Stages (10 page)

“Oh, one of the theater bunch, I suppose,” Mrs. Rubin said. She resettled a carnation that had fallen from the bouquet she’d brought.

Her mother’s visit was lasting longer than it needed to, Paula realized, because she had something on her mind that she didn’t quite have the courage to mention.

Leaning forward, and feeling as though her neck had been permanently bent, like the straw in the water glass beside her, Paula said wearily, “Mother, just what exactly are you thinking about?”

“As a matter of fact, Paula dear,” Mrs. Rubin began slowly, “since you have this broken nose, your father and I thought that we might call in a specialist. Dr. Goodman.”

“The plastic surgeon,” Paula said.

“Yes, that Dr. Goodman,” her mother replied. She was beaming and holding on to the Gucci pocketbook in her lap as if it were a grab bag full of surprises just as nice as this one.

“Your father spoke to Dr. Goodman an hour ago,” Mrs. Rubin continued. “And he said that in this instance Blue Cross would certainly cover the cost of—”

“A nose job for me,” Paula said, completing her mother’s rosy picture. She settled back on to her pillow in a resignation so serene it was almost majestic.

Why argue?

Whether or not it was residual delirium, Paula could feel the finger of God, guided by her mother’s hand, reaching down to press the tip of her swollen nose, and she could hear Him, distinctly, going “Beep!”

17

The cosmetic surgery was performed the next day. Five days later Paula was able to return to Blake. Although her new nose was still swollen, its shape was discernible: it was subtly concave, like the side of a little bell. Her friends were all relieved to have her back. Mixed with their sense of relief was an enjoyment of the novelty of Paula’s profile. Squinting at her, they tried to picture her as she would be once the swelling went down. Melanie said, “Maybe you should go blond now?” Apparently a little annoyed, David said, “I don’t know what you’re going to do with them, but I think you’re going to have
looks.
”
Kathy and Mike both told Paula that she was going to be gorgeous.

Paula doubted it. Walking to the theater with Melanie and David, she had to keep adjusting the sunglasses she was wearing to cover up the black eyes she’d gotten from the rhinoplasty.

“Dam it,” she said. “These sunglasses keep slipping down. It’s because I don’t have a bridge in my nose anymore.”

“Yeah,” said David. “It was a landmark. Too bad it’s gone.”

18

Then it was June. David took his little friend Amanda to the senior prom. Mike went with Kathy. On prom night, Melanie and Paula went to a movie together, and Lauren was with James in room 20. Wearing a T-shirt and Bermudas under his cap and gown, David attended the graduation ceremonies, “for the sake of the parents,” he said. Mike, Kathy, and Paula put on caps and gowns too. So did Lauren. She and James, who was seated on the podium, never took their eyes off each other. Melanie had her diploma mailed to her. On graduation day, her father was at a business meeting in Hartford.

After the ceremonies ended, each of the graduates was in the middle of a pool of family and friends. Kathy caught a glimpse of David being examined by his mother for that trace of imperfection her face showed she would never find. Paula saw Mike surrounded by a group of relatives who all looked like old-maid aunts.

Lauren’s mother said to her, “I’d love to meet one of your teachers.”

19

Marion, Massachusetts, the town where Melanie had grown up, was quiet and rich. Its atmosphere of staid silence, broken only by flags flapping over broad lawns or the pock-pock of a tennis match, was redolent of old money—money so old it could have been aged in casks. Like most of the town’s substantial properties, Melanie’s father’s house was on the ocean. As a child Melanie had enjoyed playing on the little beach in front of her father’s house, but she’d never been anxious to go back indoors, because the house, with its heavy, gloomy tables and chairs, felt like a dark woods.

One of the lights in the mahogany forest of Melanie’s youth had been her friend Mary Vargebedian. Mary was an Armenian girl with a wiry little brown body and a nose like the tip of a stiletto. Mary’s parents had her late in their lives. Bewildered by the infant, they let her grow up on her own and concentrated on their real estate investments. As the Vargebedians piled up apartment buildings, their daughter looked for attention. By the age of eleven, she’d found that she could get it from boys. By the age of twelve, she was a confirmed tramp.

On warm summer nights Mary would sneak out her bedroom window for assignations with twelve-year-old boys sleeping in tents in their parents’ yards. She continued this practice until she was sixteen. She had to stop, finally, when the chief of police called on the Vargebedians to report that a number of eighth-grade boys had contracted syphilis from their daughter.

Mary had gone on to drive-in movies, where she would make raw sandwiches out of herself and a pair of willing guys.

Given her reputation, Mary could never understand why Melanie had befriended her.

“Why do you put up with me?” she’d said once. “When you’re such high society.”

“I like you, that’s why,” Melanie had replied. “I like the way you make guys get red all over. You boil them up like lobsters. A person like me needs a friend like you, ’cause what you call high society is nothing but a bunch of old cold fish.”

Summer had already reached its fullness in Melanie’s home town. Roses billowed around the gray shingles and white clapboards, and the lawns were a fervent green. Yet inside Melanie’s father’s house there was never a change in the seasons. It was an interior under a bell jar, the floral patterns in the Oriental rugs flat and lifeless underfoot, the draperies heavy overcoats on the outdoors. In such surroundings, it was nice to remember Mary.

Mrs. Sousa, the Portuguese housekeeper, had already come and gone. Her nephew, Phil Sousa, who drove a taxi, would be coming for Melanie in a couple of hours.

After twenty minutes, she’d finished her packing, so she had some time to kill. She went downstairs to the living room and sat on the tufted Victorian sofa. Her hands sat in her lap with nothing to do. When she was a child, she’d sat on the same sofa racing after the dust particles in the air with her eyes. That was on a busy day.

Melanie thought that if she could only turn up the volume in this house, she’d be able to listen to the static for a while. Nothing in the living room had changed. There on its marble pedestal stood the two-foot-high bronze of Mercury, with his slick, shiny little buns that Melanie imagined had something to do with her liking swimmers. Over the mantel was the same somber portrait of her great grandfather, with his mustache and goatee. Once upon a time Melanie had amused herself by picturing Mercury, with his arm flung up like that, having just thrown a pie in great-grandfather’s bankerish face.

She stuck her tongue out at the picture.

Her father would not be returning from Hartford for a week.

Melanie shifted on the sofa. It was about as comfortable as cobblestones. She decided to go back upstairs.

Her father had left a graduation card on her bureau, along with a check for a thousand dollars. Melanie folded the check and tucked it into a pocket of her wallet. She would use it to start a checking account once she got to the city.

As she was looking around her room for anything she might have forgotten, Melanie heard a roar. She went to the window. In the driveway was a pickup truck with a ramp in the back. A guy had just started a tractor and was cutting a swath across the lawn.

I know him, Melanie thought. On the door of the truck green and yellow lettering spelled out CARGILL’S LANDSCAPE SERVICE.

It was Peter. Who in grammar school had sent Melanie the Valentine that went straight to her heart.

Melanie felt a catch in her throat. He was as beautiful as ever. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just a pair of cutoffs and sneakers. Already suntanned, he looked made of coffee ice cream. Melanie unconsciously licked her lips. She couldn’t even begin to count the number of times, in grammar school, in junior high, in high school, that a glimpse of Peter Cargill had given her soul a pause. She stood there at her window now, all but transfixed.

Then, after a minute, forcing herself, she pulled down the dark green shade. Sitting on her bed, she closed her eyes, but she couldn’t shut out the drone of the tractor.

Melanie went to her closet and took from a shelf her old photograph album. Near the back of it she found the clipping from the sports page of the
Boston Herald:
a shot of Peter in his football uniform, the ball nestled in the crook of his arm, his eyes wide open, and the caption, “Peter Cargill of Marion looks for a little running room.”

Nothing had ever happened between Melanie and Peter. He’d never known how she felt about him, never noticed her. Yet she’d not forgotten him. She wondered now if there was any point, even, in trying to forget him. Carefully folding the clipping, she put it in the same pocket of her wallet where she had secured her father’s check.

For a young actress starting out in the big city, it was good to know that she’d be able to pay her rent for a while, and it was just as good—maybe better—to keep somewhere in a drawer a little reminder that inside the actress was a heart as tender as any woman’s. Melanie had a feeling that perhaps it was women like herself, women who could sustain a tenderness for years, who in the end proved tougher than the rest.

She waited for three quarters of an hour, in her room with the dark shade drawn, until Peter had finished cutting the grass and driven away.

When Phil Sousa’s taxi pulled up, Melanie was ready. Walking across the freshly mown lawn, a heavy suitcase in each hand, she felt as if she were marching with a big brass band toward her destiny. Phil put her bags in the trunk, and Melanie climbed into the back seat of the cab. Her father’s house was only a few blocks behind her, but she felt well on her way. Then Melanie saw the familiar figure. It couldn’t have been anyone else—that little brown sprig of a body was unmistakable.

“Phil, wait! Stop!” Melanie called out.

He swung over to the side of the road and turned around to see what Melanie wanted.

Opening her door, she yelled, “Mary!”

The young woman on the sidewalk jerked to attention and stared at the cab. Then she laughed like someone who’s taken awhile to get a joke.

As Melanie rushed up to embrace her, she said, “Wow. This
really
freaks me out.” After a while it occurred to her to say, “How ya doin’, fish?”

“I just graduated from Blake,” Melanie said, “and I’m on my way to New York.” Melanie babbled on like a high school girl, reporting all her news and trying not to look too taken aback by her old friend’s appearance. Mary was barefoot and her feet were filthy. She was wearing a peasant blouse that was virtually all unbuttoned, so that her breasts, small as they were, were matter-of-factly exposed, like knobs on a kitchen cabinet. Her jeans were frayed and patched with rainbow-colored material: wide wale corduroy in a lurid purple, a yellow and black paisley, and something that looked like a swatch of squirrel’s fur. Five or six strings of beads that reminded Melanie of Indian corn hung around Mary’s neck, and her fingers were covered with turquoise and silver rings.

“Are you living at home now or just visiting?” Melanie asked.

“I’m only gonna be here another day,” Mary replied. “Then I’m going back to San Francisco. I’m living in the Haight.”

“How long have you been out there?” Melanie asked.

“I don’t know. Awhile.”

“What are you doing with yourself?”

“Just hanging out. Me and this other chick, we got an apartment. With these four guys. Sometimes there’s five. Last week one went to Venice. I think.”

“Venice, Italy?”

“No, Venice, California. It’s this place in L.A. that has these canals with no water in ’em.”

“So what are you doing here?” Melanie said, wanting to add,
so totally spaced out.

“I gave my kids to my mother,” Mary replied, “so she can, like, deal with them.”

“Your kids?”

“Yeah, I got two of ’em. The boy’s part Chicano and the girl’s part Navajo Indian. My mother said she’s gonna get a girl to come in days. That’s really far out, ya know? I might send her my friend’s kids too, and my mother can like, start this kiddie commune right here in the middle of Marion.”

Smiling, she looked up at the cloudless sky, apparently experiencing to the fullest her stoned flights of fancy.

Melanie now had enough of a sense of where Mary was at these days to want to get back into Phil’s taxi. “Mary, it’s been great seeing you again, but I’ve really got to go now or I’ll miss my plane.”

“Okay, that’s cool,” Mary said. “See ya around.”

“Yeah,” Melanie said, closing the door. “We’ll see you. Take care, now.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Mary. As Phil started the taxi she leaned over and added, “If you have a kid, give it to your father. It’ll do a number on him. Really.”

20

Kathy spent the summer working at the Ogunquit Playhouse. More elegant than most of the theaters on the straw hat circuit, the playhouse could have been the barn of a large and prosperous dairy farm. In front of it was a circle of barbered shrubs that looked, appropriately enough, like big green milk bottles turned upside down. Because the summer sun never got in, the playhouse always smelled musty. By August, Kathy had come to think of the also-ran shows that came there for two weeks and then went as theater under a dustcover