Stages (22 page)

The Littlest Angel had pulled up a cloud close to where Mike was standing. His proximity took Mike by surprise when he looked up from his beer, and so did the look the kid gave him. Instinctively Mike tried to pretend he hadn’t seen it. The harder he tried to pretend, though, the warmer his cheeks felt. He was afraid for a moment that he was actually going to blush.

Glancing around the room, Mike saw that Matt was talking to someone. He wished that he would leave with the guy.

Five minutes later, he did, with a wave to Mike on the way out.

Mike looked at the Angel, who was looking at him expectantly.

Mike walked over to him. Once you crawled out of the hole in the ice, the rest of the skating was easy.

“Hi,” Mike said.

“Hi,” said the Angel.

“I sort of felt sorry for you,” Mike said. “Sitting here in the corner by yourself, because you’re so homely.”

The kid smiled and said, “You’re pretty terrible-looking too. What’s your name?”

“Mike,” Mike said. “Mike Lange. What’s yours?”

“Rick.”

That night, as he lay in bed with Rick sleeping beside him, with his thoughts turning over in his head, Mike came to the conclusion that the worst thing about the sexual revolution was the constant upheavals it caused in yourself, every goddamn time you fell in love.

39

Kathy and Aaron lived together for almost two years before they finally decided to get married. Even then Kathy told her friends, “We’re just doing it for the sake of the parents.” Their wedding vows were their own, and they recited them in unison.

We have come together out of love and mutual respect, and we share a commitment not only to each other but to the ongoing struggle against war, poverty, injustice, and intolerance….

In the rows of folding chairs that had been set up on a sand dune in Robert Moses State Park, some of the matrons who were among the wedding guests fidgeted. Melanie and Paula—who had announced publicly she was now Veronica—pretended to be listening to the marriage manifesto, but their minds began to wander along the beach after the first five minutes.

As Kathy and Aaron read their proclamation, Melanie tried to picture her agent buried up to his neck in the sand, along with that call girl he’d been seeing and had just gotten into a TV movie of the week. The tide was coming in and they were sputtering helplessly….

Veronica was thinking about the open call she would be going to in a couple of days. She hadn’t really given Melanie or Kathy any indication of how complete her break with her own past was. They thought her new stage name was a whim; they didn’t know that this was Veronica playing Paula, nibbling her nails between cigarettes because that was one of the bits of business that defined Paula, with her little decisions to light up or go to the bathroom and comb her hair that had kept her from making any big decisions.

She let the sound of the ocean take over her mind, becoming a character out of
Riders to the Sea.
Fog rolled in, and she was walking at the edge of a cliff, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, which were aching from the damp and the cold. Yes, and such a character would be huddled inside herself, a tiny thing moving along the perimeter of a vast loneliness….

You’d have to underplay it to avoid the sentimentality, but the Irish accent wouldn’t be a problem, not with that super in the building who’d come over from Dublin….

“Before nuclear madness destroys us all,” Kathy and Aaron were saying.

Melanie nudged Veronica, who blinked her eyes as if she were awakening from a trance.

“Look at that woman,” Melanie whispered.

Three rows in front of them, a stout woman in an embroidered caftan appeared to be listing to port.

“Look, the right side of her chair is sinking into the sand,” Melanie said. It was true. Evidently the woman had dozed off and her cargo had shifted. She was going to capsize.

Kathy and Aaron were still haranguing the crowd.

“This is like one of Fidel Castro’s radio speeches,” Melanie said. “If they don’t come to the end of it pretty soon, that woman is going to…”

It happened before Melanie could get the words out of her mouth. The woman landed on her side, with a
whump
that sounded to Melanie like a parachute opening.

People all around her jumped up the way people do when the wind is carrying off a beach umbrella. Kathy and Aaron stopped in midsentence and stood there gaping while the woman was being picked up.

Feeling embarrassed for Kathy, Melanie tried to look the other way. The worst was yet to come, though.

After the fat woman was assisted back into her chair, Kathy and Aaron went on with their declaration, promising each other that they and their children’s children would live free from the masculine aggression of cap guns and the socialization of Betsy Wetsy dolls.

Finally the moment came for Aaron to break the glass. He stomped on it with his Frye boot, and squished it into the sand. He had to dig it up and try again.

“Maybe they should just put their marriage license in a bottle and toss it in the ocean?” Veronica muttered. She was wishing that she was at home, studying her movements in the mirror. She was determined, even during a tryout, that where her hands went, and every step she took, should be at one with the words.

“It’ll be a hard act to follow,” Melanie replied, “but I think the reception may even top this. Kathy told me that it’s going to be a
communal thing.
”

“At that wedding palace?
Leonard’s
?” Veronica said. Melanie didn’t quite understand why Veronica was so flabbergasted until they actually arrived at Leonard’s. Then she saw the chandeliers.

“I wonder if it’ll work,” Melanie said to Veronica when they were about a half hour into the reception.

Veronica, who was eating organic chopped liver on stone-ground seven-grain bread, swallowed a mouthful and said, “What’ll work?”

“This marriage.”

“I don’t know,” Veronica said.

Then she added, “I don’t worry about things like that. I mean, about my friends getting married, or me getting married. Acting just seems to take up every minute. There aren’t enough hours in the day, it seems. You know what I mean?”

“Frankly, no,” Melanie said. “Paula, you haven’t been in one single production since we graduated. I’m not sure what it is you’re talking about….”

“Call me Veronica,” Veronica said.

40

Melanie was wearing a black evening gown and a pair of rhinestone earrings that looked and felt like the chandeliers at Leonard’s. Every fifteen minutes she had to pick up a microphone and deliver a spiel about the glittering Buick Electra that was slowly revolving with her on the carpeted platform. Sometimes, while Melanie was doing her tango with this hunk of Detroit, five or six people would stop to watch, and she would give them a smile as white and far away as a sliver of moon in the sky.
I am
not
a recording,
Melanie would tell herself,
I am an actress, and this is a job.

It didn’t help that everyone else working the auto show was a “model” or a second-string show girl, and that they all looked half starved and would probably never get the chance to look ten pounds heavier on television. Nobody was going to get anywhere from here, unless the airlines started shanghaiing people and forcing them to become stewardesses.

One thing Melanie had in common with the crowd that came to the auto show was a dream. She saw herself on Broadway; they saw themselves behind the wheel of a Corvette. And everybody left the bright lights for the reality of the subway.

Skinny adolescent boys with wads of brochures and cameras paraded past Melanie’s stand in gangs of four or five, and there were black dudes with preposterous hats on, and couples from Staten Island for whom looking at a big sticker price was a kind of religious experience. Every so often Melanie would be temporarily blinded by a flashbulb, or she’d have to tell some hardhat type,
Sorry, only the cars are for rides.

She couldn’t say that she was unhappy, though. Since she’d moved in with Brett, nothing really got her down anymore. Having someone to come home to every night had changed things. For Melanie even the dullest day was overarched by a rainbow with Brett at the end of it.

Now that she had love in her life, Melanie also had a reason to do all of life’s unpleasant little tasks. She could never be all that frustrated in the daytime when every night her soul bathed in joy. Seeing Paula at Kathy’s wedding had only helped to make Melanie more acutely aware of how fortunate she was. Paula was a woman alone, basically, and she’d been alone for too long a time, so that she’d finally had to deal with her need to give herself to somebody somehow, and had come up with this fantasy about living for the theater. She might as well have gone back to high school and tried out for the part of Emily in
Our Town.

So Melanie considered herself lucky, even as she went ’round and ’round on a carousel with a big fat Buick.

It was time for her to do her pitch again.

Picking up her microphone, she put on once again the brilliant smile she’d put on so many times that two nights ago she’d caught herself wearing it while opening a can of tuna fish.

“Hi,” she began. “Welcome to the International Auto Show! On behalf of your tri-state Buick dealers, I’d like to tell you a little about the exciting Buick lineup for 1972….”

She let her mind wander while her mouth went through the motions. Brett was in a new band, and was supposed to hear about whether or not they were getting a recording contract sometime today. If by some miracle they did get it…

Opening one of the Buick’s rear doors, Melanie said, “And look at this beautiful crushed velour interior, custom crafted with your maximum comfort in mind.”

From behind her, she heard a thump. She turned around.

It was Brett.

“What are
you
doing here?” Melanie said.

“We did it,” Brett said, grabbing her and spinning her around. “We did it, baby. We
got
the contract.”

Melanie’s microphone fell to the platform with an amplified clunk. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a Hispanic couple trying to interpret what was going on. Some high school kids had started looking too.

Melanie was trying with a little less than all her might to wriggle out of Brett’s clutches.

“This is it,” he was saying. “This is the big time, baby.”

He pulled her into the backseat of the Buick and slammed the door shut. He clamped his mouth over hers and ran his hands up her. Melanie’s legs flew into the air and one of her high heels dropped out the window.

Under the spotlights that heated the skin like a summer sun, the Buick continued its slow revolutions.

“You’re crazy,” Melanie spluttered. “Get off me, you idiot.”

She heard her gown ripping.

The crowd around the 33 1/3 r.p.m. Buick was growing.

Melanie let out a shriek, followed by a moan.

Several flashbulbs popped, and there was a ripple of applause.

Then Melanie saw in the Buick’s window the face of a security guard. Brett, who was way under her dress, didn’t see a thing.

Not knowing what else to say, Melanie said, “It’s okay. This car is a demonstrator.”

41

“I hope you can understand,” Lauren said. “My parents are hardworking people, but they don’t have any money. And all I had was a little bit of savings, and that was what I used.”

“She paid for everything,” said Jason. He was beaming. “We were staying at this little hotel in the Swiss Alps, and that was where we got married and where we spent our minihoneymoon. Lauren blew everything she’d put aside on me and champagne.”

Mrs. Case—Andrea, she wanted to be called—was looking at her son with a pride that sparkled even more than the diamond on her finger, which was the biggest one that Lauren had ever seen. The Cases’ living room was also the biggest one Lauren had ever seen, with its wall of French doors and walk-in marble fireplace. Only Jason’s father seemed small, all bunched up in his wheelchair. Jason hadn’t said a word about his father being crippled. Lauren had no idea until the moment she met the man, and in that moment she immediately understood everything. Why Jason had always acted as if there was a meter running on the good times, why he’d made her believe he was dying just to get his way, why in the little boy always at play there was also the gloom of a sad and tired old man. Seeing Mr. Case for the first time, Lauren had wanted to ask Jason to forgive her, not so much for what she’d said as for having thought that he didn’t take life seriously. Now it seemed that it was she who was the lightweight, the dilettante. How well her young husband knew her, after all.

Maybe acting isn’t such a big deal.

“Well, you’re married and that’s that,” Andrea was saying. “But even if we can’t have a wedding in this old house, we can have a party, can’t we? So I can show off my only son’s beautiful bride?”

Jason gave Lauren an inquiring glance. “That’d be okay, wouldn’t it?” he asked.