The Music of Your Life (21 page)

Before I fall asleep, I try to figure out how I can get back to the Park Point Cinema to see
Cabaret
again without my father finding out. Maybe I'll take a bus, or call a taxicab, or even just walk; it's worth it. I want to just go back and see it by myself; it'll be much better that way. Everything always is.

III.

Soon after I start tenth grade, a Broadway director comes to our town and holds a workshop for some of the more talented local student actors—I make sure to get myself chosen. In my private evaluation, he says to me, “You're a gifted young man, Hunter, but you shouldn't always try to be funny onstage. You're good-looking enough to be a leading man someday, someday soon, I might add, but you've got an image of yourself as a comedian. Try lowering your voice—it's too high-pitched. And don't stand onstage with all your weight on one foot, it makes you look like a sissy. Even your weight out and stand up straight. Make direct eye contact with your acting partner, and with the audience. Don't move your hands and arms around so much.”

A leading man
… The phrase rings in my head; I've never considered it before. As I sit there thinking about that, he pats my hand and starts to tell me again how good-looking I am, which makes me feel kind of creepy, but I don't sweat it, or tell anyone. I just slither away from him as politely as I can, thank him for the advice, and walk out.

A leading man
… My high school is full of them. I start looking around at the popular boys, not just the jocks, but some of the honor students, also, and the school leaders. I begin to study them up close and from far away, too: what they wear, how they carry their books and saunter, maybe even swagger, down the hallways, how they slump in their seats in class, chewing on pencils, long legs outstretched in the aisles … I watch the way they smile at girls, then look away, then scoop their bangs off their foreheads only to let them fall back again, pretending to yawn, pretending to be distracted, batting their eyes … I want to do all those things, too. And even if inside I still know I'm a “comedian,” I'm an actor, too. And if I'm not really a leading man, I can at least play one. I can look, and act, the part.

One thing I learn is that leading men not only know how to stand, stretch their legs, and play with their hair so that everybody notices, they also know how to get elected to office, gain position, run the school. And even though at home I keep reading movie magazines and playing cast albums by myself, at school, in the midst of stretching out my legs, sauntering down the hallway, winking at girls, and scooping my own bangs off my forehead, I am unanimously chosen to be: prom chairman, vice president of the Student Council, and even editor of the school newspaper. I actually go so far as to make myself the paper's first ever movie critic; my friends' parents tell me they always read my reviews before deciding what movies to see.

I have become a leading man.

So now: Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill, the home of the University of North Carolina, is the land of leading men, like a lot of college towns are, I'm sure. And even though I am only one of many leading men here, I imagine that I'm still unique, in my way. Here, leading men practically fall from the branches of the pine and dogwood trees, and when they hit the ground, they travel alone or in packs: they come at you around the corners of buildings; they ascend and descend dormitory stairs day and night, sometimes wearing nothing but running shorts; they sit around in the quad, sunning themselves, or on the library steps, and it's as if invisible spotlights are always aimed to shine directly on them from some unseen lighting grid up above, because they're impossible to miss. Everyone sees them, everyone knows them, everyone wants them. Or wants to be them.

There's a song leading men sing at Chapel Hill: “I'm a Tar Heel born, I'm a Tar Heel bred, and when I die, I'm a Tar Heel dead.” My parents now laugh about how they tried to bring me up a Tar Heel, but I resisted what I called, at the time, “all that college crap,” content as I was only to play records and read movie magazines, go to movies all the time and act in community theater plays.

Now I'm a leading man both onstage and off, and when the leading men of Chapel Hill come to see the drama department productions, the ones that I'm starring in, they see themselves reflected in my performances. They now want to be what I am, because, in a play, the leading man always gets the girl, always triumphs at the end, always ends up on top. He wins.

I'm a leading man born, I'm a leading man bred, and when I die
…

Wooley Dorm, a bright Saturday morning in late April. It's not even 6
A.M.
, five minutes away, in fact, from the hour-on-the-hour chiming from the campus bell tower. I don't need the bells though, since Dalton is next to me, poking me with his fingers.

“Hey, buddy, you awake? Let's play
Chinatown
,” he says, now nudging me with his leg, and then more insistently: “Come on, Hunter, let's play.” Now his hand is pushing against my rib cage and he's trying to roll me awake, trying to rock me from side to side. I'm already awake, of course; I heard him the first time. I just like his hands on my body like that; and I especially like it when he wants to play the games I invented—games I invented just for us.

“I have to study,” I mutter into the pillow.

“Yeah, right. It's six o'clock in the morning. Study me,” he says.

And I do, and for this I have no need of Cliffs Notes.

But after a while, he interrupts and says: “Now let's play
Chinatown
.”

“OK, who's Mrs. Mulwray?”

“I'm Mrs. Mulwray. You're Jake.”

We sit up in bed and hike up our underwear. We're actors after all, and it is just instinct to want to adjust costumes and hair. Lights. Camera.
Action
.

“Who is she?” I ask, in character, gruff and resonant. “The girl. Who is she?”

Dalton/Mrs. Mulwray demurs, looking far away, somewhere in the corner of the room.

I grab him by the shoulders and shake him. “Who
is
she?”

“She's … she's … my sister,” he says, in a husky stage whisper.

I mock-slap him across the face, and his shock of brown-blond hair does indeed fall over his eyes, as if on cue. He's so incredible to look at, I almost break character. I can't take my eyes off of him. Ever.

I snap back as Jake. “
Who is she?
”

“She's my
daughter!
” he exclaims.

Mock-slap the other cheek. Hair falls to other side.

“She's my sister!”

Slap.

“She's my daughter!”

Slap.

And then, hysterical, in full movie-star breakdown mode: “
She's my sister and my daughter!
”

Great wracking sobs. I hold him.
Cut
.

“You were brilliant,” I say, as we collapse back into my iron-frame single bed, of the Early American Institutional variety.

“Faye Dunaway was robbed of that Oscar, man,” he says, as though it were his own deep personal regret.

It is one of our favorite movies; we've seen it twice at the Student Union Film Series. I've known Dalton for four semesters, from the fall of our junior year—he had transferred to Carolina from another college. We met at a Student Union screening of
The Seventh Seal
one rainy late September afternoon while practically the whole rest of the student body was at a football game in Kenan Stadium. We were both sitting by ourselves; he was a few seats away from me, and when the film was over, he turned to me with a big smile on his face and said, “Well, that was cheerful!” So we became steady movie “dates,” even though his girlfriend Susan sometimes came along, too. The movies mostly seemed to bore her, though; she obviously just liked being with him. Dalton and I took in a lot of classics together:
Citizen Kane, Dog Day Afternoon, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Manchurian Candidate
… he even let me talk him into attending a midnight showing of
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
This was October, and we were newly seniors; we had spent the whole summer writing and calling each other (his hometown was about two hundred miles away from mine) and comparing notes on the current crop of mostly awful summer movies. After seeing
Baby Jane
, we were walking together through the dark, lamplit campus at two-thirty in the morning, kicking at leaves and pushing each other into the piles, acting like kids.

He said: “Were you scared of Baby Jane, Hunter?”

“No. Why?”

“Yes, you were. You were scared of her.”

“Oh, is that so?”

“Yeah. You squealed like a girl a couple of times.”

“Screw you, I did not.”

“Yes, you did, son. You squealed. And everybody heard you.”

We were near the Davie Poplar, which campus lore says is the oldest, biggest tree on campus. When you stand underneath it, the shade of its branches covers you like a giant, leafy umbrella. It was pitch dark; no one was around. We both had on white oxford shirts, which shone in the moonlight, making it easier for us to see each other.

“Asshole, I did not squeal.”

“Yes, you did. Like a pig. Like a little pig who's about to be made into barbeque.”

I sat down on the small stone bench underneath the tree.

“You're full of shit,” I said. “And you make me tired.”

“Go back to your room and go to bed, then, little Hunter boy,” he said, kicking up leaves and stretching his muscular arms. He yawned.

“I'm gonna sit here for a while,” I told him. “
You
go back to
your
room.”

“Don't tell me what to do, squealer,” he said. “I'll do what I want.” After a few seconds, he kicked his way through leaves until he was standing in front of me at the bench; he was very close, closer than he needed to be. In his right hand he held a twig.

“So …” he said, in a low voice. “What are you gonna do? You're just gonna sit here?”

“Yeah, I thought I would. What's it to you?” I looked up at him. He had a little smirk on his face, and he was staring at me. I stared back. For a very long minute, neither of us stopped staring at each other, though neither of us said anything; we just looked at each other, smirking and breathing. Then he lifted the twig and guided it softly against my cheek and over the top of my hair and down the other side of my face, and under my chin, keeping his eyes locked with mine the whole time. My heart was pounding so fast I thought it would burst my chest wide open.

“Excuse me,” I said, using acting skills to speak in a normal-sounding voice. “Get that twig off of me, please.” I made no effort to move away from it myself, though I could have.

“Why?” he whispered, still tracing me with it. “Doesn't it feel good?”

I looked away, finally. “You're nuts, Dalty.”

He smirked again. “Maybe.”

“OK, well then I need to get going,” I whispered, and I hated how hoarse my voice sounded all of a sudden. I started to rise, and his palms glided down onto my shoulders, pushing me back on the bench, but gently. He lowered himself at the same time, crouching on his knees.

“Hey,” he whispered. “Don't go, man.” He lifted his index finger to my lips and began to trace them. I closed my eyes …

Now the alarm clock suddenly jangles madly, wildly, and Dalton reaches over to turn it off with one hand. “OK, quick, first line of dialogue,” Dalton says. It's another game we play: recite the first famous line from a movie that pops into your head.

I'm excellent at this. “What can you say about a twenty-four-yearold girl who died?” I say immediately.

He giggles, and strokes my hair. “No, don't do a morbid one. Do a happy one.”

“OK. What can you say about a
twenty-one
-year old
boy
who …
lived?
That he had hair the color of honey, and, uh … Carolina-blue eyes—”

“That's cheating, but keep going.”

“That he stood six foot two and weighed a hundred and seventy-five pounds, except in the summer when he ate too much of his mother's cooking, and then he—”

“Fuck you. Revise.”

“—That he stayed slim and desirable at all times, and was the envy and unattainable object of desire of everyone and everything on campus, teacher or student, male or female, dog or cat, bush or flower—”

“You're crazy. Keep going.”

“—that he was the pride of the metropolis of Rocky Mount. That he loved English, and drama, tennis and basketball, the theater, movies, literature, even his infantile, stupid-ass fraternity, a house of morons known through all of Chapel Hill as—”