Universe 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  Tiernan and his sultry companion presented two awards for documentaries. The Rakestraws watched both presentations without speaking, fascinated by the eerie spectacle. Daddy was—or had been—a famous movie star.

  “All right,” Nora said. “They’ve seen him. Can’t they go to bed now? Upstairs, I mean.”

  Rakestraw insisted that the twins stay for the Best Actor presentation, and Gayle and Gabe importuned their mother so enthusiastically that she had to relent. Tiernan’s appearance on the program had dislodged the sleep from their eyes.

  Another forty minutes passed before the Best Actor nominations were read, at which time a camera located Tiernan in the crowd and focused on him for almost half a minute. Then the screen was filled with that scene from Yeardance in which the title character comes face to face for the first time with the “lepers” under his care. It was a gruesome bit of film, but quickly over with. Tiernan, spotlighted again among his applauding colleagues, suddenly looked tense and uncertain. His smile was a rictus of counterfeit calm. Rakestraw could not recall ever having exercised the facial muscles that would produce such an expression.

  “He really wants it.”

  ‘They all do,” Nora said. “It’s natural that they should.”

  The other nominees were shown, along with clips from their films. But the winner was not Tiernan. The winner was an eccentric Hollywood leading man who had made his first film during the early years of World War II. The auditorium rang with shouts and applause, and a television camera dollied in on Tiernan, cruelly, as he feigned a self-effacing grimace and then waved heartily at the victor threading his way to the stage.

  “There’s the Academy Award performance,” Rakestraw said.

  “Are you happy now?” Nora asked.

  “Not yet,” Rakestraw confessed. “Not yet.”

  * * * *

  The next day he drove to Ladysmith, a good-sized textile town about thirty-five miles south of Caracal, and purchased a videocassette recorder. In several different record and television shops he informed the clerks or sales managers that he wanted to buy videocassettes of all Craig Tiernan’s movies.

  “All of ‘em?” asked a young woman with an unattractive blond Afro who was clerking in a shop at the Ladysmith Mall.

  “That’s right—all of ‘em.”

  “Well, you can buy some of the early films legit, but the most recent ones—you know, Yeardance and the remake of Dark Passage—well, you’re not likely to find those anywhere but on the black market”

  “I don’t mind. Can you help me?”

  “Hey, are you a cop?”

  “No, I’m just a Craig Tiernan fancier.”

  The girl tilted her head and gave him an appraising look. “I might be able to help you if . . .”

  “If what?”

  ‘Take out your wallet and let me go through it,” the clerk challenged him.

  Rakestraw took out his wallet and laid it on the counter. Surprised, the girl picked it up, glanced at Rakestraw, and then began folding out the laminated cards and photographs until she came to his driver’s license.

  “Cripes,” the girl said under her breath. “You’ve got Craig Tiernan’s picture on your driver’s license. You ain’t a cop, are you? How in holy Christmas did you manage that?”

  “I’ve got a friend at the Highway Patrol station.” The lie made Rakestraw infinitely happy. Three or four weeks ago he had taken an intense private pride in his truthfulness, even in situations where a small distortion of the truth would have saved him either time or embarrassment.

  “All right, mister. I guess it also looks like you can pay for what you want.”

  The clerk sold him the two black-market cassettes at steep prices, found five or six old Tiernan films in inventory, and helped him fill out an order for seven other Craig Tiernan vehicles. That was the whole shebang. Tiernan was still a young actor and, Rakestraw had learned, he was notoriously picky about the roles he accepted.

  * * * *

  “That’s the third time today you’ve watched Dark Passage,” Nora told Rakestraw one midnight shortly after his visit to Ladysmith. “Bogart was twice as good in that part, too. What do you think you’re accomplishing?”

  “I never saw Bogart in the part. I think Tiernan does a pretty fair job, really.”

  “It’s a pretentious and outdated movie, Tom. Using the camera as a character was fine the first time around, but in this remake it just seems silly. Self-conscious. The girl isn’t as good as Bacall, either.”

  “How come you know so much about it?”

  “I used to watch all the late movies on TV . . . until you started asking me out. Come to bed, Tom.”

  Rakestraw leaned forward, propped his chin on his fists, and continued to stare at the low-quality tape he had bought in Ladysmith. “You’ve got both critics and moviegoers on your side, Nora. Everything I’ve read about this one says it was a bomb. Tiernan and what’s-her-face got panned, and no one went to see it until Yeardance was released a couple of months later. Then, they say, Dark Passage suddenly got hot at the box office.”

  Nora, standing in the doorway, looked with angry compassion at her transfigured husband. “The story fascinates you, doesn’t it?”

  Alerted by the cryptic tone of her voice, Rakestraw looked toward her. “A man with a past he has to overcome has plastic surgery and takes off to make a new life. Sure it fascinates me. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why, either.”

  “I’m going to bed, Tom. Do you want me to turn on your half of the electric blanket?”

  When he shook his head, Nora left him in the den and walked through the dining room to the staircase.

  Later, Rakestraw also went upstairs. But he strode down the hall to the guest room, turned on the light, locked the door, sat down at the antique vanity, and removed a small tape recorder from its drawer. Then he began contorting his altered features back toward the shapes he had known them to have only a few short weeks ago. Silently, hunching his shoulders and then straightening them again, he mimed the gestures that were Tiernan’s hallmark as an actor. After a time he began to speak as Tiernan had spoken in Dark Passage. It astonished Rakestraw how easily and successfully the impersonation came to him, but he kept his voice down in order not to awaken Nora.

  * * * *

  Two days later, Nora was surprised to look out the kitchen window and see parked on the edge of the yard an automobile bearing on its left-hand door the insignia of one of the state capital’s major newspapers. Then a young woman with a camera case slung over her shoulder and a notebook in her hand knocked for admittance. Daffodils were growing in the grass between the kitchen door and the dirt road, and the young woman, her dark hair pulled back and tied in a navy-blue scarf, looked sunny and efficient.

  “Is this the Rakestraws’ residence?” she asked when Nora had opened the heavy Dutch door. “I’m Michelle Boyer, with the World-Ledger. I’ve got an appointment to talk with your husband.”

  Nora led Michelle Boyer into the den, where Rakestraw was intently watching Craig Tiernan in Good Country People, one of his early major films. Rakestraw turned off the videocassette and shook hands with the reporter, whereupon Nora, angry that her husband had said nothing to her about expecting a visitor, prepared to leave the two of them to whatever business they might have.

  “Stay,” Rakestraw said. “I think she’d like to hear what you have to say too, Nora. It’s very important that she hear it, in fact.” Finally Nora permitted herself to be persuaded.

  Over the next two hours Rakestraw submitted to several photographs, and he and Nora detailed for Michelle Boyer the changes that had occurred in their lives because Craig Tiernan had invoked the Physiognomic Protection Act against him.

  “I was the first defendant in this state,” Rakestraw said, “and I lost on the basis of physical measurements of my skull and facial features. The data went to court, but I didn’t.”

  “You’re being compensated handsomely for the trauma, aren’t you?�
�� asked Boyer, taking the devil’s-advocate role and writing in her notebook.

  “Five hundred dollars a month. Which Tiernan, out in Oregon, writes off his income tax as a business expense.”

  “Are you looking for a larger settlement?”

  “I’m not,” Nora put in. “I don’t know what Tom’s looking for. The monthly check from Tiernan has turned him around. He spends all his waking hours doing what you found him doing when you came in. Two months ago he would have been chopping wood, preparing the ground, ordering seed.”

  “And now he obsessively watches Craig Tiernan movies?”

  “He’s a changed person, and I’m not just talking about his face. He’s different inside. He admits it himself,”

  “What do you want,” Boyer asked Rakestraw pointedly, lowering her notebook, “if it isn’t more money?”

  “Do you think this is fair?” Rakestraw asked her in turn. “Giving up a portion of myself because of another man’s vanity?”

  “You didn’t have to opt for surgery, did you?”

  “Not if I didn’t mind moving to a war zone in Africa or an A-bomb test site in the Marshall Islands.”

  “What’s been the effect on your children?”

  ‘They’re distant. They don’t really believe I’m their father. They obey me without question.” Rakestraw laughed.

  “You don’t sound like Craig Tiernan,” Michelle Boyer observed. “How closely did you resemble him? Do you have any photographs?”

  Nora took a padded leather photo album from one of the bookshelves and also found the infamous election poster. These she gave to the reporter, who glanced at the poster and then began turning the pages of the album.

  “I think the resemblance is uncanny,” she said after a while. “I can understand why Tiernan would have been alarmed. The danger of exploitation and overexposure is a real one to a celebrity who’s worked his or her entire professional life to create a viable public image. Do you remember the Presley imitators? In those days death put Presley in the public domain, but then came the impersonators of living celebrities. Those exploiters didn’t merely imitate their famous victims, Mr. Rakestraw, they had their faces surgically altered to resemble the President’s or Bob Dylan’s or Barbra Streisand’s—while those people were still alive. Often they could libel and rip off their victims at the same time. Court cases proliferated, and a great deal of time and money was wasted. Hence, in states like New York and California, the Physiognomic Protection Act. It was probably overdue getting here, if you want my opinion.”

  “But Tom didn’t surgically alter his face to resemble Tiernan’s,” Nora said. “It was his to begin with.”

  ‘That may be, Mrs. Rakestraw—but your husband’s face wasn’t essential to him in his livelihood. Tiernan was only trying to protect his livelihood.”

  ‘Tom Rakestraw was never a threat to Craig Tiernan’s livelihood,” Rakestraw said. “Never.”

  “Your voice isn’t at all like his,” Michelle Boyer observed again.

  “No, it isn’t,” Nora said.

  As if trying to make out the lineaments of the face that underlay his old one, the reporter looked at Rakestraw. “Why exactly did you call me down here?” she asked. “What did you want me to do for you?”

  Rakestraw went to the VCR unit, turned it back on, and wound it forward to the loft sequence in Good Country People. The three of them watched as Craig Tiernan, playing the Bible-selling mountebank Manly Pointer, seduced Lisette Corley as Joy-Hulga Hopewell in the scene that not only solidified Tiernan’s status as a rising beefcake star but earned him his present reputation as a formidable actor. It was impossible to watch Tiernan in this role, a piece of brilliant against-type casting, without laughing helplessly. As Nora and Michelle Boyer laughed, Rakestraw stepped forward and froze the motion picture on the screen at the precise point where Tiernan scrambled out of the loft with Corley’s artificial leg in his Bible case.

  “Is that why you had me come to Caracal?” the reporter asked. ‘To give me a private screening of the Great Leg Heist?”

  “Partly.” Rakestraw, facing the two women, set his feet apart, hunched his shoulders, and magically transformed himself into Craig Tiernan as Manly Pointer. When he spoke, the voice was Tiernan’s Manly Pointer voice; and when he moved, the illusion of Tiernan as a callow but caustic redneck salesman was overwhelming. That illusion obliterated the commonplace reality of the den and its homely furniture.

  “ ‘I may sell Bibles,’” ranted Rakestraw in his Tiernan-Pointer voice, “ ‘but I know which end is up and I wasn’t born yesterday and I know where I’m going!’”

  “Incredible,” said Michelle Boyer, applauding him enthusiastically when he was finished. “No props, either. Very, very good.”

  Nora was staring at him as if he had just stripped naked at a Methodist covered-dish dinner. She was almost beginning to wonder if Macmillan had sent home to her from the sanitarium the same man he had taken.

  Then the young reporter’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “That’s it, isn’t it? You’re going to try to milk your connection with Tiernan. You want notoriety, and you think the World-Ledger can give it to you.”

  Rakestraw let himself slump back into his own persona, which, over the past several days, had grown more and more protean and tenuous. Nora was conscious of a firm purpose somewhere inside him, but also of the fact that this purpose was one of the few phenomenological constants remaining to him. Twice recently he had wakened at night and sleepily asked her what his name was. Sometimes, when they had looked through the photographs she had just been showing Boyer, Rakestraw had failed to recognize himself. And although he always recognized Nora’s features in the faces of their children, he said he could never—anymore—discern the imprint of his own. . . .

  “That’s right,” Rakestraw said. “Don’t you think there’s a story here?”

  “Oh, undoubtedly,” Boyer acknowledged. “But you may not like the one I’m formulating.”

  “Balance it, or unbalance it, any way you like—but get in the violence done to both me and my family.”

  “Not to mention your burgeoning talents as an impersonator?”

  “Why not? I think they’re pretty goddamn pertinent.”

  ‘Tom!”

  “Good-bye, Ms. Boyer. I appreciate your driving down.” Rakestraw shoved his hands in his pockets and stalked out of the den.

  Nora led Michelle Boyer back through the kitchen and then walked with her out to her car. Daffodils fluttered alongside the gravel road, and the breeze was silken.

  “Try to remember,” Nora told the reporter, “that he was never like this before. That means something, I think It definitely means something. I hope you’re smart enough to figure out what”

  * * * *

  Under the headline cahacal man loses face to craig tiernan, / masks hurt with rare impersonations, the story appeared in the Sunday World-Ledger. The Rakestraws were surprised to find themselves reading a sympathetic human-interest feature, for, despite Michelle Boyer’s sunny good looks and her short-lived delight in Rakestraws impromptu performance, she had seemed something of an apologist for the Physiognomic Protection Act and Rakestraw had ended up swearing at her. But the story—complete with side-by-side photographs of Tiernan and the “new” Thomas Rakestraw—was a virtual paean to the Rakestraws and a forthright assault on the arrogance of legislation expressly designed to protect the privileged.

  “I’m proud of her,” said Nora. “I’m really proud of her.”

  “The sympathies of the thing aren’t as important as the fact that my story made the paper,” Rakestraw said. “This just makes it a little nicer, a little easier.”

  The following morning the telephone began to ring.

  Rakestraw spoke to the editor of the Ladysmith Times, to news personnel from three different television stations in the state, and to a man with a booking agency in Nashville, Tennessee. Although he discouraged this man on the grounds that he wasn’t yet ready to leave Ca
racal, he made appointments with several others; and over the next three days just that many television camera crews invaded the Rakestraw house to film him doing, sans props or makeup, the loft scene in Good Country People, the metamorphosis of Karst in Singularity, and the self-blinding of the tide character in Yeardance. A different scene for each camera crew. These mini-performances were shown on evening news programs in Ladysmith, Fort Lanier, and the state capital, each with an adulatory commentary and a brief interview with Rakestraw in his obsolescent persona as a wronged country boy.

  A wire service picked up Michelle Boyer’s story from the World-Ledger, and it was reprinted in newspapers nationwide.

  In the wake of these events, a clip of Rakestraw’s Tiernan-Pointer performance, originally filmed by the CBS affiliate in Fort Lanier, appeared the following Friday evening on network news, after which a rash of new telephone calls struck the house. Nora, after talking briefly with a woman in Lebanon, Kansas, who said she wanted to touch Rakestraw’s perfect body with her mind, unplugged the telephone jack in the den and then went upstairs to lift the phone in the bedroom out of its cradle.