Confessions Of A Falling Woman And Other Stories

Dan In The Gray Flannel Rat Suit

If I were to go to sleep right this minute, I could get maybe four hours. But that's a long shot. An inversion seems to be taking place in my life: I float blearily through days that are fleeting as dreams, and then snap to at about midnight for what feels like my real life.

What I'm discovering is that the life of an insomniac very probably resembles that of a cloistered monk. Take away the unexpected diversions that fill up one's days, the soothing distraction of other human beings, and then just try to avoid becoming contemplative. The mysteries of the universe saturate the night air, questions hang unanswered in the silence. The trick here is to stay anchored to the planet. It is why I tend so carefully to my habits.

Midnight, I walk the dog. Then I slide into bed beside my wife, Robin, and go through the motions of trying to sleep. I shift into a series of positions: on my side with a pillow tucked between my knees, then on my back, my stomach, and so on, eventually returning to the fetal position. After a half dozen or so reps, it's up to check that the front door and windows are locked. They are. Back to bed. Next, a review of every relaxation exercise I can remember from years of acting classes. Somewhere in there, Puck usually has to be walked again. He is twelve years old, and the heart medication the vet has him on causes a prodigious thirst. Once I've escorted him down to the street and back, we both get a drink of water, he gets a dog biscuit, and I help myself to a few cookies. Then I settle in front of the tube and run the channels. Sometimes I get lucky and stumble onto a good movie. One of the channels is doing a Gene Kelly festival this week, so I watched the last half of On the Town before I came to bed tonight. After a while, I undress again and return to bed. I lie in the dark, as I'm doing now, watching for the shadows in the room to shift, waiting for the dark to gather itself into some recognizably malevolent shape.

The street lamps cast a dim light through the window shades, enough to see bulky shadows in the bedroom: the highboy, the television, the valet stand lurking in the corner. Now and then a car swishes by up on Prospect Park Drive. Farther out, past our quiet neighborhood, the city buzzes with sirens and car alarms and the muted rumble of traffic on the BQE, but my ears are tuned to this room, the rooms on either side, the circumscribed territory of a city dweller. All is quiet just now, except for the rhythm of Robin's breath and the dog's light snores, as muted as the sounds of the sea in a shell.

Four weeks ago, a man broke into our apartment. We had rented a video, ordered in Chinese, and were holed up in the bedroom, stripped to the skin because the night was sweltering and this is the only room with AC. A Thursday night, every light in the place on, the television murmuring, the ancient air conditioner rattling. No one who wasn't high as a kite would even think about breaking into an apartment when people were obviously inside. It's partly the irrationality of the whole incident that keeps me awake. In New York, you operate on the principle that while, yes, there's a lot of evil in the city, it's more or less predictable. Not like the suburbs, where the violence is hidden and explodes randomly, where the killers all look like computer programmers. Here, there are rules. You put dead bolts on the doors and gates on the windows, you assume the "don't fuck with me" expression when you're on the street, you avoid certain neighborhoods, certain parks, you keep to the front cars on the subway, you spring for a cab if it's late. And when you read about some tourist who got pushed onto the train tracks or a woman who was beaten in the park, you remind yourself that you don't stand at the front edge of the subway platform. You wouldn't dream of going jogging in the park before dawn. It's a terrible tragedy, of course, but they broke the rules.

I go over it in my head frame by frame, trying to figure what I've missed. The film we'd rented was a Bergman; Robin had thought maybe it would seem cooler if we were watching people shivering in bleak, snowy landscapes. Somewhere midway through, she had fallen asleep, lulled into a stupor by the drone of Swedish voices. Her freckled limbs were sprawled luxuriantly across the mattress, her hair curling in damp tendrils around her face. I can remember considering and then discarding the impulse to wake her up again. Instead, I picked at the last of the sesame noodles and was trying to see the film through to the end, when I thought I heard something in the kitchen. I pulled on my boxers and went into the kitchen. The security gate across the window was ajar.

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.

Another nine years later, I am thirty-seven years old and I don't work much in the theater anymore. No, let's be honest: I haven't done a play in three years, and months go by between auditions. I have no explanation for any of this, none whatsoever. Except luck.

When people ask what I do, I say I'm an actor. Strictly speaking, though, what I do is bartend. I still snag the occasional commercial, and every once in a while my friend Stuart throws me a job recording a book on tape, but who's kidding who? Last week, I spent a morning pretending to be a crazed rodent in hopes of landing a national for Dobbin Copiers. I had no lines, just reaction shots: curious, excited, hysterical. Facial expressions were out, because there is some kind of mask involved. "It's all in the squeaks, the body language," the director told me with that amplified earnestness that commercial people indulge in to convince themselves they're doing something meaningful. I found myself thinking, as I squeaked and squealed for all I was worth, so this is what it comes to.

Everything could change again tomorrow – that's what keeps you in the game – but eventually you also have to face the possibility that it might not.

Down on the street, a car alarm shrieks to life. Robin's breathing suspends, her eyes snap open. We listen, wait through the moments it might take for the owner to stumble from his bed and into the street, but no one comes. The alarm caterwauls and then changes key to a series of bleats. I get up, peer out the window, see nothing, pull the window closed, and turn the AC on high to muffle the keening howls.

"Have you ever been to Santa Fe?" She doesn't look at me when she asks.

"No."

"We went there once, to look at a horse Dad was thinking about buying. I remember I was surprised at how cold it was; it was December, but I thought everywhere in the Southwest was like Phoenix. It started to snow, and the arroyos blurred and turned white. It was the quietest place in the whole world."

"Sounds nice," I say, guardedly.

The morning after the break-in, Robin announced that she wanted to leave New York. A pretty natural sentiment, given the events of the previous night, but not the kind of comment you want to give too much weight. There's a garbage strike, one too many snowstorms in February, whatever, and everyone talks about getting out. I figured that Robin's was just one of those empty threats that every New Yorker makes against the city.

But she's still circling the subject. She reads the travel section first on Sundays now. She cooks up all sorts of possibilities in places like Durham, North Carolina, or Missoula, Montana. Every night it's a different town, and she puts herself back to sleep dreaming about the cottage or houseboat or cabin we would live in, the vegetables she would plant in our garden.

"If we were willing to go out a bit, we could still afford to get a place with a little land," she continues.

"What would we do in Santa Fe?" I ask.

"I don't know, exactly." Her voice stiffens. "We'd come up with something, though. We're bright, capable people." What she doesn't say, though, and it hangs heavy in the air between us, is that her options are greater than mine. She can get a personnel job anywhere, but I can't imagine there's much demand for actors in Santa Fe.

"I just can't see myself there," I tell her.

"Well, where can you see yourself?"

"I don't know."

She sighs, deeply frustrated with me.

"Honestly," I say, "don't you think the idea of packing up the jalopy and heading out West is a little over the top?" Sometimes a note of levity works with Robin. I'm guessing from her silence that this isn't one of those times. I try a different tack. "After all," I remind her soothingly, "this is our home."

Robin's eyes drift to the windows, to the streetlight seeping through the metal security gates and making hatch-marked shadows on the window shades.

"You yourself said that you might as well be in Kansas," she says.

"Well, for Christ's sake, I didn't mean it literally."

No matter how innocuously we begin, every discussion these days circles round to some question of our future, just as it did eleven years ago when we were still trying to determine whether this unlikely pairing was actually going to work. Now, it would seem, everything we agreed on is up for review again.

Maybe this upcoming trip will help. Wednesday morning, we're flying up to Maine to visit my father-in-law, who has a summer home on Penobscot Bay. Six days cooped up with Jack Casterline and his loony tunes wife is not my idea of a vacation, but I can't really kick since Jack is footing the bill.

The window shades are fading to gray with the first light. It occurs to me that I haven't actually witnessed the sun rise or set since I can't remember when, this despite the fact that I'm awake during most of them these days. There is no horizon in New York, no line dividing sky and earth. Even during the day, the sun is felt more than seen, the heat of it seeping down between the long shadows in midtown and wavering back up from the concrete. Shards of sunlight refract off glass buildings, but the sun itself, the sky…

I wish I could follow Robin into her dreams. I wish I could turn my back on my life and pull up the covers and be in a snowy arroyo somewhere.

But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And yada yada yada.

I'm on the lookout for signs and portents these days, and what I'm discovering is that if one is looking, they appear in multitudes. Even the most daily event sprouts wings, becomes vastly significant. I'm on my way to this audition, and halfway between my building and the subway, the summer sky suddenly darkens to a septic green and splits open. The water is starting to drip off my chin, and just as I'm warming into a long string of curses, an empty cab materializes out of the rain like a messenger from heaven. I hail the cab over to the curb, slide into the backseat, give the turbaned driver the address, then settle back and close my eyes for a few minutes. When I open them, we are inexplicably heading up Sixth Avenue and a good thirty blocks north of my destination. It turns out the cabbie doesn't speak English; he responds to each of my frenzied corrections with an uncomprehending nod. The winds shift again, we turn south, the meter ticks over into four digits, and it occurs to me that this is the difficulty with trying to read your own life: from the center, each sign seems to radiate out in a different direction.

We have just crossed Canal again, and he is heading doggedly back uptown. I check my watch: it is 9:20. If I cut my losses and get out here, I could still make it on foot. I rap on the Plexiglas and signal the cabbie to pull over.

When he flips up the meter and his eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror, he smiles cautiously, expectant. Against all odds, he seems to believe that a miracle has deposited us at the mysterious address I've been yammering from the backseat. A few minutes ago, I might have argued the fare with the guy. Now I see my own bewildered self reflected in his smooth face. I stuff fourteen dollars into the slot and climb out into the downpour.

I am losing my grip.

The audition is for a new play by Arthur Haines at Tribeca Rep. I'm reading for Hal, this right-wing preacher who's running for a Senate seat somewhere out of the Midwest. It's not the lead, the play's actually about the gay speechwriter who's working on his campaign, but Hal is an interesting character with some good scenes. And it's eight, ten weeks of work, a good play, guaranteed press. Not that I'm in a position to be choosy.

Three blocks from the theater I slow to a fast walk and start running lines in my head.

"What are they saying about us in the Herald, Terry?"

(Blah, blah, blah, blah)

"Well, Paul tells us we'll be persecuted for our faith."

(Blah, blah, blah)

I duck and weave through a phalanx of umbrellas at the corner, check for traffic, dive across the intersection.

"I'm not asking you to agree with me privately, Terry."

(Blah, blah)

"Don't take advantage of my good manners."

My guess is that a lot of actors are going in there and reading Hal as a cardboard villain or a buffoon, which is a mistake. This guy's likable and sincere and convincing. That's what gives the play its tension.

In the elevator, I peel away my suit jacket and shake water off myself like a spaniel. I get up to the offices, sign in: name, agency, union membership. I'm on time, which turns out to be irrelevant. They're running behind – the small reception area is clogged with nervous Hals and Terrys. A half-dozen actors are bent intently over copies of the script or staring into some private distance. Two guys in the far corner are shooting the breeze, ostentatiously at ease. One of them is Brad Whalen, who works here all the time. He's not right for Hal, but then again, you never know. I'm hoping he just dropped by.

The other guy is Kyle McCann. We have the same agent. It's not just jealousy when I say the guy is a bimbo, completely without talent and maddeningly successful. At the moment, he is lounging against the wall in the studied pose of a jeans ad and casually tapping a rolled-up script against the brick.

"When'd you get back, man?" Although the question is addressed to Brad, Kyle pitches his volume just enough so all of us can listen in.

"Last week. I took a couple extra days after we were done shooting and went on down to the Keys. You ever been there?"

"No. I did a show at the Burt Reynolds with Nate Bellogi. We kept talking about going down there, fishing some marlin. But you know how it is with Nate." You listening up, fans? He's pals with Nate Bellogi. Nate, not Nathan as he's known to the great unwashed. "Monday would roll around and I'd just drag myself out to the nearest beach and sleep it off."

"I'm telling you, Kyle, you gotta go."

I borrow the men's room key and head back out the door. In the bathroom, I check the mirror: under the fluorescent light, I look dull-eyed and pasty, like something washed up on Kyle's beach. My hair is slicked to my scalp from the rain; below the line of my jacket, my pants are water-stained and sticky with the damp heat. I spindle a couple feet of paper towel off the roll and mop water out of my hair, off my face. Then I run a comb through my hair, take a leak, wash my hands, and glance over the sides again. I say a few lines into the mirror, trying to recall what I did last night when I ran the lines with Robin. My voice sounds as phony in my ears as the jackass back in the waiting room. Whatever confidence I had about this audition, I must have left behind in the cab.

This is the first legit job I've gone out for since March. It's summer and things are dead all over town. Still, last month I dropped by my agent's office with some flimsy excuse (in the neighborhood, heard they're casting such and such, went to school with the director) just to remind him I was still alive. For better or worse, Zak is probably too nice for this business: he didn't tell his receptionist to get rid of me. Instead, he sat me down and lectured me about taking a vacation, for God's sake, giving him a break and going somewhere nice. He recommended Block Island, "but don't eat before you get on the ferry."

I'd be better off with one of those anorexic killers who live on coffee and hardball contract negotiations and bitter gossip, but I've stuck with Zak because, frankly, I get enough rejection in this business without taking it from my agent. I wouldn't go so far as to describe us as close, but we get a kick out of each other, and we've continued to stick it out when there were smarter options on both sides. There are marriages based on less. It'd be a good thing to get this job, if for no other reason than to justify his faith.

I run the lines until they stop echoing back in my ears, then head back into the office and return the key. Brad Whalen and Kyle are gone. I scout a chair next to a husky blond fellow who's carrying on an animated but soundless conversation with himself. His eyebrows raise then furrow, his lips move, then his features twist into an exaggerated expression of disdain. It's like watching a silent movie.

My name is called and I startle. I pull myself to my feet, take a deep breath, begin smiling inside my head. I don the persona of Hal: confident, earnest. I get ready to do my stuff.

Bippety bip bippety bop, I'm in the door, all smiles and bonhomie. The wax museum is lined up behind a long table: the director, the playwright, the casting director, the assistant to the director, each one sporting the glazed facsimile of a smile. I do the lightning round of introductions, shake hands up and down the table like a seasoned politician, go to the empty stool in front of the table, and ask the reader her name, which I promptly forget. Then the scene. It flies, they're awake, and they're asking to see something else, the scene with the reporter. I slide into gear again, and then it happens: I step through the looking glass. On the other side, there is a reporter asking me questions about a young woman Hal knew in Grand Rapids. Katherine Sellers. Kathy. She was wearing a white nightgown that held the shadows of her thighs, and her shoulders were like small birds. Just that once, late at night, while Janice and the children slept upstairs. When she moved underneath me, I heard wings rustling. It might have been a dream. A brilliant light shines directly in my eyes and faces swim feverishly at the edges of my vision. I smile into the light, willing myself to speak slowly into the proffered microphone. "Miss Sellers lived with our family briefly while she was attending college. She helped my wife, Janice, with the boys after Kirk was born. Miss Sellers attended our church and was a fine young Christian woman. I don't know why she would fabricate this kind of…" I feel like I'm going to puke. Some cold and predatory corner of my brain, though, is measuring the auditioners, gauging the heat of their attention. They have stepped across with me.

When the scene is over, there is a fraction of a minute before the tension snaps and we're back in the room. The playwright, Arthur Haines, grins confidentially to me. "That was great, Dan," as though we've known each other for years. The director nods his agreement and seems to be looking me over again, envisioning me in the role. There's a brief whispered exchange, then the casting director says, "Good reading, Dan. Thanks." I'm out the door. Ten minutes, tops. That's all it takes to change the direction your life is heading in.

It has stopped raining, but the air is still steamy and tropical with the smells of overripe garbage and fruit. Sun glints off water coursing down the flooded street. Like Gene Kelly, I want to stamp through the gutters, dance into those puddles, to hell with my already soggy loafers. Instead, I wait expectantly at the curb, careful not to get splashed, bouncing on my twinkle toes and waiting for the sea of traffic to part just long enough for me to dart across. I'm giddy, ready for my luck to change.

As it turns out, I didn't have to wait long. Good news was already blinking on my answering machine by the time I walked in the door this afternoon. Beep: Tribeca Rep wants to see me again in the morning. And in a when-it-rains-it-pours mode, another beep: I've been put on first refusal for the Dobbins Copier commercial. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

It's premature to start counting my chickens. I know that from experience. A callback is a long way from an offer. And even a first refusal doesn't necessarily mean they'll use you. They're covering their asses. These days, there may be two or three other actors on the back burner with you.

Still, I can't stop my brain from racing on ahead without me, whizzing down the arterials, turning out at every promising side street. Part of me may be standing here at my post behind the bar, but the rest is far away, lofted into a future from which I can see this restaurant – the speckled pink walls, the framed and autographed photo of Sinatra over the cash register, the same tapes looping over and over, and even myself, the bartender zesting lemons like a zombie – all of it tinted with nostalgia.

At nine o'clock, there are three customers on the other side of the bar, a pair of nurses and, of course, Marv. Marv is the professional hazard of this job, the regular who monopolizes the TV and takes all his phone calls at the bar, dispenses unwanted advice, and generally makes himself at home. I'm his "old buddy," a dubious status accorded to anyone pouring out the CC and soda, and carrying with it the burden of hearing whatever thoughts are currently circulating through his sodden brain. Right now, he's holding forth on some theory he's heard concerning bats, the depletion of the bat population. It seems to have something to do with architecture and Vatican II; I've been tuning in only just often enough to nod in the right places, so I may have lost a critical thread. On the floor, it is similarly quiet, only a few couples becalmed on a sea of white tables. The ceiling fans tick lethargically, pushing dust motes through the warm air. The waiters shift from one foot to the other, scoping out their tables on the sly and then slipping out to the kitchen for a smoke. A typical Monday night, the dead shift in the week. I'm only half here, but that's more than enough.

"They slept under the eaves and in the bell tower. All those doodads served a purpose, is what he's saying, you know?" Yes, we must still be on bats.

"If you want to have bats, you gotta have belfries," I joke.

"Well, that's not exactly the point." Marv waves it away impatiently. "You don't want to get hung up on the bats per se. It's what's behind the thing."

"I see." I have no idea what the point is, but I pretend to give it my fullest consideration.

"It's a whatchamacallit. You know," he accuses, "when you say one thing but you really mean something else?"

"I don't know – a lie?"

Marv appraises me slowly, working his chin from side to side.

"You being a smart-ass or just stupid?"

His mood can flip on a dime, even in mid-sentence, and you never know what will trip the switch. Most nights, I refill his drink on the fly, making sure not to pause too long near his stool, in a pinch escaping my cage with some feigned need to restock something or other. But tonight my expansiveness extends even to Marv. So what if he insists, ridiculously, on acting the part of the neighborhood don? I feel something akin to the affection one has for the recently dead – that old dog Marvin with his scuffed white loafers and his half-baked stories about what a truly decent fellow Rocky Graziano was or the time he and Dean Martin and a bunch of the guys drove up from Atlantic City at four in the morning for corned beef sandwiches. What a character. I pour him a healthy shot on the house, and we're buddies again.

I might actually get out of here for good. Why not? The way I've got it figured, the folks at Tribeca must have put the call in to Zak before I was even out of the building. I'm perfect for the part and they knew it, didn't even wait until the end of the day to weigh their options. And they're hot. They've moved something uptown every year for the past three seasons. So, let's say the play does well, pulls in some good reviews; there's no reason it couldn't be a contender. It could move to Broadway, and I could be looking at a long-term gig.

Then there's the commercial. It's not art, it's not even acting, but it's money. Maybe even serious money. The session fee for an on-camera principal is about five hundred, but the real money is in the residuals. Depending on how long it runs and in what markets, a national commercial can snag you ten grand before it plays out. One I did five years ago still brings in a nice little chunk of change every thirteen weeks; in fact, a large percentage of the money I've made in my career can be traced directly to one day spent reaching over and over again into an ice chest and pulling out a couple of beers.

The two waiters are huddled at the service end of the bar, engaged in their own forecasting. Beneath Marv's raspy drone, I hear Yusef grimly predict that they'll be lucky to go home with forty dollars apiece tonight.

Carrie takes the pluckier view, that we still might get a late-night rush after the concert. The Philharmonic is playing up in the park, and she's pinning her hopes on a mob of hungry Schubert lovers storming Picardi's.

"Maybe people would come in to drink but not for dinner," Yusef pronounces, shaking his head stubbornly. "This is it."

"I'm just saying a couple of tables." Carrie turns to me for confirmation, bright and flirty. "What do you think?"

"One way or the other, makes no difference to me." She smirks.

"Well, what's gotten into you?"

"Oh, nothing much. I had a good day is all."

Under this Gary Cooperish reticence, I'm actually itching to tell someone. I haven't even filled in Robin yet, though this is simply a matter of our paths not having crossed since this morning. Only a habitual superstition against jinxing my good fortune keeps me quiet now. I don't want to end up like one of those sad cases who's always blathering about some deal in the pipeline. Better to take everyone by surprise, walk in here one night and spring it on them. Sorry, my friends, it's been nice knowing you. Hasta la vista. Farewell.

Just as Yusef predicted, we wind down the evening nearly as poor as we started it. Before he leaves, Marv makes a point of discreetly palming a five-dollar bill to me, as though I might be embarrassed to publicly accept a tip. I lock up and am home just after eleven, eager to share my news. I come through the door calling out to Robin, who emerges from the study, her arms heaped with folded clothes. She swipes a distracted kiss past my cheek as she passes into the bedroom, her voice trailing behind.

"How was work?"

"It sucked. Now ask me if I care."

I wait, the proverbial cat that ate the canary. But she doesn't pick up her cue, so I blunder through a garbled replay of my day. I'm on first refusal for the rodent thing. It's shooting Friday. And, ta-dah, I've got a callback with Tribeca Rep. Arthur Haines was impressed – you should've seen. I'm not saying I've got it (knock on wood), but I gave the best audition of my life. It just sang, the whole damn thing. And if I get the commercial, we could be talking some serious money in the bank.

There is a long pause after I wind down. When she speaks, her voice is precise and even, as though she were balancing something on its edge.

"So you haven't actually booked the commercial, right?"

"Not yet."

"You've just agreed to be on call this Friday."

"Right."

Her blue eyes ice over with disdain. "Congratulations."

It occurs to me that I'm missing something here. For some inexplicable reason, she is intentionally trying to puncture my good mood. It's not like I have that many great days to string together. Today was one. Then it hits me. I'm supposed to be in Maine on Friday.

"If you're upset about the trip" – I'm still not sure this is the problem – "okay, I blew it. I should have consulted you first. I'm sorry."

Robin remains silent and impassive. If I thought I was going to get off that easy, I'm about to be disappointed. Not a chance, bub.

"Listen, they're going to be up there all summer. Can't we just postpone it a few days?"

"I can't just pick up and go anytime, Dan." She pauses while we both add the silent coda that, unlike me, she has a real job, the kind that pays a grown-up salary and benefits in exchange for her freedom.

"Besides, that's not the point," she says. "You've been broody and miserable for I don't know how long. Skulking around the house, making me feel guilty if I'm not miserable, too. Then you start hinting around about burning your union cards, calling up Zak and throwing in the towel, and I fall for it. You really had me going this time. I'm thinking, well, maybe this is a good thing. You know, hard but good. Maybe we can start planning a life. But we can't even plan a vacation."

Contrition fails me. "You call that a vacation? Spending a week with Jack and Mina?"

Robin draws herself up into the rigidly correct posture she assumes when she is furious. "All that matters to you is that a bunch of people you don't even know like you. You're like Sally Field. It's pathetic. You get a couple of auditions and, presto, everything else vanishes. You're right back in it. I don't matter. Nothing else matters but waiting for the damn phone to ring."

"Well, shit, I'm sorry to louse up your plans. I was just under the impression we could use the money."

"Money has nothing to do with this."

"What the hell am I doing this for, then? Because I thought it was the money. So what is it? You tell me. The thrill of dressing up in a rat costume?"

"I don't know why you're doing this. But don't pretend it's for us."

Robin gets up, stalks over to the old desk in the corner, and begins yanking open drawers and rifling through the contents. She pulls out an opened pack of Marlboro Lights and continues searching the drawers. We both quit smoking three years ago, and I'm surprised to see there are still cigarettes in the house. "I can't take it much longer," she warns me.

Finally, she finds what she's looking for, a book of matches. She tamps a cigarette out of the pack and lights up, inhaling jaggedly.

"What kind of a stunt is this?"

Her eyes train on me defiantly. "Maybe it's my turn to be stupid and self-destructive."

I proceed to list every stupid thing she's done in the last eleven years. I even make some up, stretch the truth a little to make my point. "But you don't see me complaining," I crow. "Sure, I'm difficult to live with sometimes. But at least one of us knows what it means to make a commitment. At least one of us was listening when the minister said for better, for worse."

"No question, you take the prize for stubbornness, Dan. Now if you could just learn when to quit." Robin is still glaring at me, but she doesn't look so cocky now. I note with satisfaction that her hand shakes when she draws the cigarette to her mouth.

"What did you think, everything was going to be easy?" I'm skidding wildly forward now, ranting like a drunk, spewing up rage. Out of the corner of my eye, I catch the dog slinking across the floor and cowering behind Robin's legs. "Things get a little rough and first thing, you're ready to pick up and leave town. Your husband doesn't turn out to be a star like you'd counted on, well, screw him. Or better yet, screw one of his friends." This last is below the belt, a coded reference to her one serious indiscretion, a night many years ago when she got drunk at a party and ended up in a locked bathroom with Gordon Hopper. She didn't commit adultery, but it is a technicality that rests uncomfortably on the question of how much further things might have gone had there been a second bathroom in the apartment.

"Well, I don't work that way," I bellow. "Like if someone's holding a knife on me, I think of you. I try to protect you. I don't hide under the bed and leave you out there to die. You're worse than an animal."

The words spray out of my mouth before I even know I've thought them. They shock me into silence. Across the room, Robin stares dazedly at the glowing tip of her cigarette. It is as though the eye of the storm has settled over us and sucked the air out of the room. The quiet feels oppressive and threatening.

"I was…" Her face contorts painfully as she tries to form the rest of the sentence. I think I hear the word "scared," but I may be imagining this. Then she twists away from me, hiding her face. Puck crawls out from under the desk and worms his way up into Robin's embrace. I reach out and touch her, but she flinches, so I hover there, the hun, the outsider, listening to her suck at the cigarette and exhale. Now that they are actually needed, I am stupidly at a loss for words; all I can think to say is "I'm sorry" and "I didn't mean it" over and over like some idiot Miss Manners. It's too late for apologies.

Robin carefully stubs the cigarette out in the dirt of her African violets and swivels around to face me.

"I'm going up to Camden." Her voice is flat. "Think what you want, Dan. But I was there for you." And then the coup de grace. "Not that it matters. Because I'm through."

Here's what I'm hoping. We say these things and they're out, and whatever dark hole they flew out of, you can't stuff them back in. It doesn't even matter if they're not true, if you just said them in some kind of lunatic seizure. But I'm hoping that whatever it is between us, this cord that is anchored in our guts and that rips at my lungs when I've wounded her, I'm hoping that it's stronger than we are.

Another day, but from where I sit, in a molded plastic chair facing the door to the Rep's sanctum sanctorum, it looks weirdly like yesterday. On the way in, I passed Kyle McCann leaving. He had on the same pink shirt, the tie loosened to achieve exactly the same effect (rule number one for the callback: wear whatever you wore before). He was also wearing the same self-satisfied look. The one my dad used to threaten to wipe off my face for me.

The big blond Cornhusker is here again, too, still nodding and gesturing and moving his lips. I briefly made a game of trying to identify the scenes he is reviewing, like charades, but he happened to catch me watching him and has retreated to a corner where I can't see his face.

I have broken rule number one by returning here in dry and pressed clothing, but I still probably look about as haggard as I did yesterday. I woke up about four this morning feeling seriously hungover, my muscles achy, and with a bleary sense of regret. Oh, yes, I remembered. What was it you said? That she was an animal? Nice work, you putz. Robin was curled away from me, asleep. I considered waking her, getting this whole thing straightened out before she left for the day, but then thought better of it. Instead, I went out to the living room and watched CNN for an hour until I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke, the sun was glaring and she was gone.

After I get out of here, I'll give her a call. I'll offer to call Zak and weasel out of the first refusal. He won't be happy, and I can't imagine how I'm going to explain it. I forgot I had planned a vacation in Maine? The truth sounds too lame, so I'll have to come up with some plausible lie.

They call in the beefy blond; Eric Swanson is his name. He can't be reading for Terry, but he seems a little too fresh off the college football squad to play Hal. Who would take that guy seriously as a candidate for senator? On the other hand, maybe that's just what they're looking for, a Dan Quayle type.

This is just the kind of thinking that sabotages an audition before you even get in the door. Worrying about things that are out of your control. What if this, what if that? I've got plenty on my plate right now without dipping into the long view.

The door opens and Eric is ejected, looking like he just blew the game and would really like to pound something. I'm up.

When they bring me into the room, David Stover, the director, says "Ah, good to see you again, Dan," and the wax museum stirs perceptibly from out of a sluggish doze. They sit up in their chairs and turn their expectant smiles on me. "How about the scene with the reporter?" Stover suggests.

When you hit it out of the park the first time, everyone wants to see you do it again. So you go in and try to re-create that moment. You measure out the same pauses, repeat the same gestures. Every inflection is exactly as it was before – but lifeless. Dead. Deader than the wax museum's vacant gaze. You can't step into the same stream twice. Whoever said that, it's lamentably true.

The scene started out flat, I could feel it, but I'm chugging along, trying to pump some life into the corpse, gearing up for that moment in the scene where it sparked yesterday. But that moment comes and goes, and nothing. Stover takes a slug of his coffee and then stares into the bottom of the cup. Helen Wolfe, the casting director, lets her eyes wander to her watch. The only one still in the room with me is Arthur Haines, and he looks worried. Sweat begins to blur my vision, I've lost my place in the script. I can feel myself drowning up here, and the voice in my head is hysterical, screaming DON'T PANIC! DON'T PANIC! DON'T PANIC! DON'T PANIC! DON'T PANIC! DON'T PANIC! Then bingo, something clicks, and I let the water close over my head, I give in to the terror. Which happens to be exactly right for the scene. I'm underwater and I'm thrashing, but there's a rhythm to it now. I can feel the panic channeling into the character. The lines come from nowhere, spilling out of my mouth, one after another, as if I'd just thought of them. It doesn't get more real than that. I crash through to the end of the scene, my heart ricocheting off my ribs. A little over the top, but I've definitely got their attention.

We take a breather, sixty seconds or so to wipe the sweat out of my eyes and catch my breath. Shift gears, on to another section, this one at the beginning of the play. This time, things go more smoothly. I sail along, right past the first point where they might have cut me off. Good sign. Two pages, three, four, past another break, and all the way to Hal's exit.

At the end, Stover takes me back a few pages and gives me an adjustment.

"How about this section again, starting with Sheila's entrance. Pick up the cues faster this time. No pauses, no thinking. It should be rapid-fire, like screwball comedy."

This is not criticism; this is a sign of interest. It means "I'm thinking you're right for this, but before I sign you on, I need to know one thing: if I tell you to do something, can you just do it and not give me any crap about motivation?"

So we run it again, this time in high gear. I'm firing the lines at the reader, and she's batting them right back. Arthur Haines is nodding vigorously, and several times he barks with laughter. You gotta like a guy who's in your corner and doesn't make a secret of it.

Stover is more circumspect, but there are subtle tells if you know where to look.

He rubs his palms together briskly and makes a note.

Translation: You can take direction. Good. Great.

He asks Helen Wolfe a question, sotto voce, without taking his eyes off me.

Translation: Do we have to see anyone else for Hal? Or maybe, Who is his agent, again? Something along those lines.

Afterward, as I'm taking my leave, Helen turns her maternal smile on me.

"The play goes into rehearsal in two weeks. Would that present any conflicts for you?"

I feel that little ping a gambler gets when he's been dealt a flush. It's all I can do to keep from laughing giddily at the absurdity of the question. Of course, I don't have any conflicts, Helen. I haven't had a conflict in years. What I actually say, after a suitable pause, is that there's nothing that can't be changed.

And then a gesture that needs no translation: Haines winks.

It's three a.m. I'm watching Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in For Me and My Gal. They're a vaudeville team and just as they get their big break at the Palace, Kelly gets drafted. He slams his hand in a trunk so he can get a deferment, but his sacrifice isn't appreciated by Garland; in fact, she cuts him loose because he's put his career before his country. But it's a musical and it's Gene Kelly, so not to worry, they'll get back together in the end. The movie is pretty slight, but Kelly and Garland are so committed, they actually make the turkey fly by sheer force of will. When Judy Garland sings "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paree," she's practically pole-vaulting across the stage, her brow gleaming with sweat, her elbows pumping. In the Method-trained smugness of my youth, I was critical of performances this big, but nowadays I find I really like to see actors throwing themselves over the top. I want with all my heart to feel that simple exhilaration again. I'm tired of subtleties.

Robin is sleeping in the next room, and Puck has been patrolling the rooms all night. He'll come in here for a few minutes and start to settle down, and I can see him trying to forget about the suitcase parked next to the bedroom door. I tell him that it's okay, no one's abandoning him. "The two of us guys are going to batch it for a few days," I say with Gene Kelly – influenced joviality. He wags his tail limply, humoring me, then trundles back down the hall to check again on the status of the suitcase. Earlier, when I leashed him up, he hesitated at the door as though this might be some kind of trick. It was the shortest walk in years, one quick piss at the front door and then a dash back to the apartment to make sure she hadn't slipped off without us. His anxiety is palpable.

I know just how he feels. Theoretically, I got what I wanted – I'm staying here – but it's not sitting well on my stomach. This morning, I called Robin after the audition. I had worked out the beginnings of a nicely contrite little speech that would culminate in an offer to bag the whole commercial thing and just go up to her dad's place as planned.

"Last night was entirely my fault," I began and left a little opening for her to contradict me.

"It doesn't matter whose fault it was."

This wasn't the encouragement I had been hoping for, but I agreed that, no, it didn't matter. "What matters," I continued, "is that our marriage comes first. You're wrong to think that my career is more important." Actually, when I was imagining this conversation, I think I may have counted too heavily on her to jump in somewhere, but she seemed to be waiting for me to finish. "That's never been true."

"Okay." Her voice registered that, yes, she had heard me but she wasn't about to be taken in by a word of this malarkey. "I'm on another line. Can we talk about this tonight?"

"I'm working tonight, but, yeah, sure. Actually, I was just calling to say that if you want me to, I'll weasel my way out of the first refusal thing. We'll just go ahead and go."

She sighed audibly. "I don't want you to 'weasel' out of anything, Dan." And she hung up before I could backtrack and substitute the word "weasel" with something less, I don't know what, less weasely.

We never actually did talk about it. When I got home from work, she asked me how the audition went, showed polite interest when I told her that it went well, and then moved seamlessly into a laundry list of instructions on how to survive her absence – when to water and feed the various plants, which of the vets to speak to about Puck's medications, what was still at the dry cleaner's – instructions that might, it occurs to me now, be intended to keep the place running without her indefinitely. Her manner was pointedly casual and gracious.

I repeated my offer.

"I can call Zak in the morning and get out of this commercial thing. Honestly, I don't mind." And suddenly I didn't. Go figure.

Robin turned, and for a moment there I thought she might haul off and belt me, that or burst into tears. Whatever emotion she was struggling with, though, she managed to suffocate.

"No, it's probably best this way after all."

I don't know exactly what that means, except that it's the kind of line they used to give to Olivia de Havilland all the time. The wispy bravery of it was supposed to make you admire her gentle courage. But Robin is not the Olivia de Havilland type. She's more like Bette Davis, sarcastic and plucky and not about to let anyone step on her, thank you very much. This quiet restraint is unsettling.

So she's going up to Maine tomorrow where she'll spend the week with her family, kayaking, dining on lobster and mussels, generally lounging around the beach. I'm going to stay here, hunker down in front of the air conditioner and watch TV and maybe, if I'm lucky, spend a day dressed up in a rodent suit. Mulling it over, I'm having a hard time pinpointing exactly what is in this for me. Of course, there's the money I stand to make if I book this commercial. But Robin is right: if I said that my choices were motivated by money, you'd take one look at my life and conclude that I was just about the stupidest person on the planet.

Garland and Kelly are doing a rousing finale, their arms locked, legs kicking, smiles beaming. It has nothing to do with being happy. It's not about making good choices. Everyone knows that about Garland, but it's no less true of the rest of us. Actors act because we don't know what else to do.

While Robin was in the shower this morning, I took a peek in her suitcase and attempted to determine by its contents if she is leaving me for a week or for good. There was no conclusive evidence either way, at least not on the top layer, and I knew better than to dig for clues, because I could never hope to reassemble the careful still life she had constructed: shirts stuffed with rolled socks, sweaters carefully folded, shoes wrapped in paper and tucked into the corners. One might wonder where in the wilds of Maine she anticipates wearing her red silk kimono. But, I consoled myself, if my ultimately practical wife had decided to leave me, surely my things would be packed, not hers.

Of course, I could have asked. But then she would have told me, and I just couldn't bring myself to tempt fate like that. So, instead, I pretended that everything was fine. I walked her downstairs to the waiting car service and put her bag in the trunk. I told her to have a good time. She gave me the pressed lip, indulgent smile I've seen her give store clerks or waiters when she decides it's not worth making a fuss. "You, too."

I got back up to the apartment and checked the answering machine, in case Zak had called while I was downstairs. Nothing. Then I went back to bed. I haven't done this in years, slept during the day. It is one of the many little disciplines, the seemingly inconsequential rules I made up for my life as an actor. They are the things that distinguish me from a bum. I don't sleep during the day. I don't drink or watch TV before five. I get up at a reasonable hour, do half an hour with the weights or go for a run, shave and dress, and then leave the house. I do something productive, preferably career-related, but if not, then anything concrete and improving, even if it's as small as picking up the groceries. I tell myself that all this matters, that even more than the rent money I bring in bartending, these habits are what keep me from being a nothing.

But I was so tired. It was as though the sleep I have been losing for the last several weeks caught up with me all at once. I was suddenly and completely exhausted. I made some pretense of reading the paper, sitting upright at the table and jerking awake every few minutes when my chin dropped. What the hell, I finally told myself, you're supposed to be on vacation. You can do whatever you please. Who's to stop you? No one. Puck followed me into the bedroom, and I hoisted him up with me. It's been some time since he's been able to leap up on the furniture. When I lifted him, I was careful to cradle his haunches. He remained gingerly stiff in my arms. It may not have been worth the bother for him, but I wanted his company.

Sometime later, I am swimming to consciousness in a groggy panic, dragging the empty lake of the mattress for a body. Gone. I don't know what I am missing, but it is critical. I try to recall the last fragments of a dream, but they are drifting back beneath the surface. The room is still and stuffy, the late afternoon light oppressively bright behind the blinds. From the park, I pick out the sounds of children. They are chanting something – duck, duck, goose? – and, inexplicably, I am weepy and nostalgic for my life. I have the conviction, I couldn't tell you why, that my life is shifting underneath me, changing radically, right this minute. I can't even say for better or worse. It could be that Robin is working herself up to leave me, or already has, and I'm just too thick to know it. Or perhaps my career is about to really take off and I'm going to reap the rewards of years of patience and hard work. And this, oddly, is almost as terrifying.

Everyone has these moments, I suppose, when you feel you're on the cusp of something big, that any minute now the wave you're riding will crest and you'll be able to see into your future. In my limited experience, the expectation is misguided – you reach that peak and what you see is a trough and beyond that another big wave obscuring your vision. The message here is probably more mundane, something along the lines of "Avoid afternoon naps."

I check the answering machine. Just in case I didn't hear the phone ringing. Nothing. Nothing from Robin, who promised to call when she got in, nothing from the agent. Nothing. Today is Wednesday. I auditioned yesterday. There's no reason why I should hear from Tribeca before Friday. Even next week. They may still be seeing people. Certainly not before Friday. It's ridiculous to worry until then.

The commercial is a different kettle of fish. I definitely should have heard something by now, if they need to do a fitting, sign contracts, whatever. It's what, four-thirty, so Zak probably won't call today. I can't completely rule it out yet, maybe in the morning. If I don't hear tomorrow, then I'll have to assume they went with someone else and this whole fracas with Robin was completely pointless. They could at least call, put me out of my misery. I mean, they have to know by now. Unless the person they want to use is dick-ing them around. Who knows? This whole thing is so last-minute, cast and shoot the same week. But definitely, if I don't hear by tomorrow afternoon, then I don't have it.

I stare at the phone for a bleary stretch of time, as though it may ring if I just sit here long enough. So what, if Robin said she'd call? Who am I, some prickly teenager that I should care who calls whom? And the answer here would have to be yes, because I don't pick up the phone right away. Instead, in a precise imitation of adolescent angst, I rehearse variations on an imaginary phone conversation. I try on the indignant role and discard it because, even in my own ears, I sound petulant. I try casual, just ringing up to see how you're getting on, hot enough for you, blah, blah, blah.

I pick up the phone and dial out the number Robin has left in case of emergency. It rings four times, and then a robotic female voice announces the number and suggests I leave a message. "Robin, it's Dan." I wait, hoping that maybe someone will pick up. "Okay, when you get a chance, give me a call. No big deal, I just want to know you got in okay."

It's five o'clock, and the evening looms empty in front of me. The movie channel is showing On the Town at eight, and I'm not knocking it, it's a good movie, even with Ann Miller, but there's only so many times you can watch even the good ones, and I've seen it a few more times than that.

What I need to do, I tell myself, is to get off my duff. Get out of the house, call up some friends, do a guys' night out. Having a plan invigorates me. I dial up my buddy Keith and get his machine. "You've reached the home of Sarah and Keith. There's a beep coming up and then you're on." "Keith, it's Dan. Are you there? Okay, well, it's about five, and I'm thinking it's a good night to do a little carousing. Call me for further details." Then I call Mike Hardin, whom I haven't seen in a long time but have been meaning to call, who, his message informs me, is in Vermont doing summer stock until Labor Day. Then Stuart Hoffman, who is away from his desk, and Barry Ingles, who can be a real jerk sometimes but whose name is entered right beneath Stuart's in my address book. Barry's answering machine has one of those endless musical selections preceding the beep. I wait out the first minute but then hang up. I'm half tempted to call the operator, just to confirm that it's not faulty equipment, that in fact every person on the planet but me is occupied.

When the phone rings, the sound startles me. Before I pick up the receiver, I take a deep breath to collect myself and I repeat in my head a brief incantation-slash-affirmation: you deserve good things.

"Dan-O." Stuart's rumbly bass booms over the line. "Got your message. You okay?"

"Sure."

"What's going on?"

"Oh, nothing much." The master of understatement. "I was just thinking about coming into the city, and I wondered if you were up for a little libation and conversation."

"What, now?" He pauses, then asks again. "What's up?" His voice is quietly insistent, as though I have bad news to spring on him, and I may as well cut to the chase. I suspect this is a habit he developed from years of talking with doctors.

"Nothing's up. Robin's up in Maine for a few days, and I'm just not in the mood to sit home."

"She went up there alone?"

"No, not alone." I'm trying to remember if I said anything in my message that would put Stuart on high alert like this. "She's with her dad and his wife. I was going to go, but I'm on first refusal for a commercial, so I have to sit tight until Friday."

"So you're all alone in the city, huh, big boy?" Apparently satisfied, Stuart reverts to the banter we established years and years ago, when he played Falstaff to my Prince Hal at the Dallas Shakespeare festival. The play more or less set a tone for our friendship in that he still likes to pretend that his job in life is to corrupt me. That he is gay supposedly makes him privy to all kinds of depravity; the fact that I am straight and, better yet, from Oklahoma makes me forever the innocent rube.

In fact, he's always led a very conventional and quiet life. Even when he was still acting, he was the designated adult in our group, the only one with a steady partner, dental insurance, matching glassware, all the markers of responsible living. When Andre got sick, Stuart stopped taking out-of-town jobs and gradually got hooked into this company that does books on tape. He started off just reading the books, but gradually slid over to the production side, too, because they needed the insurance coverage. Now he goes to work every morning and is probably home and in bed by nine most nights.

I take the subway in, and when we pull into Wall Street, the car fills with a swarm of worker bees heading home. It's probably still in the low eighties on the street and a good ten degrees warmer in here. A hundred upraised arms perfume the tired air. At each stop, the doors open and more bodies squeeze in. One Wall Street hustler uses his briefcase as a battering ram, letting the doors bump open and shut until he can press himself into the last inch of open space on the inside of the car. I am wedged against a young woman with plump bare arms. Behind her, a man with his suit coat flung tiredly over his shoulder holds up a wilted copy of the Post with his free hand. We are all immodestly close, and each time the train lurches around a curve, slows or speeds up, we are flung against the warm flesh of our neighbors. The woman and I are both pretending mightily, she that her breasts are not pressed into my stomach, I that the Yankees' win over the Angels is gripping reading.

Stuart and I have made plans to meet at McLeary's, one of the old hangouts on Amsterdam. It's a typical Irish bar, sawdust on the floor, greasy sausages in a warming tray for happy hour, cheap and friendly and one of the few reminders that the neighborhood was working class not too long ago. The owner has hung some ferns in the window and put out a few tables on the sidewalk to siphon off the yuppies who now stream up and down the avenue at night, but the clientele seems unchanged from twenty, thirty years ago. A half-dozen grizzled old men watch the Yankees game at the bar; a couple younger ones flirt with an orange-haired woman in a thigh gripping miniskirt. They are like Eugene O'Neill characters in The Iceman Cometh, preserved in the smoky amber tar that coats every surface of the bar. I don't recognize anyone except Stuart, sitting at a table near the jukebox. He grins and leaps to his feet, arms open to embrace me.

"Hey, you're looking good, Stu," I tell him, slapping his back with one hand and patting his gut with the other, a guy hug. He's built like an opera tenor, big and barrel-chested. He played Falstaff without padding and even did Santa for Macy's one year. ("Don't let me do that again, not if you care for me," he said afterward with jokey terror.) Then when Andre was withering away, Stuart responded by bulking up even more, eating both portions of whatever dish he'd whipped up to tempt Andre.

"I'm going to the gym three times a week. I hate it," he moans, but he seems pleased that I've noticed. "I pedal and pedal and pedal. It's so boring. They have videotapes where you can bike the back roads of France, but you can't pull over and eat a nice little lunch of pate and cheese and champagne. So where's the fun in that?"

I get us a pitcher from the bar, and we settle back into the drowsy glow of a late August evening. We talk and we watch the passing scene outside: the couples locked in heated conversations, the men in dark glasses and the gorgeous women who are palpably aware of being watched, the skinny guy hawking designer watches and keeping one eye peeled for the cops. The drone of the sportscasters is soothing, a white noise surging now and then with the derisive hoots of the patrons at the bar, and I'm tipsy well before we've drained the first pitcher. I'm having a good time. We're yakking about the shows we've seen lately, who's good in what, who stinks, who we would have cast instead.

"Speaking of which," Stuart is saying, "I saw Marylou on a rerun of Chicago Hope last week. Did you see it? She was doing the sister of this guy who's dying of some disease."

Marylou Kolodejchuk, a.k.a. Marilou Cole, a.k.a. the woman with whom I spent a few besotted, pre-Robin years until she made a pilgrimage out to LA for pilot season and just never bothered to come back.

"She fell back on that old plucky-through-the-tears thing-she does, but she was pretty good. God, remember that night she waltzed through the back wall of the set?"

We stroll down memory lane, Stuart and I, with Marylou waltzing and Jim Callahan listening to the Yankees games backstage and Sarkowski with that ratty old pea coat he wore everywhere, even to the Tonys that year, and Amanda and that boyfriend of hers, what was his name, the one who turned out to be freshly sprung from Bellevue, arguing at the top of their lungs on the street in front of Steve's until someone in an upstairs apartment began pelting them with garbage. And then there was the time Amanda and Robin made fried chicken and mashed potatoes at three in the morning, and all of us sat around drinking Jack Daniel's and eating chicken and telling stories. And the time we drove down to Louisville in Gordy Hopper's Electra 88 with the busted muffler and the ice cubes for air-conditioning. And the time Karl went up in the middle of his monologue and asked someone in the front row if she had seen the play before and did she happen to remember his next line.

Most of these people aren't around anymore. Karl's out in LA now, too, manages a plant care business, waters houseplants for all the Hollywood muckety-mucks. Calls Stuart periodically, tells him whose plants he's doing, that Kathleen Turner keeps killing her ferns, doesn't know what she does to them, but they're brown as cockroaches in two weeks. Amanda married a tree farmer and moved to New Hampshire, has four-year-old twins. Jim and Dorrie Callahan moved out to Denver, so there's a standing invitation to come and ski anytime. Steve died. Hopper went back to Baltimore after his dad's stroke, took over the family's office supplies business. Then Andre, Stuart's lover, died. The knot of our circle keeps shrinking. It used to be we could make a few calls and get up a crowd on a few hours' notice, a night hanging out here at McLeary's, shooting pool, or a spontaneous party at one of a half-dozen apartments on the Upper West Side. Or Sarkowski's place on West Forty-fifth, which was decorated like a frat house, someone always passed out on the couch or hanging out between auditions, amazing to think that his beach house was actually in Architectural Digest last year. Nowadays, any kind of gathering requires weeks of planning and then the evening ends somewhere before ten because there are babysitters and morning appointments and long drives back to Jersey.

"What the hell happened?" I blurt this out with such passion that I look around to see if anyone else has taken note. It has gotten dark while we were talking and the game has ended. I suspect I am drunk.

"Things change, Danny boy."

"The thing is…" I pause here because I can't quite place what the thing is. "The thing is, I'm starting to think like this is it, one way or the other. This is my last shot. If I get this part at Tribeca, then that's a pretty clear sign, don't you think?"

Stuart is listening, nodding slowly, but he's not convinced.

"If I don't get it" – the possibility fills me with such anticipatory grief that I have to wait for my throat to open again before I can speak – "if I don't get it, well, I guess that's a pretty clear sign, too."

"What's it say?" Stuart asks.

"Hmm?"

"The sign. What's it say?"

"You're a failure, pal. Pick up your marbles and go home. Move to Santa Fe and get a job and make your wife a happy woman."

There's nothing to say to this. He can't tell me to buck up, that if not this job, then something else will come along. We know better, old soldiers that we are. And he certainly can't tell me that it's time to call it a day, even if it is. We sit with the silence, mulling it all over.

There's an old joke, goes like this: two actors sitting in a bar – maybe not a bar, but for symmetry's sake, let's say a bar – and they're lamenting the sad state of the theater. One says to the other, "You know, I haven't worked in almost two years." The other one says, "Yeah, I haven't had a job in three years." And the first one takes another swig of his beer and says, "Man, I wish we could get out of this fucking business."

So, it's three in the morning, and I'm lying in bed, trying to recall if my hamster, Buffy, scratched his ear with his back paw or his front paw. I'm thinking it was his back paw, like a dog, in which case I'm going to have to sacrifice reality because I can't get my own leg anywhere near my head.

Zak called this morning. Tomorrow, I report bright and early to the old Astoria Studios in Queens for the Dobbins Copier commercial. "What'd I tell you, Zak," I blurted out. "The old dog still has a few tricks left in him." Turns out, these tricks do not include scratching my ear with my foot. Not that it actually matters.

They messengered the copy to me this afternoon. I hadn't seen the storyboards for this thing, so I really wasn't clear on what the commercial was about, except that it somehow figured a rodent and a copy machine. It turns out to be a crosscut kind of thing, back and forth between me, affectionately referred to as Lab Rat, whose copier jams and shreds paper, and another guy, Office Worker, the one dressed in a stylish-looking business suit, the one who bought a Dobbins. In the first shot, Lab Rat is sniffing curiously around a copier, lifting levers, pulling open doors. This is where I'm thinking an ear scratch would be a nice piece of business. Then cut to Office Worker casually loading a stack of documents into the feeder. Then Lab Rat, and he's running on one of those hamster wheels. Then a couple of shots of the copier and all its features. Then back to Lab Rat on the wheel again. Next shot is Office Worker chatting on the phone, feet up on his desk. Finally, Lab Rat lying belly up on the wheel, hysterical and exhausted. And then some artwork with the Dobbins logo.

All the dialogue is in voice-over, so I don't have any lines to worry about. Nothing to worry about, I keep telling myself. A couple of squeaks, a couple of turns on the ol' hamster wheel, and I'm out of there. Piece of cake.

Puck is pawing at the side of the mattress, letting me know that he needs to go out. I roll away from him but then feel guilty, imagining his sorrowful eyes watching my back and waiting. He's developed the patience of Buddha, this dog. When he was younger, he'd get half his exercise before we even got out the door. An elaborate dance of solicitation, prancing toward the door and then circling back until I put on my shoes and followed him. When the leash came out of the closet, his eagerness would crest into a volley of frenzied yelps and leaps, and he'd spin in skidding circles on the parquet. Now he waits quietly, trusting me to do the right thing.

Robin and I are playing phone tag. When I got in last night, there were two hang-ups on the machine, a message from Hal – sorry he missed me, out for a run, but, yeah, let's get together some time – another hang-up, then a message from Robin.

"Dan?" There was a pause, while she waited for me to pick up. When I didn't, she announced the time, one-thirty in the morning, in what I'm guessing is the exact same tone of exasperation that her mother used with her however many years ago. And then another pause before her tone shifted to brisk. "Okay. I'm just returning your call. I'll be around in the morning if you want to talk, but then we're heading out. Okay, then."

I tried to calculate how early was too early to call, but I misjudged on one side or the other because at eight this morning, I got their answering machine again. "Hi, it's Dan again," I began, and suddenly I was imagining a scene on the receiving end of my phone call. With the clarity of a psychic, I could see Robin and Jack and Mina, all of them pink with sunburn and still in their pajamas, and they're eating their granola and sipping their coffee while my voice rattles over the machine. "Sorry about last night. I was out with Stuart. Haven't heard on the commercial yet. But I was thinking, hey, maybe I could rent a car and drive up there Saturday. Let me know what you think. Hey Jack, Mina. Catching any fish, Jack? So give me a call when you get a chance, sweetie. We're doing great down here. Puck misses you." Even before I hung up, I was wishing there was some way to erase the tape and start over. This time, try to sound a little less like a used car salesman. And lose the pathetic line about Puck. What was that supposed to mean? The dog misses you, but I'm doing fine?

The dog.

I lurch upright and search the floor for my shoes. Puck's tail thumps twice in gratitude. He follows me down the hall and, when I hook the leash onto his collar, makes a sort of stiff-legged curtsy, a substitute for sitting and then having to clamber all the way up again. I find the keys on the hall table, stuff a couple of plastic bags into the pocket of my shorts, and we head out to the elevator.

Our building is old and slightly shabby, but if one can look past the naked bulb on the landing and the gouged and whitewashed walls, there are still hints of its grander beginnings. The worn marble landing is the size of a spacious studio apartment, and the scrolled plaster ceilings are twelve feet, echoing a time when space was not at such a premium. The building is rent-controlled, so nothing has changed in years, not the tenants, not the paint.

While we're waiting for the elevator, I hear what sounds like movement behind Mrs. Doherty's door. There's no light coming from under the doorsill, but I wouldn't be surprised if, even at this hour, she is eyeballing me through her peephole, alerted by the groans and squeaks of the elevator as it heaves its way up from the ground floor. She leaves her apartment only every few days for groceries, pushing her wire cart in front of her like a walker and glaring at me suspiciously whenever I greet her. When we first moved in, I tried to win her over with friendliness, but six years later, she persists in regarding me warily, as though I might one day force her back into her dusty foyer and rob her of all the china figurines and crocheted doilies that can be seen crowding the dim interior of her rooms. Robin has gradually gained her confidence, however, at least enough to discover that her first name is Mary, that she raised three children here, and that she can recite the dates and apartment numbers of every burglary, every change of tenants through death or divorce, every mishap that has occurred in this building over the last several decades. Until our break-in, the fourth floor held the record for the fewest burglaries. "And none of them came in through an open window." Robin thought she heard accusation in Mary's voice, as though our carelessness has spoiled it for everybody.

The elevator is one of the slowest rides in the city, and while we descend, Puck paces the confines of the bronze cage, in a hurry to get outside and relieve his aging bladder. I am nowhere near so eager. This late-night descent into the streets charges me with enough adrenaline to keep me alert for the rest of the night. As we emerge from the relative safety of the building, I check both ways down the avenue. That I don't see anyone in no way eases my anxiety. Puck, oblivious, lifts his leg and drowns a weed that has sprung up through a crack in the concrete.

It is actually a beautiful street, edged on this side by graceful limestone buildings and, on the far side, by Prospect Park. All of the buildings but ours have gone co-op over the past ten years, sandblasting the grime from their gargoyles and unfurling fresh awnings onto the avenue. But the quiet prosperity is misleading. This pocket of gentrification is a scant few subway stops from half the projects in Brooklyn and an inviting destination spot for the criminally minded. The length of the avenue is a particular favorite with muggers, because they can hit their target and then disappear into the foresty expanse of the park across the street. Last winter, a man on the second floor was held up at gunpoint right where I'm standing, in the shadow of our awning.

We move into the peachy glow of the sodium streetlights, and Puck shuffles slowly toward the curb. The curb glitters with safety glass, where car windows have been smashed in search of phones and tape decks. I wait impatiently while he sniffs the leg of a newspaper box and then waters it. Next is the bus stop sign, and then the light pole and mailbox on the corner. Usually, this is as far as we go at night, just twenty paces to the corner and back, but it takes a good ten minutes to inspect and mark each stop on the route. When I try to hurry him, he gives me a wounded look and, I swear it, exaggerates the arthritic stiffness in his gait. Then he gives his end of the leash a small tug toward the tree trunks down the slope.

Something is fluttering from a lower limb of the old plane tree. I can't make it out from this distance, but then I notice that the trees all the way down the block are festooned with paper. On closer inspection, they turn out to be crayoned drawings of the trees themselves: row after row of green lollipops, some with bluebirds and yellow ball suns. "Save Our Trees" is lettered in a careful, childish hand across this first one. Taped to the next trunk is another drawing, but its message is lost in the deep shadows.

Early this spring, a utility crew showed up unannounced and started surveying the block to install new pipeline. The project would entail digging into the gnarled root system that underlies the entire length and width of the block. From the city's perspective, the old trees are a nuisance anyway – their roots curdle the sidewalks and push up asphalt – but when they blithely started ribboning off old willow oaks and plane trees, they severely underestimated the depth of the neighborhood's affection for those trees. They also didn't take into consideration that half the newly renovated brownstones are inhabited by attorneys with inflated property values to protect. Wham bam, the city was up to its eyeballs in court injunctions before they could even finish staking.

A sheet of butcher paper has been wrapped around one trunk about eye level and secured with tape. I have to walk around the trunk to read the length of the message: "This tree was planted in 1927. It will take another…"

There is movement in the shadows. I feel the presence of another human being before I see him. A dark silhouette. He is maybe fifteen paces off, coming down the sidewalk in my direction, but even at this distance I can tell he is not one of the attorneys coming home late. When he sees that I have spotted him, his gait becomes exaggeratedly casual.

He is thin, I see now, and his clothes are several sizes too large. They hang off him like a scarecrow. Enormous jeans ride low on his hips and drag at the heels of absurdly large and elaborate running shoes. It is the uniform of clowns and young urban wannabes.

I see him glance around, checking for other eyes that might be watching us. My limbs fill with helium. I tighten my grip on Puck's leash and try to redirect us slowly toward the curb, toward the light, casual, as though I'm not avoiding him, oh no, I just happen to live on the other side of the street. I'm not going to make it, not without running. I stiffen my spine as we prepare to pass one another, and my eyes move to his.

It's him. The guy in my apartment. A small flinch betrays that he recognizes me, too. You fuck. You fucking son of a bitch. Hold a knife on me in my own fucking kitchen. Not again, you shithead. No way, you fucking piece of shit. The words are coming out of my mouth. His cocky swagger wilts, and he edges around me, mumbling something. Once past, he breaks into a light trot.

I drop Puck's leash and yell at him to sit and stay and, I don't know, maybe I'm yelling at the guy to stay, I'm so crazy with rage, I don't know. I follow him. I break into a run and charge after him down the block. I don't know what I'm thinking, my heart is thundering and pumping gallons of blood into my head so I can't think. I just run.

He sprints across Eighth Avenue and I follow, checking for cars, but there is only one and it is too far down the avenue to help or hurt. He cuts left, and we are pounding along Eighth. We cross Fifth Street, then Sixth, then Seventh, and I figure he must be heading for the subway station two blocks ahead. I don't think I'm going to make it that far. There is a painful stitch gathering in my side, and my breath is coming in searing gasps. I have my eyes trained on his back and I can hear him panting, too, but he is also starting to put distance between us. And then he stumbles. His gawky limbs buckle and he flies sprawling onto the pavement. I am on top of him before he has a chance to get up. He flails, and one elbow connects, hard, with my cheekbone. I scrabble back onto my feet and kick him once, feebly, but then when he starts to rise, I kick him again, harder, and again, I don't know how often, until he crumples, shielding his face. I find my breath enough to croak a few more obscenities at him.

"I wasn't doing nothing," he whimpers. "I didn't do nothing to you."

Something is wrong. Something is drastically wrong here. The voice. I have been hearing a voice in my head for the past month – "I got a gun" – the timbre of that voice, every inflection, the curl of each vowel and the thud of every consonant is burnished into my nightmares. This is not the same voice.

I look down at this guy I've been chasing. He is rising slowly, warily, to his knees, one hand cradling his jaw, and though he is the same race and has the same lanky build as my burglar, he is not the same man. For starters, this is a kid, fifteen, sixteen at most. And he's trying not to cry. His mouth is smeared with blood.

He senses the moment has shifted and suddenly springs up and back, turns heel and takes off again, a jagged painful lope punctuated every few feet by a glance backward to see if I am in pursuit.

I feel sick in my gut. I've attacked someone with no provocation, no excuse in the world, and beat him on the street. I am deeply ashamed. I am dust. There are no words for this.

I am squatted on the steps of a brownstone, hunched over and waiting for the earth to swallow me up when a voice hails me from above.

"Are you okay?" An old man, clad in bathrobe and slippers, is standing on the stoop of the brownstone, just inside his doorway. He is framed in the yellow light of the vestibule.

I nod mutely. My throat is closed.

"Do you want me to call the police?" He moves down a few steps, letting the door shut behind him. "I saw him take off. He can't be too far. I can call the police for you. No trouble."

It takes me a second before I understand. He believes he has witnessed a mugging. That I am the victim.

"No. No police."

He shrugs, puzzled, and takes another look at me. "You live around here?"

"Third and the Park."

"Ah, that's nice, those buildings up there."

"Yeah." Into my aching head swims a picture of my block and the recollection that I've left Puck sitting on the sidewalk there. Who knows how long he will stay before he tires of it and realizes he can just walk away. We've never tested his obedience this far.

"You're going to have some shiner to show for your troubles tomorrow."

My fingers find the tender swelling along my cheekbone where I caught the kid's elbow. "I'm fine."

"Well, if you're sure you're gonna be okay."

I pull myself to my feet. "Thanks."

It is a long walk home. A breeze has come up and is sending bits of trash and newspaper skirting up the street. I move blindly, passing in and out of shadow. I know that people have done worse. In the scheme of things, this is minor league barbarity. But I know what it feels like now. I've tasted what I'm capable of. Somewhere past Fifth Street, a plastic grocery bag is rattling in the branches of a tree. I keep walking until I turn up my familiar street and spy Puck in the distance, still sitting, waiting for me to come back. He wags his tail in welcome, and my grief bursts open like a melon.

It is luck I don't deserve that I'm wearing a mask for this commercial. By dawn, my right eye has swollen to a slit. Through my good eye – good being a relative term here to describe an eye that is red and rheumy with sleeplessness but otherwise normal – I survey the damage in the bathroom mirror. There isn't much to be done about the swelling, but I reason that a little makeup might at least tone down some of the more garish shades of purple blooming on the right side of my face. I'm operating on maybe two hours' sleep and so buzzy that my hand shakes when I dab pancake under the eye.

Among my repertoire of nontransferable job skills, I know how to create a completely convincing bruise with makeup. All kinds of disfigurations, in fact, along with the standard old-age lines and pouches. Covering up a bruise is much harder, though, and I make a mess of it. In addition to the swelling, I now appear to have some rare skin disease, perhaps the early stages of leprosy. On the train out to Queens, I think I catch people eyeing me circumspectly, giving me a wide berth.

Within five minutes of my showing up for my call at Astoria Studios, the production assistant has come striding down the hall, a stiffly perky blonde who sizes me up in a glance. One look confirms everything she already knows about actors, that we're unreliable children who have to be coddled because of union rules.

"You must be Dan." She scribbles something on a clipboard and then presents me with a Junior League smile and her name, which sounds like Teacup but is more likely Teeka or Teega. "That looks nasty. Does it hurt?"

"I'm fine," I tell her. "A little run-in with a mugger last night."

"How awful. Are you okay to work?" The question might seem casual, but her bullshit antennae are up and waving.

"Absolutely." I resist the impulse to elaborate, to weave some long and babbling defense of my competence. But this is all she wanted to know, that I'm not going to flake out and make her morning a living hell. Now that we've cleared that up, her features relax into a semblance of sympathy.

"You poor thing. Where did this happen?"

"Outside my home. Park Slope."

She shakes her head and confides, "My friend got mugged on Madison and Eighty-first last year in broad daylight. It just goes to show." What it might go to show, she leaves for me to figure out. "Well, all I can say is thank goodness you're wearing that costume, right? So, okay." She consults her clipboard. "I left the contracts in your dressing room. Jodi – " She waves over a waifish girl in skintight pants and an abbreviated T-shirt that look as though they were purchased for someone even smaller and thinner. When she lisps hello, she ducks her head and peers up at me with raccoon-lined eyes. "Jodi can show you where your dressing room is. They won't need you on the set for an hour or so. There're breakfast goodies on the catering table. Are you hungry? Excuse me." The two-way radio on her hip is bleating, and after a brief exchange that includes a reference to the talent – that would be me – she glances surreptitiously at me and then steps out of earshot before continuing the conversation.

My stomach rumbles at the mere mention of food and reminds me that I haven't eaten since… when? Yesterday, sometime yesterday. I'm buzzing with exhaustion and hunger and nerves. That's what this is, the jitters. After all these years, the preface to performance is still a heightened anxiety, like a motor running too fast. It doesn't matter what the role is, whether it's Broadway or, in this case, a no-liner rodent on a commercial. You'd think I could learn to relax. Then again, I did a show once with an actress whose name you would recognize, who'd been in the business at least thirty years and still, every night at five minutes to curtain, would disappear into the bathroom and empty the contents of her stomach.

Teeka returns, saying, "Change of plans. They want you on the set."

I'm escorted to a cavernous soundstage, past the catering table where half a dozen stagehands are scarfing down muffins and shooting the breeze, and through the clutch of suits who represent the agency and the client. The appearance of a one-eyed actor causes a stir. I can hear the whispered horror in my wake, but Teeka drops back to soothe and reassure them. "Thank goodness he's wearing that costume," she repeats. Yes, yes, we're all in agreement on that stroke of good fortune.

The set is something Kafka might dream up. Three walls of a room-sized cage have been constructed. Against the back wall is an enormous copier. Next to it, they've strapped a watercooler onto the bars of the cage. Strapped to another wall is a red-framed mirror and a large plastic chute filled with giant brown pellets, and from the ceiling hangs a big blue bell. The floor of the set is knee-deep in shredded paper. But the centerpiece of the set is a metal contraption, something like a small Ferris wheel. A half-dozen people are gathered watching a stagehand slowly revolve the wheel with his hands; he grabs a spoke and gives it a good pull, like Vanna White on Wheel of Fortune. Then a voice from up in the lights yells at him to hold. He stops the wheel with some effort, and they wait, staring up into the dark.

"Nope, we're still getting too much light off it," the voice in the rafters yells. The group pauses and mulls this over. There's a palpable tension on the set. Everyone is glancing surreptitiously at a man in knife-pleated khakis and a lemon yellow polo shirt. When he turns around, I recognize the director. He is small and wiry and would probably identify himself as a serious runner. I'm guessing he's about my age, but his hairline has already receded, leaving behind an island of wispy, colorless hair that floats above his creased forehead. At the moment, his face is taut with concentration or suppressed anger, his already thin lips pressed into a straight line. He squints at us, then holds up a finger to indicate he will be with us in a moment.

"Okay, so you have to matte the surface? How long will that take?" He is staring at his watch, and because he isn't looking at anyone, there is a pause while the group decides who should answer. After a brief conference, they decide the paint job will take forty minutes, so they can do a run-through with me first.

The director then turns back to us and makes a fairly obvious shift to a friendly public persona. "Dan, good to see you again. Chris Pitney." He thrusts out a hand and shakes, vigorously and a fraction of a minute too long. "Boy, they got you good. Can you see out of that eye?"

"Yeah. No problem."

"Next time, just give them your wallet. I had a neighbor tried to negotiate with some thug for his ID. Ended up with a knife in his side." I nod to indicate I'm filing this away – give them your wallet.

"No costume?" Again, the question seems not to be directed at anyone in particular, so I'm not sure if I should answer. Teeka jumps in that she can have Wardrobe bring it down to the set.

"No. Never mind. Well, just the paws. The rest we can do without for now. It's probably cooler under the lights without it."

He refocuses on me. "So Dan, let's get you on the wheel. Just hop up there and get the feel of moving on it."

A stagehand holds the wheel still while I climb through the spokes and onto the wheel. There is a floor, if you will, of foam-covered bars spaced about a foot apart. I crouch on all fours and slowly advance to the next bar, one hand at a time, following with my feet. After a few false starts where I lose my footing and bang a shin, I start to get the hang of it. It's like climbing a ladder, except that the ladder is moving underneath me, pushing me forward. I fall into an easy rhythm, alternate feet and hands working in sync. Pitney encourages me to pick up the speed.

"What you're doing is great, Dan. But we need a sense of urgency, a frantic quality. Maybe if you put more into the shoulders."

Because I have no peripheral vision on my right side, I can't see Pitney, but I can hear in his tone that he would just love to jump up here and show me how to make this baby spin. I start treading a little faster, and almost immediately, sweat beads on my forehead and begins to trickle down my ribs. I don't have a clue what he has in mind with my shoulders, so instead I try nosing my head side to side in quick little staccato motions. This is good, I can tell, and I hear what sounds like an approving murmur from the small crowd that has gathered at the edge of the set. A drop of sweat slides into my left eye and blurs what's left of my vision and I stop, gripping the bars as the wheel swings first up and then back, before coming to rest.

"That's good. Great. Don't go past your limit. We can always speed up the film if we have to."

A dark, parrot-nosed woman dressed in pink overalls has emerged through the knot of observers and approaches Pitney with what looks to be an armful of stuffed animals.

"Oh, good. I'm sorry, what's your name? Sheila? Sheila here has your paws. Go ahead and put those on and we'll run this one more time. Frank, how's it looking?"

The paws are made of smooth white fake fur and have long prehensile toes ending in claws. On the undersides of one pair are pink cotton gloves. The other pair are designed to strap over my shoes. Sheila helps me Velcro the paws into place, and I hold up my hands in front of me, slowly examining them with exaggerated horror.

"Can this be evil?" I intone and then laugh maniacally. There are a few obliging chuckles around the set. No telling how many of them recognize an imitation of Spencer Tracy's Jekyll and Hyde and how many think I'm just another loosely hinged actor. I catch Jodi, Teeka's assistant, watching me intently and sucking on a strand of hair. I wink at her, and her eyes drift to the floor.

"Okay, whenever you're ready…" Pitney is smiling, but it's a thin smile of tolerance. He doesn't have time for fooling around. I get the sense that this is a break for him, too, the chance to do a big-budget national instead of the local RV and furniture warehouse ads. He may even have private fantasies that this will break him out, that it will lead to bigger things, a TV pilot or who knows what else. Of course, he's wrong. This is a job, nothing else, a couple days' work, and at best it will lead to more days just like this one. I could tell him, relax, your life isn't in here. It's outside that door, out in the world somewhere. This? This is ridiculous. But would he listen to the one-eyed actor with the rat paws? Not a chance.

I climb back up on the wheel, my rat nails clattering against metal, and begin climbing the wheel. The paws take a little getting used to, but they also help me visualize myself as Lab Rat. I pick up speed and start the sniffing motions and manage to keep all these balls in the air until Pitney says "Cut." Again, the wheel slows to a halt and I can see a half-circle of satisfied mugs, some encouraging nods. We're in business.

Next, we run the final shot. Pitney instructs me to lie on my back on the wheel. "What we're looking for here is an exhausted rat. But also at the end of his rope. Really crazed."

"In other words, just be yourself, Dan," I joke, but of course, no one knows if I'm kidding or not, so they smile uncertainly, humoring me.

I lie back, raising my legs and arms above me, and start slowly bicycling my feet and twitching a bit, squeaking pathetically.

I'm practically giddy with sleeplessness and disdain, and who knows, this may be working in my favor. Whatever impulse comes to me, I follow it. I feel like Steve Martin or Robin Williams, ricocheting in high gear from one new piece of business to the next. At one point, I try grabbing handfuls of paper off the floor and flinging them overhead, shaking my feet so my claws clatter, and squeaking ecstatically. This is a keeper; even Pitney is chortling. I've been a little hard on him; he's not such a bad guy. Then we do the shot with the giant copier. The doors of the copier are open, and they've got it rigged to spew out shredded paper from the side. I'm supposed to nose around, lift the various levers and pull out drawers. I throw in the ear scratch bit, and it gets a good laugh from Pitney. Then I scrabble over to the side of the copier where the paper is coming out and start stuffing paper into my mouth. It's an inspired bit, and the crew is laughing. As I'm doing this, I hear a voice on my right. "A rat's not gonna eat the paper. He should just sniff it." I twist around and grab a peek – it's one of the agency goons, Ben Somebody. Everybody wants to direct.

I raise my eyebrows, a la Jack Benny, and hold up my rodent paws in appeal to my audience. This is a bad move, and I know better. I'm just the hired rat. You don't bite the hand that feeds you.

Pitney is nodding earnestly, the weenie, doing his best to pacify the suits. "Good point, yes. So, Dan, let's try that. Just sniffing the paper as it comes out." I sniff.

By the time they're done with me, I'm starving, but the catering table has been cleaned out – lots of crumb-dusted trays, wadded napkins, and used paper plates with half-eaten muffins, crusts of quiche, and melon rinds – and another three hours before lunch. I grab a couple of glazed donuts and a cup of sour coffee, and Jodi takes 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 urinate, aware as I'm doing so that the sound of my stream is audible in the next room. When I return, Sheila picks up her story where she left off. She picks up the rubber tail, which looks astonishingly like a phallus, except of course that it is roughly three feet long and ends in a point. A fantasy dick, the kind you have in your dreams. It's attached on one end to fabric panels which she wraps and cinches snugly around my waist.

"How about strapping this on the front?" I smirk.

"Don't you wish." Sheila smiles wearily and shakes her head. Boys, the mother of unruly boys. Then she helps me into Lab Rat's trousers, threading the tail through a hole in the seat and tucking my shirt in. She allows me to zip on my own.

We strap on my paws, first the feet, then the hands. Finally, Lab Rat's head. Sheila climbs onto a chair and lifts the huge head from the dressing table where it has been staring at me with beady, blank malevolence for the past twenty minutes. A tie dangles loosely from its neck. She hoists the monster above my own head, but before she can lower it, I grab her wrists, surprising us both. A chilly sweat has popped out of my pores.

"Could we wait on the head?"

Her eyebrows lift.

"Just until we get onto the set?"

"Suit yourself."

Half-man, half-rat, I follow Sheila down the hallway. I have a sudden, powerful empathy for the death-row prisoner being led to his execution. The fact that my dread makes no sense does nothing to lessen its insistence, and by the time we get to the soundstage, my heart is fairly skittering inside my ribs. There are several more people milling around than were here earlier, and the set is throbbing with hot light. I'm feeling a bit woozy and have to close my eyes for a moment against the light and noise, the buzz of voices. Under the drumbeat of my heart, I can hear Pitney's voice issuing instructions to the cameraman, and another voice saying we need to get those cables taped down before someone breaks his neck.

"Is he okay?"

"I dunno."

"Dan?" I open my eyes and Pitney is standing directly in front of me, silhouetted darkly against the glare. "Ready to rock and roll?" he asks. Sheila is behind him, and she's got one arm wrapped around Lab Rat's snout, the other grasping its open neck. I can't speak, but I attempt a smile and a nod. Sheila, my executioner, holds out the empty head. When I peer inside, there is nothing but blackness and, in the distance, two pinpricks of light, the eyeholes. They are impossibly far away, and I realize with a heart-jolting certainty that there's no way I can get enough air in my lungs to make it that far. I take a shallow gulp, though, and I try. I shut my eyes, and I swallow another breath and then another and then, God help me, I pull the head down over my own, but just as I feared, I'm not going to make it. Waves of panic crest over me, my air is running out, and I can't find the eyeholes. When I try to extricate myself, one of my damn claws gets hung up on something. I am on the verge of passing out before I finally yank myself free.

"You okay there?" Pitney asks.

I find enough breath to whisper the word "fine." This is so clearly a lie, I have to amend it. "Just give me a minute," I wheeze. "I'm a little dizzy is all." I shrug my shoulders as though to suggest I'm just as mystified as he is.

Teeka swims into view. Her head is shaking slightly, a little tremor of disgust. "Are you claustrophobic, Dan?" She might as well be asking me if I have gonorrhea. I study the question carefully. Claustrophobia? No, I wouldn't call it that, exactly. Perhaps some discomfort in dark, enclosed spaces. I try to avoid being trapped in dark and enclosed spaces, how's that?

I was five or six years old, and my brother, Ricky, and I were playing magician. Ricky tied our mother's red skirt around his neck, drew a mustache on his upper lip with what turned out to be an indelible laundry marker, and christened himself the Truly Amazing Ricardo. Being the younger sibling, I was assigned the role of magician's assistant, the one who picked a playing card out of the deck (a card, any card, not that one) and stood against the wall with a handkerchief tied around my eyes while he threw silverware at me. Anything to be in the show. Then Ricky got the brilliant idea to lock me in the hope chest at the foot of our parents' bed. This was thirty years ago, but I can still vividly recall the suffocating blackness of my blanket-lined coffin, the sharp smell of mothballs, the muffled voice of my brother explaining to our imaginary audience that he had nothing up his sleeves. And then his voice was drowned out by screams. Mine, as it turned out.

Someone has found a chair, but I can't sit down, not with my damn tail, so they instruct me to bend over at the waist. I stare down at the floor and see paws where my feet should be, paws at the center of a circle of human feet. "Take slow, deep breaths," a voice is saying. I overhear another voice, farther away. "What's the problem?" and then "You gotta be kidding me."

I try again, valiantly, but each time I descend into the interior of Lab Rat's head, I am engulfed by fresh panic, a panic exacerbated now by the fear that my career is crashing before my eyes. When I reemerge, gasping and blinking away my blindness, I am confronted by a gallery of stone faces, the veneer of patience worn thin. I try again. It's no use. Even if I could stay inside the head for a few minutes, there is no way I could simultaneously remember to move and breathe, much less climb the exercise wheel. While this is not a demanding role, it does require motor skills.

By now, the news has spread to everyone on the set: the actor is freaking out and can't get his head inside the rat costume. An impromptu powwow is called a few feet away. Because I am the subject of discussion, they are careful to lower their voices, so I can't make out most of what is being said. But I can guess. I hear Pitney issue orders to find the stand-in, and there is more murmured discussion, punctured by a crackle of laughter before the group breaks up. Preparations are underway to move forward without me.

My panic has begun to subside, and I'm pretty certain I could stand up without getting woozy. But I stay bent over all the same. I can't bring myself to face anyone. Besides, it would be unseemly to recover so readily. Indeed, I'm guessing it will be viewed by some as bad taste on my part not to expire right on the spot. I would happily accommodate them if I could. If this is not the most humiliating hour in my life, it's right up there.

Sheila appears again at my side, and as though she is talking me off a ledge, she explains that they'll need to get me out of the costume. It's all right, she says, no need to move just yet. She's brought my own clothes from the dressing room. First the paws, she says. When I lift my head, I see my street clothes in a heap on the chair. She means, I realize, to strip me right here.

"I can walk to the dressing room," I say. I intend my tone to convey steadiness, but it must sound angry to Sheila because she steels her gaze and looks right through me.

"They need the costume."

And sure enough, the stand-in, who has been recruited to take my place, is poised just on the other side of the set, behind the giant pellet dispenser. He is talking with Pitney and nodding intently.

I pick up my clothes and walk away, not as far as the dressing room but far enough to get out of the circle of broiling lights and into the relative anonymity behind the cameras. Sheila strips me of Lab Rat's costume, piece by piece, and returns me to my human state. She gathers up the costume, and I am alone. I watch at a distance as she suits up the stand-in. He snugs on that rat's head as though it were a stylish hat and hops up onto the wheel, ready to work. Pitney instructs him to lie back on the wheel and bicycle his legs, and the stand-in obliges, looking more robotic than frantic. Still, let's be frank, there's not much acting required here. He can put on the suit and follow instructions, and in the end, that's what counts.

I'm at a loss what to do now. I wait for a while, vacillating between the hope that someone will appear and direct me and the hope that, mercifully, I have been forgotten. Finally, I search out Teeka, moving around the edges of the soundstage from one clump of people to the next. As I pass, there is a perceptible ripple of awareness, but they each do their best to pretend I don't exist. Only Sheila actually makes eye contact, and she lets me know with a look that, as much as she would like to sympathize, I have brought this on myself. Now, it goes without saying that there are a lot of people here who would just as soon I'd never shown up this morning. After all, they have to rehearse the new guy, and this little fiasco is going to set back the schedule a couple of hours. By the same token, though, there should also be at least a few union people on this set who would have a generous thought for me, as I will no doubt be responsible for some overtime, possibly even golden time. If so, they keep it to themselves. I am being shunned, as surely as if I had a scarlet A on my breast for Actor.

When I find her, Teeka is painstakingly professional. She tells me in clipped tones that she's put a call in to my union rep. She's never had to deal with this situation before, so she's not sure what the procedure is. As she understands it, if I want to get paid the session rate, I may have to stay on call. In any case, I'll at least have to wait until she hears back. If I want to wait in the dressing room, that's fine. Everything in her demeanor suggests that I have pulled a fast one, that I may have conned the rest of them, but she for one is not buying.

It is only now that I remember I have an agent. This is what he gets paid for. I beg some change off Sheila and retreat down the hall to the pay phone.

"Good afternoon – Shepard, Pape, and Associates."

I recognize the voice of one of the associates. No one is a receptionist anymore; they are all associate agents. So theoretically this guy, Patrick, represents me, but neither he nor I see it quite that way.

I ask to speak to Zak, and he deflects me.

"He's on another line. Can I take a message and have him ring you back?"

"No, I need to talk to him."

Patrick repeats woodenly, "He's on another line."

"No shit. I need to talk to him now." I speak slowly, in case he's an idiot. "Not later. Now."

Patrick has no easy reply for this. I have violated the carefully honed rules of his universe: actors with status give orders; actors without status plead and grovel. I hear a click, and for a split second, I figure he's hung up on me, but then the tinny strains of salsa pipe through the phone.

If I were going to start worrying about my career at this late date, I could mull over the fact that I have just alienated one of the people whose job it is to make sure my resumes get submitted to the casting people, a person who will probably never again let me speak to my agent.

"Dan." Zak's mouth is full and I hear him chewing something, chew, chew, swallow. "So what's this big emergency?"

"Zak, I'm sorry to bother you." Now that I've got him on the phone, I'm not sure where to go from here.

"Patrick tells me you ripped him a new asshole."

"Tell him I'm sorry."

"Yeah, yeah. Between you and me." He chuckles. "Ah, never mind."

"It's this commercial thing."

Zak takes another bite. "What's that? Oh, yeah, the Dobbins national. Aren't you shooting that today?"

"Zak, I fucked up."

"What do you mean you fucked up?" I now have his complete attention.

"There's a head. The costume has a big headpiece, and I couldn't wear it."

"I'm not following you."

"I couldn't put the head on. I get claustrophobic. No one ever said anything about a big head, or I would have told them."

There is a pause while Zak attempts to make sense of this.

"So you're at the studios, yes? And what are they do-ing?

"They're rehearsing the stand-in."

"And no one ever mentioned this headpiece to you? Not during one of the auditions, maybe?"

"No. I mean maybe I should have assumed."

Zak jumps in. "Fuck that. That's not your job. That's their job." I can hear him working out his strategy. "Someone should have informed us if the costume required special skills."

I could weep with gratitude.

"Forget about it. Go home. Make sure you sign the paperwork."

"I'm sorry, Zak."

"What are you apologizing to me for? Go home, get drunk, whatever. There'll be other jobs."

Yes. Other jobs. Of course. A tiny bright light winks in the blackness, like the eyeholes in the rat's head, far away but bright. This time, though, I may make it. I take a deep breath.

"Speaking of which," I say, "you haven't heard anything from Tribeca yet, have you? I know it's early, but I had a really good feeling about that one."

Zak clears his throat. "They went with someone else, Dan."

There is a fly on the wall, right at eye level. I could move to the desert like Robin wants. To hell with these people. This life. My chest feels heavy like it's covered with a lead X-ray apron.

"But Helen said they loved you, that you read like a house afire. They just decided to go a different way. You know Kyle McCann? He's one of ours. Maybe you met him at the Christmas party." I gotta go.

"Okay, kiddo. Sign the papers."

It's three in the morning and I'm driving up I-95, headed to Maine. Just past Boston, the jazz station I've been listening to dims and sputters out. A little farther north, Puck, too, grows quiet, finally exhausted after hours of lurching around the interior of Stuart's car, whining and stress-shedding on the immaculate upholstery. He is asleep now on the seat beside me, dreaming who knows what, his paws lightly beating the air. There is only the occasional car. The night is quiet and dark and empty. Living without a car for the past fourteen years, I had forgotten how intoxicating it is to drive alone at night. Cocooned in Stuart's snug little Honda, I might go anywhere. The world becomes a series of possible destinations, the road signs lit up like invitations. And behind me, New York recedes like a weirdly distorted dream, a dream peopled with outsized rats' heads and boys with baggy pants and enormous running shoes, boys who are running from me. I need to catch up, to explain something, but no matter how hard I push myself, I don't seem to be any closer. I am running and running, and then suddenly I am on a wheel and my feet have become paws and I am running, still running. And Judy Garland is dancing, her knees and elbows pumping, her smile game, her eyes wide with fear.

That was hours ago, years ago, a lifetime ago. If it weren't for the hollow ache in my gut, I could almost pretend that none of it had ever happened.

I roll down the window, just in case I'm sleepier than I think. The air is cool and smells like seawater. I haven't yet figured out what I'll say to Robin. She doesn't even know I'm coming. I should probably pull over and sleep, but I'm afraid that if I did, when I woke up I wouldn't have the courage to do whatever it is I'm about to do. A little sleep might put this all in the flat, reasonable perspective of daylight.

I remember the first night I went on stage in New York. I didn't come on until near the end of the first act, but I was too antsy to wait in the empty dressing room, so I came upstairs early. I stood in the dusty dark behind the back set wall and listened to the spill of familiar lines, mixed now with the laughter of an audience, a stray titter, a cough. The play was zipping along, and as my entrance drew closer, I started nervously running my lines in my head. A few lines in, I blanked. Suddenly, I couldn't remember what came next. Nothing, not what Rob said, not what I said, not a single line of the play from that point forward. Nothing but sheer blank terror. The bottom fell out of my stomach. I had a fleeting notion that I could run downstairs and grab the script off my makeup table, check the lines, find my place. But on stage, they were maybe six lines from my cue. Five. Four. I moved stolidly toward the stage right wing, to the edge of the light, and before I could think any further, there was my cue. I took a deep breath and walked into the blinding light, like stepping out of a plane and into the sky, trusting the chute will open.

Of course, it did. No problem. Once on stage, I was home. I knew what to do as if I'd been doing it all my life. The lines appeared as they were needed, as though I had just thought of them. And it was exhilarating, living in that moment, knowing only peripherally what might come next.

The moon, sweeping in and out of clouds, follows at a distance. The engine hums, the dog snores, pavement unrolls beneath the headlights. If some miracle were to occur and I was able to sleep again, this is what I would miss.