Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories

And he scrabbled out the window and disappeared.

I stared at the open window, a minute, maybe less, before I ran into the bedroom. Robin was gone. Bedsheets were strewn across the empty mattress. I yelled her name and heard a rustling coming from under the bed. As I came around to her side, she managed to pull herself free from under the low bed frame. Her eyes were wild with terror.

'Are you all right? Robin, are you all right?' I know I wasn't thinking clearly because I had the frenzied idea that somehow he had gotten to her while I was inside the study. She shook her head and tears brimmed up in her eyes.

'I thought he had a gun.' She sprang into my arms and we held each other. She was shaking, as though she had caught a chill, and foolishly I wrapped the comforter around her.

'It's all right, sweetie. He's gone. It's all over.'

Now that we were safe, the fear I hadn't felt earlier bubbled up in my veins, light as helium. We might have been killed. But no, I reminded myself, Robin had been safe. She'd been hiding. And then my brain snagged on a question.

'Robin, did you call 911?'

She shook her head no, her breath coming in hiccuping sobs now. I noted the phone on the nightstand, still in its cradle.

'It's okay, sweetheart,' I told her. 'Everything is going to be okay now.'

I was wrong about that, though. For starters, this incident has destroyed my sleep, not something I was great at to begin with. Even Robin, who can sleep like the dead for nine, ten hours at a stretch, starts at the slightest sound. She happens to be out at the moment, but it is a restless business: she jerks and twitches and occasionally whimpers something indecipherable.

Me, I watch and listen. It gives me a lot of time to think. And what I've been mulling over during these vigils is the possibility that my life has jumped the tracks. Or worse, that there were never any tracks to begin with.

Maybe a crack-addled brain can explain singling out a secure and well-lit apartment to burgle. But then, how to explain why I'm not dead, or at the very least lying in St. Vincent 's recovering from multiple slash wounds and sipping my dinner through a straw? Everyone says we were lucky, no one was hurt, nothing was stolen. And maybe I should feel grateful, but it's a disconcerting thought when you get right down to it. Luck cuts both ways.

Case in point: my life as an actor. When I moved here from Tulsa in '75, I gave myself five years to make it. I wanted to be a star, but one who did interesting, offbeat work, one who, even when LA came courting, would never completely abandon his roots in the theater. The actor's actor: a De Niro, a Pacino. I never owned up to wanting the stardom part, though. Instead, I made it known that I simply wanted to do good work, to be an artist, to have a life in the theater. At the time, these seemed like humble aspirations.

Nearing the end of my fifth year in New York, my resume listed a mercifully unnoticed workshop production, Nick in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Passaic Playhouse, the role of Flight Engineer on a TV movie of the week, and a smattering of extra work. Nights, I did phone solicitation, trying to sell vacation packages. In short, I hadn't made it by anyone's definition, but by the standards of a business where the unemployment rate hovers around ninety-two percent, I was holding my own. I had acquired my union cards and a decent, though not powerful, agent. I was paying my dues and honing my craft – quack, quack, quack, quack, quack – all the things I told myself while I dialed for dollars.

Then I got cast in an off-Broadway play called Crosshairs. I was convinced, along with the rest of the company, that we had our hands on a brilliant play, so I was not surprised, much less grateful, when the Times agreed. Frank Rich said my performance was 'disarming' and 'hilarious,' and I thought that, well, yes, that was about right.

The upshot was that my life was transformed. Suddenly casting directors were chummy, women brazenly available. The show moved across town to Broadway and started raking it in. I spent money like water, picking up checks for all my unemployed friends, buying a share in a summer rental out in Montauk. I signed autographs at the stage door and pretended modest surprise when people recognized me. More important, I started getting seen regularly for film roles, and there were a few key names in the business – what's the point of dropping names now? – they liked me and were introducing me around. The end of my fifth year came and went, and if I noticed, I don't remember.

Another nine years later, I am thirty-seven years old and I don't work much in the theater anymore. No, let's be honest: I haven't done a play in three years, and months go by between auditions. I have no explanation for any of this, none whatsoever. Except luck.

When people ask what I do, I say I'm an actor. Strictly speaking, though, what I do is bartend. I still snag the occasional commercial, and every once in a while my friend Stuart throws me a job recording a book on tape, but who's kidding who? Last week, I spent a morning pretending to be a crazed rodent in hopes of landing a national for Dobbin Copiers. I had no lines, just reaction shots: curious, excited, hysterical. Facial expressions were out, because there is some kind of mask involved. 'It's all in the squeaks, the body language,' the director told me with that amplified earnestness that commercial people indulge in to convince themselves they're doing something meaningful. I found myself thinking, as I squeaked and squealed for all I was worth, so this is what it comes to.

Everything could change again tomorrow – that's what keeps you in the game – but eventually you also have to face the possibility that it might not.

Down on the street, a car alarm shrieks to life. Robin's breathing suspends, her eyes snap open. We listen, wait through the moments it might take for the owner to stumble from his bed and into the street, but no one comes. The alarm caterwauls and then changes key to a series of bleats. I get up, peer out the window, see nothing, pull the window closed, and turn the AC on high to muffle the keening howls.

'Have you ever been to Santa Fe?' She doesn't look at me when she asks.

'No.'

'We went there once, to look at a horse Dad was thinking about buying. I remember I was surprised at how cold it was; it was December, but I thought everywhere in the Southwest was like Phoenix. It started to snow, and the arroyos blurred and turned white. It was the quietest place in the whole world.'

'Sounds nice,' I say, guardedly.

The morning after the break-in, Robin announced that she wanted to leave New York. A pretty natural sentiment, given the events of the previous night, but not the kind of comment you want to give too much weight. There's a garbage strike, one too many snowstorms in February, whatever, and everyone talks about getting out. I figured that Robin's was just one of those empty threats that every New Yorker makes against the city.

But she's still circling the subject. She reads the travel section first on Sundays now. She cooks up all sorts of possibilities in places like Durham, North Carolina, or Missoula, Montana. Every night it's a different town, and she puts herself back to sleep dreaming about the cottage or houseboat or cabin we would live in, the vegetables she would plant in our garden.

'If we were willing to go out a bit, we could still afford to get a place with a little land,' she continues.

'What would we do in Santa Fe?' I ask.

'I don't know, exactly.' Her voice stiffens. 'We'd come up with something, though. We're bright, capable people.' What she doesn't say, though, and it hangs heavy in the air between us, is that her options are greater than mine. She can get a personnel job anywhere, but I can't imagine there's much demand for actors in Santa Fe.

'I just can't see myself there,' I tell her.

'Well, where can you see yourself?'

'I don't know.'

She sighs, deeply frustrated with me.

'Honestly,' I say, 'don't you think the idea of packing up the jalopy and heading out West is a little over the top?' Sometimes a note of levity works with Robin. I'm guessing from her silence that this isn't one of those times. I try a different tack. 'After all,' I remind her soothingly, 'this is our home.'

Robin's eyes drift to the windows, to the streetlight seeping through the metal security gates and making hatch-marked shadows on the window shades.

'You yourself said that you might as well be in Kansas,' she says.