man in his red sweater hit another pane of glass with his hammer. I heard Ron telling Rudy this was inspired. Letterman seemed now suddenly to be having the time of his life. He smiled; he said ha ha; his eyes came utterly alive; he looked like a very large toy. Everyone seemed to be having a ball. I touched my ear and heard my husband thanking Ron.

We talked and laughed for one or two minutes more about art and self-acceptance being inestimably more important than assets. The interview ended in a sort of explosion of good will. David Letterman made confetti out of a few of his body's labels. I was frankly sorry it was over. Letterman smiled warmly at me as we went to commercial.

It was then that I felt sure in my heart all the angst and conference, Rudy's own fear, had been without point. Because, when we cut to that commercial message, David Letterman was still the same way. The director, in his cardigan, sawed at his throat with a finger, a cleverly photographed bumper filled all 6-A's monitors, the band got funky under Shaffer's direction, and the cameras' lights went dark. Letterman's shoulders sagged; he leaned tiredly across his obviously cheap desk and mopped at his forehead with a ratty-looking tissue from his yachting jacket's pocket. He smiled from the depths of himself and said it was really grotesquely nice having me on, that the audience was cetainly getting the very most for its entertainment dollar tonight, that he hoped for her sake my daughter Lynnette had even one half the stage presence I had, and that if he'd known what a thoroughly engaging guest I'd be, he himself would have moved molehills to have me on long before this.

"He really said that," I told my husband later in the NBC car. "He said 'grotesquely nice,' 'entertainment dollar,' and that I was an engaging guest. And no one was listening."

Ron had gotten a driver and gone ahead to pick up Charmian and would meet us at the River Cafe, where the four of us try to go whenever Rudy and I are able to get into town. I looked at our own driver, up ahead, through the panel; his hat was off, his hair close-clipped, his whole head as still as a photo.

My husband in the back seat with me held my hand in his hands. His necktie and handkerchief were square and flush. I could almost smell his relief. He was terribly relieved when I saw him after the taping. Letterman had explained to the audience that I needed to be on my way, and I'd been escorted off as he introduced the self-proclaimed king of kitchen-gadget home sales, who wore an Elks pin.

"Of course he really said that," my husband said. "It's just the sort of thing he'd say."

"Exactly," I maintained, looking at what his hands held.

We were driven south.

"But that doesn't mean he's really that way," he said, looking at me very directly. Then he too looked at our hands. Our three rings were next to each other. I felt a love for him, and moved closer on the soft leather seat, my face hot and sore. My empty ear did feel a bit violated.

"Any more than you're really the way you were when we were handling him better than I've ever seen him handled," he said. He looked at me admiringly. "You're a talented and multifaceted actress," he said. "You took direction. You kept your head and did us both credit and survived an appearance on an anti-show." He smiled. "You did good work."

I moved away from my husband just enough to look at his very clean face. "I wasn't acting, with David Letterman," I told him. And I was sincere. "It was more you and Ron that I had to… handle." Rudy's smile remained. "I would've taken Ron's earplug out altogether, agreement or not, if Charmian hadn't had me wear my hair down. It would have hurt the man's feelings. And I knew the minute I sat across that silly desk from him I wasn't going to need any direction. He wasn't savage." I said. "He was fun, Rudy. I had fun."

He lit a long Gauloise, smiling. "Did it just for fun?" he asked wryly. He pretended almost to nudge my ribs. A high-rent district that I had remembered as a low-rent district went by on both sides of us.

And I'll say that I felt something dark in my heart when my husband almost nudged me there. I felt that it was a sorry business indeed when my own spouse couldn't tell I was being serious. And I told him so.

"I was just the way I am," I maintained.

And I saw in Rudy's face what my face must have betrayed when I hadn't a clue about what he and Ron or even David had been talking about. And I felt the same queer near-panic I imagine now he must have felt all week. We both listened as something sweetly baroque filtered through the limousine intercom's grille.

"It's like my birthday," I said, holding my second husband's hand in mine. "We agreed, on my birthday. I'm forty, and have both grown and tiny children, and a husband who is dear to me, and I'm a television actress who's agreed to represent a brand of wiener. We drank wine to that, Rudy. We held the facts out and looked, together. We agreed just last week about the way I am. What other way is there for me to be, now?"

My husband disengaged his hand and felt at the panel's grille. The Spanish driver's hatless head was cocked. A part of his neck was without pigment, I saw. The lighter area was circular; it spiraled into his dark hair and was lost to me.

"He leaned across right up to me, Rudy. I could see every little part of his face. He was freckled. I could see little pinheads of sweat, from the lights. A tiny mole, near that label. His eyes were the same denim color Jamie and Lynnette's eyes get in the summer. I looked at him. I saw him."

"But we told you, Edilyn," my husband said, reaching into his jacket pocket. "What put him there, here and now, for you to see, is that he can't be seen. That's what the whole thing's about, now. That no one is really the way they have to be seen."

I looked at him. "You really think that's true."

His cigarette crackled. "Doesn't matter what I think. That's what the show is about. They make it true. By watching him."

"You believe that," I said.

"I believe what I see," he said, putting his cigarette down to manipulate the bottle's cap. The thing's typed label read TAKE SEVERAL, OFTEN. "If it wasn't true, could he use it the way he does. .?"

"That strikes me as really naive."

". . The way we used to?" he said.

Certain pills are literally bitter. When I'd finished my drink from the back seat's bar, I still tasted the Xanax on the back of my tongue. The adrenaline's ebb had left me very tired. We broke out of the tall buildings near the water. I watched the Manhattan Bridge pass. The late sun came into view. It hung to our right, red. We both looked at the water as we were driven past. The sheet of its surface was wound-colored under the March sunset.

I swallowed. "So you believe no one's really the way we see them?"

I got no response. Rudy's eyes were on the window.

"Ron doesn't really have a mouth, I noticed today. It's more like a gash in his head." I paused. "You needn't defer to him in our personal lives just because of your decisions in business, Rudy." I smiled. "We're loaded, sweetie."

My husband laughed without smiling. He looked at the last of the sun-colored water as we approached the Brooklyn Bridge's system of angled shadow.

"Because if no one is really the way we see them," I said, "that would include me. And you."

Rudy admired the sunset out loud. He said it looked explosive, hanging, all round, just slightly over the water. Reflected and doubled in that bit of river. But he'd been looking only at the water. I'd watched him.

"Oh, my," is what David Letterman said when Reese the coordinator's distinguished but raccoon-ringed face had resolved out of a perfect ring of exploded explosives. Months later, after I'd come through something by being in its center, survived in the stillness created by great disturbance from which I, as cause, perfectly circled, was exempt, I'd be struck all over again by what a real and simply right thing it was for a person in such a place to say.

And I have remembered and worked hard to show that, if nothing else at all, I am a woman who speaks her mind. It is the way I have to see myself, to live.

And so I did ask my husband, as we were driven in our complimentary limousine to join Ron and Charmian and maybe Lindsay for drinks and dinner across the river at NBC's expense, just what way he thought he and I really were, then, did he think.

Which turned out to be the mistake.