'Break Character', a new story by Chloe Wilson

The Hair Tom wasn’t supposed to bring the wig home; it was peeled from his scalp like a banana skin every night. Then it was arranged on a faceless polystyrene head that sat in front of his dressing room mirror. I guess I shouldn’t really call it a wig. The first time I saw it – the only time he let me come backstage – I said ‘That’s quite a wig,’ expecting him to laugh. He didn’t. His makeup artist then explained, straight-faced, that theatre people didn’t say wig. They said hair. Where’s your hair? As though to claim it was the real thing would turn it into the real thing. I wondered how The Hair had managed to make it as far as our third storey walk-up. Had he smuggled it out in a pocket? Had he left it attached to his head? That, I thought, was a possibility, given how he’d been, lately, silent and brooding, the intense, glazed look in his eye. He wouldn’t want to be separated from The Hair. He would have left it on until the sticky heat, the itch of it, forced him to tear it off. Now, though, he was sleeping. I looked at the wig, bunched up on the bedside table like a frightened hamster. I reached out, tentative, as though it might flinch away from my hand. I crept to the hallway and looked into the mirror, tried to scowl the way Tom scowled when 8pm struck and it was time to stride out as Alexandre Boulet. I’d seen it, just that one time I’d been allowed to see, how he left the room with a sword in his belt and tall boots, glaring, glancing at himself in the mirror, his eyes lined, his face powdered, the place smelling of talc and cold cream and costumes sweated in so intensely and with such regularity that the stains never quite came out. I tried to sit the wig on my head. When they attached it to Tom’s, they first used something called Gafquat – an undiluted hairspray which stank and slicked his own hair flat as an otter’s. No seam was visible between The Hair’s edge and his skin. On me, it just sat there – inert, lopsided, almost embarrassed. I slipped The Hair off, and settled for burying my face in it, smelling the smell that was his and no one else’s. The Labradors Before Alexandre Boulet – before I found myself living with a man who ate only bloody steak, stale bread and hard cheese, limes, salted fish – no fruit, no vegetables – who drank beer and cider and wine, but not orange juice or milk, who wouldn’t touch a phone or a computer, who almost never washed his hands – I lived with a man known for being cast in commercials with dogs. Specifically, Labradors. Often, the ads were for dog food (Tom, throwing a frisbee; Tom, rolling in the grass; Tom, snoozing on a couch with a dog at his feet). Once, it was for a cologne called Pine Mist. Once it was for a weight-loss meal replacement shake. Tom brought home some free samples he’d received on set, and I threw them back at him. For one of these shoots, I came along. It was an open set. I watched as they filmed him walking along with this blond Labrador, throwing a stick, retrieving it from the dog’s mouth, then throwing it again. When the stick became too wet and slimy, a gloved assistant would dash in, remove it and replace it with a fresh one; a pile of pre-prepared sticks was stacked nearby. A couple of hours in, the director said, ‘You’re doing great, Tom, but we’re going to change up the dog. Something doesn’t look right.’ I could have told them what the problem was. They looked too similar, Tom and the dog; same eyes, same blond hair, same wide open smile, the same joy in taking orders. They replaced the Labrador with a clever-eyed black and white collie; the type of dog who who’d bite you just to see if she could get away with it. Old-Fashioned Tom used to work in a bar, an expensive one. The night I met him, I was at that bar with a friend from work who had recently broken up with her fiancé. She was one of those people who seem to get drunk all at once; one moment, she’s fine, talking about the civil way in which they’d divided their shared DVD collection; the next, she’s casting her eyes cloudily around the bar for prospects, crying that she’ll never find love again, striding off proud and unsteady to the restroom, and coming back with crooked lipstick and a train of toilet paper attached to one shoe. ‘Aren’t you cute,’ she said to Tom, eating the olive out of her martini. ‘Buy me a drink?’ ‘I’d love to,’ he said, ‘but it’s against the rules.’ She leaned forward and tried to touch his arm, but wound up stroking the rich mahogany of the bar instead. Soon after, my friend left, suddenly wide-eyed and aware in her drunkenness. She’d left Tom a handsome tip, which he pocketed in a single, smooth gesture. He turned to me. ‘What are you drinking?’ he asked. Hall of Mirrors ‘How old are you?’ I asked. He’d taken me to a carnival and was concentrating hard on a stick of candy floss, licking the sugar from his lips between bites. ‘I’m seventeen to thirty-five,’ he said. Maintenance I was eighteen. ‘You’ll thank me for this,’ my mother said, as we took our seats in front of the tall mirrors. ‘Trust me.’ A succession of ladies then spent the next several hours ‘fixing’ me. They fixed my hair; they fixed my eyebrows, shaping them into lean arcs; they fixed my body hair, buttering each leg with hot pink wax. They fixed my faint moustache by sticking a needle into each follicle and electrocuting it until it was dead. Then my mother poked my protruding belly with a long, painted nail. ‘They can’t fix this,’ she said. ‘This you’ll have to manage on your own.’ I haven’t had a moustache since. But sometimes I catch myself staring out my office window, stroking the place where it would have been. The Arrival of Alexandre Boulet I’d never heard of The Pure White Light of Morning, even though, as everyone kept telling me, it was a classic. An early nineteenth-century classic, over 1000 pages long, by the brooding genius Jean-Baptiste Dupont. I didn’t read books like that. I’d majored in economics and then gone to business school. I didn’t have time for melancholic sagas in which everyone gets to make a speech before they die. One night, I was working in the living room when Tom walked in with the book under his arm. Usually he only read the sports section, or the reviews. ‘What’s that?’ ‘Nothing. It’s for a part. An audition.’ ‘A film?’ ‘No, it’s a show.’ He passed me the book. There was an illustration of crossed, tasselled swords on the cover. ‘A timeless tale of rebellion and romance,’ I read. ‘What do you think? Could I play period?’ They’ll have to dirty up those teeth, I thought. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘What’s the part?’ ‘Alexandre Boulet,’ he said, in a mock-grave voice which was deeper than his own. ‘A nineteenth-century war hero, struck down by poverty on his return to Paris. In desperation, he turns to crime, and becomes captain of a gang of charismatic thieves, Les Degradées. Which means, The Degraded Ones. In French.’ ‘Oh?’ ‘Of course, he only breaks the law to save the love of his life, Mathilde.’ ‘That’s nice,’ I said, and went back to work, my hands blued by the glow from my laptop. ‘Don’t you want to know how it ends?’ I looked up, smiled tiredly. I had work to do. ‘They die?’ Tom frowned. ‘It’s very moving,’ he said. Then he took the book into the bedroom, and closed the door. I Wouldn’t Do That if I Were You One day, getting dressed, I bent over to slip my foot into a pair of pantyhose. Then, I registered an odd feeling – I was being touched, but not in one of the usual places. The approved places. I looked down. Still lolling in bed, smiling, propped on one elbow, Tom was prodding the rolls of fat which hang from my abdomen. They aren’t big, but they’re there. He laughed. I think he expected me to laugh too. At Least I Wasn’t the Tree When I was in year two, I won a part without realising I was even auditioning. The drama teacher, Mr Koch, told everyone in my class to line up on the floor of the gym, kneeling on all fours. Then he told us all to bark like dogs. He told us that the best, loudest, most convincing dog would win a prize. So I barked. I barked and howled my classmates into submission. The prize? A part in the sixth-grade play. For the dress rehearsal, Mr Koch affixed a dog hat made from scraps of brown carpet to my head; it had long floppy ears. Everyone around me laughed. ‘You’re so cute. Look at your cheeks!’ said a blonde girl named Kimberley, pinching my face. She was dressed as a butterfly; pink pantyhose stretched over coathangers to make wings, glitter on her face and down her arms. She tugged on one of my dog-ears and smiled, wrinkling her nose. As I walked through the school gates that afternoon, a group of boys started barking at me. When the time came to perform, I couldn’t bring myself to bark at anything above a conversational level. Mr Koch lifted the hat from my head after the show. He’d been an actor too, once, and conveyed his disappointment without uttering a word. The Heart Throb Years before The Pure White Light of Morning, Tom was cast in a film called The Heart Throb; this was back when he was playing seventeen to thirty-five, rather than twenty-two to forty. ‘It sounds awful,’ I’d said. I was trying to read the newspaper, sitting on the living room floor, eating 99% fat-free yoghurt straight from the tub. ‘Don’t be so negative. It’ll be fun. Besides, my agent says it’s a vehicle,’ he said, coming up behind me, slipping his arms around my waist. ‘Like a sedan?’ He tickled me and I yelped. ‘What’re you reading about?’ he asked, staring down at the columns of numbers. ‘Stocks.’ ‘They up or down?’ ‘Both.’ ‘Huh,’ he said. The Heart Throb went straight to DVD. The DVD didn’t sell well. I patted Tom’s shoulder and told him it didn’t matter. But all the while I couldn’t help but imagine them being destroyed, the leftover, excess copies – I couldn’t help but picture Tom vanishing, his blond hair and big white teeth slowly consumed by fire. I Wouldn’t Do That if I Were You (2) White Light had been running for two weeks. Tom had been receiving the first good reviews – glowing reviews – of his life. We’d been out. Tom looked like Tom but at dinner he ate a chicken leg with his hands, ignoring the inquiring glances of other diners. When we arrived back home, he let me open the door, then kissed me in the cold hallway; a hard and urgent kiss. He lifted me by the hips and pressed me into the wall, causing the top of my head to flick the lightswitch. The room was flooded with light, and we were left looking at each other in full colour while the tungsten hummed passively on. Signature People started asking Tom for his autograph. He had prepared for this. One evening, I came home to find him sitting in his underwear at the kitchen table, pens scattered everywhere, practising his signature. ‘I’ve got it down to three,’ he said. ‘Which one do you like?’ I set down my briefcase and tried not to stare at the pen marks on the table. ‘That one,’ I said, pointing to the one that most resembled his real signature. ‘Huh,’ he said. Then he turned to smell my chest. ‘You smell good,’ he said. ‘What is that?’ ‘L’Autre,’ I said. I’d gone into a perfumerie, a tiny, exclusive boutique, and asked for something that would linger in a room after I’d left. Something people would remember. L’Autre was the perfume the matron in a black pantsuit had produced. ‘What is that?’ my mother asked, when I met her for lunch later that day. She leaned forward, blowing smoke out of her nose before inhaling my wrist like a sniffer dog hunting for contraband. ‘Bah.’ Her head jerked up. ‘Smells like B.O. Men will hate it.’ Now, in the mornings, I step out of the shower, spray L’Autre in a cloud above my head and walk into it, my eyes closed, letting its tenacious little atoms grip my hair and clothes and skin. Night is the Only Home I Know It’s his classic line, the one Boulet says before he commits the final crime, the one that sees him executed by a firing squad. Night is the only home I know. Alexandre says it to the woman he loves. Mathilde. During rehearsals Tom took to saying the line to himself dozens, even hundreds of times per day: Night is the only home I know; Night is the only home I know; Night is the only home I know. He said it into the mirror. He said it in the shower. He said reading the sports section and again when watching TV. He’d get up in the night when he thought I was asleep and pad around the living room, saying it again and again, until he must have been numb to the words, to their meaning. I asked him to say it for me, once. To me. Pretend I’m Mathilde. He looked shocked; he didn’t say it. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask again. Allowances On the first of every month. I do a calculation, adjust the amount for inflation and cost of living increases. Neither of us say a word about it. Grooming One night: my hand on his chest. ‘Tom,’ I said. ‘Tom, you have chest hair!’ I looked closely at the little blond hairs, sparse but plucky, laying themselves flat against his skin. ‘I’ve always had chest hair.’ ‘No you haven’t.’ I pulled at them, watching the skin rise in little tents. ‘I did. I’ve just been ... removing it. Until now.’ ‘Removing it? Like waxing?’ ‘Exactly. Loads of actors do it.’ He yawned. ‘I’m growing it in for White Light. People didn’t wax in the 19th century.’ ‘Maybe I’ll stop waxing,’ I nudged him, smiled, assumed a pose that would usually prompt him to say aren’t you cute. He shrugged. ‘If you like.’ He switched off the lamp. I laid my head back on his chest, then grasped one of the newly sprouted hairs. When I yanked it out, he gasped. The Heart Throb (2) That film did have one fan. My mother. She tracked down a bulk lot of DVD copies on eBay for $4.99. ‘There he is! The heart throb!’ she’d say said to Tom when we visited. She’d then cuddle him vigorously until he found a way to eel out of her grip. She liked to make us watch the film with her. She had, she told us, many favourite lines. She proved this by speaking along with Tom from start to finish. ‘I’m a dreamer, Veronica. And I think you’re a dreamer too,’ said my mother, blowing smoke rings. ‘You’re with me in every word I say and every breath I take.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Come with me, and we’ll be the people we were always meant to be.’ Alexandre Boulet Must Die ‘You should have warned me.’ ‘You could have read the book.’ ‘I know, I meant to, but – God, Tom, it’s a little graphic, don’t you think?’ I’d brought him flowers, a big bouquet of white blooms (‘Nothing too feminine,’ I’d told the florist). It was the night I’d seen The Hair, and we were back in his dressing room after the show. There were little explosions of blood all over his frilled shirt. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back to life tomorrow. And the next night. And for the Saturday matinée. I’m resurrected eight times a week.’ I didn’t say anything else, but wondered what it must be like, to run out of luck over and over; to make all the same choices, even though you know what will happen if you do everything the same way you did it the first time around. The Company of Monsters Once, he said, he’d been in a show which had a chorus, a company of monsters, all in different masks. Before each performance they’d take a mask from a hamper full of them. After the show all the masks were thrown back in. They repeated this for every performance. The smell, he said – the smell inside those masks. God it was awful. All that trapped breath, from all those different bodies. A different face every night. And you never knew who you’d be, or who had been you the night before; or who, tonight, was inside the face that you would wear tomorrow. Break Character It was a Friday night. It had been a good day at work – sunny weather, happy clients. I was maybe a little drunk, after two or three vodka sodas. I’d had pizza on my own, on the couch, and was still there, in a tracksuit, waiting for him to come home. He came in late, and went through the hallway straight into the darkened bedroom. ‘Hey,’ I called out. Then, louder: ‘Hey. Tom!’ He didn’t come out, so I followed him into the bedroom, switched on the light. And there he was – not Tom, but Alexandre Boulet, tall, sweaty, pungent, determined. In full regalia. He took a step back from me. But I walked right up to him, took him by the waist. ‘This is very convincing,’ I said, whispering into the talcum and hairspray smell at his neck. ‘Totally believable.’ A hand – a slow but insistent hand, was placed between my breasts and pushed slowly backwards, until I was as far away as his arm could reach. There was a pause, a silence. ‘Tom?’ His eyes weren’t shining and wholesome anymore. They roiled like the sea. ‘Tom? Where have you been?’ ‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘Tom – stop it. You’re crazy. You’re being crazy! Hey! Look at me!’ He looked. Stepped close, until there was almost no distance between us; looked through me, straight down, at all the versions of me that there were to see. Then he huffed once, flared his nostrils, and walked out the door. The Labradors (2) In bed one Sunday I was reading the newspaper and came across an article warning the owners of lovable family dogs to beware. Rottweilers and Pit Bulls might have the bad reputations, it said, but really it’s Golden Retrievers and Labradors who are the most lethal. Lethal because you think you know their limits, but you don’t; their violent outbursts are all the more terrible because they’re delivered by that beatific face, that clean pink mouth, those teeth you paid a vet to polish up while the dog was sedated, and dreaming, you thought, of your life together; of a quiet walk and a quiet meal, then curling up on the floor at your feet. ‘Break Character’ was commended in the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize.

Chloe Wilson

From the New Issue

Straight Acting by Will Tosh & The Hollow Crown by Eliot A. Cohen

The Men Who Killed the News: The inside story of how media moguls abused their power, manipulated the truth and distorted democracy by Eric Beecher

Oblivion by Patrick Holland

Tangled Paths: A life of Aby Warburg by Hans C. Hönes

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