I was glad to be back in the salon so soon. It was warm and steamy and purred with blow dryers and the smell of professional shampoo. Patrice showed us the thank-you card from Hair for Care, and Carl was impressed. He gave himself to her as if she were taking blood for the Red Cross. Every once in a while I looked up from my magazine to check on his progress. They were little things, a beard trim and haircut, nose and ear hairs trimmed, eyebrows neatened, but I thought they were necessary. If we looked anything other than clean and ordinary, we would pull attention away from the foreground actors.
I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but Carl seemed to have opinions; he was in perpetual conversation with Patrice. She would nod, take a step back and look at him as if he were a painting, nod, and begin cutting again. I could have watched this forever, Patrice and Carl talking in the warm, perfumed room. It was not hard to imagine them having sex, her skirt up, him entering her, her hands in his hair as they were. She could suck him; he would like that. I felt kindly toward Carl and like a sister to Patrice. “Sister” was too strong a word, really; I wanted her to beg for it. I bequeathed all kinds of desperation to her; I gave her things I wasn’t sure I even had. She leaned in, carefully trimming his eyebrows, and then stepped back, twirled him around, and asked, What do you think?
I suggested we go to the shoe store next, but Carl pointed out that you rarely saw the shoes of people in movies.
But that’s because they go close up on their faces. They won’t be close on our faces; we’ll be walking around in the background with our shoes showing.
If we’re far away enough for our shoes to be showing, then we’re too far away for anyone to see them clearly.
I thought about this, and it seemed true. It was strange how Carl seemed to know things about cinematography and the trade. When he was initially ridiculing my idea, he scoffed and said, Even if it wasn’t a silly, low-level, almost offensively banal idea, we still couldn’t do it because we aren’t in the guild.
What guild?
The union of background actors.
Is there really such a thing?
Well, you don’t think they’d just let anyone waltz onto a set, do you?
But they do; later, we looked it up on instantcast.com and found out that many movies hire regular people after they fulfill their union quotas. We also read about how important extras are; they aren’t “extra” at all. Imagine a busy saloon in the old west. When the bad guy walks in, how do we know he’s bad? Because hundreds of background actors freeze in midaction, beer glasses raised halfway to lips, cards half shuffled, darts frozen in midair. I read this aloud to Carl after he finished his nightly dharma talk transcription.
Now can I read something to you?
What?
Yes or no.
Yes.
When you can see the beauty of a tree, then you will know what love is.
That’s beautiful.
I think it is.
Did you just transcribe that?
Yeah, it came to me after dinner.
Came to you … through the headphones.
Right.
On the third day of the rest of Carl’s life, and the eleventh day of mine, I began calling the number. Instantcast.com explained that your willingness to hit redial for hours at a time is the screening process. This is the actual, professional way that one applies for this job, in the manner of a person trying to win tickets off the radio. The directors are looking for people who are willing to do almost anything, but will happily do almost nothing, for hours.
While I pressed redial, I visited many websites about background acting, and these sites were linked to sites about famous Hollywood stars, and these sites were linked to sites about adult movie stars, and eventually, I found myself watching the personal webcam of a pretty young woman named Savannah Banks. Savannah wasn’t naked, like I would’ve thought. She was at her desk, first doing something that looked like paying bills, and then making phone calls. It looked as though she was checking her messages, but after a while, I realized she might be pressing redial, like me. I was suddenly sure she was on hold for the Hello Maxamillion, Goodbye Maxamillion casting call. If they took her call first, I was going to be very frustrated. She didn’t need this like I did; she lived alone, she had a webcam, she had many, many options. She leaned back in her chair, waiting. I could wait, too. We were locked in a dead heat, a stalemate. And then, I won.
Casting.
Hello! I’m calling about the casting call?
Which one?
Hello Maxamillion, Goodbye Maxamillion?
Oh, that’s been cast.
Really?
Yes.
Oh.
Yeah. Well, then.
Well.
Okay, maybe they still need one more person. I don’t know for sure, but they might still need one more person if you go down there right now.
Oh, but it’s not just me, it’s my husband, too, and he’s at tai chi right now.
Well, two is unlikely.
But that’s the whole point—this is for us together.
I don’t know, maybe they need two, I really don’t know.
You think?
You guys should just go down there.
Really?
What have you got to lose?
Nothing.
Bring three shirts each.
I’ll bring four!
I hung up and looked once more at Savannah. She was putting on her coat and grabbing her purse. I gathered up our shirts and stood in the driveway. She had an unfair advantage because I had to wait for Carl.
It was a tragic romance. Maxamillion was an old man who falls in love with a child and waits for her to grow up, only to die of old age on her eighteenth birthday. We were in an early scene, where Maxamillion takes his six-year-old love interest to a fancy French restaurant called Mon Plaisir. We and twenty-two other extras were paired and clustered at tables with long tablecloths. Maxamillion and the girl were right beside us, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes in a way that I, for one, felt uncomfortable with. But it was not my place to judge the love between these two fictional characters. Dave, the assistant director, told us to talk and eat just as we normally would if we were enjoying a meal at a fancy French restaurant, but to take tiny bites, so the meals would last for the next four to five hours. Carl looked down at his plate; not eating French food was easy for us, because we’re macrobiotic. And action!
Hi.
Hi, Carl.
We don’t normally say hi at dinner.
I’m going to drink some of my water now.
Me, too.
No, we can’t both drink water!
Why not?
That’s not real.
But I’m really thirsty.
Well, just wait.
Carl leaned back in his chair, waiting.
What are you doing? We have to keep talking!
Well, clearly I’m not an actor, but then it wasn’t my idea, was it?
Oh, terrific, so now it’s my fault for—
CUT! Cut, cut, cut, cut!
Wherein we learned our first big lesson about background acting. When Dave told us to talk as we normally would at a fancy French restaurant, he meant talk as you normally would but don’t use sound. Talk silently. He thought we knew. No. We didn’t even know why we were here. Where was Savannah Banks? I glanced around, but she wasn’t at Mon Plaisir. Of course she wasn’t. She probably didn’t even live in this city. She was probably on a real date at a real French restaurant. I looked at Carl and he looked at me. Our bleak reality was now apparent: we couldn’t leave and we couldn’t change partners. Maxamillion stroked the little girl’s hand with a wrinkled finger, and Dave called action.
Suddenly we were actors. We alternated like people talking, we listened and nodded and laughed silently and ate tiny bites of food. We moved our mouths and faces, we gestured occasionally to emphasize, we animated ourselves as young couples animate themselves when they are talking. Carl e
ven interrupted me, mouthing and nodding in agreement with what I was saying, presumably taking it one step further, and I just knew, knowing the way that people talk when they are happy, that he had said something funny. I laughed soundlessly and Carl smiled, a real smile, so pleased was he to have made me laugh. And it was so tremendous to see that smile, I could feel myself glowing, I somehow felt beautiful, and cut.
We said nothing now that we were allowed to speak. We couldn’t even look at each other; it was too embarrassing. I waited nervously for action, and when Dave yelled out, I looked up, meeting Carl’s eyes as they crinkled into a smile. How striking he was in his collared shirt with his new haircut. He poured more wine, and we raised our glasses and mouthed, To us! And by “us” I knew we both meant not us but these two people who had met for the first time at Mon Plaisir. I slid my hand across the table, Carl quickly covered it in his, I bloomed like a struck match. And cut.
Again we waited with our eyes lowered. His hand remained on mine, but lifelessly, and as lights were adjusted around us, I had time to wonder how many more takes were left. There could not be enough.
On action, I squeezed Carl’s finger and he gripped mine. The urgency seemed obvious now, we both leaned forward and I held his bearded chin as we kissed quickly, not wanting to distract from the lead table. The feeling between us was mournful and desperate. We could not look away from each other, every inhalation was a question: Yes? Followed by: Yes. Falling and catching and falling and catching, we descended into a precarious and vivid place; I had always known it was there but had never guessed where. Carl’s new sense of humor flourished in silence, he made subtly absurd gestures that surprised me into almost audible laughter. And I could not make a move without making love. Every time I shifted in my chair, lifted my fork, brushed my hair from my eyes, I seemed to be pushing through the motions as through honey, slowly and with all kinds of implications. I feared our breath was too loud. I seized his forearms, he took off his shoes, beneath the table, our feet pushed with an almost vocal eloquence. Dave cried, Cut, and then:
That’s a wrap for our background, thank you, background actors!
How could it be over? Carl and I looked at each other with disbelief. The crew began to clap, everyone clapped; we could only rise from our table and stumble out of the room with the twenty-two other diners. We didn’t look at each other when we parted toward different dressing rooms. The drive home was long and sealed in a drowning silence. Walking across the front lawn, Carl stopped to re-coil the hose that I had left out the day before. I waited for him for a moment and then felt silly standing there and went inside. It was late, so I started making dinner. Only once we sat down did it strike me as bizarre. Here we were again, eating together in silence. I pressed my fork into the greens and began to cry. Carl looked up, we stared across the table at each other. It was plain between us: we should not be together any longer. And cut.
In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily; I woke up early in the guest room; he stayed up late chatting with Buddhist strangers on the Internet. Like college roommates, we instinctively used different shelves in the refrigerator for the foods we now bought separately. It turned out we didn’t really like to eat the same things. We searched for new places to live, sometimes seizing on the same apartment listing. And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment? We helped each other move, first loading boxes into a studio he had found in our neighborhood, then driving the U-Haul across town to my new place. When the truck was empty, we hugged and I thought: In less than one minute, I will be walking into my new home. Carl gave me a salute through the window and drove away. I turned and walked toward my new front door. This is it, I thought. Here I go. But before I reached the door I heard a honk. He was back. I had left a trowel in the front seat. We discussed what to do with it; neither of us had a yard now. I began to feel that the conversation about the trowel might never end. I saw us as two old people standing on the sidewalk with the trowel between us. I quickly took the tool from Carl and held it against my chest. He got back in the car and I walked toward the door with the trowel in hand. This is it, I thought. I’m alone now. I looked down the street to be sure. Yes.
Birthmark
On a scale of one to ten, with ten being childbirth, this will be a three.
A three? Really?
Yes. That’s what they say.
What other things are a three?
Well, five is supposed to be having your jaw reset.
So it’s not as bad as that.
No.
What’s two?
Having your foot run over by a car.
Wow, so it’s worse than that?
But it’s over quickly.
Okay, well, I’m ready. No—wait; let me adjust my sweater. Okay, I’m ready.
All right, then.
Here goes a three.
The laser, which had been described as pure white light, was more like a fist slammed against a countertop, and her body was a cup on the counter, jumping with each slam. It turned out three was just a number. It didn’t describe the pain any more than money describes the thing it buys. Two thousand dollars for a port-wine stain removed. A kind of birthmark that seems messy and accidental, as if this red area covering one whole cheek were the careless result of too much fun. She spoke to her body like an animal at the vet, Shhh, it’s okay, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry we have to do this to you. This is not unusual; most people feel that their bodies are innocent of their crimes, like animals or plants. Not that this was a crime. She had waited patiently from the time she was fourteen for aesthetic surgery to get cheap, like computers. Nineteen ninety-eight was the year lasers came to the people as good bread, eat and be full, be finally perfect. Oh yes, perfect. She didn’t think she would have bothered if she hadn’t been what people call “very beautiful except for.” This is a special group of citizens living under special laws. Nobody knows what to do with them. We mostly want to stare at them like the optical illusion of a vase made out of the silhouette of two people kissing. Now it is a vase … now it could only be two people kissing … oh, but it is so completely a vase. It is both! Can the world sustain such a contradiction? And this was even better, because as the illusion of prettiness and horribleness flipped back and forth, we flipped with it. We were uglier than her, then suddenly we were lucky not to be her, but then again, at this angle she was too lovely to bear. She was both, we were both, and the world continued to spin.
Now began the part of her life where she was just very beautiful, except for nothing. Only winners will know what this feels like. Have you ever wanted something very badly and then gotten it? Then you know that winning is many things, but it is never the thing you thought it would be. Poor people who win the lottery do not become rich people. They become poor people who won the lottery. She was a very beautiful person who was missing something very ugly. Her winnings were the absence of something, and this quality hung around her. There was so much potential in the imagined removal of the birthmark; any fool on the bus could play the game of guessing how perfect she would look without it. Now there was not this game to play, there was just a spent feeling. And she was no idiot, she could sense it. In the first few months after the surgery, she received many compliments, but they were always coupled with a kind of disorientation.
Now you can wear your hair up and show off your face more.
Yeah, I’m going to try it that way.
Wait, say that again.
“I’m going to try it that way.” What?
Your little accent is gone.
What accent?
You know, the little Norwegian thing.
Norwegian?
Isn’t your mom Norwegian?
She’s from Denver.
But you have that little bit of an accent, that little … way of saying things.
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I do?
Well, not anymore, it’s gone now.
And she felt a real sense of loss. Even though she knew she had never had an accent. It was the birthmark, which in its density had lent color even to her voice. She didn’t miss the birthmark, but she missed her Norwegian heritage, like learning of new relatives, only to discover they have just died.
All in all, though, this was minor, less disruptive than insomnia (but more severe than déjà vu). Over time she knew more and more people who had never seen her with the birthmark. These people didn’t feel any haunting absence, why should they? Her husband was one of these people. You could tell by looking at him. Not that he wouldn’t have married a woman with a port-wine stain. But he probably wouldn’t have. Most people don’t and are none the worse for it. Of course, sometimes it would happen that she would see a couple and one of them would have a port-wine stain and the other would clearly be in love with this stained person and she would hate her husband a little. And he could feel it.
Are you being weird?
No.
You are.
Actually, I’m not. I’m just eating my salad.
I can see them, too, you know. I saw them come in.
Hers is worse than mine was. Mine didn’t go down on my neck like that.
Do you want to try this soup?
I bet he’s an environmentalist. Doesn’t he look like one?
Maybe you should go sit with them.
Maybe I will.
I don’t see you moving.
Did you just finish the soup? I thought we were splitting.
I offered it to you.
Well, you can’t have any of this salad, then.
It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying. Years went by. This thing grew, like a child, microscopically, every day. And since they were a team, and all teams want to win, they continuously adjusted their vision to keep its growth invisible. They wordlessly excused each other for not loving each other as much as they had planned to. There were empty rooms in the house where they had meant to put their love, and they worked together to fill these rooms with midcentury modern furniture. Herman Miller, George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames. They were never alone; it became crowded. The next sudden move would have to be through the wall. What happened was this. She was trying to get the lid off a new jar of jam, and she was banging it on the counter. This is a well-known tip, a kitchen trick, a bang to loosen the lid. It’s not witchery or black magic, it’s simply a way to release the pressure under the lid. She banged it too hard, and the jar broke. She screamed. Her husband came running when he heard the sound. There was red everywhere, and in that instant he saw blood. Hallucinatory clarity: you are certain of what you see. But in the next moment, your fear relinquishes control: it was jam. Everywhere. She was laughing, picking shards of glass out of the strawberry mash. She was laughing at the mess, and her face was down, looking at the floor, and her hair was around her face like a curtain, and then she looked up at him and said, Can you bring the trash can over here?