"So far, Jack--so far!" Alice called after him, as he stepped out on Queen Street and closed the door to Daughter Alice.
IV
Sleeping in the Needles
23
Billy Rainbow
Jack was on a press junket in New York. ("Following Miramax's marching orders," as Emma put it.) The only thing memorable about this particular interview was not the opening question itself, which he'd been asked a hundred times before, but the sheer clumsiness of how the journalist worded the question--that and the fact that Emma called in the middle of his oft-repeated answer, and it was the last time Jack would hear her voice.
His interviewer, a matronly woman with a baffling accent, was the same journalist, from the Hollywood Foreign Press, who, in a previous press junket, had asked Jack if he was modeling his appearance on that of a young Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. She was drinking a Diet Coke and smoking a mentholated cigarette, her artificially sweetened breath wafting over him like smoke from a fire in a mint factory.
"Captain Willard has short hair," Jack had answered her that previous time.
"Cap-ee-tan who?"
"The Martin Sheen character in Apocalypse Now--Captain Willard," he'd said. "I'm not a hundred percent sure about his rank."
"I didn't mean-a hees hair," the journalist had said.
"I'm not consciously modeling myself on a young Martin Sheen," Jack had told her. "I'm not trying to kill Marlon Brando, either."
"You mean-a young Marlon Brando?" the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press had asked him.
"In the movie you mentioned," he had explained to her, slowly, "the young Martin Sheen
character is sent to kill Marlon Brando--remember? Not a young Marlon Brando, either."
"Forget eet," she'd said. "Let's-a move on."
This time her question was breathtaking in its awkwardness, but she had at last moved on from Martin Sheen. "Are you a person who-wa, though not a homosexual, psychologically identifies weeth the opposite sex-sa? I mean-a weeth wee-men."
"Am I a transvestite, do you mean?"
"Yes!"
"No."
"But-a you are always dressing as a woo-man--or you seem to be theenking about eet, I mean-a dressing as a woo-man, even when-a you are dressed as a man."
"I'm not thinking about dressing as a woman right now," Jack told her. "It's just something I occasionally do in a movie--you know, when I'm acting."
"Are you writing about eet?"
"About dressing as a woman?"
"Yes!"
"No."
His cell phone rang. Ordinarily he didn't answer his phone in the middle of an interview, but Jack could see that the call was from Emma and she'd been depressed lately. Emma was losing the fight with her weight; every morning since he'd been away, Emma called to tell him what she weighed. It was almost lunchtime in New York, but Jack knew that Emma was just getting up in L.A.
He'd told her that he was being interviewed around the clock--Emma knew very well what press junkets were for. In mild exasperation, Jack handed his cell phone to the lady from the Hollywood Foreign Press. "This woman won't leave me alone," he said to his interviewer. "Try telling her I'm in the middle of an interview. See how far you get."
If nothing else, Jack hoped this might interrupt the chain of thought that the journalist from the Hollywood Foreign Press was pursuing. He already knew that his interviewer would have no luck interrupting Emma from her train of thought.
"Hello-a?" the woman who thought he looked like a young Martin Sheen said.