The Spot: Stories

The Actor’s House

Passing the actor’s house one thought of biker films, of his former edginess, of his beautiful young face on the screen, of his slight lisp — eventually a trademark of sorts — and the way he stood, slightly to one side, and tilted his head, along with the expressiveness of his features, which weren’t perfect because there was something wrong in the symmetry of his face, and his nose had been broken and he tended to blink in a way that made you aware of the lens — but that didn’t detract from the power of his genius, and he had three Academy Awards to his name. If you knew he lived there (when he did), you saw the house in light of his ownership. Otherwise, it was nothing more than one more grand house along the river in a long line of grand houses, and there was nothing to make it stand apart from all the others except for the wall along the front, which wasn’t built by the actor but rather by the next owner, an actress and television talk show host who found the house lacking in security and, two weeks after she moved in, began to modify it — so that, passing it at that time, one thought not only about the actor, but also about the actress, too, because from her modifications one garnered a sense of what she was like: slightly paranoid and a bit antisocial (there was a rumor afloat that some welcome-wagon soul had come to her front door with a pecan pie and had been duly told, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off). So for a few years one passed the house thinking about both souls (the actress and the actor) with a sense that, behind the walls, the actress moved about from room to room fluffing her hair with the flat of her palm, because she had a habit, most knew, of reaching up to touch her hair as if to affirm its existence — beautiful auburn hair that seemed to have as much to do with her fame as anything. But even a few years after the actor was gone, most people thought of him first and then the actress second when they passed the house, hidden behind the wall: high, built of expensive brick, with security devices in the corners on top — small red pinprick beams that couldn’t be seen in normal circumstances but could be seen when it was foggy out, or at night from certain angles, coming back from the city. There were security cameras in the trees, too, and tall evergreen bushes planted just inside the wall that grew to shield the upper reaches of the house from view, so that eventually you couldn’t see any of the house at all and had to look at the wall and the bushes and imagine the house as it had once been, years ago, before the talk show host/actress and even the actor lived there and the house had been owned by the Grande Dame of the theater who had been, at least in appearance, unconcerned about privacy.

When the actor bought the house there had been a transition period in which those passing it still thought of the Grande Dame first and then the actor second (if at all), and then thought about her roles on Broadway, and in several movies, and the elegance and almost Gatsbyesque essence of her personality — the splendid parties she threw over the years on soft summer nights, with sedans and chauffeurs, bored, smoking, leaning against fenders, along the curbside. But then, eventually, over time, thoughts of the Grande Dame faded and the thought of the actor came first, as the primary owner, and with his ownership a different kind of feeling, when you passed, and a sense of mystery, because he was an enigmatic actor and known just as much for his reclusive nature and strange behavior as he was for the fact that he had grown enormously fat, so that the body that had once adorned the screen, and before that the stage, was hidden beneath rings of fat, like a Russian matryoshka doll; along with the fact that he was known for his ranting and his bitter anger and the high energy that seemed to reside beneath his roles in later years when, for example, in one film, he sat amid the jungle in a Buddha calm and mumbled his lines. Passing in a car, one imagined him shuffling from room to room in bedroom slippers, muttering to himself, rehearsing new roles or — in some visions — mumbling old lines that had once given life to new characters set in stone, so to speak, on the films that had recorded his gestures. Passing the actor’s house one often thought of a single scene, a favorite, and remembered it while, at the same time, imagining him fat behind the walls of the house. Because many knew the house’s interior — during those early days of the actor’s ownership — from the tours that had been given back in the Grande Dame’s days, when, once a year, she had opened her door to the general public and allowed them to traipse through, fingering the brocade bedspreads and touching her fine collection of Native American — they’d think Indian — artifacts, a huge array of drums and cradle boards. (Go ahead and touch, she liked to say. Touch anything you want.) Most folks taking the tour did not realize that she had a smaller house downriver, closer to the city, up on the Palisades: a more manageable house in which she spent most of her free time, and that the actor’s house, the one that for many years had been attached to her name by the general public, was mainly for show, or to make her feel a certain way. At the big house — nicknamed Wooden Nickel — she felt like the Grande Dame. At the other house — nicknamed Little Penny — she let her hair down and lay casually about and threw small, intimate dinner parties for her friends who came up from the city and admired her humility and the fact that someone so famous could live in such — and these were the words they used — limited circumstances, all the while knowing, of course, that she owned Wooden Nickel, too, along with Little Penny, and that she represented herself to the world — the general public — with Wooden Nickel and felt secure in doing so because she was not only the Grande Dame of Broadway but also a kind soul, altruistic and giving, and had shared the power of her wealth and fame more than most stars. Passing Wooden Nickel, those few who were aware that she owned Little Penny, and that she threw small parties there, were able to imagine both houses and to see the big house, with its widow’s walk and stately facade and fantastic backyard — the pool, the guesthouse, the boathouse with the green light — those few were able to see Wooden Nickel in relation to the actress who also owned Little Penny. But even those souls, limited in number, still looked at the house and — if they were in a hurry — thought of her simply and cleanly. Whereas later, after the actor bought the house, if the same souls passed they made a single connection and thought only of him — the actor’s house — because as far as anyone knew, it was his only residence. Not only was it his only house, but he lived there alone, too. So it took on the added weight of his isolation. He had moved there, most knew, after the divorce of his third wife, a famous beauty who had starred in a movie with him years earlier, a comedy about mismatched love: a young girl and a much older man who suffered from a form of autism that gave him (in the movie) an innate ability to communicate through his virtuosic piano playing. (And watching that film they couldn’t help but remember his old roles and the way, years before, his thick hands, tight in black gloves, had gripped the handlebars of his motorcycle while his hips shifted in his leather pants and his broad shoulders rolled gently beneath his T-shirts.) So passing the actor’s house one might think, for no apparent reason, unable to pin down exactly why, about undershirts, and in doing so envision the old actor walking from room to room inside, head bowed, his big gut lurching, moving solemnly, stopping now and then to gaze out the window while he thought about some long-lost moment, a scene from one of his movies, maybe, in which he had embodied some character and given it life only to end up feeling, when the shot was finished, a sense of depletion and loss as he sank down into his chair bereft of whatever creative fuel and psychic juice it had taken to get himself into characters so far from himself — and not even real in the first place — that it seemed impossible, at times, to see across the chasm between the two states: as if he were now nothing but a husk of skin that had once contained those former characters. And it was easy to imagine, passing the house, that he felt empty and depleted all the time now, a remnant not only of his former self but also of his former characters. Eventually, almost everyone in the town who had known the Grande Dame and taken the annual open-house tour of Wooden Nickel forgot most of the details of the interior, with the exception, perhaps, of the cradle boards, and when passing the actor’s house they were unable to completely imagine what it was like inside and could only conjure empty rooms defined by walls and the view of the river out the windows: the river, constantly changing, going from placid, glossy smooth one morning — littered with trash and old tree limbs — and then ruffled with long flails of chop the next, always changing and never the same. So they found themselves limited, most of them, to imagining what the actor saw, if he actually looked from his back windows, when he sat alone and gazed out at the water, thinking about his past with a bitter sense of regret over the loss of his third wife, who was dead, or the fact that he had squandered his career under the guise of being a genius, or perhaps because he really was a genius and did not know how to come to terms with the powers that came to him naturally and without study and made him feel uncomfortable: whereas (some passing the actor’s house thought) if he had had to train hard and work at the acting, he might’ve felt a sense of proprietorship over his abilities (and, in turn, the house); whereas, some imagined, passing, he had been helplessly buoyant upon the raging sea of his talents so that, in turn, he could only garner a sense of control over his life by not acting, or by taking bit roles that were far beneath his talents, forcing his so-called genius into small, ill-fitting characters the same way he now squeezed into his ill-fitting clothes.

For a few years the actor’s house did the best it could to maintain its former grandeur and to hold on to the Grande Dame for as long as it could until eventually the windows began to warp out of their frames and the eaves sagged, chewed up by carpenter ants, and the paint began to scale along the clapboards. By the time the actor died, one windy fall afternoon, the house was fully his. On the day he died, those passing on the road glanced over and saw the house and perhaps thought: There’s the actor’s house, and then they thought about his films or looked ahead and simply went on their way, because he had lived there long enough in solitude, without showing his face, to nullify most speculation, and on that brisk fall day the structure had become, quite simply, the actor’s house, and not much more.