Your Duck Is My Duck Read online

  * * *

  At home in New York, something was wrong. The rent had gone way up, her father said. The two of them moved in with Sandi, and Emma was to share a room with the two little kids until her father found a new apartment. Sandi was kind, but on the TV soldiers were trapped in a jungle with explosions and people were dying and dying, not like a movie, there was no ending, and her father couldn’t stop watching. What were they doing? He just shook his head.

  She was old enough to go on the plane by herself for the first time. Yes, now she remembers—on the plane alone. Her father had let her pick out a little suitcase. The consolingly familiar surfaces of the plane, its seats and the armrests that could move, arriving into the lush air, the sunsets shimmering in the fringes of the palm trees, Zoe’s pink dress, empty days, milk and cookies . . .

  There was a bicycle. Sometimes she rode over to Anton’s house, where she had stayed on visits when she was little, but her old friend was working on a movie. The housekeeper, Flora, would visit with Emma, and let her roam around the sunstruck rooms that were so familiar and yet so unfamiliar. Hello, house. Did it remember her?

  And then there was the day when the boy with the colorless hair and scabby knees was standing in Anton’s doorway and Emma stopped at the bottom of the driveway and they stared at each other and she turned around and bicycled back to Zoe’s.

  And there was the day, it must have been earlier, when Zoe took her shopping. They were all going to go out to dinner, Emma, Zoe, and Duncan, and why hadn’t Emma brought a party dress with her, Zoe said. “Close your mouth, darling, a fly will get in. You’ll need something pretty tonight. What was that crazy father of yours thinking?”

  They went to a shop and the lady there hugged Zoe, and Zoe picked out some dresses. There was a white cotton one. “Just look at that precious eyelet!” the lady said, and when Emma tried it on, the lady almost cried, she said, because Emma looked like a princess. Emma looked at Zoe.

  Zoe considered, and nodded. “All right,” she said. “We have to do something about your hair, darling, but that’ll have to wait until I can get you to Philippe.” Eyelet? “This,” Zoe said, indicating the magical little holes that made the dress look like it was floating.

  Later, it must have been later, that afternoon, Emma went out to ride her bike, but when she came back to the house, Zoe was slamming around. “Serena Lassiter! Can you believe it? Serena Lassiter—that vile girl! And this is the second part, the second one! That’s not acting, that’s mime. You can see that girl coming around the corner.”

  Duncan was darkly silent as Zoe stuffed Emma roughly into the delicate new dress. “Serena Lassiter does not look one week younger than I do!” Zoe was in no mood to go out, she had changed her mind—settled. Did she want to see any of those people? But Emma and Duncan were to go, nonetheless. She herself needed some privacy, please—some quiet.

  It was hard to sit in the car without creasing her new dress. Duncan said not to worry. At the restaurant they got out of the car and a man in a uniform got into it. Duncan came around to her side to help her out. Inside there were carpets and candles, and the soft chime of glass, laughter, silver, china. Behind the tall windows the palms swayed, and tossed their graceful branches.

  Back at the house, Zoe might be crying, but maybe it was best not to remind Duncan. He was cheerful, and handsomest of everyone there. He let her have a sip of his cocktail. The waiters brought her special things and spoke to her tenderly, as though she were soon to ascend the throne.

  If only she had a picture to show her father! Was there a postcard, she wondered, but she couldn’t explain to Duncan. You could never tell about her father, anyhow. Sometimes he didn’t like very nice things. Polluted, he said.

  * * *

  “Do you remember that photo of Zoe in my father’s play?” Emma asks Coral.

  “What? No—what play? That’s right, I’d forgotten he wrote plays.”

  “Oh, he used to,” Emma says. “He gave up.”

  “I remember that picture,” Duncan says. “It was up on her wall for a while, yes?”

  “I wonder what ever happened to that,” Emma says.

  “She looked so young . . . ,” Duncan says.

  “Well, it would have been the early 1960s,” Emma says. “They were in college. Zoe was only a sophomore.” Her father stands triumphantly on a stage in front of a crowd; his dark hair is still neatly cut and he wears a white shirt with a button-down collar, but his fist is raised, and the young faces looking up at him are rapt. Standing next to him, dewy, flushed, haloed with joy, and invisibly pregnant, is Zoe. “I’m in that picture, too, actually,” Emma says.

  The occasion is the curtain call at the first performance of the play Emma’s father wrote called Emma in the New World, an imagining of Emma Goldman’s reflections while she was on trial for inciting to riot.

  “Zoe as Emma Goldman?” Coral says.

  “She would have been very good as Emma Goldman,” Luther objects.

  “Indeed,” Roman says.

  “Oh, she could do anything, your mother,” Luther says. “She could be anyone. And she could make even the most vacuous, inconsistent, clichéd nonsense seem plausible.”

  Yes, there was her mother curled up on a sofa, no makeup on, as if she could absorb a part better without it, studying a script hour after hour.

  “She always seemed to believe that there was a real person locked away in the words, no matter how inane,” Duncan says. “It was always as if she was rescuing somebody lost there, or imprisoned.”

  “She never really got the credit she deserved,” Luther says. “The only thing people ever talked about was how pretty she was.”

  “Oh, I know,” Coral says. “Zoe was simply amazing. But Emma Goldman! For one thing, she was far too pretty.” And Emma has to laugh a bit, too.

  * * *

  Duncan Macgregor owes his reputation as an actor to his appearance. If you analyze his performances you will see that they consist largely of standing still. He has portrayed on film nine senators, seven of them fictitious, and three congressmen. Add to that his stage appearances as two more members of Congress. Out of all these, only one was corrupt, an unlikely average.

  After Anton returned to Europe in the mid-1980s, Macgregor’s lucrative but unadventurous career thrived. Others who had habitually worked with Anton fared less well. A number of those who had appeared in his early movies, such as Peter Lofgren and Tara Foley, had already passed away. And a new breed of directors, much younger men, notably Kenneth Pell and Rick Heaton, now dominated the public imagination. These directors had been profoundly influenced by Anton, they had learned from him, they had copied his tricks, they revered him, and audiences had forsaken him for them.

  Still, no other director seemed to be able to use his performers as effectively. And in his roles during that period, Kaminsky in particular, a very broad actor, is unconvincing, even ludicrously miscast. Zoe Sills had long outgrown her niche as ingenue, Pansy Resnik took on a series of trivial parts in B movies, and Coral Durance (who was rumored to have been an old rival of Zoe’s from their days of closeness to Anton) defected to New York, to work in theater, for which she had originally trained. Roman Karsk, whose performances never rose above workmanlike solidity, faded away entirely.

  * * *

  “Coral, do you mind if I ask you something?” Emma says.

  “You are asking me something, Emma dear.”

  “Did you ever actually have a fling with Anton?”

  “I might mind answering, though.”

  “You did have an affair with Anton?” Roman says.

  “Of course not,” Coral says.

  “You wouldn’t lie to me, of course,” Roman says.

  “Of course not,” Coral says again. “But I might lie to Emma.”

  “I can’t believe this!” Roman says.

  “I’m just joking,” Coral says.

  “You two?” Emma, wide-eyed, asks Coral and Roman.

  “Of cours
e not,” they say in unison.

  Well, who is Emma to judge?

  * * *

  They all concur: much of the stuff in the book about Anton’s early life probably is true, or at least is something that Rouse might have been told, by his mother if not by Anton; Zoe had alluded more than once, when Emma was young, to the hair’s breadth escapes, the wandering and hiding in the forests during the carnage, starving and stealing, laboring for the farmer under cover of night in the frozen field, the bribes, footsteps approaching the closet door, the forged passport . . .

  And it is surely the case that back there, way back before all the other women, there was Clement’s grandmother, fleeing, on the boat over with Anton, and that Anton made his way to California’s sunlight without her, by sheer will and brains and nerve, and started right off with cameras.

  Anton. The nice scratchy feel of his jacket when he picked her up, his laugh! How could that Anton have disappeared from Emma’s mind this whole time? Immensely old, courtly, remote, cryptic, ironic, fastidious . . . that accent of his! When she was little she craved hearing it, as if it was a special language that conveyed only the most important things.

  Well, no mystery about why he’d left Europe. And if the accounts are to be credited, he was the only one from his family who managed to. The mystery is why he returned.

  “After half a century,” Duncan marvels.

  “Well, for instance, my dear late wife injured her knee in a childhood accident,” Roman says. “And the whole rest of her life she could tell what weather was coming,”

  “He knew perfectly well how fast things can happen,” Coral says. “People always say, ‘Oh, things might not be great here, but it’s stable, our problems are ordinary.’ You know. And the next thing you know, laws are gutted, the economy comes crashing down, people are in the streets, it’s all the fault of the ones with beards or the ones without beards, or whoever . . .”

  “And he was sick of the pressure to make huge profits,” Roman says. “The big budget money. He was sick of the marketing and sick of having to meet with idiots and trying to explain what he was doing. Really sick of it.” Absently, he picks up the salt shaker, weighing it in his hand.

  “Well,” Duncan says. “Anyhow, those are the sorts of things people tell themselves. Explanations. You know.”

  “I suppose people always want to go home,” Emma says.

  “Even if they’ve never had a home in the first place,” Coral says.

  “And there would have been that other thing,” Roman says.

  “What other thing?” Duncan asks.

  “That other thing. You know, the now-or-never thing.”

  * * *

  Grainy rather than glossy, sepia lighting, the movies Anton ended up making in Europe, though more overtly harsh, weren’t too different from the ones he had made in America. There were the misleading clues, the tightening spirals of danger, approaching footsteps, neighbors inexplicably appearing, reflections in mirrors or puddles or windows, obstructed views . . .

  The European movies were as misinterpreted as the American ones had been, and briefly they were as popular. Then audiences in both Europe and America moved on to simpler, noisier, and less troubling movies.

  “They look very good now,” Duncan says. “I happened to see a couple of them recently. In my opinion, they’re due for a serious reevaluation.”

  “What were you up to in those years?” Luther asks Roman. “I lost track of you for quite a while there.”

  “Oh, me,” Roman says. “Well, I suddenly couldn’t stand any of it.” “The auditioning, the stupid parts, waiting for the phone to ring—with all due respect, what kind of life is that for a grown man? So I decided to grow tomatoes instead.”

  Coral smiles. “Remind me. How did that work out for you?”

  Roman spreads his hands in a shrug. “Who wants a life for a grown man?”

  Amazing—eighty-some years old, and they’re sort of flirting, Emma thinks. Good news. Or maybe not.

  “Heavens,” Luther says. “Can you believe that all that turned out to be then? At the time I somehow thought that it was now. Did it occur to you that it was going to be then?”

  “It didn’t need to occur to me,” Roman says. “I already knew it.”

  “But Luther means, did it occur to you,” Coral says.

  “Well, no,” Roman says. “Of course it didn’t occur to me.”

  “Aren’t you going to finish that bacon?” Luther asks Duncan.

  “Please,” Duncan says. “Help yourself.”

  * * *

  “Why don’t you and Duncan get married one of these years?” Emma remembers asking once. She was visiting. It was a few years after Anton had pulled up stakes, and she and Zoe were sitting in a café that served big salads Zoe liked.

  “I don’t want to get married again, darling,” Zoe said. “Why should I get married? I was married to your father. That was quite enough of that. I want my independence, I like having my own little house. Duncan and I are very happy as we are. And this way, if he goes off one day with some young girl, I won’t have the humiliation of being the wretched old wife.”

  No, but they weren’t in that café, Emma thinks—they were in Zoe’s house, because there was a little stack of scripts at the side of a sofa. “You don’t know what it’s like, darling, getting old. Look at those—all trash. Foolish busybodies, despicable mothers-in-law, horrible gargoyles, pathetic trolls, there are two bedridden souses somewhere in there . . . Every once in a while something comes in with a noble old hag, some plucky old hag, and how moving, how inspiring it is that despite her advanced years she’s finding solace and purpose in, what, in, I don’t know, in raising warthogs.”

  “Forty-two is not old,” Emma said.

  “Thirty-six, darling. Maybe in that East Coast paradise of yours a woman of my age is not all that old, but here I might as well be a thousand. A thousand! Thirty-six? It’s big news out here that women live that long! Just yesterday I got a call about something in which I’d be Austin Arles’s mother, can you imagine? Austin is five years older than I am! I mean of course I’ll take it. They’ll add a few wrinkles, I’ll dodder.”

  Emma sighed.

  “Not that it’s a large degrading part, naturally it’s a degradingly small degrading part. Oh! You can seriously not know what it’s like to become old.”

  “If I’m lucky I’ll get to find out one of these days,” Emma said.

  “But, no, darling, seriously. Of course it’s not so important if men don’t find you attractive any longer. That’s not an important thing. What’s important is—what’s important, what’s very, very important, is to make a place for yourself on the planet, your own little place. To do your work. You think people can’t take that away from you, but they can.”

  “Men still find you attractive, Zoe.”

  “Why don’t you call me Mother, darling? You never called me Mother even when you were a little girl. You were so sweet, darling, but you never called me Mother. I know what you think, you think, my mother is a silly woman, a superficial woman. My mother is just depressed because she’s lost her looks and men don’t find her attractive any longer, but Emma darling, do you think that took me by surprise? I’m not an imbecile. I was the pretty girl, but as long as I worked with Anton, I could do things that had some substance. Now, all that’s available is the old hag with no substance whatsoever. And even if you’re good enough to be the old hag, even if you have the stamina to wait it out, there are years of purgatory before you’re allowed even that.

  “But the worst thing is that you’re just not exactly part of the world any longer. When you’re young, everyone is holding hands, all your friends, even the people you don’t like, everyone in the world, but at a certain point, when you get older, you float a little off the surface of the earth. Everyone is rising up off the surface of the earth, everyone is farther away from one another—you can’t hold hands any longer, you stretch out your hand, but you can’t reach
anyone else’s, and when you look down, you see that what you thought was the world is just a wrapping around the world, a loose, disintegrating wrapper, with a faded picture of the world on it. The world is where young people live.”

  “You haven’t lost your looks,” Emma had said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Oh, I know you won’t be silly like me when you come to be my age.”

  “What if you’d had to spend your life working on an assembly line in a meat-packing plant?” Emma said. “What if you lived in a mining town where the air is poison and the men die underground tearing minerals and fuel out of rock—Mother? What if you always had to get up while it was still dark to gather firewood and fetch water from the stream miles away? What if the plantation was taking your little subsistence farm, what if the bank was taking your little house? What if there were always managers watching to see if you fulfilled your quota of stocking shelves or slinging burgers or checking out T-shirts? What if you’d been sold? What if you picked fruit in the scalding sun fourteen hours a day and lived in a trailer with six other people who were citizens nowhere? What if planes flew overhead all day every day, dropping bombs on your village? What if you lived any of the lives lived by most of the people in the world?”

  “Well, I don’t, darling, do I. Like everybody else, I live the life that I live. We’re each allotted the life of one particular person. We don’t choose it. I’ve had very good luck, I know that. And, frankly, darling, so have you. As it happens, you don’t work in a meat-packing plant, either. As I remember, you’ve just gotten yourself a lovely job with the Parks Department.” Zoe’s gaze was brief, irritable, final, as if Emma were only an annoying memory she was dispensing with.

  Emma remembers that look. She remembers it. Over and over, it makes something inside her tear, like the lining of an old, useless coat.

  “Ah, well,” Zoe had said, “you come by it honestly.”

  “What?” Emma demanded. “I come by what honestly?”

  “I never should have let you live with that gloomy, censorious, sanctimonious father of yours—never.”