But it’s funny how the body, having learned a way of being, doesn’t like to give it up. I was sure that being Steve would make it easier to be with Jane, but often, in the actual act of talking to her, I noticed Steve sliding away. I would make an effort to go back, from my old self back to Steve, and I would go back and forth, and sometimes I got lost in my old self; some memory or fantasy would lead to a series of memories or fantasies and then, like waking up, I’d think, Oh, here I am, and I’d go back to practicing Steve. Not only did I prefer Steve, I was seeing my old self as a hindrance. Which is why I invited her home.
Home, of course, meant the Metropole, and because visitors weren’t allowed, we decided to drive our separate cars to her house. She would probably have liked the crowd that hung out in the Metropole lobby. They were all men, all of them quite polite. Earl, who was behind the desk most of the time, was an intelligent guy who was usually reading, and a few nights earlier I told him about the Houdini I’d seen. Earl knew a little bit about Houdini, and he said he considered him, not an escape artist — escaping was the easy part — but a performance artist. According to Earl, his artistry was his ability to make people feel empathy, to feel the possibility of escape. And as I drove down Sunset, stopping at the stoplights, I was thinking about Jane and also thinking about Harry Houdini, inside a coffinlike box, under some body of water, bound with chains and handcuffs, and what if he couldn’t break free? I pictured him holding his breath in the darkness, a minute going by and then a second minute, and his chains not coming off. He knew he could only hold his breath for so long, so instead of getting nervous, he did what he’d practiced doing. He’d practiced slowing down his heart and that’s what he did, and once he slowed it down, once he could feel his heart’s steady beating, he stopped struggling. It’s the oldest trick in the book. He stopped trying to escape, and once he gave up trying, his hands easily slid through the handcuffs.
By the time I got to Jane’s house, she was already there, straightening up her bedroom. We moved into her kitchen, cooked tomatoes and garlic, which we ate together, and afterward we sat together on her beanbag chair. At a certain point I looked at her and she was talking to me, and as I watched her talk it happened again, the sound got turned off. Not metaphorically, but actually, in my brain, some chemical or electrical signal had paralyzed that one particular sense door. As she talked I could see her lips moving, and I had an impulse to kiss her lips. Her and her lips. And usually I didn’t act on impulses like that but this time I did. And kissing usually leads to something, and I remember she said, “Kiss my tummy.” And when I bent down and lifted up the material of her shirt, there was her belly button, and around that, her skin, and my lips were following the contours of her skin.
I was in a kissing mood, and she was too, I guess. It was Tuesday, and as the day turned into evening, and as I kept making my eyes into beams of light, and imagining a tail between my legs, being Steve seemed to be getting easier. What I needed to do I seemed to be doing, and sometimes I forgot what it was I was doing, assuming that Steve was me, or I was Steve, and as the kissing continued I found myself feeling desires that weren’t normally my desires. But they were there, and when we went into her bedroom she took off her pants and shoes and got into bed.
She lay down on her side, pretending to be asleep. I took off my clothes — everything but my underwear — and as I slid up along her pretending-to-be-sleeping body I could feel the muscles of her back against my chest, and her thighs and her hips and her breasts, which were smallish, the same color as the rest of her skin. It occurred to me that there were experiences she’d had, that there were things she probably liked, and I began thinking about those things. A moment earlier I’d been feeling desire, and now, instead of feeling desire, I was thinking about desire, her desire. I was running my hand along her waist and over the rise of her hip, and I could feel her moving. I could feel her pressing up against my groin, and I could hear her breathing, and I could smell her, and all of it, including her wiggling, was an indication of her desire, and her desire was for something to be different.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine too,” she said, and maybe she was.
Because sex is a kind of utopia, it demands that something be different. And I wanted to be ready for that difference. I was desperate, in fact, for something to be different, and I would have reached out and embraced that difference except that something in me was still unwilling. And it wasn’t about Jane. And it wasn’t about the difficulty of being another person. It was almost as if I couldn’t stand the possible happiness that being another person might engender.
The next day I went to a yoga class on the ground floor of Alison’s building, in Santa Monica. Since she lived right there, and since I needed a shower, I stopped by. We’d had a period of flirtation in New York, when Alison was a costume designer, but somewhere along the line we’d decided that what we had was friendship. Now she was working in the movie business and I was in her house, standing next to photographs of her as a child ballerina, telling her about my Steve fixation and my idea to find work as a Steve Martin look-alike. I was surprised that instead of some ironic dismissal, she went into her walk-in closet and came back out with a camera. She told me that I would never in a million years look like Steve Martin, that the best I could do was be charming like him.
“That’s what I’m doing,” I said, and I showed her my walk.
According to her, the walk was acceptable, but she didn’t like the hair. “Is it supposed to be so white?”
“It’s silver,” I said.
“Does it wash out?”
I tried to explain about Scott and his hair, and although I knew that being Steve had nothing really to do with the color of my hair, it was part of me now, and—
“Fine,” she said, and she held up the camera. “This can be your head shot.”
So I stood in front of the white wall next to her kitchen, and the beauty of the Steve Martin walk is that you don’t even need to be walking. I was just standing there, brushing back my hair with my fingers, and everything was fine until, as she started taking pictures, I realized that some tertiary muscles in my face, without my doing anything, seemed to be tensing. She kept telling me to relax and I kept telling her I was trying to relax, but I couldn’t forget about the camera long enough to remember what relaxation was. Until she lowered the camera. Then I looked at her in her white blouse. Then it was just the two of us. And that’s when she snapped another picture.
“Wait,” I told her. “I wasn’t ready.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It was good.”
“But that was me,” I said, and I suggested she take another, better photograph, but she said she didn’t have time.
“We have to get dressed.”
“For what?”
“The party.”
She had an invitation to a movie “wrap” party, and so we drove our separate cars to the Los Angeles Athletic Club. We found places to park near a Scientology center, across Hollywood Boulevard, met her friend Sharon at the entrance, and because of Sharon’s connections we had no trouble getting in.
We drank red drinks in plastic glasses and wandered into a ballroom area and then into a smaller room where tables were set and the crowd was more well-dressed. People were milling around, clustered in groups, and in one of the groups I noticed the actress Scarlett Johansson. Actually, Alison pointed her out. She was the female lead in the movie, and partly because she was surrounded by people, and partly because we’d seen enough close-ups of her face, we were staring. Alison was commenting on her low-cut emerald-green dress, and I wasn’t commenting, but I was noticing her red lipstick, which made her look like a version of Marilyn Monroe. And that’s when Sharon said she’d be happy to introduce us. She was talking to me. She said Scarlett was really very friendly.