Star Page 5

  After filming the last scene, our days were spent taking care of little bits and pieces and dubbing in the dialog. All the serious dramatic work was done. We shot all seven of the remaining phone call scenes in just one day. I grew weary of holding the receiver, and tired of the clever ways that Takahama captured every phone call from a different angle. Out of pride, he refused to rely on the old standby of cutting to a close-up of the telephone as it begins to ring.

  In the afternoon, I stepped out into the sun and went for a walk on the studio grounds. There was nothing to see. It may as well have been the compound of a factory. On the other side, at the building where the producer had his office, I spotted the studio’s sapphire flag flapping from a pole at the peak of the roof. It must have been there all along, but this was the first time that I’d noticed it.

  The flag spasmed in the breeze. Just as it would fall limp, it whipped against the sky, snapping between shadow and light, as if any moment it would tear free and fly away. I don’t know why, but watching it infused me with a sadness that ran down to the deepest limits of my soul and made me think of suicide. There are so many ways to die.

  By the guardhouse at the main gate, I was surrounded by another crowd of fans begging for autographs, but was so absurdly tired I could barely write my own name. Shameless fans waved their autograph books over the outstretched books of other fans, the pages piling from my chest to my chin. The hand that held its book most desperately above the others was half-consumed by a violet birthmark. Tracing the arm to its body, I discovered an oafish woman with a tiny, sour face, proudly thrusting this violet hand at me, her birthmark nearly pressed against my cheek.

  I was once more overtaken by a deep fatigue; my thoughts returned to death. If I was going to die, now would be as good a time as any. Rather than a death cushioned by pleasure, I would die embracing a despicable filth. Cheek in the gutter, curled up against the corpse of a stray cat.

  That night, I finally confessed to Kayo my unreasonable urge to die.

  “In that case, stick your head in there and get it over with.” She gestured toward the green electric fan we’d just bought to fight the heat. Its blades were metal.

  “I’m not kidding,” I said, staring into the handsome blur.

  I was drawn to the cool whir coming from its bluish vortex. It commanded the airflow of our little room, making it feel like time was moving in the way that I know best, the artificial flow when the camera is rolling. Only there could I breathe easy, talk of death without fear, and die without suffering.

  From her usual position, sitting with her legs out to the side, wearing nothing but a slip, Kayo flashed her silver teeth and gazed at me reclining on the sofa.

  “Of course you’re going to die. I wouldn’t be the least surprised. You call it unreasonable, but you don’t need a reason.”

  “Right. I don’t need a reason,” I agreed, striking a grave tone. I was stretched out on the sofa like a cadaver, my fingers interwoven at my chest.

  “You’re twenty-four, at the top of your game. A heartthrob. A movie star, more famous by the day. No poor relatives to take care of, in perfect health. Everything is set for you to die. If you died today, maybe everybody would forget you. Not like you’re James Dean or anything, but maybe they’d love you even more, and pile so many flowers on your grave that there’d be no more room to leave them. But what difference does it make?”

  “You’re right. It makes none.”

  In the midnight air, churned by the fan, jazz streamed out of the radio like an excited swarm of golden flies. I was absurdly tired.

  So tired I didn’t know if I wanted to sleep or if I wanted to die.

  “Listen, Rikio. It’s only human that you want to die. And when you do, instead of eulogizing you, I’ll write a thousand-page memoir to set the story straight. Then your ‘assistant’ Kayo will finally take off her mask.”

  “Sounds fun. I’ll just sit back in my grave and watch their jaws drop.”

  “But Ri-ki-oh . . .”

  Kayo sat up and crossed her bare legs. The sight of her plump thighs would have jolted anyone who’d only seen her during the day. “At least my thighs are still young,” she said to herself, pinching at her skin.

  “Ri-ki-oh . . .”

  She uncrossed her legs and crawled across the floor to the sofa, where I lay in just my underwear. Leaning close, she traced a finger up my thigh. “Hah. Our thighs are the only part of us that matches.”

  “Get off me! I want to die!”

  “Of course you do — who wouldn’t, with a life like this? So go ahead and die. But listen, Rikio. It has to be an accident. Something that catches you totally off-guard. If you’re thinking about dying in some fantastic blaze of your own making, forget about it. Has the ‘gaze of reality’ you’re so fixated on finally started getting to you? Do you want to be human now like everybody else? Stop being so predictable. The real world can’t wait for you to die. And maybe for me, too. . . . That’s its plan. It wants to cleanse the planet by eradicating everything that contradicts its vision.

  “Consider why you’re still alive. This power you get out of ‘being seen’ is just a way of playing by reality’s rules and doing what they ask of you. In exchange, they let us have our secret life together, our passionate artifice, and especially the faith behind the artifice, because they know that a convincing sense of reality can only be born from an unholy faith.

  “For a star, being seen is everything. But the powers that be are well aware that being seen is no more than a symptom of the gaze. They know that the reality everyone thinks they see and feel draws from the spring of artifice that you and I are guarding. To keep the public pacified, the spring must always be shielded from the world by masks. And these masks are worn by stars.

  “But the real world is always waiting for its stars to die. If you never cycle out the masks, you run the risk of poisoning the well. The demand for new masks is insatiable.

  “If you want to stay new in the eyes of the world, do what I say. Run this mystic vein, scorn the real world, curse it with all your heart, but trust the artifice. To put it in more human terms, don’t ever lift a finger. From the moment I first saw you, I knew that you could take it. I knew that you . . .”

  That’s basically what I remember hearing Kayo say, but at some point I drifted off to sleep.

  5

  The day after we called it a wrap was the first day the sun was harsh enough to feel like summer. It was almost like a holiday for me, but in my usual masochistic way I went to the studio early for a haircut.

  Kayo had a meeting with the PR Office, and I walked clear across the studio grounds toward the old squat building that was the barber shop. The vast lawn was banded with islands of light. On the other side, next to a row of tour buses, squads of extras waited to be shuttled off-site for location shoots.

  Someone gave directions through a megaphone: “All those assigned to head into the city with Director Takeuchi, please proceed to your designated bus.”

  The voice, grainy and barely comprehensible, repeated the directions. The extras wore the robes of vagabonds. As if on cue, the whole posse looked my way.

  I plodded toward them through the sunlight. At the buses, I said “Good morning!” to Director Takeuchi, gave an affable “Good morning!” to his crew, and then turned to admire the swaths of cloud lingering over the woods edging the lot.

  I was modest and merry, everybody’s favorite star. Along came Ken from lighting.

  “Morning, Ken!”

  “Richie! You’re out early. Who’s the lucky lady?”

  “Come off it, Ken. You see these eyes? These are the eyes of a virgin!”

  I pulled my eyelids back, to prove it. We parted in front of the barber shop.

  Inside, I sank into the ancient chair and watched the bright white sheet billow up in the reflection of the mirror. As it settled over my ch
est, the quiet old barber picked up his scissors and went to work behind me. He knew exactly what I wanted.

  The snipping of the scissors made me sleepy. Off to the side, on the seats by the sunny window, I saw the morning paper, tossed aside and pulled apart.

  Since I had nothing on my mind, I thought of Kayo.

  I was certain she was over at the PR Office. She had to be. But who could prove it?

  Battling sleep made the pattern of my thoughts grow hazy and obscure.

  If I couldn’t say for sure that Kayo was at the PR Office, could I be sure that she existed? What if she wasn’t actually anywhere? Not the PR Office, not the soundstage, not anywhere on the face of the earth? If Kayo was something only I could see, then why did everyone pretend to see her? Or maybe I just thought they were pretending. What if no one ever mentioned her because they couldn’t actually see her?

  A snipped bang dropped across my vision like the shadow of a bird. The problem of Kayo’s existence prodded my numb brain bluntly, almost imperceptibly.

  If Kayo didn’t exist, if that much was true, what guaranteed that I did? If I didn’t actually exist, then who was here, bright and early, barely awake in the barber’s chair?

  I must have fallen into a deep sleep.

  “Kokura’s here!” a voice said into my ear, startling me awake. It was Kayo. I looked over, and seated two chairs down, attended by a pair of reverent assistants, was Aijiro Kokura. The original lady killer. The cornerstone of our studio. A star among stars.

  I couldn’t help myself and jumped out of the chair to greet him.

  “Good morning, Sensei!”

  “Morning. Sleepy huh? It’s tough being young.”

  Kokura winked at me, with a rakish glimmer in his eye.

  Even through the mirror I was too bashful to look at him directly. No one knew his actual age, but judging from the fact that he was famous in the silent era, he had to be over fifty. His face was breathtaking. Handsome in a way that blended manliness and suppleness, the rugged and the placid, stoicism and feeling. He was the dream lover of generations of women, from fifteen to seventy, sneaking into their bedrooms every night like a sandman of love.

  But in the pronounced daylight of the barber’s mirror, Aijiro Kokura’s excesses were evident. He was a living god, male beauty sublime, incapable of doing wrong, but he had committed one great sin: the sin of growing old.

  He wasn’t wearing any makeup; and while he had retained his silhouette, his skin had lost its tautness. Decay was evident. Thanks to expert makeup, subtle camera angles, and tricks with lighting, the creases under his eyes had been hidden from the public, but there was no hiding the wrinkles from this angle. Something in his big, beautiful eyes had begun to turn, like dark ripples approaching from the distance. His mouth had slackened, and unless he kept it firmly shut the youthful line of his bottom lip was lost.

  His handsome face had become a dingy plaque, a place to hang a mask — the mask of the handsome face that he had lost.

  I was struck by an unfathomable terror and looked back into the mirror.

  The old barber shifted his attention to Kokura and stepped away from my chair. The only thing remaining in the mirror was my young face poking from the bleach-white sheet.

  Kayo entered the frame. The real Kayo, who existed. With her hair in a bun and no trace of makeup, she brought her lips to my ear and smiled at me through the mirror. Her silver teeth flashed between her lips.

  She whispered to me in a voice almost too low to hear but hot with zeal.

  “Even when you’re sixty, I’m still going to call you my handsome prince.”

  new directions titles available as ebooks

  ndbooks.com