The Red Book (8 page)

“Defacing government property.” Lena had taken an anthology of poetry out of the Novato Public Library, the kind where all the poems are written by white men, and scribbled her own poems in the margins.

“That’s right! I remember now! That was such a badass story . . .”

Clover’s BlackBerry buzzes for a third time, from the same 617 number. “Sorry, Bucky, I have no idea who this is, but whoever it is keeps calling me. Let me just get rid of it . . .” She holds the phone up to her ear. “Hello?”

The voice on the other end is crying, gasping for air. “Clover? Is that you?”

“Yes,” she says. “Who’s this?”

The woman sounds so distraught, she’s barely able to speak. “It’s Addison.”

“Addison, baby. What’s wrong?”

At the sound of Addison’s name, Bucky’s ears perk up, like a dog’s.

“I’m . . . I’m in jail!” she says.

“
Jail?
What the fuck . . . for what?”

Bucky grabs the phone from her unceremoniously. “Ad, it’s Bucky. Where are you?”

Okay, Clover thinks, so the two were friends since preschool. So they went on mind-expanding binges in the Ramble in Central Park during school breaks when they were teenagers, and they took formal dance lessons together when they were twelve. Does that give him greater claim to her cell phone or to a friendship she’s now stoked and nurtured for twenty years? Where was Bucky when Addison was recovering from her appendectomy; when each of her children was born; when her postpartum depression after the second was so intense she was threatening to kill herself ? Where was he when Addison’s daughter Trilby fell off the monkey bars and broke her leg, and someone had to pick up Houghton and Thatcher at preschool and bring them to the lobby at Mount Sinai? Where was he when—

“Which police station?” says Bucky. “I’m sorry, where? Sixth Street? Near Kendall Square? Yes, okay, don’t worry. We’re on our way.” He throws three crumpled twenties on the table, despite his earlier deal with Clover, and grabs his ex-lover’s hand, as if it were once again November of 1985, and they were rushing off to the Fly Club to rescue Addison, who this time had eaten so many mushrooms before a game of strip poker that she was standing on the roof of the club wearing only her panties (this last part much to the delight of the Fly’s members, many of whom had dreamt about seeing Addison Hunt’s breasts thus unleashed), flapping her arms like a bird and squealing to the young buck trying to coax her back inside, “It says the
Fly
Club, silly! I’m just following the rules!”

V
IVICA
S
NOW.
Address:
Creative Artists Agency, 2000 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles, CA 90067.

L
UBA
A
NDREIOVICH
S
MOLENSK.
Home Address:
2238 S Street, NW, Washington, DC 20008 (202-335-9334).
Occupation and Office Address:
Attorney, Covington & Burling, 1201 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20004-2494.
E-mail:
[email protected].
Graduate Degrees:
J.D., Yale 2001.

I finally gave in and decided that not writing one of these things is as revealing, in its own way, as writing one. The way I see it, those who don’t write in do it for one or more of several reasons: (1) They’re dissatisfied with where they are, and they don’t feel like broadcasting it to 1,600 former classmates; (2) They consider themselves above such nonsense; (3) They’re bad with tasks and/or deadlines; (4) They dislike(d) Harvard and have no desire to be reminded of those four years; or (5) Writing three to five paragraphs on any subject, no matter their innate knowledge of the topic, is still as painful for them now as it was during freshman expos. I used to lie to myself and claim #’s 2 and 5 for my own, when in fact, it was really #1 all along, with a small smattering of #3.

So, now that I’m here, where do I begin? The assignment says I should describe the past half decade of my life, but I can’t really do that without referencing all the other stuff that came before, which I haven’t yet reported on. But I’ll be brief, as instructed, I promise.

Okay, so first five years out of school I pounded the pavement in New York City trying to get a role on Broadway. Bartended, waitressed, tutored kids for their SATs and worked periodically as an office temp to pay the rent. Got a few off-off-Broadway parts here and there, but suddenly I was twenty-seven, and I wasn’t any further along to making my Broadway debut, and my hair was turning prematurely gray. So I dyed my hair blond and moved to LA to try to make it in film before it was too late. Landed a few minor guest appearances here and there on soap operas, dramas, and whatnot (I played a corpse in a Fox
Tuesday night movie
and a waitress on
Mad About You
) but suddenly I was thirty and broke and tired of living with roommates. I thought about trying to get a job in the film industry behind the camera—writer, producer, agent, what have you—but I realized it would be too painful for me to be on the periphery of acting.

I’d like to say I went to law school after that because I had a sudden epiphany that I was always meant to be a lawyer, but my thought processes at the time were much more scattered and mercenary. I needed a job. Preferably one that would give me good health insurance, and where my weight, age, hair color, and bra size had no bearing on my future earning potential. I figured what I’d learned as an actor could not only be applied in the courtroom but maybe even be put to good use.

Turns out? I was right. Not only that, I’ve been told I’m actually good at my job. Clients hire me (I know, it shocks me, too!) to represent them because they’ve heard I’m a persuasive orator, that I win over juries, that I “put on a good show” in the courtroom. Which was and still is a welcome change from the daily rejections, the “Sorry, next!,” the freak show and lack of control over my own destiny I felt when I was an actor.

I made partner at my firm last year. I celebrated by buying a house in Adams Morgan. There’s plenty of room for guests, so next time you’re in DC, look me up.

Still no husband or kids yet, but if life’s taught me anything it’s this: You never know what’s just around the bend.

Chapter 3
Mia

Zoe Zane, aged seven months, is starting to fuss for her night feeding when Mia receives the call from Clover asking her to drop everything and head to Kendall Square. So after a brief explanation to her husband—“Get this: Addison was taken into the Cambridge police station. Something about old parking tickets, God only knows”—she straps the baby to her chest, throws some extra diapers and wipes into a bag, and leaves Jonathan and her three sons to sort out the housing situation on their own. “Let her spend the night behind bars,” Jonathan shouts after her, only half-jokingly. “It’ll teach her a lesson.” Jonathan can’t understand how his wife and Addison were ever friends, though Mia claims that buried under Addison’s rampant narcissism lies a tenderhearted kitten, scratching at the walls of her self-importance.

Jonathan sees no evidence of this, but he tends not to argue with his wife when it comes to questions of character and human nature, because it was Mia’s ability to see both the good and the less-good in everyone (she doesn’t ever use the word
bad
, which she claims is more judgmental than descriptive) that drew him to her in the first place, when she walked into his casting director’s office, fresh off the boat from college, and performed a stirring rendition of his most villainous character with the type of multilayered pathos that was totally wrong for the part he’d written yet absolutely right for what he’d always envisioned—but hadn’t yet found, after nearly two decades of searching—in a life mate. “Make sure the boys eat some dinner,” Mia now shouts over her shoulder. “And keep your phone nearby, okay? I’ll call when I figure out what’s going on.” She hurries out of the dorm room assigned to her family—the dorm room her husband and sons had called respectively upon entering, much to Mia’s populist chagrin, “a fluorescent-lit hellhole” and “lame”—and heads toward the front entrance of Kirkland House, feeling guilty for telling Max to leave his laptop at home. “There’s no Wi-Fi in the dorm rooms,” she’d said when he asked if he could bring it, picturing the Adams House suite she, Clover, Addison, and Jane had shared their senior year, with its antique wood trim and primitive electronic infrastructure that could barely handle their answering machine and those first archaic Macs, which crashed whenever a term paper exceeded five pages. Meaning, always.

To which Max, nonplussed, said, “Are you sure? Like, sure-sure?”

“I’m double sure,” she’d answered, doubly sure, rambling on about how hard it was just to get a phone line connected back when she was a student. “Now, hurry up and finish packing.”

When, several hours and three thousand miles later, the friendly junior manning the reunion check-in table handed the Zanes six threadbare white towels, a minuscule bar of soap, five keys to their room in C-entry, and a series of wallet-size cards, five of which opened the front door of Kirkland House, one of which bore a series of numbers and letters comprising the guest Wi-Fi password, Max turned to her, mouth agape. “Mom! Of
course
there was no Wi-Fi in the dorms when you were in college
because the Internet hadn’t been invented
! Oh my God, I can’t believe I listened to you!”

“You could read a book,” she offered brightly.

“I didn’t bring any because you said we had to pack light!”

“Homework?”

“It’s all on the Web. Which I can’t access. Because you said there’d be no Wi-Fi!”

“Well, I screwed up,” said Mia. “And I’m sorry. Really, I am.”

“Oh, Mom, it’s just”—Max, who’s been taller than her for three years now, leaned down to hug his mother, whom he could tell, she could tell, was experiencing a middle-aged person’s time warp—“what are we supposed to do while you’re out at your parties?”

Mia hadn’t considered the answer to this question when she was booking their dorm room on a whim, instead of a hotel, out of a sense of nostalgia only she could appreciate. “You could take your brothers out for an ice cream?”

“Great. Then what?”

Jonathan told her not to worry. First he’d locate them a hotel room, then he’d take the boys into Harvard Square to find a bookstore before joining her at the luau. When Addison’s call interrupted the latter part of these plans, Jonathan was secretly thrilled that Addison had always been such a fuck-up. He’s always hated cocktail parties, especially costume-specific ones, and now he has the perfect excuse not to attend the Hawaiian-themed extravaganza, whose chattery buzz Mia can hear receding in the courtyard behind her.

She, too, is somewhat relieved to miss it. Not that she doesn’t want to mingle with her former classmates. She’s dragged her entire family across the country, after all, when they could all have been doing things they would rather be doing: location scouting (Jonathan); sucking face with his girlfriend (Max); playing Xbox (Eli); going to Ezra Lang’s birthday party (Josh); pulling all the books out of the bottom shelves and teething on them (Zoe). But Mia’s feeling a bit bedraggled after the flight from LA, and she has yet to lose the baby fat from Zoe’s birth, and her jowls have suddenly grown jowlier, and her joints ache from carrying the baby around or age or probably both, and her hair would not be out of place on a cartoon character who’s just stuck his finger in an outlet. In short, she feels sleepy, ugly, scruffy, and old. Or at least sleepier, uglier, scruffier, and older than usual, although a good night’s sleep and a quick fling with her blow-dryer should be able to plug the dike in time for tomorrow’s picnic.

Just as she’s congratulating herself on a clean escape, Mia pushes the exit door open to find Luba Smolensk pulling it in. “Oh my God, Mia Mandelbaum?!” Luba played Arkadina to Mia’s Nina in
The Seagull
and, in an instance of life imitating art, seduced Mia’s then boyfriend, Clay Collins, who was playing Trigorin.

“Luba!” Mia doesn’t bother correcting her last name, which hasn’t been Mandelbaum since she married Jonathan, a year out of college. That was the same year she spent banging her head against every stucco wall in Hollywood, trying to catch a break, wondering if the Semitic thud of her maiden name might be partially to blame. So after she and Jonathan married, she pulled a Bob Dylan and changed it to the ethnically ambiguous, melodious Mia Zane. Although Mia Collins, she’d sometimes imagined, would have been equally euphonic. She was secretly relieved when Clay Collins came out of the closet in the tenth reunion red book. She’d suspected as much when they were dating, but she wasn’t sure, and when he left her for Luba, she got so depressed, she spent a couple of days lying listless on one of the psych beds at the University Health Services; if nothing else, the revelation of his sexuality had allowed her to put to rest the sting of that rejection.

“You had
another
one?” says Luba. “How many kids does that make now? Four?”

“Yup. Four.” There was something irritating to others about the addition of any child over the socially acceptable two, as if you’d hoarded too much candy from life’s piñata. Sometimes it was subtle, like the widening of Luba’s eyes as she formed the word
four
. Other times it was outright, like when Mia’s mother responded to the news of her latest pregnancy, which she erroneously assumed was an accident, with a, “Wow, what a shame. You were almost home free.”

“That’s incredible,” says Luba. “How do you do it?”

“Oh you know, the normal way,” says Mia. “Missionary style.” She loathes that question:
How do you do it?
As if women since the dawn of time haven’t been birthing and raising litters of children far larger than hers.

“No, I meant—”

“Luba, I’m so sorry, but I’m sort of in the midst of a minor emergency. Let’s chat tomorrow at the picnic?”

“What kind of minor emergency?”

Luba, Mia remembers, was both an unrepentant gossip and a social troglodyte who was—and still is, apparently—unable to read the subtle hints of verbal cues and body language. When she read that Luba had become a lawyer, she felt the same kind of relief she once felt when Eli, as a toddler, finally realized that the plastic pentagon, no matter how hard he pushed, would never fit into the shape sorter’s hexagon. Everyone knew, even back in college, that Luba belonged on Broadway like a Mack truck belonged in a narrow alley. But no one had the guts to tell her, not even Clay Collins, who was cast in a small part on the New York stage straight out of Harvard, only to abandon both the bright lights and the Big Apple—and Luba, and several other women he tried and failed to love—for the cool mist and small core of the arts scene in Seattle, where he founded an experimental theater group in an abandoned milk-bottle factory. “The kind I’m not really at liberty to discuss,” Mia says, dodging the whole Addison-in-jail issue. “But I’d love to catch up later. You’ll be at the picnic?”

Luba was one of the chorus of people, no less loud than Mia’s mother, who’d urged her to head for LA after college and try her hand at becoming a film star. This was awful advice in retrospect, and subconsciously she must have even known it back then, but everyone kept telling her, melodramatically, “You’ll never know until you try,” and the words rang in Mia’s ears throughout the months leading up to graduation. She’d always succeeded at anything she undertook. Why should Hollywood be any different?

Of course she would have never met Jonathan had she taken a different path, or had the kids she had, and looking backward, she knew, was never useful, but she should have known better. Actresses like Mia were not valued in Hollywood. As an undergraduate, she was luminous: every role she performed—Nora in
A Doll’s House
, Martha in
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
,
Lady Macbeth—received standing ovations, incredible reviews in the
Crimson
, accolades from the likes of Robert Brustein, the director of the A.R.T. during her college years. But you can create the greatest Nora of all time and fall flat on your face in LA if you are short, of normal body weight, and have a head of recalcitrant, dark curls. Even if your face could hardly be called plain. In high school, she’d won Best Eyes, which was not Most Beautiful, but still. She’d also won Most Likely to Succeed, which while technically true up until her move to LA didn’t stand the test of time as well as her eyes, which still shone as fiercely as they did back in twelfth grade, and had been passed down, despite Jonathan’s brown eyes and the laws of recessive genetic probability, to three out of four of her long-lashed children.

“I’ll definitely be at the picnic,” says Luba. “So what are you up to these days? Are you working?”

Oh my God, Mia thinks, what is with her? Have I not made it clear I have to go? “Not at the moment, unless you count this.” She points to the baby ironically but with a secret dose of pride at having raised what her children’s teachers have consistently called good kids. She is under no delusions that her efforts on their behalf is work in any traditional sense of the word, or that her children would have been any less well adjusted had she hired a fleet of energetic, warm nannies and traded her dreams of stardom for a job that paid more than the nannies’ salary, but she once calculated the amount of money it would have cost her to hire full-time help for each child since Max’s birth, and she found, to her surprise, that during the past seventeen years she’d saved her family well over three million pretax dollars by doing the bulk of the child rearing herself: a small percentage of Jonathan’s income during that same period, and somewhat beside the point, since her staying home was never about saving money and much more about the carpooling than she’d ever imagined possible, but it was not an insignificant number either.

Her college roommates, she knew, were baffled by her choices, though only Addison judged her out loud, albeit indirectly. “Don’t you miss the stage? Miss being out there?” Addison had asked her last summer at their annual Fourth of July gathering at Clover’s. Mia had answered as honestly as she could, knowing Addison’s question was coming more from a place of insecurity of having not yet made her professional mark as an artist than from concern over Mia’s welfare. “Sure,” she said, “I miss the stage, but I live in LA, where it’s all about film and TV, and no one ever wanted to cast me in their films or TV shows, either before I had the boys or after, when I lost the weight and tried again, and I could never figure out what else to do that would give me as much as it took away from my kids, and now I’m turning forty, and we’re stuck living there because of Jonathan’s career, plus the weather’s great, so I really can’t complain, and yes, Jonathan has offered me parts in his films, but I think that would create a weird nepotismy atmosphere on set, like when Francis Ford Coppola cast Sofia in
Godfather III
. Plus, frankly? I know it’s not the most PC thing to admit, but I’ve really enjoyed staying home with my kids.”

Her precollege life back in Syosset, for as far back as she could remember, had been consumed with getting into a good college. Her father, a graduate of Calumet, was a medical devices sales rep whose dreams of going to medical school had been shattered, he claimed, by having gone to a subpar college. Her mother passed the bulk of her days clipping coupons in front of the TV and seething. Together, they pushed their children to not make the same mistakes, carefully choosing for them only those after-school activities (debate team, cello, soup kitchen volunteer, candy striper, etc.) that would look good on a college application.

Their efforts with Mia’s younger brother Jerry, who wanted to learn the electric guitar but was made to play the oboe, backfired. He quit everything, including high school, started smoking pot and shoplifting Hostess cupcakes from the 7-Eleven, and barely made it into a community college after taking his GED. Now he runs a successful biotech company in Palo Alto.

As for Mia, the classic oldest child, she did exactly as she was told, excelling at every activity. She skipped first grade, then third. She spent every afternoon after school finishing her homework and building her résumé. Then, one day in her early teens, after seeing an ad in the paper for weekend teen classes at Stella Adler, she asked her mother if she could take the train into New York on Saturdays to attend them. Her mother initially said no, having never heard of the school and thinking a frivolous activity such as acting would be frowned upon by Ivy League college admissions committees. Mother and daughter argued vehemently over it until, at Mia’s urging, her father talked to the high school guidance counselor and was told that, on the contrary, colleges like to see child-directed interests pursued. Yes, even acting. For Mia those precious eight hours of intensive training every Saturday were a revelation, not only because she learned how to live—really
live
—a theatrical role, but also because it was the first time in her short life she not only excelled at an extracurricular activity but actually liked it. No,
loved
it.