Playworld, p.46
Playworld, page 46
Out of the apartment, into the elevator, onto the street—the two of us supporting her—Miss West held her injured hand out before her with the towel beneath it. Her other hand delicately supported the bunched fabric as if it were a ringbearer’s pillow. Amanda and I huddled to her with our hands cupped beneath hers. “Keep it elevated,” Miss West said, “above my heart.” The hospital came into view as soon as we turned on Amsterdam. Shuffling as we were, the walk seemed to take forever. Amanda kept saying, “You’ve got this, you can do it, not too much farther”; I kept saying, “Keep going, don’t give up, you’re doing great.” Miss West kept repeating, “I’ve got this, I can do it, doing great.” But once we arrived at the emergency room, once we stepped under the ambulance bay’s light, Miss West lost her composure. She spotted a nurse she knew and called out, “Dolores!” in a voice hoarse with terror. The woman came running over to us and said, “Patty, my God.” All the people seated in the waiting room looked up, and Miss West turned to me. When she spoke, her tone was distant and professional, so at odds with the escalating emotion I couldn’t help but take note. “I appreciate your help, Griffin, Dolores can take it from here,” and Amanda, who was crying, nodded at me and then wiped her nose so that it smeared her mother’s blood on her nostrils and across her mouth. Dolores took my place by Miss West’s elbow. And the three of them walked into the building and through another set of double doors, which, along with my chances, swallowed them whole.
Union Buster
In the year that I returned home from college and began seeing Elliott again—the year that I began to open up to him in ways I was incapable of as a boy—he said to me that we process all trauma like the oyster. We pearl the dangerous particle, if we are lucky, into something precious, into the gift. He never explained what that gift was, or what happened if we are less than lucky, because he and I ran out of time. Only in our final sessions before he died would I return to the site of my selfhood’s inception—not to the fire, to the panicked flight of our family from our burning home, but to the moment, as Dad walked me down the hallway from Al and Neal’s apartment to our incinerated one, when I felt the instant that millimeter opened between my inner terror and impassivity. And once we identified that moment, Elliott and I began to inventory certain scenes in which I’d failed to feel anything: I spying Naomi’s upturned face, her absorbed expression, when we first kissed in her car. Me lying atop Kepplemen, on his bed, his head locked in my arms, his foot trying to hook mine, our feet pointed toward his headboard; him kicking the pillows clear, me staring at the cover of the magazine, of the picture of the two wrestlers, until Kepplemen and I finally lay still. Only decades after these last sessions with my therapist would I fully comprehend what Kepplemen had done to me—and to my friends and teammates; only in middle age would I identify the source of the fury I felt when, deep beneath my school, I’d clasp that man and make him feel it—would make him pay for his pleasure with pain. Here, nearer to where the subways rumbled, to the network of pipelines into which the city’s catch basins fed, I was taught the indelible lesson that, to arrive at love, I must suffer through someone else’s idea of it. And yet even now, I resist the notion that we are reducible to our wounds.
But that night, after leaving Amanda and her mother at the hospital, I remained my ciphered self. I walked to Broadway and caught the bus home in something close to shock. I recall, as I deposited change in the fare box, the driver eyeing my blood-blackened hands with a wariness verging on alarm. Other than a couple of passengers sitting near the front—who, to also ignore the threat I might pose, studied our southbound progress—the bus was nearly empty. At that hour, the streets were mostly empty too. In something close to a daze, I took a seat in the back, watching the avenue unspool against the windows. I recall how voided I was, how stunned and emptied—sometimes it seemed I struggled to feel anything at all.
By the time I got back to our apartment, it was very late. I went straight to the kitchen and washed my hands with dish soap, then scraped the blood from beneath my fingernails with a paring knife. I turned off the TV in my parents’ bedroom; Mom was asleep while the national anthem played over the image of the flag. As I undressed in my own room, I noted that Oren was gone again, his bunk so neatly made it appeared as if it hadn’t been slept in all summer. I stared at the ceiling’s blank screen, replaying those same lambent images: Amanda’s smile as she lay back on her bed, propped on her elbows; her knees swaying against mine; the down above her top lip, soft as sea anemone. And the shame that follows hard on all timidity, that pursues missed opportunity.
Call at 30 Rock was seven a.m., and waking early once again I could hear the TV in my parents’ room—soft music, voices. The sun was just about to rise. Mom’s door was cracked, so I knocked and entered. She was showered and dressed, her legs stretched on the bed, several tissues bunched in her fist. I lay down next to her and placed my head on her shoulder. Prince Charles and Prince Andrew, in full military uniform, were just entering Saint Paul’s Cathedral and shaking hands with the bishops. The organ boomed. Charles was the more weasel-faced of the pair, Andrew more gopher-cheeked and beaver-toothed than his brother. A gilded stagecoach, carrying Diana, was seen moving through London’s streets. And we await the moment, said the male newscaster, when this glass coach, which we can see without periscopes, comes to a stop…the door opens, and for the first time we see in all its glory that dress. Diana exited the fairy-tale vehicle with her whale-length train extended behind her. Two bridesmaids tended to its ends as she proceeded up the steps. The woman announcer said, What a dream she looks…a bride any man would be happy to see coming down the aisle toward him. The dress is made of yards of ivory pure silk taffeta, it has big sleeves with deep lace flounces at the elbow. It has a very, very long train, and if you asked a little girl to draw a princess, I think she’d draw a dress just like that.
I wondered if Amanda and Miss West, in a room at the hospital, were watching this together.
When I asked Mom why she was crying, she replied, “Because it’s all so lovely. Because Diana’s so young and so beautiful. And it makes me think about my wedding.”
“Your wedding makes you sad?”
“Just the time that’s passed,” Mom said. She occasionally spoke in mysteries like this, but it was too early to interrogate her about this one. She loudly sighed and laughed at herself, pressing both index fingers to her lower lids. “Off to torture my ladies,” she said. Then: “You and I have an appointment with Elliott this evening, at six.”
I got up the nerve to call Amanda before lunch, from my dressing room, and she answered. On the phone she was cordial, relieved. Everything was okay, she explained. Amazingly, her mother had done no major damage to her hand, it was a one-in-a-million injury not to have harmed any tendons or bones or arteries or nerves. All she’d needed was a tetanus shot and stitches, but she’d lose her grip strength for a few weeks. It was just very sore and wrapped in so many layers of gauze it looked like a Muppet, she said. Amanda was running around taking care of her, she had to pick up her antibiotics at the pharmacy. Could she call me later? she asked. Her rushed brightness felt like a stiff arm. Of course, I said. And she hung up.
My mood darkened, and for the rest of the day I was distracted on set. I regularly blew my lines, so that even Andy, who was usually forbearing, lost his patience with me. I brought no energy to my battle with archvillain Microwave Mike, and when I did, I got the choreography wrong and accidentally punched him in the mouth. When Alison, at day’s end, noticed how taciturn I was, she asked, with real interest, “How’d your date go?” to which I replied, “It was a disaster.” “Well,” she said encouragingly, “I thought you looked very handsome.” And in a moment of thoughtlessness that I regret to this day, I said, “Not handsome enough.” Which she took as a dig and nodded, as if I’d just confirmed some personal truth about helping people, and for the remainder of my time on the show, she never spoke to me again. When I arrived at Elliott’s office I was in something close to despair.
I had never been to Elliott’s during Mom’s midweek appointment, and every seat was taken in the waiting room. Standing between two chairs, I leaned down to ask Mom about this, and she said, “It’s almost August.” When I looked at her uncomprehendingly, she pulled me by the sleeve to whisper, “All the therapists go on vacation for the month. So everyone’s stuffing their cheeks with insight.”
When her session ended, Elliott appeared at his door, bleary and baggy-eyed. He seemed stooped and distracted, and when he spotted me, he paused, confused, as if he didn’t recognize who I was. For the first time in my life, I thought he looked old.
“Take a seat,” he said. He wrote some notes on his legal pad, then removed his readers and placed them in his breast pocket. He checked his watch. “I give you fifteen minutes,” he said, “you give me your world.”
It was to be, then, one of those hurry-up sessions, tacked on to Mom’s appointment, which Elliott occasionally did with Oren and me after Dad’s Saturday sessions. It was one of those instances when I was reminded that even though Elliott was my father’s best friend, or seemed to be; even though we were treated like special guests at all his parties, we were still customers of his attention, a fact I mostly did not reflect upon but, at that moment, decided somehow cheapened the advice and the fellowship, making both suspect. I wondered, as he rubbed his eyes before closing the door—this with an expression close to impatience—if he ever got sick of us, of everything we transferred upon him for failing to fix.
Instead of telling him about my evening with Amanda, I stuck to the surface, to work and its exasperations. To today’s fuckups and my enduring outlier, outcast status. To my lost summer.
Elliott was twiddling his thumbs.
“Am I boring you?” I asked. My anger shocked me.
Elliott stopped and chuckled. Then he shrugged. “You’re talking about this like a ten-year-old,” he said. He raised his voice several octaves: “Why me, boohoo.” From his jacket’s breast pocket, he removed his handkerchief and blew his nose. “Question: What do you like about acting?”
“I don’t…” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“About the process. The art of it. Does it jazz you? Do you have limitless energy for it? When you worked with Alan Hornbeam this spring, did you want to get to the beauty and truth of each scene? Or were you just watching the clock?”
“I’m not…” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“Why do you even do it?”
“Because I’m…good at it?”
“I asked you.”
I slumped against the chairback and looked at his frog, which was either staring at the ceiling or giving me the side-eye, it was hard to tell. “Don’t I have to?”
“Do you?” Elliott asked.
“Can we go for a walk?”
“Not today, kid, sorry.”
“I want an egg cream.”
“And I,” Elliott said with a heaviness I would later come to understand, “want more time.”
I crossed my arms. “Can I at least get a hint?”
“Young man,” he said, “your father’s got a voice from God. Your mother moves like an angel. You can breathe life into characters. Be that as it may, just because you have a talent doesn’t mean you have to use it.”
From the side table between us, he slid open its drawer and removed a small, wrapped box, which he placed on the desk.
“Go on,” Elliott said, “open it.”
It was a Space Pen.
“You’ve been eyeballing mine for so long I thought I’d get you your own. Give what I said a think and we’ll discuss in September.” Elliott unfolded his glasses, checked his watch, nodded toward the waiting room. “Now, off with you,” he said. “I got fires to put out.”
Mom wasn’t in the waiting room, so I left the office, figuring she was on the street. I emerged from the office’s long hallway into the city’s noise and evening’s falling brightness to spy my mother talking to Naomi.
They stood by Naomi’s Mercedes. She’d lucked into miraculous parking right out front. They were speaking animatedly, loudly, the sort of catchup that involved the touching of arms, a covering of mouths, laughter that vied with traffic noise, that reminded you how rarely you heard pedestrians in Manhattan talking. As my mother gestured, Naomi spotted me, and in that glance’s microsecond we were alone. I had not spoken with her since we’d said goodbye that January. She wore a summer suit made of white linen and was very tan. The spray of freckles dotting her nose and cheeks were darkened beneath her blue-tinted lenses. I felt a complicated relief, a need to collapse into her arms and tell her everything along with an imperative to pretend we were only family friends, when she did something unexpected. She reached out to me, snapping her fingers before I was within her grasp so imperiously it made me weak-kneed, and then she pulled me close.
“Look at Mr. Muscles here,” Naomi said, and made a great show of giving me a side hug, her eyes exaggeratedly widening at Mom as she patted my chest. “Six months, I don’t see him,” she said, “he’s like a grown man already.” And then, out of my mother’s view, she slid her hand from my side to secretly run her fingernails up and down the small of my back. She asked what I was up to, how it was going with The Nuclear Family, poor baby locked inside all summer, Daddy’s gone, where’s your brother? The torrent of questions while her nails traced my spine had rendered me mute. They were a kind of cover, this peppering. My mouth went dry. I stiffened so instantaneously it was like a beak trying to break through my jean’s denim. I was embarrassed and paralyzed with desire. She said to Mom, “You should all come out to my brother’s beach house sometime, what with Shel on the road, and just relax.” And here, as if for emphasis, she pressed her nails so hard against my shirt they nearly pierced my skin.
“We might just take you up on that,” Mom said.
Naomi checked her watch. “I’m late for my session,” she said, and released me to kiss Mom’s cheek with a loud pop. “Don’t be a stranger,” she ordered. She turned to kiss me as well, allowing her lips to touch the corner of my mouth, and had I not been so stunned, had my mother not been present, I’d have kissed her back, right there. She waved to me with a tiny flap of her hand and said, “Bye, Griffin.” And she hurried into Elliott’s office.
“That woman,” Mom said, the minute we were out of earshot, “is too much.”
In bed that night, all thoughts of Amanda were blown from my mind. Instead, I was standing with Naomi on the street. With a heat that, even now, has been undiminished by decades, the scene replayed—she asks me questions, but the sound of her voice is muffled and far away; I am at once light and heavy, buoyant and weighed down. I had at my disposal no subsequent scenes by which this fantasy might have played out. And because I was virginal in every way, because I could not imagine its fruition, I was trapped in it. That was its power. To this day, I can conjure it, but there are times when it seems to conjure me, so that I wonder if it is Naomi’s doing, her passing thought, some arcane aspect of our connection, current traveling down memory’s hot wire to arc across space and time. I confess I live in fear of seeing her. She could be decrepit, and I am certain that, in my presence, her youth and my desire would be restored. But that night, in my bed, I could summon no release. I flipped onto my stomach, burying my face in my pillow. With all my strength I gripped the bunk’s rails and pressed the balls of my feet to the frame, pinning myself to my mattress, because this exertion was my only relief.
* * *
—
On Friday, Oren, Mom, and I took the Amtrak to Philadelphia, to stay with Dad and see Sam and Sara in preview—our first glimpse of the musical front to back and out of rehearsal.
The Forrest Theatre was a historic building fashioned of white limestone. Its interior’s hues were a combination of peach and turquoise, its colossal chandelier, inset beneath its ornate, domed ceiling, loomed so massively I imagined it falling on the unwitting spectators. After checking into the hotel, we hurried to briefly meet Dad in his dressing room beforehand to wish him luck. His costume was a tweed jacket and khakis. He wore a white button-down shirt, a red-and-blue varsity scarf knotted at his throat. His hair was sprayed blond. A prop pennant leaned against his vanity mirror. He looked like he was headed to a college football game. In the glance Oren and I shot each other, it wasn’t clear which we thought was funnier: Dad’s golden locks or the fact that he couldn’t tell an offensive tackle from a fullback. He was harried, happy, nervous, and preening, as he paced the small room. I forgot sometimes how much heavier stage makeup was than for television. His brightened face seemed to float, as if attached to his skull by a slightly loose spring. When Mom kissed him in parting, his foundation left a flesh-toned brushstroke on her cheek.
