me to my dressing room. Halfway there, we pass a guy coming the other way. He looks like something you might see at a sinister theme park: an enormous white rat in standard issue business attire – pale blue dress shirt, rep tie, chalk-striped trousers – but minus the paws, which I've left on the set. There's a large furry headpiece with pink ears and eyes, a pointed snout maybe two feet long and with stiff plastic whiskers. Human eyes peer out through wire mesh in the mouth. A bubble of anxiety loosens in my bowels. As we pass, I take note of the long, rubbery tail emerging from the seat of his trousers.
'That's the stand-in,' Jodi informs me. 'I got assaulted at a club,' she adds, making conversation. The remark strikes me as a bizarre segue until I remember that, in theory, we are fellow crime victims.
'These guys come up behind me and one of them, he, like, smashes me on the head with a beer bottle. For no reason. I was just standing there. I had to have six stitches.' As she's talking, I realize that what I had taken for a speech impediment is actually a tiny silver barbell implanted in her tongue. I am attracted and repelled in about equal measure.
'Is that what happened to you?' she asks.
'What?' I snap back into the present moment.
'Were you, like, an innocent bystander?'
'No, I guess I provoked this one.'
We have arrived at my dressing room. She points me inside and tells me that Sheila will help me with the costume when they're ready. I thank her, but she hangs in the doorway expectantly.
'So, did you try to fight them for your wallet?' She brushes a wisp of invisible hair out of her face and squirms against the door.
'No. I didn't have my wallet with me. I was just out walking my dog.' For some reason, it seems important to stay on the technical side of the truth.
Her expression brightens with childlike glee. 'Oohhh,' she coos. 'You have a dog?'
What the hell, I go ahead and invite Jodi into my dressing room. I offer her one of my donuts, which she declines with a wrinkled nose.
Girls are one of the perks of being an actor. You might think that you'd have to be a handsome leading man to get the women, but I am proof positive that this is not the case. Even a thirty-seven-year-old schmoe playing a lab rat in a commercial and with one eye resembling a rotting onion can, in fact, attract women. Not grown women perhaps, but it's not a quibble to give the average guy pause. Not this one anyway. It even crosses my mind that maybe I could get along in the world without Robin after all, armed as I am with a dog and a SAG card.
Jodi and I compare notes on urban crime and I relate, immodestly, my recent encounter with the burglar in my apartment. She is rapt as I recount his demand that I get down on the floor, my refusal, his threatening me with the paring knife. 'And the funny thing is,' I tell her, 'I was calm the whole time. Calm is not my usual style,' I admit, 'but I was talking to this guy like I was his shrink.'
A stickler for the truth, I don't neglect to include Robin in the story, but the mention of a wife doesn't cause any visible wrinkle in Jodi's attention. This means that either I have misjudged her interest or she is one of those young women for whom a wife is not regarded as the slightest impediment. Either way, it dampens my enthusiasm. I cannot pretend, not even long enough for a protracted flirtation, that I am not married.
'I have a couple of calls to make,' I tell her. 'Is there a phone somewhere I can use?'
''There's a pay phone back the way we came.'
'Thanks, Jodi. I'll see you later.' I wait for her to exit, and then follow her down the hall at a safe distance.
When I dial the number in Maine, I fully expect to get the answering machine – this will be my fourth message in three days, not counting hang-ups – and I'm trying to decide how much to say, specifically whether I should mention my black eye, which would then involve explaining how I came to attack a complete stranger on the street last night, when I hear Robin's voice. I'm startled into silence until she says hello again, this time phrased as a suspicious question. It s me.
'Dan.' She says my name in a pitch that suggests someone else is in the room with her. 'I tried to call you.'
'I know. I'm sorry. I was out with Stuart and it got late, and then when I tried to call you yesterday, you were gone.'
'How's Stuart?' Still the neutral conversational mode.
'He's fine, I guess. He's working on one of those books, some Eastern mystic's guide to striking it rich in the stock market, so every time he opens his mouth, he sounds like a late-night FM disc jockey. But other than that, he's good.'
I translate the length and weight of her silence like Morse code: whoever was there has cleared out, and she doesn't have to be polite anymore.
'I got the commercial,' I tell her. 'Actually, that's where I'm calling from. I'm on a break now.'
'That's good, right?' I don't know whether she means that it's good I'm on a break or good that I booked the commercial, but her inflection indicates that she is impatient with this chitchat. If I called simply to tell her I booked this stupid commercial, she's got better things to do. My sleep-deprived brain is slogging along at a maddeningly slow pace, and I can't devise what to say next. How to…
'So, what's going on, Robin?' I blurt. 'Are you going to leave me?'
There is another exquisitely full silence, and I know without a doubt that she has been considering this very question, that she is considering it still, as we speak. Telepathy is hardly the occult talent it's made out to be; spend eleven years with another person, each of you curbing your own will and trying to bend the other's, trying, that is, to twine in the same general direction, and you find that words become not unnecessary but supplemental.
'I don't know. It's not that I want to. But…' She stops and we both mentally review all the good reasons she has to leave.
'I don't want you to,' I say.
'I know.'
And there we are. There is another painful silence that I don't know how to fill. The thing I want to say – the world would be empty without you – I can't seem to say, although it's true. One of the comforts of marriage has been the dailiness that doesn't require or even allow poetic passion. And so I suppose our vocabulary has become stunted by familiarity. Often, I will tell her I love her in the perfunctory way of ending phone calls or saying good night. I'll listen with one ear cocked to the game while she tells me the events of her day. We bump companionably along, adjusting without thinking if something chafes. Oh, now and again I'll happen to glance at her standing in front of the bathroom mirror in one of my old T-shirts, and my breath will catch unexpectedly. Or she'll casually disclose some facet of herself that she's just never happened to mention – she can walk on the backs of her toes, she was state champ in women's archery, she wants to go to the Galapagos Islands before she dies – and I'll have a fleeting rush of admiration for what an amazing, original woman she is. But for long stretches I am as unaware of Robin as of my own breath. Only now that I am jerked up short by the possibility of loss, when I see that love, too, is mortal and fragile, only now do I fully realize what I stand to lose here.
'Is it living in New York?' I ask. 'I mean, is that what we're talking about?' I'm not at all sure that I can quit the city, but if that's what's required, I want to know.
'I don't want to do this on the phone, Dan. Let's wait until I get home.'
Long after we have said good-bye, I am still holding the receiver and staring into some vague middle distance. The phone squawks for a while, then eventually falls silent. When I bring the receiver back to my ear, I hear the sound of the sea.
I pass a blank hour before the wardrobe person, Sheila, arrives with the costume and supervises my dressing. I'm guessing she must have small children at home. She tells me to strip to my shorts, and while I do, she watches with total disinterest. Then she hands me one item of the costume at a time, first the undershirt, then the furry white knee-high socks, then the crisp blue dress shirt, all the while narrating her views on street crime as I dress. She holds up the trousers but then retracts them.
'Do you need to pee first?' she asks.
I assure her I'm fine, but she is unconvinced.
'There's a girdle in here to keep the tail erect. Once we've got you in, you're in for the duration.'
She waits while I excuse myself into the adjacent bathroom. I shut the door and then stand at the toilet and
