Free Dry Your Smile by Robin; Morgan Page B

before a perfect-cue question, managed to be sick or busy when the moment came. So, kicking and screaming, Julian went. Kicking and screaming but with the blasé pride of the old pro, Julian went. She had sat in audiences and stood offstage too many times by then, wringing her hands with frustration over a missed chance to make a point, over a tone that lacked conviction though she knew its speaker had the conviction. She had endured the frustration of the teacher unable to correct or cover up the nervous mistakes of prize pupils. She had glimpsed the helplessness of the stage mother. At last, when they repeated that they needed her, she sprang to the call with an exultation that warmed her sisters and chilled her soul.
    Then, suddenly, it was too late. There was a new persona: Julian Travis, the feminist. The exposure that shone on that face was unsettlingly familiar—and antithetical to the other exposure, the hunger to be perceived.
    Privacy, she mused. And so, in an act of insanity, she was now thinking of writing about it? She shook her head violently against the seatback. The gesture of an exhibitionist, she admonished herself, not someone seeking privacy! What kind of madwoman would try to bring the behind-the-scenes—of a childhood, a marriage, a political movement—center-stage, as if reality were a rehearsal for art?
    But even to pose that rhetorical question was to activate an internal dialogue between two familiar voices, resident character-actors in her own private repertory company:
    â€œ Why would you write it? To justify yourself? Poor beleaguered Jule, beset by evil nonstepmother and then by wicked nonprince and finally by starving masses of enthralled women? Come on. ”
    â€œWell, to justify them , then? The other characters? To kill them off, free them from their long-term contracts in a series gone stale? How about that one?”
    â€œThat’s a more interesting one, I’ll grant.”
    â€œAnd—to understand something more about it, beyond stereotype of child star, rhetoric of politics, erosion of marriage, pretense of truth. To find something … universal in a life so peculiar? Recognize something that … recognizes itself as real?”
    Julian loosened the seatbelt and fumbled at her feet for her overnight bag, fishing the writing pad from its depths. Like a neophyte possessed by her first visitation, she hurried to locate a pencil, grope for the overhead lightswitch, unhook the tray-table.
    The white sheet of paper. The world before her, hers to choose.
    She’d have to do it as a novel. Hadn’t Mary McCarthy once said somewhere, “Only in fiction can I tell the truth”?
    But if she did it as a novel, then it would be too close to life—autobiographical, roman à clef , or godforbid “confessional.” Or else it would violate life: it would disguise. Which was the problem and always had been. The masks beneath the masks. The nested Chinese boxes. And all the while famished for the core, for one thing simply true.
    She wrote at the top of the lined pad:
    â€œA Mask of One’s Own”
    Notes for a Novel:
    But how could she do it? She’d been Julian, all the Julians. Now she wanted to see Julian in the third person. Change her name; something else, also genderless: Ashley or Leigh? Lesley. Shawn? Blair. No, not right, any of those. Never mind, she could keep her as Julian for now, change the names later. Write it with the real ones, fiddle the details afterward. She could try to go behind the scenes of the writing of a novel itself. Behind the proscenium, the set, the frame. Behind the Stand By We’re On The Air sign. Behind the script. Yet the opening line of the book should be in the first person. Yes, she reasoned, but I don’t want to get trapped in Julian’s first person. I’ve been her and been her.
    She drew in a sharp breath, as if the realization were a sudden paper-cut along the skin: I