Dreams Of Rescue - Softcover
"I have spent the winter at my summer place," begins the narrator of this startlingly original literary chiller. Juliana Durrell Smythe, known for her "female in jeopardy" performances on film, fears her roles are proving prophetic. As an actress, she is accustomed to rescue. In movies, "Having known the comfort of muscled arms, I still expect, without reason, to be carried to safety and, ultimately, to be loved." But confined to her Victorian lake house, Juliana discovers the discrepancies between film and actual jeopardy. "The police have not turned out to be kindly, potential lovers...." She must walk the fault line of fiction and confront the mysterious and violent end of her marriage. An atmosphere of danger descends with the snow. The men who enter Juliana's life seem suspect; her predicament shadowed by the distress of her housecleaner. How much did she see? How much does she know?
Haunted by her past roles and the history of her romantic home, built for a wedding in 1899, Juliana's marital mystery becomes entwined with that of the original Victorian bride's. To survive, she is compelled to connect a nineteenth-century disappearance to the contemporary despair of the lakeside resort. In a snowscape of dazzling beauty, Juliana must enact the role that will save or cost her own life.
Plumbing the secrets of two centuries, Cunningham has written a hypnotic novel that will transport the reader into a brilliantly evoked world. With its hard-chiseled realities and incandescent images, Dreams of Rescue is a new take on a classic form, that shatters convention and will entrance readers long after its stunning finale.
Haunted by her past roles and the history of her romantic home, built for a wedding in 1899, Juliana's marital mystery becomes entwined with that of the original Victorian bride's. To survive, she is compelled to connect a nineteenth-century disappearance to the contemporary despair of the lakeside resort. In a snowscape of dazzling beauty, Juliana must enact the role that will save or cost her own life.
Plumbing the secrets of two centuries, Cunningham has written a hypnotic novel that will transport the reader into a brilliantly evoked world. With its hard-chiseled realities and incandescent images, Dreams of Rescue is a new take on a classic form, that shatters convention and will entrance readers long after its stunning finale.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Laura Shaine Cunningham is the author of Beautiful Bodies, A Place in the Country, and Sleeping Arrangements. A playwright and journalist, she has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. She is a native New Yorker.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
From Chapter One
In Character
I have spent the winter at my summer place. Every night I watch the tabloid television shows for news of other estranged wives, and the extended coverage on those who have already been murdered.
Each evening I wrap myself in a shawl and settle on the sofa. Then I lie back and stare at the double flicker of the television and the fireplace. I am not operating at full efficiency, but am sustained as if on a dual pilot light. Some nights I play compact disc recordings, always operas, at the same time that I watch television, and the combined sound and light gives the cottage an electric liveliness, an air of camaraderie, as if I were having a party without people.
My summer place makes for an odd winter hideout. I am reminded of the scene in Dr. Zhivago, the movie, in which Omar Sharif finds his dacha transformed into an ice palace. Zhivago is freezing, but one senses that the unexpected beauty of his crystallized home sustains his soul. My summerhouse is much smaller than Zhivago's, but it, too, is iced with winter whimsy and offers its own chill consolation.
Can I call it pleasure? Perhaps not, under these circumstances, but my spirit rises to the white vista, the glittering twigs, and cushioned bushes. I love the snow -- have always loved it -- and now I need the snow in ways I never imagined.
The snow might save me, in every sense. The snow keeps a perfect palette: I can detect if anyone has tried to approach on foot. That is a practical advantage of being snowbound, but the spiritual benefit may prove more significant. To survive now, I must recall beauty, the possibility of bliss....
This house was dedicated to love, to the promise of joy. The house is not an ordinary house; Casa di Rosas was built as a chapel for a single occasion, the June wedding of a tobacco heiress in 1899. The Wedding Cake House, as it is more often called, has always depended on the triumph of charm over practicality. Only its fanciful design -- and the increased market for second homes upstate -- saved the structure from demolition years ago.
The Wedding Cake House stands at the edge of a bluff, overlooking the lake. The rationale for this picturesque but precarious position was the portico, where the bride and groom could pose, framed by latticework, the blue glitter of Lake Bonticou as backdrop.
From where I lie on the sofa, I can see their original wedding photograph, sepia and further faded from the century of sunlight. The Victorian bride and groom appear formal in their garb and expectation. They are young and extraordinarily attractive, but they look to one another with the solemn intention of the past, displaying none of the abandon of my own wedding photograph. My Kodachrome print fell from its hanging nail long ago and now leans against the wall below the more formal 1899 portrait. The contrast is acute: The unposed picture shows me bare-armed as I look up at my new husband; we are laughing, I remember, because the day was chillier than anticipated, and we tried to feign composure. I am wearing a sleeveless white crepe cocktail dress and trying not to visibly shiver; the camera caught us as we collapsed in laughter. The Victorian couple's decorum and our lack of propriety strike me -- as if my husband and I, the interlopers, trespassed to carouse where the first bride and groom exchanged sacred vows.
Now, in late February, the light slices through the rooms. The halls appear as through a reducing glass, angles oversharp and outlined. Even the parquet floor seems heightened and whitened, as if the cold raised wax to its surface. The windows tremble and the furnace roars. Every several minutes the boiler grunts and fires. The house vibrates at the effort of keeping the wind outside these walls.
The Wedding Cake House was never intended to be used in winter, let alone converted to a home. Many years ago, the previous owners inserted a bed, dressing, and bathroom under the eaves, and the heat still travels toward the original vaulted ceiling and escapes through fissures in the attic. The upper story rooms overheat, while the downstairs living and dining area remain chilled.
One of the challenges of this winter has been to stay warm. My husband and I added, at some cost, this fireplace into which I now stare. The leaping flames provide a visual cue, but the fireplace loses more heat than it provides. There is a small radius of warmth directly in front of the crackling hearth, and I huddle toward that. I feel warm as long as I don't move, keep my shawl tucked around me, and sip my hot tea and listen to operas. I hope the arias will, in a magical aural equivalent to the beauty outside, counteract the ugliness of the events that happened here.
I have a mental habit, perhaps it qualifies as a tic, the reverse of tic douloureux, tic of sadness. My tic is the prediction of happiness, or at least pleasure. Before I actually see a person or a destination for the first time, I visualize appealing men and women, beguiling locations. I'm not conscious of projecting these people or places; they present themselves, full blown, in exact detail. En route to the actual meeting or on the phone, I conjure a face, a home, an office.
I'm not always accurate; I'm often disappointed, occasionally alarmed, when confronted with "the real thing." I have no idea why I project these visions, as they run counter to my experience. But I cannot stop, nor do I wish to. I have my successes -- perfect matches of expectation and reality and a few spectacular improvements over fantasy. I believe my dreams-come-true, my good fortune, predict that I will be blessed somehow. I have always entertained the idea that, someday, someone will come forward on my behalf and offer me love, in all its most magnanimous incarnations, and I will be forever changed, blessed. It's almost happened, just that way.
Seventeen years ago, en route here for my surprise honeymoon, I "saw" Casa di Rosas in my mind's eye. I pictured a pleasant cottage, nothing fanciful. My projection was specific as usual: I saw a blanched cabin, listing blue shutters, picket fence. A single rosebush, thorny. Hummingbirds. The entire vision was blanched, as in an overexposed print.
We arrived in June. The orchard was in bloom, an aisle of cherry and apple blossoms. The white-veiled trees were bridal for us, as they had been for the original newlywed couple. We, too, walked that blossomed aisle, kissed beneath the boughs of the most bountiful tree, the weeping cherry. Matt and I admired the roses for which the house was named -- "antique" roses -- white, scarlet, teatime yellow. It was not that there were so many roses; it was their run of the property that charmed me. Roses climbed trellises; they poked up from behind the rusting wrought-iron gate and rambled in hedges round the house. The white roses twined and twisted through the wedding latticework on the portico, then descended the cliff, adhering to the rock ledges all the way down to the lake. These renegade white roses had escaped, domestic joining the wild, and they flourished in aromatic profusion.
I inhaled, sighed. We came to honeymoon, and remained to purchase. It was I who cried, "Oh, this is the place." The house was so inexpensive, it seemed to be a gift, sold "below market" with all "the original furnishings," including the four-poster bed upstairs and the rather sunken sofa, upon which I now recline. Even the rugs remained, faded Orientals, showing bare at the tread of my predecessors. The style, Victorian, with many griffin-clawed, ball-holding furniture feet, was not especially fine, just old. But the bureaus were filled with creamy linens monogrammed AJD, almost my maiden initials. Folded sheets, lace-trimmed shams and cases, embroidered holders for every household object -- Spoons, Buttonhooks. I was beyond charmed; I felt enchanted.
The house met my criteria at that time -- a perfect set, I thought, for romance. I could walk outside naked by moonlight and not be spotted by neighbors. The night we took possession, my husband and I dove naked from our dock into the lake. We laughed as he carried me, nude, over the threshold. Propriety was not a problem then...
Now seclusion has become ironic. My desire for privacy boomeranged; no one witnessed what happened to me here. Yet, even after all that occurred, I still find solace in this place during its winter metamorphosis. The orchard bears blossoms of snow. The lake has become a Lalique; the house itself a confection. True to its conception, Casa di Rosas looks like the bakery's best wedding cake, kept fresh under refrigeration. Icicles double its Victorian frills; frost fern retrace the curtain lace.
Outdoors, the grounds are decorous as a deco lounge, draped in white, dust-covered to stay fresh for the next season. The summer wicker furniture, casualties of my distraction, remains unstored for winter, arranged in conversational circles on the white lawn. The porch swing sways, carrying its plumped white pillows, a wind-sculpted passenger. And over all is the whisper of the snow, the unending snow.
Never before has there been so much snow. The locals, the Bonticouans, as the summer people call the natives of Lake Bonticou, swear that this winter surpassed all records. The snow fell before the leaves, aborting autumn. More snow has fallen than the town plows can push; the roads have narrowed to lunar canyons.
I must be the single person here not to complain about the snow; it serves my purpose. The snow has become my buffer zone, kept my situation on literal ice. The blizzard seems to have drifted selectively: The roads may be impassable, but the wind whisked a magical passageway from my front door to the woodpile, a route along which I scurry several times a day to feed my now continuous fire. I have lost only my driveway; the snow drifted over it, obscuring even the delineation of the road that used to lead to me.
I have had an order of protection since New Year's Eve. The actual order, a smudged Xerox, I keep in an old Bendel box, labeled THE ATTACK. In my mind the order is strung round my property like a red surveyor's ribbon, looped through the gray trees, to define my new boundaries. My husband may not step within a thousand feet of me. If he does, I can summon the sheriff of Lake Bonticou. I imagine the sheriff striding from the woods, with his own order of blue knights, the state troopers.
I should know better than to entertain such visions. I already know the reality: I have dialed 911; I have summoned the police. The squad car, red light pulsing, has skidded up this driveway. I know what actually happened next...
Yet, even after this experience, I am too attuned to fiction to contemplate danger without rescue. I'm infected with optimism. I have seen too many melodramas in which the heroine is saved "in the nick of time." I am conditioned now to expect cinematic salvation. I confess that I am implicated in these fictions, having performed in those movies known in the trade as "FemJep" -- female in jeopardy. For sixteen years, in a dozen films, I have played the victim-heroine. The aftereffects have been insidious: Having known the comfort of male, muscled arms, I still expect, against reason, to be carried to safety and, ultimately, to be loved.
Now it worries me that I was so often cast as a victim. What is it about me that I must play the hunted, the frightened? I once asked my friend the casting director, Elsbieta, and she said, "It's your eyes: They widen so nicely in terror. And the pointy chin...You look sympathetic yet vulnerable." She used a word I loathe -- plucky. I put plucky right there beside spunky, which is my usual character description in scripts -- "spunky but vulnerable." And I am light for my height: I can be carried or thrown without too much stress on the actors playing either my attackers or my saviors.
Of course, I imagined a different career. In fifth grade, we were asked to select a play and dramatize a scene for class. Other girls brought in Peter Pan or Grease. I enacted the climax of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer. I can laugh now at how I flattened myself against the blackboard and recited, in breathy tones, the murder of my beloved bisexual Sebastian: "Against the white wall," I recall saying. "Blood against the white wall." I modeled my performance on Elizabeth Taylor's in the film, American Classics Channel version. The teacher's eyes widened and her jaw dropped, but I was recommended to the drama club, and in a sense never left. Soon after I went out to audition for ingenue roles, I was cast -- my first strangulation by a serial killer who preyed on schoolgirls. I recall being bent backward in a school coatroom. My legs kicking. I wore small white boots.
Once cast, my trajectory has been direct -- straight to Wardrobe for the costumes that would ultimately rip, to Makeup for cosmetics that would smear, and to Special Effects for the fake blood packets, to be concealed and burst upon puncture. I have, most often, been stabbed. Thirteen stabbings, three strangulations, two drownings, one gunshot to the head, and, most inventively, a single impaling with a decorative sword. I survived all. In that sword sequence I had to do ten takes; I was "speared" for days. I cannot even count the hours I have worked on hospital sets, tucked into beds with artful bandages on my head.
Last year I began to refuse scripts in which I was threatened. Now I wonder: How much was premonition? Was it possible that deep within, in some untapped subconscious from whence all motivation springs, I had begun to question whether I wanted to play victim-heroines anymore? Had I sensed in that core of the self, where all is known, the reason?
I should have paid closer attention to the tabloid news, on which most heroines appear in the past tense. FemJep as genre is, I am discovering, criminally false. The producers themselves should be stalked and shot. I had always supposed that such films were not realistic, but the gap between truth and fiction is wider than I would have guessed, and I have taken an almost fatal fall into the abyss.
The first night under the new order, I flipped the yellow pages to Security and telephoned around the county, trying to hire a bodyguard, only to discover that I could not afford one. Even the decrepit, crackle-voiced self-described "seventy-five-year-old retired cop" said, "Have to charge you fifty dollars an hour. And how many hours do you need?"
I have no answer. My case could go on for years; it may never be resolved to my satisfaction. In my economic situation -- my bank account emptied, unable to work -- I could not be protected for a week. My assets, like my house and grounds, are frozen.
In movies, security cost is no object. In my female jeopardy roles I was accustomed to quality alarm systems and even the occasional high-tech electronically sealed half-million-dollar so-called panic room. In my actual low-budget, low-tech life, the cost of being fully "armed against intruders" is prohibitive. I must settle for sound waves that cover my "main points of entry," the downstairs front and back doors, the ground-floor windows. This arming of doorways strikes me as comical, as if my attacker would observe the etiquette of a polite form of entry.
There is also the fact that several years ago it was my husband who paid for this minimal security system; I have now changed the code and my password, Dot (the cat's name), but I suspect this will not be a deterrent. Even in the bygone days of "normalcy," the Be Safe system was more nuisance than reassurance: How many times have mice set...
In Character
I have spent the winter at my summer place. Every night I watch the tabloid television shows for news of other estranged wives, and the extended coverage on those who have already been murdered.
Each evening I wrap myself in a shawl and settle on the sofa. Then I lie back and stare at the double flicker of the television and the fireplace. I am not operating at full efficiency, but am sustained as if on a dual pilot light. Some nights I play compact disc recordings, always operas, at the same time that I watch television, and the combined sound and light gives the cottage an electric liveliness, an air of camaraderie, as if I were having a party without people.
My summer place makes for an odd winter hideout. I am reminded of the scene in Dr. Zhivago, the movie, in which Omar Sharif finds his dacha transformed into an ice palace. Zhivago is freezing, but one senses that the unexpected beauty of his crystallized home sustains his soul. My summerhouse is much smaller than Zhivago's, but it, too, is iced with winter whimsy and offers its own chill consolation.
Can I call it pleasure? Perhaps not, under these circumstances, but my spirit rises to the white vista, the glittering twigs, and cushioned bushes. I love the snow -- have always loved it -- and now I need the snow in ways I never imagined.
The snow might save me, in every sense. The snow keeps a perfect palette: I can detect if anyone has tried to approach on foot. That is a practical advantage of being snowbound, but the spiritual benefit may prove more significant. To survive now, I must recall beauty, the possibility of bliss....
This house was dedicated to love, to the promise of joy. The house is not an ordinary house; Casa di Rosas was built as a chapel for a single occasion, the June wedding of a tobacco heiress in 1899. The Wedding Cake House, as it is more often called, has always depended on the triumph of charm over practicality. Only its fanciful design -- and the increased market for second homes upstate -- saved the structure from demolition years ago.
The Wedding Cake House stands at the edge of a bluff, overlooking the lake. The rationale for this picturesque but precarious position was the portico, where the bride and groom could pose, framed by latticework, the blue glitter of Lake Bonticou as backdrop.
From where I lie on the sofa, I can see their original wedding photograph, sepia and further faded from the century of sunlight. The Victorian bride and groom appear formal in their garb and expectation. They are young and extraordinarily attractive, but they look to one another with the solemn intention of the past, displaying none of the abandon of my own wedding photograph. My Kodachrome print fell from its hanging nail long ago and now leans against the wall below the more formal 1899 portrait. The contrast is acute: The unposed picture shows me bare-armed as I look up at my new husband; we are laughing, I remember, because the day was chillier than anticipated, and we tried to feign composure. I am wearing a sleeveless white crepe cocktail dress and trying not to visibly shiver; the camera caught us as we collapsed in laughter. The Victorian couple's decorum and our lack of propriety strike me -- as if my husband and I, the interlopers, trespassed to carouse where the first bride and groom exchanged sacred vows.
Now, in late February, the light slices through the rooms. The halls appear as through a reducing glass, angles oversharp and outlined. Even the parquet floor seems heightened and whitened, as if the cold raised wax to its surface. The windows tremble and the furnace roars. Every several minutes the boiler grunts and fires. The house vibrates at the effort of keeping the wind outside these walls.
The Wedding Cake House was never intended to be used in winter, let alone converted to a home. Many years ago, the previous owners inserted a bed, dressing, and bathroom under the eaves, and the heat still travels toward the original vaulted ceiling and escapes through fissures in the attic. The upper story rooms overheat, while the downstairs living and dining area remain chilled.
One of the challenges of this winter has been to stay warm. My husband and I added, at some cost, this fireplace into which I now stare. The leaping flames provide a visual cue, but the fireplace loses more heat than it provides. There is a small radius of warmth directly in front of the crackling hearth, and I huddle toward that. I feel warm as long as I don't move, keep my shawl tucked around me, and sip my hot tea and listen to operas. I hope the arias will, in a magical aural equivalent to the beauty outside, counteract the ugliness of the events that happened here.
I have a mental habit, perhaps it qualifies as a tic, the reverse of tic douloureux, tic of sadness. My tic is the prediction of happiness, or at least pleasure. Before I actually see a person or a destination for the first time, I visualize appealing men and women, beguiling locations. I'm not conscious of projecting these people or places; they present themselves, full blown, in exact detail. En route to the actual meeting or on the phone, I conjure a face, a home, an office.
I'm not always accurate; I'm often disappointed, occasionally alarmed, when confronted with "the real thing." I have no idea why I project these visions, as they run counter to my experience. But I cannot stop, nor do I wish to. I have my successes -- perfect matches of expectation and reality and a few spectacular improvements over fantasy. I believe my dreams-come-true, my good fortune, predict that I will be blessed somehow. I have always entertained the idea that, someday, someone will come forward on my behalf and offer me love, in all its most magnanimous incarnations, and I will be forever changed, blessed. It's almost happened, just that way.
Seventeen years ago, en route here for my surprise honeymoon, I "saw" Casa di Rosas in my mind's eye. I pictured a pleasant cottage, nothing fanciful. My projection was specific as usual: I saw a blanched cabin, listing blue shutters, picket fence. A single rosebush, thorny. Hummingbirds. The entire vision was blanched, as in an overexposed print.
We arrived in June. The orchard was in bloom, an aisle of cherry and apple blossoms. The white-veiled trees were bridal for us, as they had been for the original newlywed couple. We, too, walked that blossomed aisle, kissed beneath the boughs of the most bountiful tree, the weeping cherry. Matt and I admired the roses for which the house was named -- "antique" roses -- white, scarlet, teatime yellow. It was not that there were so many roses; it was their run of the property that charmed me. Roses climbed trellises; they poked up from behind the rusting wrought-iron gate and rambled in hedges round the house. The white roses twined and twisted through the wedding latticework on the portico, then descended the cliff, adhering to the rock ledges all the way down to the lake. These renegade white roses had escaped, domestic joining the wild, and they flourished in aromatic profusion.
I inhaled, sighed. We came to honeymoon, and remained to purchase. It was I who cried, "Oh, this is the place." The house was so inexpensive, it seemed to be a gift, sold "below market" with all "the original furnishings," including the four-poster bed upstairs and the rather sunken sofa, upon which I now recline. Even the rugs remained, faded Orientals, showing bare at the tread of my predecessors. The style, Victorian, with many griffin-clawed, ball-holding furniture feet, was not especially fine, just old. But the bureaus were filled with creamy linens monogrammed AJD, almost my maiden initials. Folded sheets, lace-trimmed shams and cases, embroidered holders for every household object -- Spoons, Buttonhooks. I was beyond charmed; I felt enchanted.
The house met my criteria at that time -- a perfect set, I thought, for romance. I could walk outside naked by moonlight and not be spotted by neighbors. The night we took possession, my husband and I dove naked from our dock into the lake. We laughed as he carried me, nude, over the threshold. Propriety was not a problem then...
Now seclusion has become ironic. My desire for privacy boomeranged; no one witnessed what happened to me here. Yet, even after all that occurred, I still find solace in this place during its winter metamorphosis. The orchard bears blossoms of snow. The lake has become a Lalique; the house itself a confection. True to its conception, Casa di Rosas looks like the bakery's best wedding cake, kept fresh under refrigeration. Icicles double its Victorian frills; frost fern retrace the curtain lace.
Outdoors, the grounds are decorous as a deco lounge, draped in white, dust-covered to stay fresh for the next season. The summer wicker furniture, casualties of my distraction, remains unstored for winter, arranged in conversational circles on the white lawn. The porch swing sways, carrying its plumped white pillows, a wind-sculpted passenger. And over all is the whisper of the snow, the unending snow.
Never before has there been so much snow. The locals, the Bonticouans, as the summer people call the natives of Lake Bonticou, swear that this winter surpassed all records. The snow fell before the leaves, aborting autumn. More snow has fallen than the town plows can push; the roads have narrowed to lunar canyons.
I must be the single person here not to complain about the snow; it serves my purpose. The snow has become my buffer zone, kept my situation on literal ice. The blizzard seems to have drifted selectively: The roads may be impassable, but the wind whisked a magical passageway from my front door to the woodpile, a route along which I scurry several times a day to feed my now continuous fire. I have lost only my driveway; the snow drifted over it, obscuring even the delineation of the road that used to lead to me.
I have had an order of protection since New Year's Eve. The actual order, a smudged Xerox, I keep in an old Bendel box, labeled THE ATTACK. In my mind the order is strung round my property like a red surveyor's ribbon, looped through the gray trees, to define my new boundaries. My husband may not step within a thousand feet of me. If he does, I can summon the sheriff of Lake Bonticou. I imagine the sheriff striding from the woods, with his own order of blue knights, the state troopers.
I should know better than to entertain such visions. I already know the reality: I have dialed 911; I have summoned the police. The squad car, red light pulsing, has skidded up this driveway. I know what actually happened next...
Yet, even after this experience, I am too attuned to fiction to contemplate danger without rescue. I'm infected with optimism. I have seen too many melodramas in which the heroine is saved "in the nick of time." I am conditioned now to expect cinematic salvation. I confess that I am implicated in these fictions, having performed in those movies known in the trade as "FemJep" -- female in jeopardy. For sixteen years, in a dozen films, I have played the victim-heroine. The aftereffects have been insidious: Having known the comfort of male, muscled arms, I still expect, against reason, to be carried to safety and, ultimately, to be loved.
Now it worries me that I was so often cast as a victim. What is it about me that I must play the hunted, the frightened? I once asked my friend the casting director, Elsbieta, and she said, "It's your eyes: They widen so nicely in terror. And the pointy chin...You look sympathetic yet vulnerable." She used a word I loathe -- plucky. I put plucky right there beside spunky, which is my usual character description in scripts -- "spunky but vulnerable." And I am light for my height: I can be carried or thrown without too much stress on the actors playing either my attackers or my saviors.
Of course, I imagined a different career. In fifth grade, we were asked to select a play and dramatize a scene for class. Other girls brought in Peter Pan or Grease. I enacted the climax of Tennessee Williams's Suddenly, Last Summer. I can laugh now at how I flattened myself against the blackboard and recited, in breathy tones, the murder of my beloved bisexual Sebastian: "Against the white wall," I recall saying. "Blood against the white wall." I modeled my performance on Elizabeth Taylor's in the film, American Classics Channel version. The teacher's eyes widened and her jaw dropped, but I was recommended to the drama club, and in a sense never left. Soon after I went out to audition for ingenue roles, I was cast -- my first strangulation by a serial killer who preyed on schoolgirls. I recall being bent backward in a school coatroom. My legs kicking. I wore small white boots.
Once cast, my trajectory has been direct -- straight to Wardrobe for the costumes that would ultimately rip, to Makeup for cosmetics that would smear, and to Special Effects for the fake blood packets, to be concealed and burst upon puncture. I have, most often, been stabbed. Thirteen stabbings, three strangulations, two drownings, one gunshot to the head, and, most inventively, a single impaling with a decorative sword. I survived all. In that sword sequence I had to do ten takes; I was "speared" for days. I cannot even count the hours I have worked on hospital sets, tucked into beds with artful bandages on my head.
Last year I began to refuse scripts in which I was threatened. Now I wonder: How much was premonition? Was it possible that deep within, in some untapped subconscious from whence all motivation springs, I had begun to question whether I wanted to play victim-heroines anymore? Had I sensed in that core of the self, where all is known, the reason?
I should have paid closer attention to the tabloid news, on which most heroines appear in the past tense. FemJep as genre is, I am discovering, criminally false. The producers themselves should be stalked and shot. I had always supposed that such films were not realistic, but the gap between truth and fiction is wider than I would have guessed, and I have taken an almost fatal fall into the abyss.
The first night under the new order, I flipped the yellow pages to Security and telephoned around the county, trying to hire a bodyguard, only to discover that I could not afford one. Even the decrepit, crackle-voiced self-described "seventy-five-year-old retired cop" said, "Have to charge you fifty dollars an hour. And how many hours do you need?"
I have no answer. My case could go on for years; it may never be resolved to my satisfaction. In my economic situation -- my bank account emptied, unable to work -- I could not be protected for a week. My assets, like my house and grounds, are frozen.
In movies, security cost is no object. In my female jeopardy roles I was accustomed to quality alarm systems and even the occasional high-tech electronically sealed half-million-dollar so-called panic room. In my actual low-budget, low-tech life, the cost of being fully "armed against intruders" is prohibitive. I must settle for sound waves that cover my "main points of entry," the downstairs front and back doors, the ground-floor windows. This arming of doorways strikes me as comical, as if my attacker would observe the etiquette of a polite form of entry.
There is also the fact that several years ago it was my husband who paid for this minimal security system; I have now changed the code and my password, Dot (the cat's name), but I suspect this will not be a deterrent. Even in the bygone days of "normalcy," the Be Safe system was more nuisance than reassurance: How many times have mice set...
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- PublisherBloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 0747577935
- ISBN 13 9780747577935
- BindingPaperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages368
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(2006)
ISBN 10: 0747577935
ISBN 13: 9780747577935
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Softcover
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Book Description Condition: New. pp. 368. Seller Inventory # 7164495
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