The Missing Person (19 page)

The door opened, and Franny, dressed in gray workman's pants, a black silk shirt, and wood-soled clogs, came out. “I'm sick, Rube. I'm going home.”

The truth was, she
did
look sick. Great dark circles had worked themselves up through her faded make-up. The blue craters that were her eyes made her cheeks look sunken, and her blond hair, pulled back and piled on her head, gave her the suffering, withdrawn look of a movie spinster-type. After the dumb, lovable blonde married to an English lord that she had been playing a half-hour ago, the change was startling.

“Franny, you'll be all right. Stay here. I'll send Jay for Doctor Levy. He's right near here. Brock, for God's sake,
apologize.”

Brock hated his part—the English lord with all his looks and manners who turns out to be a fool, manipulated by the curvy, ignorant farm girl from Oklahoma. He wanted it to be over so he could move on to better things. He said to Franny, not looking at her: “Sorry, darling. Lost my head. Let's have at it again.”

Franny seemed not to have heard him. She took Reuben's arm and pulled him along with her.

“Please.
Please
, Rube. Don't be mad. I'll be back in the morning. I promise. You can use Dolores on the run-through of the next scene. Just today. I feel awful, Rube. No kidding.”

He believed her. The pressure of her hand on his, even though he knew it was just a signal of her need, made him happy. His awkward, undersized Jewish businessman's body was suffused with joy, and he could not hold out against her. Her illness, he suspected, was one he had known something about when he was younger. It was dislocation sickness, a loss of a sense of place and self, a disease he knew to be ineluctable, one for which there is no amelioration. On the set he had watched Franny react to other players or, more often, fail to react. He knew she was searching for moorings, for a place to put her head, to house her nameless griefs, to shelter her sick heart. He longed to offer her consolation, his sympathy, something immense like an ocean or a forest of redwoods or the Hope Diamond. Instead, he said: “Okay, Franny. Take it easy. I'll have Jay drive you home.”

Dolores Jenkins was sitting on the edge of the set holding wool for Charlene Emory, the script girl, when she saw Franny and Reuben walk toward the parking lot. Following at a respectful distance one of the assistant directors, Jay Boardman, was struggling into his sports jacket as he walked. She put down her two handfuls of wool. “Be right back, Charlene. Hang on.”

Running, holding her arm across her chest to keep her one breast in place, Dolores caught up with Franny and Reuben. They were talking, his head bent earnestly toward hers, but they stopped when she came up to them.

“I'll see you tomorrow, yes, Franny?” he said.

“Tomorrow. Yes,” she repeated in her flat, toneless way, as though the exact use of someone else's words was superior to any response she could make.

“Take care of yourself,” he said and kissed her lightly on the forehead.
The kiss of peace
, he thought,
between two priests
. He walked back to the set, feeling defeated and angry at the same time, like an athlete leaving the field in a fit of bad sportsmanship.

“Is there anyone at home, Franny?” asked Dolores. “Is your husband there?”

“No,” she whispered in her half-voice. “He's in New York. Just Olivia, I think.”

“Tell you what. Why don't you go to my place? You can rest there. My mother's there. I'll call her and tell her you're coming. She'll make lunch for you. She'll love to. Then I'll drive you home tonight. Okay, Franny?”

Franny looked at her, seeming not to see her. After a moment she said: “Your place. Okay.”

She got in beside Jay in the black sedan the Studio kept on the lot for emergencies.

Dolores said to him: “Take her to Lilac and Vine. Number seventy-three. Right above the bakery. You'll be able to smell it a block away.”

“Want me to wait for her, Miss Jenkins?”

“No, my mother will be there. And I'll be home soon.”

Jay backed up carefully, went into forward gear, and started ahead slowly, as if he were driving the lead car in a funeral procession.

“Feel better now, Miss Fuller?” he asked in a hushed voice.

She did not answer. Slumped down in the seat, her head thrown back, she appeared to be asleep.

After Dolores's call, Billie-Jo Jenkins scurried around tidying up the apartment. She greeted Franny profusely, ignored Jay's presence, and ushered the Star into the living room. Jay hung about for a few moments, realized that his assignment, in Mrs. Jenkins's eyes, ended at her doorsill, and left, shutting the door quietly behind him. He was used to his function as errand boy for the Great, biding his time until, as a director some day, he would do some ordering around himself. With the recent spectacle of powerless Reuben Rubin in his mind, however, he was not so sure.

“Would you like to lie down, dearie?” asked Billie-Jo. “The chesterfield's very comfortable.”

“The what?” An old, hated, buried world flooded into Franny's mind at the sound of the word.

“The couch, I guess you call it. Where I come from—well, never mind, here, try it.” She puttered about, arranging a plump pink pillow neatly into a hollow in one cushion caused by defective springs. She had compensated for this imperfection the day the sofa arrived from the May Company and by now had forgotten that it had not always been this way. To her, no structural defect was objectionable if it reduced the cost of an object and then could be repaired with “something I had around the house.”

Franny lay down. Billie-Jo removed her clogs and covered her with an afghan Dolores had crocheted during waits on the set.

“Now, dearie. Tell me what you want for lunch and I'll fix it while you rest.”

Franny said, with her eyes closed: “Some grape juice, please, Mrs. Jenkins.”

“Nothing to
eat?”

“No, grape juice is fine. Nothing else.” She was almost asleep as she said the last words, her energy having seemingly been exhausted by them.

After an hour she woke, sat bolt upright, and looked around blankly. She seemed not to remember Mrs. Jenkins. The dream she had just had was still there, whole and terrifying.

Two little boys and Fanny Marker walked barefooted to the dried-up reservoir bed and then crawled into the pipe almost big enough to stand up in and it got darker and then black inside and there was some water full of orange rust like dried blood at the bottom of the black pipe and every sound of her foot on the pipe and the swishing of the water made a roar like a bull and all at once nobody was in the pipe but Fanny and she started to run to one end and banged her head and went down on her hands and knees and crawled in the bloody water and looked back and there at the opening was a great grinning face, the eyes crossed and a great red tongue hanging out and hair all over its head like tar and Fanny screamed and her scream came back to her like the high notes of a saxophone never stopping and Fanny crawled on, her knees scraped and rusty crying so hard she could hardly see, her hair in her face her heart echoing like a drum in that black pipe and at the other end oh jesus, another face, fingers pulling down the corners of the mouth and no teeth in it and the blood roaring in her ears as she tried to stand again and banged hard at the side of her head and slipped back in the muck crying and screaming, even after she remembered about the boys and recognized their faces and saw it was a game and then she put her head down and crashed into one face and fell out of the pipe hitting against the face that pulled away from her before her exploding head the roar the bull's roars the blood bursting in her hair and fright screaming flowing from her ears the roar and the blackness and the blood

Then she saw Mrs. Jenkins. She shook her head to wipe away the dream, the dream she had again and again since it had happened to her in Utica when she was a child. She smiled her instant, brilliant, distant smile.

“I was dreaming,” she said.

“Tell you what, dearie. I just thought of a place near here you'd like to see. Put on your shoes and I'll show you.”

“Outside?”

“Oh yes, but not far. Just about five blocks away.”

As they came out of the building, Franny stopped, shocked by the glare of midafternoon California sunlight. She found her sunglasses in her handbag and then turned to look into the window of the bakery. It was almost empty except for white doilies on empty white plates. In the center on a pedestal a three-tiered dusty wedding cake bore aloft two celluloid dolls. Franny stared at them. The groom doll had stiff arms painted black all the way to his finger tips, the bride-doll was buried to her knees in the sooty white cake.

“Come on, dearie, it's not a bad walk from here.”

Franny pulled a kerchief over her hair. In her workman's pants and silk shirt she looked waiflike, fragile. Billie-Jo took her hand, as she would a child's, and pulled her along. It was difficult to make much progress because Franny's clogs did not give as she walked. With each step her feet made a slapping noise, like the sound a circus clown makes with great false feet. Even so, no one on the street looked at her. The citizen of Hollywood, accustomed to nobodys accoutered like Stars, distrusts everyone he sees: Franny in clogs, work pants, and cat-eyed sunglasses looked like an imitation of Franny Fuller. No one paid any attention to her.

They arrived at a brick building painted black.

“This is the place.”

A sign entirely composed of electric bulbs read
WAX MUSEUM
. Underneath, in gothic letters, a painted sign said
MADAME TWOSO'
S
and then, in black block letters,
SEE THE STARS
!

“What's in there? What is it?” asked Franny, backing away.

Billie-Jo put down two quarters at a window in the kiosk in front of the museum and took Franny's hand again. They went in through a black velvet curtain and stood uncertainly just inside, blinded in the darkness after the sunny street. In a few moments Billie-Jo saw a green arrow glowing.

“This way, Miss Fuller. The arrow says over here.”

“What arrow?”

“Take off your glasses and you'll see it.”

Together, like mountain climbers tied together and groping past a dangerous place, they moved in the direction the arrow indicated. Past another black velvet curtain musty with the odors of many hot, confused hands pushing at it, they were in a large, lighted room with recessed glass panels set into walls. Franny put her dark glasses back on.

Billie-Jo said: “Yes, I remember now. We start over here, dearie.” Each window revealed a group of Hollywood stars, called
Greats
in the legends printed beneath them, in a scene from their
GREATEST SUCCESS.
Billie-Jo ushered Franny rapidly past the first displays—frizzy-haired Mae Murray embracing smooth, seductive, frowning John Gilbert; languorous, sulky Constance Bennett in the fierce arms of Richard Barthelmess; famous comics in sailor suits, horn-rimmed glasses, and police uniforms chasing women into revolving doors or falling out of skyscraper windows.

“Now,
here
. Take a look at this one, dearie. Take off your glasses.”

Through her smoked glasses Franny saw herself. She was dressed in a black satin evening gown cut to a deep V in front. Two bulbous wax breasts pressed out of the cleavage of the dress. Waxy and painted so that it looked like the embalmed remains of someone she remembered having known well, her head was thrown back, her eyelids were lowered over glassy bright-blue eyeballs like giant marbles, and her lips, oversized, swollen, and bursting with jellylike red wax, opened as though to allow some last, vital ceraceous breath to escape. Vaguely, because she could not take her eyes away from herself, she was aware of two male figures flanking her, both in evening dress, both handsome, stiff, their marble eyes looking avidly at her.

She recognized the dress but could not remember the movie the scene was from; even the men were unfamiliar. But the angle of that head, the deep dimple struck into the wax cheek
(with a hot needle?
she wondered), the silky hair pointed down that forehead—oh, she knew
that
one, that was the face she had worked on as a girl on her mother's bed, the day Jerryboy came home early to find her there.… Behind the glass, sculptured for all the world to see, was Fanny Marker who lived forever behind her, under her, like vegetables under a stone, and that was why it was so hard for her to breathe, to live.

“Don't you think that's a swell likeness? It takes you off just perfect, I think. Take off the glasses. You'll get a better look.”

Franny made no move. Through the glasses the unlined face, the body, the glowing canary hair, were mercifully darkened, diminished. Bright lights shone down on her manufactured skin, grayed out and dulled into a twilight color.

“I look dead,” Franny said aloud to herself. But Billie-Jo heard her speak.

“What's that?”

“That really is me,” said Franny. “And I'm
her
stand-in, like Dolores is mine.”

“Oh no, dearie,” said Billie-Jo.

“Yes,” said Franny in her flat whispering monotone. “See, just
look
at me. I tell you, look: I'm dead. Really. Dead.”

A week later, lights were being arranged on the set of
The Princess and the Pomegranate
, and then shifted. Dolores Jenkins waited, changing her position at command, her face tilted upward and then lowered, then raised again. She held still until the lighting director said she could move. Dolores had developed a technique, an occupation to follow, while remaining absolutely still. She would freeze into the desired position and then hold it by thinking hard about non-thought. Sometimes her concentration on blankness was so intense that, when she was told to relax, it was an effort to obey. She was the ideal stand-in, unambitious for herself, unglamorous yet attractive in a quiet way, perfectly yet mindlessly still when she worked.