The following day, in the afternoon, Jane was sitting at an outdoor coffee shop on Main Street in Santa Monica. We’d agreed to meet, and she was waiting for me, thinking about me and what I meant to her, wondering what we were doing together and whether a relationship with me would actually work out. And what that meant, work out. She’d lived with a man once, a painter, and that hadn’t worked out, and she was thinking about the painter and the life she’d planned with him when I arrived.
I walked to her table and was about to join her when she stood up. “Ready?” she said.
“Sure.”
And that’s when she noticed my hair.
That morning, in preparation for our “meeting,” in an attempt to look a little more like Steve Martin, I’d changed the color of my hair. I’d stood in front of my bathroom sink, opened a packet of hair dye, poured the powder into a bowl, added water, stirred it up into a paste, and now here I was.
“Wow,” she said, “you’ve turned gray.”
“It’s white, actually.”
“It’s silvery,” she said, and I could see she wanted to touch it.
“It’s permanent.”
“No, of course, it’s just. . I like it.”
And I think she did like it.
We started walking, past clothing stores and home furnishing stores, our arms occasionally touching, and although I had the white hair, which signified Steve Martin, I didn’t feel I was embodying Steve. And how could I? Who was Steve to me, or me to Steve? There were hundreds of actors I could’ve been, people who had charm and savoir faire. Johnny Depp, for instance, why not be him? That was the question. And the answer was, I wasn’t him. And although I wasn’t Steve Martin either, that was the possibility that had presented itself.
“You look wiser,” she said.
“Must be the hair.”
“You’re prematurely gray.”
“I guess so,” I said.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the father of invention is possibility, and walking with Jane along the sidewalk, watching her eyes glance over at my head, although I didn’t say anything about the actual Steve Martin, I was practicing my version of the Steve Martin walk. It was a cross between dancing and staggering, and the trick was combining the two. In the interplay between control (the dance) and loss of control (the stagger) there was a kind of grace, or I should say there could be a kind of grace.
“Where do you want to go?” she said.
“Go?”
“Do you want to go to the water?”
“Sure,” I said, and although I was talking to her, I was distracted, not only by the Steve Martin walk, but by the whole Steve Martin body. I was trying to imagine a tail at the end of my spine, and walking with this imaginary tail dangling between my legs.
“Is your ankle bothering you?” she said.
“No, no,” I said. “I’m fine,” and we crossed the street and the cars all stopped for us.
Not only did I have the Steve Martin walk going on, and the tail, but Scott had told me to imagine that my eyes were like ray guns, that a beam of light was shooting out of them, and I didn’t know what I looked like, but Jane was looking at me — sympathetically — as if I was having some kind of problem. And the problem I was having was that, although I was enacting the physicality of Steve, the person who was doing the enacting was me. I couldn’t quite get into the full Steve groove because there was another groove. I was real, and the groove of who I was was real, and yes, I could picture Steve, with his joie de vivre, walking down the street with a beautiful woman, but because of my idea of reality, I couldn’t step into that picture.
When reality and the fantasy of reality are not in complete correspondence there’s usually awkwardness, and I was being awkward and she was no doubt noticing, which is why, probably, we weren’t talking. We walked past slightly run-down houses and apartment buildings, and when we hit the beach we turned south, walking along the cement boardwalk, past the denizens of Venice, the homeless or almost homeless, and then we walked out onto the sand. We wanted a dose of nature, or at least an approximation of nature, and we walked across the soft sand to an empty lifeguard tower and sat, our backs against the tower posts, facing the waves. I watched her hands moving through the sand, holding the sand and then letting it drain out through her fingers.
A concrete jetty stuck out into the ocean to our left, the hills above Malibu were there to our right, and in front of us was the water. And the waves. I don’t know about Jane but I was watching the sky, and the clouds in the sky, and the water, hoping the water, such as it was, would inspire me to jettison the person I still was, the person that was merely imitating Steve. I was sitting there, thinking of a witty question that would engage the two of us in conversation, when I heard a voice.
“Check it out, check it out.”
It was coming from the concrete jetty. A small figure of a man in a hat was standing on the jetty, looking in our direction, motioning people to join him.
“What do you think?” I said.
“Let’s check it out.”
As we walked across the sand I knew I was only being Steve halfway, but I figured half Steve was better than no Steve, and Jane, I think, could tell I was trying. She was not insensitive, and she must have appreciated even my half-successful attempt because she took my hand and we walked onto the jetty. When we got to the end of the jetty, there he was, a normal-sized man in a sleeveless wetsuit, holding in his arms a cinderblock. He had a pair of handcuffs around each wrist; they were attached to a steel cable running through the cinderblock. He had a smudged tattoo on his upper arm, and he was saying “Check it out” to the assorted people at the end of the jetty. He looked at Jane and he said, “I’m the new Houdini.”
Although he was talking to Jane, I stepped forward.
“I’m going to escape from the lake,” he said.
“The lake?”
“The water, whatever.”
I thought there was some kind of trick involved, and since no one else spoke up, I suggested he tell us what it was.
“There’s no trick,” he said. “I control my body. My body is my vehicle.”
I noticed that his hat was now lying upturned near the railing, and I anticipated the payment he’d expect for performing his trick. I started to turn away, but Jane held on to my hand. She wanted to watch. And it occurred to me that this fellow, who had jet-black hair and looked nothing like Steve Martin, was acting more like Steve than I was.
“Feel how heavy this is?” he said, and he held out the cinderblock.
“Why not just tell us the trick?”
“It’s not a trick,” he said. “I’ve spent years of my life training for this.”
I looked at Jane, who was looking at him, and when he said, “If I could do it with a simple trick. .” I stepped forward. I placed my hands underneath the cinderblock and yes, it was heavy, and I said it was heavy. And when I did he climbed up onto the railing. He stood there, holding the cinderblock with one hand, the lamppost with the other, his white toes curled over the edge of the railing, looking out to the water. About six people, tourists with windbreakers and kids with skateboards, had formed a circle around him, waiting for him to jump. He was standing there, hyperventilating, getting psychologically prepared, and the water was choppy that day, so I was surprised that when he did finally jump, in the place where he jumped, the water was smooth, like glass. We looked over the edge to see if we could see him, but all we could see was the water, like a mirror.