He told me to forget about the actual Steve Martin and to concentrate on one particular aspect of my own personal Steve.
“Like?”
“Breathing.”
And it’s funny, because when I’m very relaxed, usually lying down, I can sometimes feel my body breathing. And it’s pleasant at first, but then the same thing always seems to happen. I’m observing my breath, breathing out and breathing in, and it’s all fine until, after a while, I start to get worried about who’s doing the breathing. Theoretically, I know it happens on its own, but when I try to just let it happen without me, I start to worry that maybe it won’t happen, that I’ll forget to breathe. And in a similar way, being Steve, even to the tiny extent I was doing it, was making me worried about where, if I was Steve, was I?
“Breathe,” he said.
And I did. And when I concentrated I was able, for the most part, to put the habit of myself on the back burner. I was talking to Scott and watching myself talk to him, thinking that if Jane liked the Steve Martin I’d done before, then I would get better. And that’s what I tried to do. Instead of worrying about being myself, I could worry about something else.
We talked about girls and families and where we used to live. He said he used to live with someone in Tucson.
“Tucson is dry,” I said.
“It’s a desert.”
“True,” I said. “But in a good way.”
He told me he’d come to Los Angeles to be an actor, and that doing the Steve Martin thing had saved him at first but now it was getting in the way.
“Of what?”
He didn’t say, and maybe it was getting in the way for him, but for me, although whatever transformation was happening to me was minimal, there was an emotional component, a giddiness in my body that I liked. Although Scott was a better Steve than I was, I wasn’t terrible. And I was enjoying it. “That’s the main thing,” he said. “Enjoy it.” And I was. Certainly more than being myself. Which was weird. As if now, because I was this other person, an entirely new world was possible.
I looked at Scott in the mirror and I could see the two of us, reflected in the mirror, my face and his torso, and I realized that Scott, standing there, was a version of what I wanted to be. And because I wanted to be the only version, when I took off the coat I said to him, “You’re right.”
“What?”
“It’s silly. Being Steve Martin? Come on.”
“Not being.”
“Whatever.”
“You’re doing a great job.”
“Not me,” I said. “You. You said it gets in the way and I can see, I mean. . You’ve got some girlfriend, right? Waiting for you in Tucson.”
He hung up the coat.
I continued talking about Tucson, and got him talking, about Tucson and Los Angeles, and about not having enough money, and I think I saw the twinkle in his eyes start to flicker. We kept talking, and after a while I didn’t care about the twinkle in his eyes because I had my own twinkle now, and when I said to him, finally, “It’s kind of stupid, right? Being someone else,” he was looking out the window. And I didn’t say anything more and he didn’t either, and that’s how we left it. When he went to his gig at the car dealership, I didn’t tag along.
I finished the look-alike article, and before I gave it to Alan, I was going to show it to Scott, to see if he had any changes. So I drove to his house, and because the people who owned his house didn’t like cars parking near their driveway, I parked by a school down on Wonderland Avenue. I walked up the street, knocked at his door, and when he didn’t answer I looked through the window next to the door. I could see he wasn’t in the “living room” area, but maybe he was in the bathroom, and if so, I thought I’d give him a few minutes of privacy. I walked back down to the school playground, looking for his car, in case he’d gone out for some milk or something. When I got to the playground I stood on one side of the chain-link fence, watching the kids, running after each other and hiding from each other, and as I was standing there, watching them, I noticed a man coming down the street. He was the kind of person I classified as a bum, a man with a large box on wheels filled with furniture and bags, and because there wasn’t any sidewalk, he was walking in the street, near the gutter. He had two Labrador-type dogs on leashes, and when he looked up he said, “I’m just walking,” as if I was some kind of security guard.
“I’m just standing here,” I said. His dogs were brown and large, and I told him they looked healthy.
“They live outside,” he said, and he said “outside” as if it meant, not just outside a house or outside a neighborhood, but outside society, free from the poison of society, and because I must’ve looked like a representative of that infected society, he kept on walking.
He walked down the street and I walked up the street, and on my way to Scott’s house I came to an open area in the hillside. Scott had mentioned a trail, and so I turned and followed it, a single-file trail that wound around what looked like olive trees, and ended at a flat shaded area marked off with stones. Scott had told me about a picnic spot and now I was standing in the middle of it. It was a rock garden nestled in the trees, with a rusting metal chair in the dirt. Near the chair was a cactus plant with a fruit growing on the end of one of its arms, and I knew some cacti were edible, so I plucked off, first the flower, then the fruit. I peeled away the thin thorny skin, and although I’d never eaten a cactus, I bit into the orange flesh. And it was good. It was sweet and juicy and I ate the rest of it, letting the juice run down my lips.
By then I figured Scott had had enough time to do whatever he was doing, and when I came out of the trees and onto the street a man was taking out his garbage. I knew that Joni Mitchell had once lived in the area and I asked him if he knew where Joni Mitchell’s house was. He didn’t. He said he knew where the Mamas and the Papas had lived but I wasn’t interested in the Mamas and the Papas, so I walked back, up Scott’s dead-end street and up the steps to his door. I stood in the mottled light, and when I knocked this time it was obvious he hadn’t come back, and probably wasn’t still in the bathroom, and since I thought I knew him well enough, I tried the door. I turned the handle of the door and oddly, it wasn’t locked. The door swung open and there was his room, too small to walk around in, but I stepped inside.
“Scott?”
His bed was made. Pictures were on the walls. His cell phone was on the edge of a fake wood dresser and I picked it up. The place had a definite scent, like the odor of old men, sweet old men, and I liked it. I felt a kind of familiarity, and I’m not an expert on the chemistry of the human body, but I know certain chemicals are released by the body that cause us to feel certain things. And I’m not saying Scott had released any chemicals, but I was feeling the effect of something in my body.
I sat on his bed, looking at the various reproductions of art on his walls. I hadn’t noticed them earlier, but I knew Steve Martin collected art, and there they were. A Vermeer of a girl standing by a light-filled window. A print depicting an atrocity of war, by Goya. There were several landscapes by Brueghel, a short-legged jester by Velázquez, and a snapshot of a woman standing somewhere in the sun. Mostly they were postcards, a collection of reproductions he was attracted to.
The desire to collect art begins with attraction. There’s an urge to be near a thing of beauty, and over time, when you’re with something like that, with something beautiful, a relationship begins to form, and that relationship begins to have a meaning, and it’s meant to. A work of art is meant to have an effect, and it does, and the original desire changes from simply wanting to be near that beauty to wanting to possess it, wanting to be so close to it that some of the beauty rubs off.