A POOR MAN, WALKING long straight roads. It’s been an epic trek home. The edges of the city slowly become apparent; more cars, more buildings, fewer cabbage fields and citrus groves. Warrens of modest houses. Dry hour after dry hour he trudges on. His cheap clothing grates on his skin and the heat saps him. But he must get home. The journey seems endless.

But he can anticipate the arrival. Back to accustomed pleasures. A bath, clean clothes, and a drink. Sit by the pool with a Gibson in his hand, perhaps. Eat a fine dinner with candles lighted.

His adventures among the populace have been a lark, something like a brief return to harder times. The long way back from there has been unexpected. There lies a chasm between these worlds. In the middle is just the endless repetition of the same gas stations, storefronts, and parking lots. The normal trappings of normal lives. Cars pass by but he seems the only one on foot, and he sees from those car windows the looks of deep suspicion toward himself, a man who lacks means and maybe self-respect. If they only knew. A Rolls-Royce is most often at his disposal. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t just call to have himself picked up; he hasn’t seen a phone and has just pushed ever onward.

He finally reaches Sunset Boulevard, coming into West Hollywood, where the traffic gets heavier but it still seems as if he is the only person on foot. It’s getting toward late afternoon. The sun is dropping steadily. He passes the Gaiety Diner, where through the window a waiter at the door watches him pass.

Then, farther on, an explosion of glass. He reflexively jerks his hands up to protect his face. He looks down and sees the brown shards of a beer bottle. Someone has thrown this at him, and just barely missed. He can hear the receding laughter. Up ahead, a battered, paint-peeled car speeds away with a young man hanging out of the passenger window, grinning manically.

He just wants to get home, which feels simultaneously close by and still so far to reach. He has come through Hollywood and is now on the quiet streets of Beverly Hills. He keeps his gaze on the sidewalk ahead of him, but a while later, he looks to see a Los Angeles police cruiser slowing as it passes, going the other way, the cop giving him a careful, sour look. But the cruiser doesn’t stop, and he picks up his pace. As he walks on, he’s more wary, ready to scramble behind a tree or fence to avoid being seen.

Finally, he is on his own street, as a stranger in a familiar land. Walls of high hedges stand endlessly on either side, meant to create privacy for the wealthy residents, but making a person on foot feel vulnerable and conspicuous. Looming ahead, finally, is his house, its rooftops high above the hedgerow.

He comes up the curving driveway, going through his pockets for a house key, but he has none. He reaches for the doorknob and realizes how filthy his hands have become. When he tries to push the front door open, he finds that it’s locked. He presses the doorbell button, but no one answers. He presses again.

No one comes to greet him. He realizes his makeup may have fooled them. He holds his sleeve against his face and rubs his cheek against the coarse sleeve. But when he looks at the sleeve there isn’t makeup at all, only the stain of dust and sweat mixed into a grubby sheen. He steps back onto the driveway.

Up in the second-floor window, a man is watching him. A man who appears very much like someone he has played in a picture. Tall, dark-haired, and dressed in a silk dressing gown. The man looks down through the window for a bit, then turns away. And then the drapes close.

Outside, it’s getting dark. The house is unlighted other than that window. The weather feels colder than it should be. He is heavy with the fatigue of a very long journey from which he is not yet home, despite being so close to it, always.

1958

HE WAS HIDING IN the bathroom. In his silk pajamas, and with bare feet, having been too furious to even put on his slippers. The Acrobat’s marriage was dying and he didn’t want to come out of this small sanctuary. Betsy—his docile, aims-to-please, adoring wife—had just told him to go fuck himself.

He held his ear to the door and couldn’t hear a sound. The funny thing was, she said it not with rage but with a sense of tired dismissal. A sense of control. It was a side of her he’d never seen, and he was horrified. She’d never uttered that word for as long as he’d known her, and he’d leapt out of bed. He’d have made a better choice to storm off to another part of the house.

She might have had good reason, though. The situation with his co-star Sophia during the shooting in Spain of The Pride and the Passion was so obvious, he knew, that Betsy saw where it was all going. He just couldn’t help himself. So Betsy decided to head back to America on an ocean liner. That seemed a rather pointed message. They’d met on an ocean liner, of course, and then he’d made a picture about love begun on an ocean liner. Now, for her solitary retreat, she went off on another ship: the Andrea Doria. How did anyone know the ship would sink, rammed by the Stockholm on that foggy midsummer night off Nantucket, just to make everything worse?

Her rescue from the listing ship, and her intuition that he’d shifted his attentions to Sophia, and then her venturing into the Treatment with Dr. Hartman, had seemed to change her. He didn’t know what she’d become. And on top of that, Sophia had now run off and married Carlo Ponti, the Italian director who had discovered her when she was a teenager and hadn’t let go. The Acrobat had begged her to abandon the married Ponti and marry him instead. He’d hardly felt guilty as he told Sophia how quickly he could divorce Betsy. Now he was in the bathroom, barricaded against foulmouthed insult.

Ear pressed on the door, he only registered silence from the other side. He turned the lock as softly as he could and slowly eased open the door. She was right there, sitting up in bed, as if nothing at all had happened.

“Are you quite done now?” he said.

“With our marriage?”

“With your profanity.”

“I can’t really say. Do you expect a wife who just endures it all, in silence?”

“I thought we were done with that regrettable interlude.”

“Really? Interlude? I think we’d call it betrayal. I don’t intend to serve as a placeholder, dear.”

“I’ve never seen you this disrespectful.”

“Yes, indeed I’ve spent years being the obedient wife. And how has that gone for me?”

He was standing at the foot of the bed, unsure how to answer.

“And do you know how painful, after all of that, to be left?” she said.

“I do, actually.”

“You’re obsessed with that damned girl, and now she’s run off and gotten married. How bloody embarrassing for you!”

“I think you read too much into that, my dear.”

“I saw it all on your face. It couldn’t have been more legible.”

“But as you said, she’s gone off and gotten married now anyway.”

Betsy seemed completely calm, sitting in bed, as if they were talking of small things.

“I stood on the deck of that ship,” she said, “thinking about my sinking marriage. Then I got rescued. For this marriage of ours, I’m not going to wait for it all to sink.”

“I suppose we’ll need to take separate lifeboats, then,” he finally said.

On Dr. Hartman’s couch, he lay with his eyeshades in his hand, ready to take the dose. But when the doctor came in, the Acrobat said, “Before we start all this, I’d like to talk to you about what you’re doing with my wife.”

“We don’t speak of other patients, you know that. Even when it’s your wife. Even when she may not be your wife much longer.”

“You know, I only decided to come here to find out what she was saying about me behind my back.”

The doctor smiled. “The greater concern, I’d think, is what you’ve been hiding from yourself.”

“Yes, that’s why I actually showed up, I suppose. But I’m just so puzzled as to why this is all happening.”

“That answer, I think, lies deep within,” the doctor says, holding out the white dosage cup for him to receive. “Why don’t we start, then?”

1959

AS THE TREATMENT ONCE again takes hold, on a sunny December Saturday afternoon shut out by the closed blinds, he’s restless, on the couch, with the doctor close by. The new decade looms ever closer. Dr. Hartman will be the subject of a Time magazine article in the early months of 1960. But the American Medical Association is beginning to cast a wary eye. Rumors have begun swirling about certain governmental agencies using the medicine as torture, and some beatnik poets are beginning to give people the wrong ideas. And the Acrobat gets grayer at the edges, slightly more toward looking like the man in makeup back in January.

He feels the chill descend as the medicine announces itself, and maybe for that reason he’s talkative.

“Would I sound foolish, Doctor, if I say that just as things threaten to be perfect, I’m aging too fast?”

“There’s nothing we can do about that, other than mind our health and keep our minds lively.”

“No doubt, at all. But I find I’m still obsessive about such small things.”

“Maybe you haven’t found the big thing you need.”

“Still searching.”

“Why have you never had children?”

“The thought terrifies me. I have no idea why.”

“None of your wives have ever become pregnant? None of your many girlfriends? None of your numerous conquests?”

“It is a mystery, I’ll admit that. If anyone got pregnant, they certainly never told me.”

“Some men consider numerous children a sign of their virility.”

“I’m well aware. But I was raised by two people who had no idea how to look after a child, or possibly had no interest. Why do I think I’d do any better?”

“Maybe you’d do better for exactly that reason.”

The Acrobat says no more. He’s come to liken each treatment as a long flight through a high sky, and he knows he’s only beginning to truly gain altitude. The doctor, as always, remains inscrutable.

This time, prompted perhaps, he has the most curious journey.

In it, he’s in his tuxedo, as if in celebration, and he realizes he is walking down a long hallway. A door is at the very end. But he also realizes he is in his mother’s womb, approaching his own birth. A journey beginning, but a journey ending as well.

Beyond the door, he can tell, are cold and blowing winds. But he feels heat under his clothing, as if under the glaring lights of a set. He admits to himself his fear. Through the door is life; through that door is pain. And confusion and elation and experience. And in life is the next door that is death, wherever that may lie.

And now the door gives way to a stage, and it opens to a parting curtain, and the applause and the warmth of an audience, and its love, and its anticipation. But he has no lines. Or he’s forgotten them. He’ll need to make it up as he goes.

Sunday morning, not in the familiar leather back couch of his own Rolls Silver Cloud, but in a less-obtrusive Lincoln he’s arranged for Saturdays. Albert is behind the wheel, silent. Professional bearing, one might presume, or so many jobs carting big names that he hardly cares any longer.

The Acrobat’s feeling a bit sunny, a bit sociable. Breakfast on his mind. He carefully chooses his cameos around Hollywood, well aware that sighting an elusive star is a lifetime thrill for some of the most devoted. For some of the less devoted, it’s still notable. He remembers when he was first in town, how he saw William Powell, hot off The Thin Man, buying a sack of plums at the Grand Central Market. People around him looked without looking and traded sly glances. It had a powerful effect—a famous man buying plums—even as everyone acted as if nothing was happening at all.

Today it will be Canter’s, on a morning in which the chill seems off-season. The deli runs twenty-four hours a day and late night is the busiest, but even early in the day the place is nearly full.

He’s led to a booth and he duly plays his part, acting as if all eyes are not on him. Old Ben Canter, the owner, comes by with a solemn nod: Both are good for each other’s business. He looks over the menu as a seen-’em-all waitress named Phyllis stands impatiently.

“Scrambled eggs and toast,” he says, to Phyllis’s stern countenance, above him as if carved of Rushmore granite. She grunts and is gone.

He wants to check the house, the way Bob Pender would peek through the heavy stage curtains before the troupe went on, counting bodies and converting it in his head to shillings. The Acrobat just wants to know he still holds his star power, and that there is no other person here who could divert that attention. But to look up would be to admit it. So he ponders his hands and waits for his coffee, which Phyllis quickly slides before him.

This act is akin to being a living statue, there to be considered and appreciated. He’ll eat his breakfast as if in front of a lens, then recede as if this were not a performance. But his periphery has not been unguarded as he avoids eye contact, and he realizes somebody is sliding into his booth, onto the seat across from him. Two somebodies, in fact; a boy and a girl who look about eighteen or nineteen.

The Acrobat, well aware the imaginary camera is still rolling, smiles and says in his theater voice, “Well, I didn’t know I had made a date.”

An older woman across the aisle laughs from her booth, as if she’s sitting in the movie theater, and he looks at her and gives her a wink before returning to his guests. The boy is in a striped T-shirt with a small beard capping his chin in the new style. The girl has pigtails in a child’s style, and a turtleneck sweater.

“Hey, I know you from somewhere . . .” the boy says, grinning madly. “Like, somewhere, man . . .”

“I’m quite sure you have.”

“Yeah, like somewhere from ancient history.”

The girl giggles and the Acrobat says, “He is rather amusing, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, man, you were like somebody, sometime, somewhere.”

“Well, I was an actor, but I suppose now I’m a straw man.”

“Like a scarecrow?”

The Acrobat grins tightly. “And was there something you two were here about?”

He can see Ben Canter, edging up but not sure what to make of it.

“Are you from the past?” the girl says.

“Past, present, future, dear. Take your pick.”

“That’s like, wow,” the boy says. “I mean, you used to throw babies off the balcony, man.”

The Acrobat stares for a just a second.

“I haven’t the faintest . . .”

The girl says, “He means you used to be big.”

“Six feet, two inches, just as always.”

“Is that a joke?” the girl says.

“I’d like to think so. Do you want an autograph or something? What can I do for you two?”

They have no intention of leaving, it seems, but here comes Phyllis with his eggs and toast. She eyes the two kids in his booth and her eyes narrow.

“You two again? Didn’t I already tell you to fuck off?”

Suddenly, they’re scolded children, avoiding eye contact.

“Right now,” Phyllis says, and they slide out of the booth. Phyllis motions to a very large young man, apparently a dishwasher, who has just been brought out of the kitchen.

“Juan, help these two find the door.”

But the two don’t fight it; the boy says, “You don’t need to bring out the pearl diver, lady. We’re gone.”

They parade by mostly quizzical diners, and then are as quickly out on Fairfax, wandering.

“Beggars,” Phyllis says to the Acrobat. “Druggies, I think. They bother people until someone gives them some money. They’re probably going to go down to Schwartz’s Bakery and bother the customers there. Then they take their drugs and start the whole thing all over again.”

“It felt different than that. They didn’t ask for money at all.”

“You got me, then. Maybe you looked like an easy target . . .”

“I suppose the world as they know it is what they fight back at,” he says.

In the back of a limousine, he’s surveying what feels a fading empire. Abdication feels nearer than ever; the business he’s known is largely gone, and the rules of the new game seem more puzzling.

But the force of habit is a tough thing to shake. The old saying is that an actor is retired when they stop casting you, but the illusions of the actor are many: Could you be the greatest old man in the history of the movies? Spencer Tracy was turning into such an elder; at fifty-nine he was starring in The Old Man and the Sea while the Acrobat, at fifty-five, just played a dashing young ad man.

But who had the heart to let yourself fall apart onscreen?

Now he sees Albert, his driver, looking at him through the rearview.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Perfectly, Albert.”

“Is there anything I can do, sir?”

“You’re doing it, Albert, thank you.”

And so they drive on in silence, the ending unclear, but the whisper of many possibilities up the road. But he’s going home now, to the life he’s built for himself, like a brilliant trick from the old stage, like a world made of light, like an image from a lens, conjured from nothing and made spectacular.