Story of My Life

by Jay McInerney

  Anyway I never did tell Skip, I don’t know why, I guess I just didn’t want to talk to him, the son of a bitch.

  So I’m smoking a cigarette, thumbing through my Actors’ Scenebook, sort of looking for a monologue, I’ve got to get one for next week but I haven’t found anything I like, I start browsing around the other sections, Monologues for Men, Scenes for Two Women—no thanks—Scenes for One Man and One Woman. Which is about the worst scene there is.

  The phone rings again and it’s Didi. Unbelievable! Live—in person, practically. And it’s daylight outside.

  I just went to my nose doctor, she goes. He was horrified. Told me that if I had to keep doing blow I should start shooting up, then the damage would be some other doctor’s responsibility.

  What’s with you and Wick? I say.

  I don’t know, she goes, I went home with him a couple of weeks ago. I woke up in his bed. I’m not even sure we did anything. But he’s definitely in lust with me. Meanwhile, my period’s late. So maybe we did.

  Didi has another call. While she takes it, I’m thinking. The wheels are turning—wheels within wheels. Didi comes back on and tells me it’s her mom, who’s having a major breakdown, she’ll call me back. I tell her no problem. She’s already been a big help.

  I get Skip at his office. He doesn’t sound too thrilled to hear from me. He says he’s in a meeting, can he call me back?

  I say no, I have to talk now.

  What’s up? he says.

  I go, I’m pregnant.

  Total silence.

  Before he can ask I tell him I haven’t slept with anybody else in six weeks. Which is totally true, almost. Close off that little escape hatch in his mind. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.

  He goes, you’re sure? He sounds like he’s just swallowed a bunch of sand.

  I’m sure, I say.

  He’s like, what do you want to do?

  The thing about Skip is that even though he’s an asshole, he’s also a gentleman. Actually a lot of the assholes I know are gentlemen. Or vice versa. Dickheads with a family crest and a prep-school code of honor.

  When I say I need money he asks how much.

  A thousand, I say. I can’t believe I ask him for that much, I was thinking five hundred just a minute ago, but hearing his voice pisses me off.

  He asks if I want him to go with me and I say no, definitely not. Then he tries to do this number about making out the check directly to the clinic and I say, Skip, don’t give me that shit. I need five hundred in cash to make the appointment, I tell him, and I don’t want to wait six business days for the stupid check to clear, okay? Acting my ass off. My teacher would be proud.

  Two hours later a messenger arrives with the money. Cash. I give him a ten-dollar tip.

  Saturday night Jeannie and Didi go out. Didi comes over, wearing this same horrible surfer shirt she’s had on all week and her blonde rastafarian hair. Really gross. But she’s still incredibly beautiful, even after four days without sleep, and guys make total asses of themselves trying to pick her up. Her mother was this really big model in the fifties, Swedish. Didi was supposed to be the Revlon Girl or something but she couldn’t be bothered to wake up for the shoot.

  Jeannie’s wearing my black cashmere sweater, a couple yards of pearls, jeans and Maude Frizon pumps.

  How do I look? she goes, checking herself out in the mirror.

  Terrific, I say. You’ll be lucky if you make it through cocktails without getting raped.

  Can’t rape the willing, Jeannie says, which is what we always say.

  They try to get me to come along, but I’m doing my scene for class Monday morning. They can’t believe it. They say it won’t last. I go, this is my life. I’m like trying to do something constructive with it, you know? Jeannie and Didi think this is hilarious. They do this choirgirl thing where they both fold their hands like they’re praying and hum “Amazing Grace,” which is what we do when somebody starts to get religious on us. Then, just to be complete assholes, they sing, Alison, we know this world is killing you . . . et cetera, which is kind of like my theme song when I’m being a drag.

  So I go:

  They say you’re nothing but party girls

  Just like a million more all over the world

  They crack up. We all love Costello.

  After they finally leave, I open up my script but I’m having trouble concentrating, it’s this play called Mourning Becomes Electra, so I call up my little sister at home. Of course the line is busy and they don’t have call waiting so I call the operator and request an emergency breakthrough on the line. I listen while the operator cuts in. I hear Carol’s voice and then the operator says there’s an emergency call from Vanna White in New York. Carol immediately says Alison, in this moaning, grown-up voice, even though she’s three years younger than me.

  What’s new? I go when she gets rid of the other call.

  Same old stuff, she says. Mom’s drunk. My car’s in the shop. Mickey’s out on bail. He’s drunk, too.

  Listen, do you know where Dad is? I go and she says, Virgin Islands last she heard, maybe St. Croix but she doesn’t have a number either. So I tell her about my school thing and then maybe because I’m feeling a little weird about it I tell her about Skip, except I say five hundred dollars instead of a thousand, and she says it sounds like he totally deserved it. He’s such a prick, I go, and Carol says, yeah, he sounds just like Dad.

  And I go, yeah, just like.

  Jeannie comes back Sunday morning at 9:00 A.M. She’s a shivering wreck. For a change I’m just waking up instead of just going to sleep. I give Jeannie a Valium and put her to bed. It’s sort of a righteous feeling, being on this end of the whole experience—I feel like a doctor or something.

  She lies in bed stiff as a mannequin and says, I’m so afraid, Alison. She is not a happy unit.

  We’re all afraid, I go.

  In half an hour she’s making these horrible chainsaw sleep noises.

  Thanks to Skip, Monday morning I’m at school doing dance and voice. Paid my bill in cash. Now I’m feeling great. Really good. In the afternoon I’ve got acting class. We start with sense-memory work. I sit down in class and my teacher tells me I’m at a beach. He wants me to see the sand and the water and feel the sun on my bare skin. Hear the volleyballs whizzing past. No problem. First I have to clear myself out. That’s part of the process. All around me people are making strange noises, stretching, getting their yayas out, preparing for their own exercises. Some people I swear, even though this is supposed to be totally spontaneous, you can always tell some of these people are acting for the teacher even in warm-up, laughing or crying so dramatically, like, look at me, I’m so spontaneous. There’s a lot of phonies in this profession. Anyway, I don’t know— I’m just letting myself go limp in the head, then I’m laughing hysterically and next thing I’m bawling like a baby, really out of control, falling out of my chair and thrashing all over the floor . . . a real basket case . . . epileptic apocalypse, sobbing and flailing around, trying to take a bite out of the linoleum . . . they’re used to some pretty radical emoting in here, but this is way over the top, apparently. I kind of lose it, and the nurse says I’m overtired and tells me to go home and rest. . . .

  That night my old man finally calls. I’m like, I must be dreaming.

  Pissed at you, I go, when he asks how I am.

  I’m sorry, honey, he says, about the tuition. I screwed up.

  You’re goddamn right you did, I say.

  Oh, baby, he goes, I’m a mess.

  You’re telling me, I go.

  He says, she left me.

  Don’t come crying to me about what’s-her-name, I say. Then he starts to whine and I go, when are you going to grow up, for Christ’s sake?

  I bitch him out for a while and then I tell him I’m sorry, it’s okay, he’s well rid of her, there’s lots of women who would love a sweet man like him. Not to mention his money. Story of his life. But I don’t say that of course. He’s fifty-two y
ears old and it’s a little late to teach him the facts of life. From what I’ve seen nobody changes much after a certain age. Like about four years old, maybe. Anyway, I hold his hand and cool him out and almost forget to hit him up for money.

  He promises to send me the tuition and the rent and something extra. I’m not holding my breath.

  I should hate my father, sometimes I think I do. There was a girl in the news the last few weeks, she hired her boyfriend to shoot her old man. Families, Jesus. At least with lovers you can break up. These old novels and plays that always start out with orphans, in the end they find their parents—I want to say, don’t look for them, you’re better off without. Believe me. Get a dog instead. That’s one of my big ambitions in life—to be an orphan. With a trust fund, of course. And a harem of men to come and go as I command, guys as beautiful and faceless as the men who lay you down in your dreams.

  2

  Scenes for One Man and One Woman

  Watch Out! Rebecca’s coming to town, and I’m definitely not talking about the one from Sunnybrook Farm. This is my maniac sister. She’s flying in from Palm Beach with her latest squeeze, staying at the Stanhope. If I was the management at that establishment I’d hide all the valuables, tie everything else down and stretch a tarp over it. Last time she was in New York they actually threw her out of the Sherry Netherland, and Rod Stewart and his band used to practically live at that dump. Like, I’m sure those guys behaved themselves, right?—TVs out the windows, groupies out the wazoo. . . . So you can imagine what my sister can do to a room. Becca uses things up quickly—cars, credit cards, men, drugs, horses, you name it. The men and the credit cards are sort of mixed up together—after she’s totally burned out some guy she usually asks if she can have a credit card, which he’ll wait for five days and then report stolen. I don’t know, she must give great head is all I can say because these guys always say yes, even when she’s done something really horrible like sleep with their best friend. The best way I can think of to describe Rebecca is to say she’s like the Tasmanian Devil, that character in the Bugs Bunny cartoons that moves around inside a tornado and demolishes everything in his path. Or else she’s like an entire heavy-metal band on tour—all wrapped up in this cute little hundred-and-ten-pound package.

  What really worries me is the combination of Becca and Didi. When those two get together it’s like—what were the two things you were never supposed to mix in chemistry class or you’d like blow up the whole school? You know what I mean. Not oil and water—something else. So much for my education. Blanks that never got filled in. None of the above. Story of my life. Anyway, I know several drug dealers who are going to open bottles of Cristal and buy new Ferraris when they hear that Becca’s back in town—I’m talking about guys who bought their first Ferraris out of profits from Didi’s trust fund—but for the rest of us it’s basically like hearing that a hurricane’s cruising across the Gulf toward your brand new uninsured beach house. Just when I was getting my acting together.

  But the main thing is I’ve met a guy and I’m totally in lust, so who cares about Rebecca? What’s really amazing is that his mind is what I was attracted to first, and I wasn’t even thinking about the other thing.

  I’m at Nell’s, as usual, hanging out. Me, Didi, Jeannie, Rebecca and my friend Francesca, who I haven’t mentioned yet—she’s practically my best friend, we used to show horses together, no one else could stand her because she was Super-JAP, her Dad’s a big movie producer and her mother is some sort of Rockefeller, so she had a stableful of the best hunters and jumpers in the country, she was always throwing tantrums and screaming at the judges and the other girls but we got along great from the word go, and now she supposedly works for William Morris although I’ve never been able to reach her there. She has one of those incredible jobs that you just hate the people who luck into them, the kind of job I’d have to have if I was ever going to become a member of the work force. So she works for William Morris, but when I say works I’m being a major philanthropist. I mean, she gets this job as an assistant to a high-powered agent and the next week her boss gets diagnosed with AIDS and of course everyone is totally sympathetic and enlightened—I mean, come on—so of course the agency keeps him on even though he’s in the hospital half of the time and three-quarters of his clients bail out for ICM and CAA and Triad, so all Francesca has to do is show up once in a while and answer letters of condolence. But meantime she’s got this sort of credibility and access from being with William Morris, not to mention being her father’s daughter.

  So Francesca, she knows everyone, right? Partly because of her family and also because that’s her great passion in life, meeting rich and famous people. A lot of people think she’s a snob or a starfucker because all she can talk about is lunch with Jack Nicholson and drinks with Sting, but she’s so up front about it you can’t hold it against her, really. She’s totally wide-eyed, which is pretty amazing given her background: all these famous people always coming over to the house for dinner, you’d think she’d get jaded, but she’ll walk across the room to meet a guy who had a walk-on in The Young and the Restless, congratulate him on his career. Granted, it’s a little bit too much sometimes—like, Francesca, I’d like you to meet Adolf Hitler, and she’d be like—oh, wow, I just loved your last war. Her ambition in life is to get invited to Mick and Jerry’s house for dinner. She keeps cultivating people who know them and saying nice things in public about Mick’s music and Jerry’s legs and even I want to puke sometimes when I’m around her. But basically she’s totally cool and would do anything for me or any of her friends.

  So we’re sitting on one of those supposedly antique couches at Nell’s and I have to go to the bathroom—no, honestly. It’s wall-to-wall people so while I’m waiting for this path to clear this guy says to me, didn’t I see you onstage in Williamstown last summer?

  And I’m like, sure.

  He goes, in The Seagull, right? Wasn’t that you?

  And I go, I wish.

  He looks real young—I mean he looks my age, boyish. Blondish hair that needs a trim, white sneakers, blue jeans, white shirt, this old ratty blazer that fits him like a bathrobe. Eyes like the Caribbean, warm and blue green.

  So I go, if you want to meet me, just say so.

  And he says, you are an actress, aren’t you?

  And I say, how can you tell?

  I don’t know, he says, the way you carry yourself.

  It’s called a Maidenform underwire, I go, because that’s where he’s looking.

  God bless the manufacturer, he says. I’ll buy some of their stock tomorrow.

  I like the way he raises his eyebrows and the corners of his lips when he says this.

  So I look down at his crotch and say, you’d be better off buying stock in Levi Strauss. Looks like it’s going up.

  I kind of hope they might come down, actually, he says.

  And I go, suit yourself, there’s no law against self-abuse.

  He doesn’t have a snappy comeback for that one. Most guys can’t really go the distance. But still, he’s cute.

  So really, I say, how’d you know I’m an actress? I’m thinking, maybe my training is starting to show, I know my voice is a lot less nasal than it used to be, at least some of the time, my voice teacher says I’ve got to work my voice down into my chest—it’ll have a lot more room down there, he goes, he’s sort of a dirty old man, but cool. Plus I’m working on my posture. My mom used to actually try to get us to walk around the house balancing a book on the top of our heads, that’s so typical of her, we’d be like, right, sure Mom, pass the Doritos and turn up the volume on your way out—that’s probably the only thing anybody in my house ever thought of doing with a book so naturally I’m impressed by guys who actually read some. But I kind of wish I’d listened to my mom about posture, I’m like the hunchback of Seventy-eighth Street and now I have to improve my posture for my acting career. Anyway, I’m asking him how he knew I was an actress.

  I guess I’m just
incredibly perceptive, he says.

  I go, am I supposed to believe that?

  Also I overheard you talking to your friends, he says.

  You’ve been eavesdropping, I say. Actually, I’m kind of flattered. Usually when I’m out with Didi it’s hard to get any attention. Plus I like the fact that he’s honest enough to admit the real story—if there’s one thing I hate it’s the usual bullshit.

  He tells me his name is Dean Chasen and I tell him mine is Alison Poole. I mean, that’s a sign right there—if I have any doubts about a guy I just give him a bogus name.

  Dean’s waiting for me when I come out of the bathroom, so I let him buy me a drink. Francesca and Didi are waving and pointing from the other end of the room but I ignore them, I’m into what Dean is saying, it turns out he knows everything about theater, even though he’s a Wall Streeter, sells bonds or something. We start talking about all the plays around town and he asks me about my classes and then we have this debate about method versus other kinds of training, when he first came to New York he studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse for a while under Meisner. He’s thirty-two, it turns out, but he seems a lot younger. He says he wants to retire at the age of thirty-five and write plays, maybe novels.

  It’s a funny thing but I’ve noticed when I’m with creative guys like artists and actors, they hardly ever talk about their work, they’re always talking about the stock market or something like they’re trying to convince you they understand the real world, then you get with stockbrokers and bankers and all they want to talk about is art and the theater and they practically apologize for making a lot of money.