Sixfold Fiction Winter 2016

  #6—OBVIOUS CHANGE IN A WART OR MOLE. You needed me from the beginning, you see. And your need became my mirror, the only place I saw myself, day after day, role after role. At first, my mother went with me to the studio, standing anxiously at the fringes of the sound stage, tripping over wires, unwrapping aromatic sandwiches.

  But one day the producer asked her not to come anymore. He told her they would send a car for me instead, and every day from then on, a long, purring limo picked me up in front of our house. Soon, in a matter of months, Patricia Ann Houton disappeared. In her place, Sable DeWitt, sprung from your devotion, forged in the cauldron of your love, left her mother, her dresser with pink bunnies painted on the drawer pulls, and a life whose rhythms were slow and regular as sleep.

  “Sable sizzles!” “New star on the horizon!” “DeWitt’s a bomb—a sex bomb!” The reviews for Last Chance brought you to me by the hundreds, then by the thousands. You begged me for autographs. You haunted my hotel, the restaurants where I ate. You stole pillowcases I’d slept on, napkins stained with my lipstick, buttons, strands of hair, food from my trash. You stalked me patiently, relentlessly, and the more you dreamed of me, the more beautiful I grew.

  Take Three: The nurse and orderly stopped flirting long enough to lift me onto the stretcher, but now I am alone again. Alone and very dizzy, my angels. The tablet, tangled in my bed sheets, took me forever to retrieve. But I need to write you about Scott Fallon. Do you remember my co-star in Warm Front? How tall he was? Lean and dark, with sinister, hooded eyes and the sort of wounded half-smile that draws women for miles. You adored him; you adored us together. In Warm Front, I played a paralyzed dancer, and in the final scene, Scott lifts me from my bed and whirls me around the room to the procession theme from Swan Lake. “I’ll be your legs, darling,” he tells me tenderly. “We will be partners forever.”

  In real life—can you bear it, loves?—our dialogue was somewhat different. “Hey, Babe,” my leading man said when I told him I was pregnant, “we ain’t going to the chapel just because you forgot what time of month it was.” At close range, Scott was hardly the sensitive, tortured soul he appeared on screen. He sucked his spaghetti, called everyone “Babe,” and took fewer showers than anyone I’ve ever known.

  But if my co-star didn’t stick to the script, I followed it slavishly. “I don’t care what you do,” I told him. “I’m having this baby.” (I knew what you’d want me to say, you see. I knew how brave and principled you dreamed I was.)

  “And how will that make me look, huh?” Poor Scott was genuinely bewildered, stretched beyond his capacities by view points other than his own. “I mean, what exactly do you figure that’s going to do to my image?”

  “Hey, Babe,” I told him. “I couldn’t care less.”

  There should be a chain of tiny stars here—to signify still another interruption. This time, they wheeled the stretcher out of the room and pulled it onto an elevator. I slipped the tablet under my bruised hip, then spent the ride staring up into strange faces, sagged with gravity and concern. I was wheeled off at basement level, then left to lose consciousness in this drafty room. Cold lights are bouncing off chrome and steel. My legs and arms are turning numb, but I roll over and pull the tablet from under me.

  You wrote me letters during my pregnancy. Hundreds and hundreds of letters, telling me how brave I was, how you admired me for placing the sanctity of life above my career. You wrapped trinkets in the envelopes, sent me packages of baby clothes and blankets and silver spoons. But most of all you chose names for the baby. Boys’ names like Cedric and Garth and Lyle and Sherman. Girls’ names like Estelle and Ashley and Morgan and Lucinda.

  I didn’t name my baby until she was dead. And then none of your names were right. You’d sent me saucy names like Brandy, sweet ones like Taffy, elegant ones like Justine. They didn’t belong to my little still-born daughter, to the tiny, wrinkled girl who smelled like dead flowers on the side of a vase. I called her Camille. She was supposed to be a happy ending. I don’t want to write about her anymore.

  I made movies with a vengeance then. Some were good, some were bad, but none approached the low watermark to which I sank when I allowed myself to get involved with the elderly, tuxedoed suitor who dogged my every step after Silent Heart.