Going Dark

I am an aging actor. Well, I was one, but I seldom get opportunities to audition any longer. When I do I'm rarely called back.

Actors are notorious prevaricators. There's a simple explanation for this. We like to think of ourselves as a tabula rasa until the script or dialogue is in hand. That's when we come to life. But it isn't ours. Luigi Pirandello wrote about such matters.

So if you were to ask, say, Where do you live?—I will lie and recall my most recent role, offering that person's address.

How many children do you have? Then I must think back to when I played a father, and answer: six. He was a German soldier in a little known World War II drama I starred in Off-Off-Broadway. His name was Josef, and he'd hidden his SS Waffen uniform under the attic floorboards for fear that it would be discovered by one of his offspring.

And your wife—who is she? I've had many, but then I picture the comeliest, Alana, whose raven black hair she'd braid in one glorious strand. When she climbed the stairs to bed at night, I'd watch it sweep from the left side of her porcelain back to the right, pendulum-like. In a pre-Technicolor film, I'd taken her home to my widowed mother, who lived in Ohio. That evening when Alana retired to my old bedroom, Mama inquired if she were a "Jewess."

Immediately I visualized my uniform up in our attic. But there was no attic. And my surname is Daugherty. Well, it was in a television commercial where I played the bank manager, Christopher Daugherty. When we'd wrapped up the one-day shoot, walking out of the studio, famished, I laughed to myself. I hadn't a dime in my pocket. If I had borrowed the bespoke three-piece and those to die for calfskin cap-toe shoes I wore, posing before a Chippendale desk, I could have passed myself off in a restaurant as someone of means. When the check arrived, I'd feign I'd left my wallet in my Bank of North America office and would return posthaste with cash.

"And your name, sir?"

"Daugherty … Christopher Daugherty." I'd grimace to the waiter. "My wife, Alana, who comes in here often, will be mortified to hear what I've done."

Then I'd gather my overcoat and gesture Be right back. But where did I put it? I remember seeing it on a coat tree, a camel's-hair model with bone buttons, alongside the desk. And wasn't there a hat also—a felt narrow-brim Dobbs? Did I forget that?

Christ, Alana will think I'm losing my mind.

Will she inform the neighbor, Mrs. Mueller, who periodically knocks on our side door and hands Alana a tuna fish casserole she's prepared? The two women talk as if they're old friends. But how could they be? Beatrice Mueller is Josef's wife. She must know what he's secreted above their bedroom ceiling. She complains to Alana of severe migraines. Alana commiserates. Of course, I know why she has headaches.

I've suffered from one ever since I watched a chiaroscuro Nazi movie as a 12-year-old. Except when I took on that cinematic role I was a graduate student at the University of Southern California, smoking and seeing women. Not Alana—I hadn't had the pleasure of meeting her yet. But I knew it would happen one day because as I ran through them, the women kept growing lovelier. Once the studio technicians applied my makeup, I was genuinely frightened with what I saw in the mirror. A good 10 years had been lopped off my life. And with them the anxieties of adolescence returned within minutes. From puberty through my early teens I'd suffered this inexplicable anguish that I was about to die. In fact there was this character in my head who owned a basso profundo voice—it could have been Josef Mueller—lecturing me...