Heart of Glass (29 page)

“Hmm, well, it must be her fault. If a kid isn't speaking to a parent, it's always the parent's fault.”

“What did you think of my mother? What was she like back then?”

“Pretty. Thin. She seemed, I don't know, disappointed
by her life. Like she thought it was going to be this fairy tale, and it wasn't. I felt sorry for her, to tell you the truth.”

JoAnne's pity surprised me. I had never had any sympathy for my mother. To me, she was this gorgon who suddenly flew out of the darkness to swoop down on me and do her best to make me feel small and unloved. Her mantra was to replay her abandonment by everyone she loved—the most recent escapees being my sister and me. Through therapy, I'd begun to see that I was far stronger, and higher functioning, than I—or she—gave myself credit for. My mother could never overcome her horrific abusive childhood, but perhaps one day I'd be able to look upon my mother with some degree of forgiveness, even compassion for her, as JoAnne seemed to.

•   •   •

The show opened—and it was eviscerated in the press. All the papers said it was a dud, a bomb. The day after the scathing reviews came out, the cast and crew were summoned to the theater a half an hour early. Joe Papp, the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater, stood in the house to greet us. He seemed tall, but perhaps that was his towering presence. He was a strikingly grand man, elegantly dressed in a suit, with a wiry head of unruly graying hair, an impressive and handsome nose, and furry, caterpillar eyebrows that framed his energetic, lived-in face. Before he even opened his mouth, I felt as if I'd follow him into a burning building.

JoAnne was nervously chewing gum, arms folded across her chest, pacing a piece of carpet next to Mr. Papp. She cleared her throat. “Hey, everyone, Joe has something to say.”

The great man smiled and nodded and then said in a perfect mid-Atlantic accent, “I want you all to know how proud I am of this production. The critics are wrong. They simply do not understand what JoAnne is—what all of you are— trying to do. This is a production of vision, of ideas, and they must be made to see that. And they will. I've invited all of them to come back next week for a special performance. I know that, after they see
Cymbeline
again, they will toss out their reviews and proclaim the show a triumph.”

We all clapped, thrilled. Our leader had spoken; with stars in our eyes, we ran backstage to get ready for the evening performance, believing that we weren't in a turkey.

The following week, as the critics from
Time
,
Newsweek
, and the
New York Times
found their seats in the theater and the actors' half hour was called, Joan's makeup table at the end of the row in the ladies' dressing room sat empty. Since I was her understudy, I felt a little nervous, but figured she was just running late. We'd had the day before off, and she'd flown somewhere to meet her boyfriend. She was probably stuck in traffic coming from the airport. But another fifteen minutes went by, and she still hadn't turned up. Suddenly, at five minutes to eight, Mr. Papp strode into the dressing room, surrounded by an entourage. I had my wig on and my long skirt, but no top. Standing there in my bra in front of the artistic director of the Public, I started to have a creeping sense
of doom.
Holy shit, I'm going on for Joan
. It all seemed to be happening so fast, but in slow motion, like a car ­accident—time sort of stopped. I was having trouble breathing.

Mr. Papp regarded me, looking me up and down. “Is this the understudy?” He made a theatrical, sweeping arm gesture in my direction. The entourage nodded yes, heads bobbing up and down in unison, while I felt as if I might faint.

He looked me right in the eye. “Are you ready to go on? Do you know the lines?”

“Um, yes, Mr. Papp,” I croaked. “I know the first half but might have to be on book for the second act.”

“So you need to carry a book? There's no shame in that. Someone get this girl a book!” he thundered, and a minion scampered away to find one.

“Let's get this young woman into a costume!” he bellowed, and another member of his posse ran to get Joan's clothes.

I nodded weakly as they started pinning me into her ­costume—a long, voluminous, rose-colored nightgown—for the first scene. Joan was quite a bit bigger and taller than me.

JoAnne, who had been lurking in the corner chewing her nails, walked up to me and took my shoulders in her hands, fixing her steely gaze upon me. “Just do it,” my former babysitter said solemnly.

Frantic, I shoved quarters at my friend Sharon Washington, who played the other lady-in-waiting, to call Didi from the pay phone in the greenroom and let her know I was going on.

After the terror, I began to feel excited, even eager, to get out there. I was about to go onstage at the Public Theater in a leading role, and I thought suddenly I might even be quite good in it. Maybe this was my big break! As I exited the dressing room, all the women kissed me and patted me on the back. I walked through the greenroom—the other actors cheering me on and applauding. I could feel the adrenaline coursing through my veins. Brilliant and invincible, I would conquer New York and receive the key to the city.

Practically levitating, I turned into the hallway to the stage and ran smack into Joan, who was frantic and jabbering a story of being stuck in traffic on the Grand Central Parkway. As soon as I saw her, water came pouring out of every pore in my body. Drenched in flop sweat, I had an immediate, piercing feeling of disappointment—I was sorry that she'd shown up, I was so convinced that I was ready. It was not my big break, after all.

In June, after we'd been running for a month, my old boyfriend Graham showed up in New York. I hadn't seen him since our last year in acting school—after the sweater incident—where we avoided each other in a civil fashion. I'd heard he and his girlfriend had broken up, and he'd moved to Seattle, where he was acting in local theater and working in a coffee place. He'd recently sent me a letter, care of my friends Jen and John, that cried out for some kind of declaration on my part. I hadn't responded.

I got him a comp to the show, and we walked across the street to Indochine afterward for a drink. Indochine had
become the cast hangout, a restaurant that looked like a decadent café in a jungle with palm-frond wallpaper, wicker chairs, and whiffy hostesses who looked like fashion models. I could tell he'd hated the show; almost every one of my friends who'd come to see it thought it was a disaster. But I could also see that he was bothered that my fellow cast members came up to me to say hello after we'd grabbed tall, metal stools at the bar. I'll admit I enjoyed it—not only that I was working as an actor and he was not, but that I was liked and settled while he was still trying to find a place to land. Maybe I had moved on.

“What are you doing in the city?”

“I've moved to New York.” He smiled and turned his scotch on the rocks around on the cocktail napkin.

I noted, with some amusement, that he looked out of place in this downtown world, with his quarterback looks and preppy clothes. “Really? What happened to Seattle?”

“Christ, it rained all the time. I'm over it. So whaddya think?” He lit up a Camel Lights.

“About what?”

“Me moving to New York.”

I signaled the bartender to bring me another Maker's Mark. “Great. If that's what you want.” I was determined to keep things light, whatever game he was playing.

“I found an apartment, and I think I got a gig bartending on the Upper West Side that starts in a few weeks.”

I smiled and chewed my lip. There was a silence.

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“Um, yes, actually. A lawyer. He's a really lovely guy.”

Graham nodded and fiddled with the little plastic straw in his glass. “Well, maybe when I get settled, we can meet for coffee or a movie sometime.”

“Okay, sure.” I shrugged, nonplussed.

He walked me to the subway, and we exchanged a chaste hug. Our eyes met briefly before I turned—pretending not to see the baffled look on his face—and walked down the steps. I didn't have time for his games; I was busy working and taking care of myself. I was my new priority, not some old boyfriend.

Cymbeline
closed at the end of June after a sold-out run. The show was never re-reviewed, but with the word on the street that it was a stinker, flocks of haters and curious theater folk came to see what all the fuss had been about. So we played to packed houses every night until the end. It was bizarre performing the show to a wall of silent onlookers, who were clearly mystified by JoAnne's interpretation of the play—as if we were in an underwater tableau vivant or a freak show that no one understood.

With the closing, I was once again an unemployed actress. I registered with another temp agency, Rosemary Scott, which had a single-room office in a generic Midtown building where three motor-mouthed women in knockoff Chanel suits barked into phones nonstop all day. Despite my inability to type or even file, they managed to book me into jobs, answering phones mostly. I worked in a posh furniture showroom in Midtown, at a Japanese bank so close to the
top of the World Trade Center that I could feel the building sway slightly in the wind, at a supplier of office equipment where they kept me for two weeks just because I made them laugh.

After work I'd meet Isaac for drinks at fancy bars or the University Club, where he was a member. I was staying over at his apartment quite a bit, then going out to his place in Speonk on the weekends. Robin came along one weekend, and we attempted to cook Isaac dinner. We burned the roast chicken, and our risotto was a yellow puddle of goo. We giggled at Isaac when he refused to eat it, and we ended up going out to eat.

One weekend when I'd taken the train out to Speonk, I was sitting by the pool with a friend of Isaac's—a world-weary Italian woman, Gia, who was married to Isaac's business associate. She had incredible taste, looked like a thinner Sophia Loren, and had an adorable little girl who was splashing in the pool with Eli.

“So,” she said in her beautifully accented English, “are you going to marry Isaac? He is crazy for you, I think.”

“Oh, I don't know. We've never talked about it.” Isaac and Luca, Gia's husband, sat out of earshot drinking beers with their pants rolled up and their feet in the water, keeping an eye on the kids.

“He is a good man and he cares for you. You should marry him.”

“Well, first, he hasn't asked me, and second, I'm not in love with him.”

“So what if you do not love him? You will be rich!” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand.

Isaac was a good boyfriend, someone who treated me well, appreciated me for me. I was determined to just enjoy an even-keeled relationship for a change. We had no great passion, but we were fond of each other and made each other laugh. And the sex was great. Slowly, I had begun to wonder if Isaac was it—the one for me. I had been around, slept with a lot of guys, broken some hearts, and been dumped big-time. I was twenty-eight, and Isaac felt like my first adult relationship, in which I wasn't constantly putting my ego on the line. He liked me the way I was and saw me in a way that many other men hadn't. He respected me and treated me with concern and kindness. We were perfect . . . except that I wasn't in love with him. But maybe true romance wasn't in the cards for me. If I married him, I'd be very comfortable—like my actress girlfriends who could afford to work for lousy money or not to have day jobs because they had trust funds or rich husbands. And I'd be a stepmom to Eli, whom I loved. I had never thought about having a child before, but maybe we could have one together and give Eli a little brother or sister.

The summer was winding down; the weekends in the Hamptons ended when Isaac closed up the house and started a new, high-profile job at a firm in Midtown. He was still slipping me an occasional twenty for lunch and subway money and had kindly paid my rent one month when I was completely skint.

“Don't worry about it,” he'd shushed me when I told him I felt guilty taking the $300. “You can pay me back . . . someday, okay? Or you know, we can work it out in sexual favors.” He grinned and wiggled his eyebrows.

“All right. Thanks.” I felt like a loser. A grateful loser, but a loser nonetheless.

“And cheer up! I'll take you out to dinner someplace tonight. All right?”

I nodded.

Even Robbie asked me why I didn't marry him. She thought he was sweet and that his helplessness in practical matters and in the kitchen was endearing. “He's crazy about you. And think of all those guys Mother went out with. The ones we dreamed she'd marry.”

It was true. Our mother had had a seemingly endless line of suitors—admen, TV writers, heirs to industrial fortunes and patrician estates—who always wanted to marry her. As little girls being tossed about in her wake through New York and London and the rest of Europe, we'd dreamed of settling down with any number of them into a “normal” and “secure” family life. We'd even sing “If Mama Was Married” from
Gypsy
to each other. But she never said yes. The only great romance of her life seemed to have been with our ex-stepfather, Pop, Didi's dad, and the best years of that relationship occurred after their divorce and with an ocean between them. As for all the others, I was beginning to wonder now if the answer had been simple all along: she wasn't in love with them.

So despite Isaac's kindness and sense of humor and generosity, I broke up with him. Sitting in plush, powder-blue velvet armchairs at his club, nursing old-fashioneds, I told him that I thought we should break up.

“What?” He sputtered. “Why?”

“Because we're not in love.”

“But, we have fantastic sex.” He reached over and squeezed my knee.