Laura Lippman - Another Thing to Fall

It was only this year, after seeing Bob’s strange passive reaction to defeat, that George had come to realize that Bob had some of the same problems as Marie. The difference was that Bob had coped by inserting a camera between himself and the world. He could function as long as he had a lens, as long as he was on the sidelines, framing the story. This year, for a few heady months, Bob had seen himself as the hero, in center frame, the little guy who was going to take on the Goliaths and win. But he was one of the ordinary folks that Goliath trampled, one of the people you never heard about. In the end, it was Bob’s dream that killed him. A case could be made that all George was doing now was trying to avenge his best friend’s death, by any means necessary, and in a movie, that would make him the hero.

In the bedroom, Marie’s snores roared on, a strange sound track to the dreamy, beautiful creations her brother had left behind.

Tess’s reporting career may have been short-lived, but she still had met her share of famous people. Presidential candidates, Nobel Prize winners, a couple of minor movie stars, and, in a rather startling turn of events, Boris Yeltsin, who had mistaken her for a member of his welcoming party and swept her up in a vodka-infused bear hug. Tess had actually been on deathwatch, a morbid little reporting detail in which a junior staffer ensures that luminaries arrive and depart a city safely, but it had seemed more tactful to let Yeltsin have his version of the event.

Tess had enjoyed those encounters for the anecdotes they provided, but she had never gone civilian on a source, or felt the smallest whiff of fan-girl excitement. Until now, going for coffee with Johnny Tampa, something she had actually imagined when she was in middle school. Well, not coffee. She had probably envisioned an ice cream date or a romantic dinner in some candlelit venue. But she would settle for Bonaparte Bread, the high-end pastry shop only a few blocks from the high-rise where Selene lived. The request had seemed to unnerve Johnny, yet it apparently didn’t occur to him that he could say no. Tess knew from the call sheet that he wasn’t scheduled for pickup until noon.

He was waiting for her when she arrived, a true non-diva move. The lean, sharp features that she had idolized as a teenager were somewhat obscured by middle-age fleshiness, but when he smiled, he was the heartthrob that she recalled. Tess noticed that other women in the pastry shop also responded to Tampa ’s smile and manner.

“You’re the one in charge of guarding Selene, right?”

“I’m handling that detail with my friend, Whitney, yes.”

“Right, the scary blonde. So how come one of you didn’t catch her sending me that stupid magazine?” He brushed off Tess’s reply before she had a chance to formulate it. “Oh, she’s too smart to do it herself, but I know she put someone else up to it. Someone on the crew, or maybe even Ben Marcus.”

“Why do you think that one of the producers on the show would be willing to do that for Selene?” she countered, fishing. Maybe Ben’s relationship with Selene wasn’t the well-kept secret he believed it to be.

“Because he’s mean . He’s always teasing me about my weight. A young skinny guy like him, he probably thinks it’s funny that I have a… glandular problem.”

A glandular problem . Tess couldn’t remember the last time she had heard that euphemism. Then again, current science was on Tampa ’s side, making the case that willpower wasn’t enough for some people to lose weight.

“But Ben wants you to be happy, right? Ben and Flip. They see you as the linchpin of the show.”

“So they say.” He chewed thoughtfully on his chocolate croissant. “They say they wrote the show for me, and they can’t help that the network is hot for Selene. They talked pretty big, when they were trying to get me for this. Now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t have entertained some of the other offers I had. At least I wouldn’t have to live here . Sorry. No offense.”

It happened to be one of Tess’s least favorite phrases, a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too bit of rhetoric that demanded the listener forgive the speaker for saying something impossibly rude.

“If the show goes,” Tess said, “you’ll be here quite a bit.”

“Yeah,” he said. “And in winter yet. I don’t do winter.”

“It’s relatively mild.”

“No such thing to someone like me, who grew up in Florida and has lived in California since age sixteen.”

“How did you get into acting?” She knew, of course. She could recite much of Johnny Tampa’s biography from memory. But she was trying to get into a groove with him, find an innocuous topic that they both could enjoy, and she figured that Johnny Tampa was one of Johnny Tampa’s favorite subjects.

“Mickey Mouse Club,” he said.

“So you were in the Mickey Mouse Club and then you went out to California to do” – she pretended to grope for the name of his first show – “ High School Confidential .”

“I went out to California with nothing promised to me. But my mom believed in me, and she agreed to go out for a year, see what I could get started. The year was almost up when I landed the featured part on High School Confidential, then got the lead in The Boom Boom Room . And the rest is history.”

Of a sort, Tess thought. If one had very low standards for what constituted history. “But you’ve been taking some… time off, as of late?”

He had moved on from the chocolate croissant to a Napoleon. It was hard for Tess not to wonder if he was a bulimic, albeit one who had mastered the binge without learning how to purge. Tess hadn’t eaten this much even in her competitive rowing days. Or, come to think of it, her own bulimic teens.

“You’re very polite,” he said. “Everybody knows what happened to me. I left television to make movies, and not a single one of them hit. It wasn’t my fault – in every case, I could show you what rotten luck we had, none of it connected to me – but you get only so many chances. That is, if you were a star on television, you only get so many chances. Meg Ryan was on a soap. Julianne Moore, too. Hilary Swank did a bit part on my show. But they weren’t well known when they started making movies. I wonder if they have any juice here. I would love a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.”

He looked around with the expectation of someone who usually had a person at his beck and call, but then life on set was like that, in Tess’s limited exposure to it. For the leads, it was a magical world of enabling elves. Makeup people appeared to touch up the actors’ faces, food kept arriving, transportation was arranged. The theory seemed to be that the actors shouldn’t expend any energy on activities beyond their performances.

“What do you do with your downtime? Here in Baltimore, I mean.”

“Read, mainly. I like science fiction.” He sounded a little defensive, but Tess was charmed. In most actor interviews she had read, the oh-so-serious thespians were always claiming to be reading Faulkner or Pynchon, or the cool book of the moment. She never believed those actors, but she had a hunch Johnny Tampa was telling the truth.

“Have you made any friends on set?”

“I like the guys in the present-day scenes – but I’m not with them that much. Actually, it’s not a bad thing for my character – I’m isolated, the way he is, cut off from old friends and family, in a strange place. It’s good for my character,” he said, making the point a second time, as if trying to convince Tess – and himself. Tess couldn’t help noticing, however, that he omitted any mention of Selene, with whom he had the bulk of his scenes.