Debra Dean - Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories

Afterward, the cops said we should have had the window closed. Never mind that there was a locked gate covering it. Never mind that a ten-year-old couldn't squeeze his hand through the openings. According to them, I should have known that some crackhead with an hour to spare, a metal file, and the manual dexterity of Houdini could crouch on a fourth-floor fire escape and somehow saw off the lock.

There was a rustling sound coming from the study across the hall. I went into the room. A rickety thin man stood in the shadow of the open closet door, his hands pushing through the rack of winter clothes stored there. He saw me, and we stood there a long moment, eyeing each other, neither of us certain what to do next. In the dark, his eyes were glazed and bright.

I began to talk quietly, soothingly. "Everything's going to be okay. It's going to be fine. Really." Over and over, the same words, as monotonous and meaningless as the Swedish floating in from the next room.

In slow motion, his hand went into the pocket of his jacket.

"I got a gun," he said, but his hand stayed in his pocket and it was dark. It might be a gun, it might be just his hand, no way of knowing. "Turn around. Get down on your knees, motherfucker."

"I can't do that," I said, "but it's going to be all right. No one's going to get hurt."

I could hear my heart thudding in my ears and the sound of this voice, my voice, but far away and as calm and detached as a doctor's. "Everything's going to be fine. Just go back out the way you came and everything will be fine."

Miraculously, he moved to follow my instructions. I stepped away from the door, and he stepped toward it. We circumscribed a slow half-circle, like dance partners. A step, another step, the murmuring of my voice, my heart doing the rumba, and this guy, his eyes locked onto mine. He was afraid, too. I could see it.

When he got to the door, he tried to pull it shut with me inside, but my hand caught the other side of the knob and pulled back.

"It's going to be okay," my voice said. "I can't stay in here, but it's going to be okay." I thought of Robin asleep in the bedroom. Maybe a minute passed, each of us pulling, then I felt the pressure release on the other side, and the door swung open. He was disappearing into the kitchen. I followed him around the corner, still talking, and planted myself in the doorway while he backed slowly toward the open window. Under the lights of the kitchen, he looked frail and less dangerous than I'd imagined. Maybe it was the baseball cap. I remember being surprised by that, the Mets cap. I was a Mets fan, too. He was still backing up, feeling his way behind him with the hand that supposedly had held a gun. A few inches short of our goal, almost home free, he stopped, and I saw his eyes light on a paring knife in the dish rack. He grabbed it and came lunging back across the kitchen toward me. I held up my hands to block him, thinking to myself I'm history now and feeling remarkably calm about that. Then, for no reason that I can imagine, he stopped, the knife a bare inch from my hands, wavering, glinting. Our eyes locked again and we stood frozen like actors in a film when someone stops the projector. This is it. See, this moment, right here. This is when everything changes.

And then the film jerked to life again.

"Don't tell him I was here, man," he said, shaking the knife at me for emphasis. He backed toward the window. I won't.

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.