Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical Rent (27 page)

“Oh, I don’t know, Tonio,” Mom said. “I don’t think he’ll ever really change. He’s not a bad guy, he’s just sort of clueless sometimes.”

“I guess.”

I was happy that Mom had opened up to me. And as usual with these visits, lurking around the edges of the warmth I felt in her presence was the now-familiar dread that soon these moments would be gone.

Back in New York, back in the grind of eight shows a week, I rarely spent time in my apartment; I enjoyed running around like crazy, and I had little reason to be in my home except to get clean clothes, since I was still spending most nights at Todd’s place, even though time with him was becoming increasingly difficult. But I still didn’t like the idea of spending nights alone, with all that was going on, so I weathered our storms, and took solace in our occasional peaceful nights.

I still shared an apartment with my brother, but since we had upgraded to a slightly bigger place we now had two other roommates, and the four of us pretty much pulled our own weight, taking care of our personal space and whatever messes we might make in the common areas. For the most part, everyone was tidy and mellow, although my small room was becoming overrun by my ever-growing CD and book collections, and I longed for an apartment with more space and privacy.

Even though the mood was generally easygoing, Adam and I had had our share of roommate-style arguments over the years. But since I rarely saw him anymore we hadn’t had a good fight in a while. One night when I got home from the show—a rare occasion when I was going to sleep in my own bed, since Todd and I were in the middle of a major tiff (there was that pattern again, of escalating fights with my boyfriends)—Adam came out of his room, his arms folded across his chest. An imposing figure at six-foot-three, he looked even scarier at the moment, with his large brow knitted and his imposingly chiseled jaw tightly set.

“We need to talk,” he said. My pulse immediately quickened, and I faced him down in our narrow hallway.

“About what?”

“Where the hell have you been? You’re never here.”

“What do you mean?” His steady gaze felt like a blazing hot searchlight.

“It’s like you’re a fucking ghost, you’re never here.”

My voice started to rise in volume. “So
what
?”

“So it’d be nice if you pulled your own weight for once.”

My fists clenched tightly. I was already set off and began to yell. “What the fuck are you talking about?!? I’m not even here, I’m not even doing anything to the apartment in the first place, so what’s the fucking problem?!”

“That’s exactly my fucking point. It’d be nice if you were here, if you took a little initiative, or something. If you made a little effort. You know, did a little something extra. It’d be a little bit of common courtesy. It wouldn’t kill you.”

I couldn’t believe he was laying this on me. I started pacing, my voice getting more and more shrill, my chest tightening, my head pounding. “Where the fuck do you get off being the fucking head of household?!?”

“It’s not just me, Anthony, Walt was bitching about it the other day, too.”

This was something I
really
couldn’t stand, to hear a complaint from someone other than the person complaining. “Well why the fuck doesn’t he tell me himself?!?”

“Because you’re never
here.”
Throughout the conversation, Adam’s voice had not altered in volume, and he stood in the hallway impassively, his arms still folded, like a statue guarding a palace or temple. Losing control of myself, I kept pacing furiously, feeling the weight of this moment crushing down on top of all the other pressures and struggles of the last few months.

“Do you have any
idea
what my life is like right now?!?”

“How could I? I never see you.”

In spite of myself, tears welled in my eyes. I fought off hyperventilation. Somewhere in the back of my mind was a rational, calm eye watching my hysteria, but I couldn’t get a grip on myself. “I’m working my
ass
off, I’m working so
hard,”
I sobbed.

“Get off it, we’re all working hard. You’re nothing special.”

And before I knew what I was doing, I charged at my brother and spastically whipped my fist into his shoulder as hard as I could, matching every word with a blow.
“Leave—me—the—fuck—alone.”
He didn’t move at all as I hit him, didn’t try to stop me.

“You’d better calm down,” he said.

My chest heaved. “Fuck you, leave me
alone,”
I said again. I charged away from him, my head spinning, and headed into my room for a second, then wandered down the hallway like a drunken moth.

“Why are you freaking out so much?” Adam said impassively.

“You have no
idea
what it’s been like for me. I have no help anywhere, I’m doing it all
myself,
I’m exhausted—”

“What about Todd?”

“Todd is no fucking help, either, he just comes at me and
at me
all the
time
with all the things I’m not doing, and then I come home for once and
you
come at me—”

“I’m just trying to tell you what’s going on here.”

And there I was, leaping at him again, my fist pathetically plowing into his shoulder. Once again, he did nothing to stop me. “I can’t
take
it right now, leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me
alone.
”

“Why are you freaking out so much? Calm down.”

I flew away from him again, my mind racing, and I tried to find that quiet part of myself, but it was locked away and I was drowning drowning drowning. “I feel like I’m going to explode,” I wailed. “I can’t take anything more right now. Mom’s dying, Mom’s
dying,
and I can’t do all of this, I’m sorry, but I can’t, I can’t.”

“I know Mom’s dying,” Adam said. It was the first time such words had come out of him.

“I just have too much, I have too much to deal with right now,” I said, my voice sounding and feeling foreign to me. “Please leave me alone. Please leave me alone. Please leave me alone.”

Adam remained inert, his voice calm and clear. “Well maybe we should talk about all this so you don’t keep freaking out,” he said.

“I’m talked
out,”
I said. “I talk about it so much with so many people, I’m exhausted.” That wasn’t true; I didn’t know why I was saying it.

“But you never talk to me about it.”

And somewhere through my craziness it dawned on me that Adam was being as gracious to me as he’d ever been—he hadn’t hit me back, he had offered to help, he had said he wanted to hear from me how I was feeling—and my pulse slowed.

“I mean,” Adam said, “I’m going through the same things too, you know.”

I stopped and leaned against the wall, gradually coming back down to earth. Tears still flowed, but they were slower and somehow truer now, no longer hysterical. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Maybe you needed to let off some of that steam.”

“I just…” I began, and couldn’t finish.

“It’s okay, everybody freaks out sometimes.”

“Yeah…” I said.

“Hopefully Todd can be more supportive.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know sometimes,” I said.

Adam looked at me steadily. “I just want to be able to talk to you, too,” Adam said.

I could barely bring myself to look back at him, I felt so ashamed and sickened by the inanity and volume and violence of my outburst. “I’m sorry,” I said again.

“I’ve never seen you like this before,” Adam said.

“I’m sorry I hit you.”

“Believe me, if it had hurt I would have stopped you. I would have clocked you.”

I couldn’t help but laugh a little.

“Sometimes people need to let off steam,” Adam said. “You shouldn’t keep it all bottled up.”

I sighed. “You’re right. I’m doing my best.” But letting off steam was still a somewhat terrifying prospect; it could lead to disaster if left unchecked.

“Life sucks right now in a lot of ways,” Adam said.

“Yeah.”

“It sucks, what’s happening with Mom. It sucks.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I mean, we have no way of knowing what’s going to happen, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“But you have to find ways to get this off your chest.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We stood there in silence for a long moment. My shame melted away and in its place emerged more love for my brother than I’d ever felt. We’d crossed over into a new world with each other. In spite of, or maybe in some ways because of, my brush with temporary insanity.

“Just talk to me when you want, okay?” Adam said. “There’s no reason you have to let yourself get so burnt out.”

I looked at him and nodded. “Thanks,” I said.

“No problem.”

O
n my next visit home, I walked into the house and realized there was no eager Zelda panting and pawing at me as I opened the door. Of course—she was too much for the hospice workers to handle, so she’d had to go. I was sure that Mom missed her. And then I realized that there was no gleeful little Rachel running to give me a hug, either. Mom had mentioned during my last visit that Anne would take Rachel when the time came. Well, I guess the time had come. In their absence, the stillness of the house took on an almost holy quality, bathed in the sunlight streaming in through the glass patio door and the windows. I stood there and breathed in the quiet.

Tom, one of the hospice workers—a small, gentle, mild man with a dark mustache and slightly rumpled clothes—emerged out of the hallway and walked right up to me.

“Nice to see you, Anthony,” he said. We’d met briefly, once before.

“Nice to see you, too.”

“I knew you were coming home today. Mary didn’t even have to tell me, and I knew. She was so up and happy when I got here.” He smiled as he said it, but his words didn’t sound right, at first. Mom was excited I was coming home? I thought my visits with her were always so serious, why would they be exciting to her? If I had still been the angelic boy she talked so fondly about, who wowed the crowds singing “Where Is Love?” at eight years old, I might have understood. But now? As an adult I’d brought her so much concern and worry and more than a little heartache that, without realizing it, I’d come to think she half-dreaded my visits.

“That’s nice,” I said.

“She’s sleeping now—she just fell asleep—but I’m sure she’ll wake right up when you go in.”

“Thanks,” I said.

Now Tom became slightly—only slightly—more serious. “I want you to know, if you need to talk about any of this, you are more than welcome to talk to me.”

I nodded, not intending to open myself up to yet another person, but not wanting to blow him off, either. “Thanks, I will,” I said.

“I know this must be very hard for you. So I just wanted to let you know I’m here.”

I nodded again, feeling cornered by his kindness. “Thanks, I appreciate that.”

“Well, I’ll see you soon. Have a nice visit.”

“I will.” And I shook his hand and headed down the narrow hallway, the cheap floor creaking under the dingy carpet in the same spot it always had, and walked into Mom’s room.

She lay on her back, her lips chapped and parted, her bony, nearly translucent hands splayed out at her sides. I realized that, in all these months of visiting her, this was the first time that I had been in her room while she slept. It was the first time I could just stand there and take in the ravaged shell that her body had become. I quietly seated myself in the recliner next to her bed and stared at her, listening to her shallow breath, watching her tiny chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and for the first time in all of these months, I saw, really
saw,
that all of her was no longer there. For the first time, I imagined what horror she must be experiencing every day, how impossibly hopeless she must feel as she lay day after day fixed to her bed, waiting for the phone to ring or some friend or loved one to drop by or for the nurse to take her vitals or change her dressings or empty her colostomy bag or refill her Demerol cartridge or feed her. How was she abiding this? And for the first time in all of these months, I sat next to my mother as she slept and I lowered my head into my hands and I wept, as quietly as I could, my face hot and slick with tears. This was not right, not at all, not any of it, not for her, not for anybody, but especially not for her.

As silently as I was attempting to weep, I couldn’t stop myself from sniffling, which must have woken her up, because her meek voice called out, “Who’s there?” And as soon as I heard her voice I clamped down on my tears, quickly wiped my face, and steadied my voice as much as I could—I didn’t want Mom to know I had been crying. I didn’t want her to feel she had to comfort me, since I was there to comfort her. Wasn’t I?

“It’s me,” I said.

“Oh, hi, Tonio,” she said. I stood up and clasped her hand, which had already reached toward mine. “I didn’t know who it was at first.”

“It’s me, Momma,” I said. She smiled, and I knew then that Tom had told me the truth: she was happy that I was there. I smiled back. “I didn’t want to bother you while you were sleeping,” I said. “I know you need to rest.”

“Oh, I get plenty of rest,” she said. “That’s all I do, is get rest.” She smiled ruefully. “I’m all rested up. This medication makes me so sleepy. That’s why I try to keep it to a minimum.” That’s when I noticed a handwritten note on her Demerol cartridge: “Do NOT touch this without permission.”

“Yeah, but if you need it,” I said.

“I take as much as I need,” she said. “But I hate to feel all sleepy and loopy. I don’t like that.”

“I understand.” I sat then on the bed in what had sort of become my customary spot, careful not to jar the mattress too much or knock into her weak and sore legs. As I held her hand and she looked up at me, I hoped there wasn’t any evidence remaining of my recent tears. We looked at each other in silence for a moment, not sure where to begin our conversation. I was curious how long Rachel and Zelda had been out of the house, but I feared that asking Mom about it would depress her, so I said nothing.

Breaking the silence, Mom asked, “So how are you? How’s the show?”

“I’m fine,” I said, relieved. “The show’s going great still. Daphne’s leaving, which is really sad.”

“She is?”

“Yeah, she got a movie. I wish she wasn’t going, but I know she has to do what she has to do.”

“Well, she’s very talented. All you guys are talented.”

“Yeah…” I said. “Oh, the Clintons are going to come to the show.”

“Really? That’s exciting.”

“Yeah. There’s going to be all this security, and Secret Service sharpshooters on the roof. It’s going to be pretty wild.”

“I bet. That’s wonderful.”

“Yeah.”

“So you get to meet the president,” she said.

“Yeah. Apparently they’re going to come up onstage after the show and we’re supposed to line up and they’re going to shake all of our hands and take pictures with us.”

“You’ll have to show me the pictures when you get them.”

“Of course.”

“This is all so exciting, Tonio,” she said. “What a wonderful show, it’s so nice that it’s such a success.”

“Yeah…” I was filled with a genuine happiness to be able to sit with Mom like this and give her updates on
Rent’
s success, but I also felt the pressure of the inexorable forward movement of time. How many topics, how many questions, could I cram into this moment? What could I think of now to ask, to say, since who knew how many more opportunities I’d have to do that?

She saved me from having to choose the topic, though. “So Joe wrote me a very crazy letter,” she said. Joe was her brother, a manager of a Sizzler franchise who lived in southern Illinois with his wife and kids. Apparently in recent years he’d become something of a religious zealot, taking to wearing an oversized plain wooden cross fastened around his neck by thin twine. “He kept telling me to let go, that Jesus would come and take care of me.” She did her best parody of his thick, slow, flat voice. “ ‘Let go, Mary Lee, let go!’” She rolled her eyes. “The card’s right there, you should take a look at it.”

I picked up the card and regarded the childish scrawl with which Joe had fashioned his message. There it was, with exclamation points and everything:
LET GO
!!! “That’s crazy,” I said.

“I don’t hear from him or see him in months and months, and then suddenly out of nowhere, there he is, telling me to let go. It’s almost like he wants to get rid of me.” She smiled as she said that last bit, surprising me with her gallows humor. I found myself giggling with her.

Shaking my head, I put the card down. But even as Mom and I chuckled at Joe’s over-the-top message, I wondered if there was any part of her that was thinking about taking his advice and letting go.

Later, I rifled through her closet—with her approval—looking through mementos of my career, which she’d kept in various cardboard boxes. She had always been better at such things than I, for which I was grateful. Embarrassing headshots of an eight-year-old bespectacled me gave way to old Playbills from the short-lived Broadway flop of
The Little Prince and the Aviator
(we previewed for two weeks and then closed, without ever performing an opening night). Underneath those were other clippings, including copies of the issue of
Seventeen
that featured me—along with my cast mates from
Adventures in Babysitting
—and an interview from when I was twelve, appearing in a Milwaukee summer stock theatre production of
Oliver!
I recognized in the grainy picture accompanying that article a badly mauled haircut I’d given myself a few days before, which Mom had tried to fix to no avail. “Oh,
Tonio,”
she’d said as she amateurishly snipped away. “Look what you did to your beautiful
hair.”
I didn’t know why I’d done it—it was one of my rare childhood moments of blatant rebelliousness.

As I flipped through more papers, I came across an audiocassette. I picked it up, surprised to see the call letters of our local radio station—WJOL—typed on the tape’s label.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Oh, that? Don’t you remember? We did an interview together when
Adventures in Babysitting
came out.”

“Oh yeah…” Mom’s memory had always been sharper than mine about most things, as this once again proved. But now it was coming back to me—the two of us sitting in a cramped and decidedly unglamorous studio in mostly deserted downtown Joliet on a hot summer day. My little claim to local glory, if it could be called glory—even when I went to see
Adventures in Babysitting
at the Louis Joliet Mall, I had to pay for my ticket, and the ticket taker and rest of the staff had no idea I was in it. This being my first movie, I didn’t know that such experiences would continue to be the case in years to come.

“Can we listen to it?” I said. It was one other thing I wouldn’t be able to share with her when she was gone, and I wanted to seize the moment while I could.

“Sure.”

I popped it into her boom box and turned it up. As we listened I was struck by how much firmer and stronger and deeper and more substantial her voice sounded on the tape than it did now. I sounded young, but I also seemed to be trying to talk with as low a register as possible, to sound like a serious actor.

“Oh, I’ve always been very proud of him,” Mom said on the tape. I watched her listening to herself and wondered how she felt being confronted with a time and place before this illness had begun to stalk her.

I sounded cocky. “I really want to move to New York and just keep working as an actor,” I said. “I’m really primarily a theatre actor, and that’s where I have to be.” I laughed now. Yes, those things were true, but did I have to be so
serious
about it then? Couldn’t I have lightened up a little? I remembered the huge chip on my shoulder I’d had about Joliet, which had only somewhat faded.

“Well, we’ll see about when he’s moving to New York,” Mom said on the tape, trying to sound lighthearted. It had been a point of conflict between us—I had been all ready to just pack up and go, and she had wanted me to finish my high school career in Joliet. At the time of the interview, I had only my senior year left, but I was so ready to get the hell out.

The interviewer asked a few more innocuous questions and thanked us, and that was that. I stopped the tape and realized I’d been holding Mom’s hand. Her expression seemed more melancholy than it had before the tape began. I wondered if it had been a mistake to bring it out, to remind her of everything.

“That was interesting,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I was never comfortable being in the spotlight.”

“But you handled yourself well,” I said. “You sounded comfortable.”

“Well, I don’t know. I’m just a normal person. I’m just your mom.”

Back in the closet I came across my baby book. It was white with “Baby’s Milestones” written in sparkly silver letters on the front, underneath a simple line drawing of a bouquet of roses. I flipped through it briefly. It was packed with pictures and cards and page after page of Mom’s impeccable handwriting, recording every detail of my early years.

“You can keep it if you want,” Mom said.

“I’d love to.”

“I want you to have all of that stuff in there,” she said. I looked at her from my spot on the floor of her closet. Her eyes were clear and solemn and peaceful. Her voice gave no trace of sentimentality. This was just part of what she had to do now; relinquish her hold on her things, give them up to whom she chose. “And if there’s anything else of mine that you want, you have to let me know, okay, Tonio?”