The Spot: Stories

Passing the actor’s house one thought of biker films, of his former edginess, of his beautiful young face on the screen, of his slight lisp — eventually a trademark of sorts — and the way he stood, slightly to one side, and tilted his head, along with the expressiveness of his features, which weren’t perfect because there was something wrong in the symmetry of his face, and his nose had been broken and he tended to blink in a way that made you aware of the lens — but that didn’t detract from the power of his genius, and he had three Academy Awards to his name. If you knew he lived there (when he did), you saw the house in light of his ownership. Otherwise, it was nothing more than one more grand house along the river in a long line of grand houses, and there was nothing to make it stand apart from all the others except for the wall along the front, which wasn’t built by the actor but rather by the next owner, an actress and television talk show host who found the house lacking in security and, two weeks after she moved in, began to modify it — so that, passing it at that time, one thought not only about the actor, but also about the actress, too, because from her modifications one garnered a sense of what she was like: slightly paranoid and a bit antisocial (there was a rumor afloat that some welcome-wagon soul had come to her front door with a pecan pie and had been duly told, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off). So for a few years one passed the house thinking about both souls (the actress and the actor) with a sense that, behind the walls, the actress moved about from room to room fluffing her hair with the flat of her palm, because she had a habit, most knew, of reaching up to touch her hair as if to affirm its existence — beautiful auburn hair that seemed to have as much to do with her fame as anything. But even a few years after the actor was gone, most people thought of him first and then the actress second when they passed the house, hidden behind the wall: high, built of expensive brick, with security devices in the corners on top — small red pinprick beams that couldn’t be seen in normal circumstances but could be seen when it was foggy out, or at night from certain angles, coming back from the city. There were security cameras in the trees, too, and tall evergreen bushes planted just inside the wall that grew to shield the upper reaches of the house from view, so that eventually you couldn’t see any of the house at all and had to look at the wall and the bushes and imagine the house as it had once been, years ago, before the talk show host/actress and even the actor lived there and the house had been owned by the Grande Dame of the theater who had been, at least in appearance, unconcerned about privacy.