Homesick for Another World(15)
“A beer commercial,” I said, backing away. “Your face,” I pointed.
“I’ll fix it,” he said. “Babe, we’re gonna be rich.” I watched him peel off his clothes and get into the shower. I sat on the toilet and clipped my toenails.
“The trick to acting,” he said from the shower, “is you really need to give it one hundred fifty percent. Your average actor gives maybe eighty, at most ninety percent. But I go all the way and then some. That’s the secret.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, flushing my toenails down the toilet. “Is that the secret to success?”
“Yeah, babe,” he assured me, whipping open the shower curtain. His body was a freckled mess of jerking muscles and stubble. He shaved his chest almost daily. He had a scar on his rib cage from where he’d been stabbed in a bar fight, he told me. He had all kinds of stories. He said back home in Cleveland he used to hang around with gangsters. He spent a night in jail once after beating up a pimp who he’d seen kick a German shepherd—a sacred animal, he explained. Only his story of burning down an abandoned house when he was sixteen had the ring of truth.
“And you know what else?” he said, squatting in the bathtub and slathering the towel between his legs. His towels were all stenched with mildew and streaked with rust stains, by the way. “I’m handsome.”
“You are?” I asked innocently.
“I’m a total stud,” he said. “But it creeps up on you. That’s why I’m good on TV. Nonthreatening.”
“I see.” I stood and leaned against the vanity, watched him wrap the towel around his waist, pull out his bag of makeup.
“I’m a face changer, too,” he went on. “One day I can look like the boy next door. The next day, a stone-faced killer. It just happens. My face changes overnight on its own. Natural-born actor.”
“True enough,” I agreed, and watched him dab concealer all over his nose.
? ? ?
While he was at his audition I walked around the apartment complex, kicking trash into corners. I sat in the concrete courtyard. There were birds everywhere, pecking at trash, lining the balconies, purring like cats between the succulents. I watched one walk toward me with a candy-bar wrapper in his beak. He dropped it at my feet and seemed to bow forward, then extended his wings wide, showing me the beautiful rainbow sheen of his jet black chest. He flapped his wings gently, with subtlety, and rose from the ground. I thought maybe he was trying to seduce me. I got up and walked away, and he continued to hover there, suspended like a puppet. Nothing made me happy. I went out to the pool, skimmed the surface of the blue water with my hand, praying for one of us, my boyfriend or me, to die.
“I nailed it,” he said when he came home from the audition. He shrugged the yellow blazer down his stiff arms, laid it on the back of the barstool at the kitchen counter. “If they don’t hire me, they don’t know what’s good for them. I really hit a home run.” I kept stirring the spaghetti. I nodded and tried to smile a little. “And I saw the other guys that were auditioning, and man,” he said, “they were all the worst. I’m a shoo-in. My agent call yet?”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
“I should go rub my crystal skull,” he said. “Be right back.”
? ? ?
I had a bad feeling about what my boyfriend had brought back from the post office. The box sat on the couch, unopened. He stood at the sink, vigorously scrubbing the plates from dinner, buttocks clenched and vibrating. “What’s inside?” I asked.
“Open it up, babe,” he said, turning slightly to make sure I caught sight of his devilish grin. It was the same grin he gave in his head shots. “Check it out,” he said.
I licked my knife clean and cut through the packing tape. The box was full of Styrofoam peanuts. I fished around inside and found a long shotgun padded in bubble wrap.
“What’s it for?”
“To shoot the crows,” my boyfriend said. He held a plate up to the light and polished it frenetically with a paper towel. I thought for a moment.
“Let me take care of it,” I said. “You need to focus on your career.”
He seemed stunned, put down the plate.
“You do enough around here,” I said. “Unless you would actually enjoy shooting those birds?”
He picked up the plate and turned his back to me.
“Of course not,” he said. “Thanks, babe. Thanks for your support.”
He slept that night with his phone next to his ear on the pillow and didn’t touch me or say anything at all except “Good night, Skully” to his crystal skull on the bedside table. I put my head on his shoulder, but he just rolled onto his side. When I woke up in the morning, he was staring at the sun through the smog on the balcony, holding his eyes open with his fingers, crying, it seemed, though I wasn’t sure.
? ? ?
I still hadn’t cleaned the vacant apartment by the time the couple showed up to see it in the afternoon. I found them wandering around in back by the pool, sharing a huge bag of Utz potato chips. The man was younger, maybe midthirties, and wore a button-down shirt much too big for his wiry frame. The shirt had rectangular wrinkles in it, as though it had just been taken out of its packaging. He wore jean shorts and sneakers, a red Cardinals hat. The woman was older, very tanned and fat, and had long salt-and-pepper hair parted in the middle. She wore a lot of turquoise jewelry, had something tattooed on her forehead between her eyes.