THREE HOURS TO GO.
I should be napping, I guess, but I’m sitting on shpilkes, as Mom used to say about twice a day. I also want to get this down while I can, since there’ll be lots more to tell you after tonight.
Jeff took me to the tech rehearsal this morning at the Beverly Hilton. Leonard was there for a while and made a big gushy show of hugging me. When I introduced him to Jeff, such a look passed between the two of them you could’ve hung laundry on it. Part of this has to do with Gut Reaction furor and part with the fact that each regards the other as Callum’s corrupter—so Leonard obviously saw Jeff as an infiltrator of sorts, a loose cannon with a backstage pass. They were civil to each other, though, at least on the surface.
When I remarked on how skinny Leonard looked, he rattled on so long about his latest diet (a woman brings him Baggies of greens once a week) that I thought he must have thought that I thought he had AIDS. That would be just like Leonard, to think that. For all I know, he does have AIDS; he’s not the sort of guy you’d hear it from first. He looked pretty good, at any rate—tanner than ever. His concern over Jeff’s presence may have worked for me in some ways, since it allowed me to cast myself in a less dangerous light. I tried to project an air of coolheaded competence, one that said I was just there to do my job and go home, a solid no-nonsense professional.
The ballroom was bigger than I’d imagined. (One of the biggest, according to Leonard, which is why the Hilton does so many of these industry events.) The place was empty except for a few techies, a few stray producers. The stage was fairly small, since the all-star audience was obviously the whole show. To make for good television, the guests would be seated cabaret-style on tiers surrounding the stage—a great big drinkless party full of startlingly familiar faces. Some of the chairs were labeled with masking tape and Magic Marker, so Jeff sprang from tier to tier, reconnoitering on my behalf. When he returned, grinning like a bandit, he took a piece of tape off his arm and stuck it on mine. It said: MRS. FORTENSKY.
“Put that back!” I said.
“Why?”
“Because…” I took off the tape and gave it back to him. “I want Mrs. Fortensky to have a good seat.”
He laughed.
“Is there a ‘Mr. Fortensky’?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said, “and a ‘Mr. Eber’ next to them.”
“Makes sense. It’s a long evening. They could have hair failure.”
He smiled.
“What else?”
“Callum’s two seats away from ‘Miss Foster.’”
“You’re kidding.”
“No.”
“What else?” I asked.
He smiled. “No more. You’ll overload.”
“I fucking love this!”
“No shit,” he said.
Later, the stage manager heard us laughing and came to introduce himself. He led us to a dressing room, where the elf already awaited, dormant in his coffin—a metal crate with a big lock, designed to safeguard all that costly machinery. I remembered it from the old days, with nothing like fondness. As promised, the dressing room was all mine, which had obviously been no big deal, since the other performers will arrive at the hotel in evening clothes and take the stage that way. In fact, as far as I can tell, I’m the only person who even requires a place to change.
The stage manager said the MC for the evening will be Fleet Parker. (The obvious choice, when you think about it, given the number of Blenheim films in which he’s flashed those lovely silicone pecs.) I make my entrance at the very end, just after Callum, who’ll plug his new movie and talk about what a great dad Philip was to him on the set. Then Fleet will come back and say a few more words, prompting Philip to leave the imperial box he’s been occupying all evening and join the actor onstage. They talk a while—yodda, yodda, yodda—which leads to my cue. I toddle on adorably, hand Philip the award (which is hideous), issue my heart-warming prerecorded message, and toddle off again.
“It’s fairly straightforward,” the stage manager said, summing up. “Just a quick fix for the audience and off again, before it wears off. The element of surprise is what we’re going for here.”
“Gotcha.”
“How long should she be suited?” asked Jeff.
“Before, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, an hour or so. They want you here at seven, but you won’t have to put on the rig until about nine. There’ll be somebody here to help with that.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” said Jeff.
“No. I mean somebody to check the wiring, make sure everything’s up.”
“Oh.”
“Will you be with her backstage?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Jeff, trying to sound like a voice of authority.
The stage manager’s brow creased ever so slightly, so I added: “I need somebody…you know…” I widened my eyes and left the sentence unfinished as if to suggest that the stage manager could easily imagine the sort of personal, unmentionable services a person like me might require.
“Right,” he said, nodding, not really wanting to know.
Our first small storm cloud had passed, so I was gladder than ever I’d asked Jeff to remove his WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER button before we entered the ballroom. The way I saw it, the fewer waves we made, the better.
The stage manager was called away about a lighting problem, which enabled us to case out the place on our own. There was a fairly short, straight route from the dressing room to the stage, so the gauntlet I’d have to run as myself wasn’t as bad as it might have been. As for mikes, there were several on stands along the edge of the stage, so Jeff agreed to bolt out and leave one on the floor during the brief moment of darkness before my entrance. I should grab it on my way to Philip, Jeff said, and just start singing.
“What if it’s dead?” I asked.
“I’ll find you a live one.”
I told him, if he didn’t, he’d be dead.
“What about the award?”
“What about it?”
“Can you carry that and the microphone?”
“Fuck, no.” This fairly crucial logistical point hadn’t even occurred to me.
“OK…then leave the award.”
I popped my eyes at him. “He has to get the award, Jeff.”
“Why?”
“He just does. I’m not trying to ruin his evening.”
“Then come back and get it. Or I’ll bring it to you.”
“That’s not very graceful.”
He shrugged. “A coup d’état never is.”
“If you’re trying to make me nervous,” I told him, “you’re doing a swell job.”
He gave me a droopy-eyed smile. “Take the award out with you, then, and put it down when you pick up the mike. And take your time about it—work it. You know what to do. A spot’ll follow you the whole way, so make it into shtick. This isn’t anybody walking onto that stage, Cady. You will have their attention. And you’ve got some good props to work with.”
This made sense, I admit, even as it suggested new horrors. “What if they turn off the spot?”
“When?”
“When they see that it’s me.”
“They won’t do that.”
“Why won’t they?”
“Because Blenheim will be onstage, for one thing.”
“And?”
“And…this could be some last-minute surprise he planned himself. Isn’t he kind of famous for that?”
“Kind of.”
“So if he’s up there reacting to you—smiling and everything—they’ll think everything’s cool.”
“What if he’s not smiling?”
“He will be. He thinks he’s liberal, remember?” Jeff seemed to ponder something for a moment, then asked: “Are you just gonna sing?”
“What do you mean, just?”
He chuckled. “I mean…are you gonna say anything to him?”
“I guess I’ll have to.”
“Like what?”
“Who knows?” I’d thought about this a lot, of course, but still hadn’t decided on anything.
“What’s Mr. Woods’ big line?” asked Jeff. “The thing the suit says.”
I told him to forget it.
“Why? That might be the logical thing. It would help to connect you with the character.”
“Why do I have to be connected?”
“So they’ll know why you’re out there, Cadence. Besides, you want credit for the role, don’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“Makes sense to me.”
I told him he was right. Again. We left shortly after that, as soon as I’d checked out the stage from the top of the tiers. My heart did a few somersaults when I imagined the tiny fleck of flotsam I’d make in that sea of celebrity, but I was basically all right about it. Getting out of the suit was obviously the biggest hurdle; the rest would be like working a birthday party—only bigger.
Jeff dropped me off here at the house just after noon, arranging to pick me up again at six. He was bland about his goodbye—largely on my account, I think—but I could tell he was just as wired as I was. He honked a second farewell as he turned the corner out of sight, as if to assure me one more time that we were absolutely doing the right thing.
The house was a mess, since I’ve been anything but tidy lately in my preoccupation with the tribute. I fluffed a few pillows in the living room, threw out old newspapers, raked my dirty laundry into a single pile in the closet. They say this helps order the mind, but it didn’t do shit for me. I decided to confront my demons head-on and rehearse my number one more time, using what I’d learned about the layout of the stage. Enlisting my vibrator, Big Ed, as a substitute microphone, I slinked my way across the backyard, singing at the top of my lungs, stopping when I reached the banana tree that was supposed to be Philip.
I got through the whole song without a hitch. At the end, where the sea roar of applause should have come, I heard only the un-Zenlike sound of two hands clapping. This startled me so that I dropped Big Ed in the grass, then looked up to see Mrs. Bob Stoate grinning at me over the fence.
“That’s really pretty,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“I hope I didn’t scare you.”
“No.”
“Is that a hobby or something?”
“No,” I said evenly. “I do it professionally.”
“Really? I never knew that. I mean, I know you do movies sometimes, but…well, I never knew this.”
She was so obviously impressed that I lost my head and told her I was singing tonight.
“Really? Where?”
“At the Beverly Hilton. With Bette Midler and Madonna and Meryl Streep.”
She gave me a sickly little smile that made it clear she thought I was several sandwiches short of a picnic.