by Meg Wolitzer
“I’m sorry. So how’s it going?”
“Like shit,” said Shawn.
“Well, welcome to the club,” Adam said. Then he went to the bureau where Shawn kept his belongings, and picked up a yellow folder lying on top, marked Spinsters!
“Leave that,” said Shawn, grabbing for it.
“No,” said Adam. “I want to look at it. You tell me I don’t take you seriously, so let me prove that’s not true.”
Holding it out of Shawn’s reach, he opened to the first page and read aloud:
“‘Act One, Scene One. A typical Roman fountain quietly burbles in the distance. It is dusk. A woman enters stage L. She is DIANA ROWLAND, mid-fifties, American, dressed like a tourist. She sits down on the lip of the fountain and begins to sing the following song, “Meet Me at the Trevi”:
DIANA
Oh, I have no energy
and oh my aching dogs
I sat in the trattoria
and ate like a hog…
“I said give me that!” said Shawn, and he grabbed the folder back.
“I thought you wanted me to see it,” said Adam.
“I changed my mind,” said Shawn.
“Look,” said Adam quietly, “I have to go. My producer’s waiting.” He left swiftly. All Shawn wanted was a producer, someone who was willing to stand behind him, to read his work as soon as it slid out of the printer, someone waiting to see what he was capable of doing. Which was exactly what Adam had.
Adam drove Peter’s truck to Shoes of the Fisherman, and saw that Mel’s Lexus was already in the parking lot, with its bumper sticker that read “Honk If You Love Strindberg.” Inside the dining room, which was as pink as a nursery, waiters carried trays high above their heads, and the room resonated with the clatter of silverware and spirited conversation. At a table in the corner, Mel had systematically eaten almost the entire basket of bread before Adam arrived, leaving behind a vaguely unappealing pumpernickel roll.
“Adam!” Mel cried, and he stood up to hug him. When they sat down, the two men began an ardent conversation about theater in general and then about Adam’s play in specific. “So tell me about the follow-up to Take Us to Your Leader. What’s it going to be?” Mel asked. “Something equally funny? Or maybe something darker. I know you’ve had a tough time this summer; I heard all about it. My sympathies.” He patted Adam’s hand and there was a nervous moment of silence; Mel Wolf was the last person you would ever want to have console you. But then the moment was abruptly over. “Please,” Mel continued, “promise me one thing.” Adam nodded. “Promise me that you won’t get too dark all of a sudden, you know? Don’t start getting like Woody Allen did in Interiors. All serious and self-conscious and trying to be a fucking Scandinavian. You wouldn’t pull a Scandinavian number on me, would you, Adam?”
“Scandinavia? Never heard of the place,” said Adam.
“Good,” said Mel. “Let’s keep it that way. Your strength lies in light, funny, ethnic comedy. That’s where you belong. So tell me, what’s the new play about? Enquiring minds want to know.”
“Death,” said Adam.
Mel smiled a tough businessman’s smile. “You trying to kill me?” he said. “Is that it? Because, you know, I went for a stress test last week and I failed it. So your death play better have a little humor attached.”
“It will, it will,” mumbled Adam.
“Where does it take place?” asked Mel.
“A summer camp in the Adirondacks,” Adam said. “The year that Nixon resigned. Watergate seen through the eyes of a child.”
“I’m loving it,” said Mel. “A backdrop of major upheaval. Who dies? Not a kid, I hope. I’ll kill you if it’s a kid.”
“No, a counselor,” said Adam. “College age, bad skin. You’ll hardly miss him.”
“A counselor’s okay,” said Mel, waving his hand magnanimously. “Just as long as it’s not a kid. Audiences do not want to see that, I’m telling you. There is nothing funny in the death of a kid. We tried to do a musical of Death Be Not Proud—couldn’t get backers.”
Despite Adam’s protests, Mel followed him back to the house after lunch so he could see the place. “I want to see the environment my young star is working in,” Mel said, and Adam blushingly led him inside the house. Mel stood in the middle of the living room and stared. “This?” he said. “This is it? Broadway’s great gay hope is writing his plays in a trailer park?”
“It’s not a trailer,” Adam said. “It’s a house.”
“Theoretically, it’s a house,” said Mel. “I’ll give you that. But Adam, you deserve more than this.”
Just then, Shawn came into the living room, clutching the score to his musical. “Oh, hi,” he said, observing Adam and Mel with wide, innocent eyes. Adam muttered introductions, understanding that from the upstairs window Shawn had seen Adam and Mel coming into the house, and that Shawn was trying, desperately, to make himself appear on Melville Wolfs radar. Shawn sat down at the old piano in the corner, arranging his music in front of him, and softly began to play “Meet Me at the Trevi,” the opening number to Spinsters! Adam closed his eyes in embarrassment as Shawn played; the music was as unobtrusive as something heard in a cocktail lounge, but the intensity behind it, the ambition and the desire and the need to be discovered, were so apparent that Adam wanted to apologize to Mel. But when he looked at Mel, he saw that Mel did not seem annoyed by Shawn’s music; he didn’t seem to feel he was being set up. In fact, he didn’t seem to hear the music at all. Shawn kept glancing up quickly from the piano to see whether Mel had any response, but Mel was gazing, transfixed, across the room into the doorway that led to the kitchen.
“Adam, who’s that?” Mel whispered as Shawn began his next number, “Chianti for Two.”
Adam looked into the kitchen and saw what Mel had been staring at: Natalie at the counter, washing a head of lettuce. Her hair was pulled back off her face, but a few strands had separated themselves out, and fell into her eyes. Her face was flushed with exertion, and she looked young and fragile and particularly beautiful. “That’s Sara’s mother,” he said. “Her name is Natalie Swerdlow.” Mel continued to contemplate Natalie, gazing at her in shy admiration. Natalie sensed that she was being looked at and she turned, brushing the hair from her face. In the background, Shawn played his medley of moody songs.
“Hello,” said Natalie, and she shut off the taps and stepped forward, her hands spattering water to the floor. Adam introduced her to Mel, and she shook his hand with her own wet hand, creating a moment of awkward humor, sealing this introduction in water. “Whoops, I’m sorry,” she said. “I got you all wet.”
“Ah, it’s nothing,” said Mel. “Now I’m baptized.”
Behind them, Shawn stood up, done with his attempts to get Mel to listen. He headed outside without saying a word. Adam didn’t go after him, didn’t even consider it; he was mesmerized by watching Mel and Natalie. Flirtation was different between men and women than it was between men. When men and women observed each other, it was as if across a great and wary divide, while men tended to respond to other men with locker-room/pup tent/collegial familiarity. Heterosexuality held real mystery to Adam, and always would. He had never been able to understand what his parents had had to say to each other all those years when he lived in their house, what they discussed in bed at night when he wasn’t there; his imagination failed him on this point, and he finally decided that the only thing his parents discussed when they were alone was him. He pictured them lying in their bed with the padded headboard, the television yakking softly across the room, talking to each other about Adam’s report card, or his lack of skill in sports, or the impressive but vaguely disturbing fact that he had memorized all the lyrics from the cast album of Man of La Man-cha and would often walk around in a dreamy state, stretching out his arm as he sang, his mouth full of Mallomars, “To love … pure and chaste from afar …” But perhaps there was more to his parents than he had ever gathered; perhaps they had an entire underworld tee
ming with secret passions and interests.
He used to ask Sara what she liked about men, and she would reel off a list of the qualities that had attracted her to a variety of men over the years. There was no consistency to her list; one man was admired for his long, muscular back, another for his impression of the Beatles singing “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand” at their Hamburg concert. It wasn’t that Sara felt a commonality with men; she simply liked being around them, liked being touched by them. And Natalie was the same way, Sara had always said. “My mother is totally into men,” were Sara’s words. “She never kept this fact from me. Which, now that I think about it, I kind of wished she had.”
“Look, Natalie,” Mel was saying, and Adam realized that in the few moments that he hadn’t been listening, Natalie and Mel had progressed very nicely into an actual conversation, unassisted by him. “I’m in the area for a while,” Mel continued, “and maybe I could take you out for lunch or something.”
“Sure, fine,” she said, with neither genuine enthusiasm nor resistance.
“Then I’ll call,” said Mel, and he reached out to shake Natalie’s hand good-bye. “All dry,” he murmured, looking at her hand, and then he was gone.
Adam went upstairs to his computer, flicked on the screen, and sat in front of the shimmering square of light, staring at the most recent scene he’d written. It wasn’t good, and he knew it. He felt himself sinking into some kind of failed existence, his own version of what Shawn felt. If Sara hadn’t died, Adam could still be funny. He would have someone to be funny for; he could call her up, as he always did, and read her his latest pages, and she would laugh hard, or let him know when a joke was bad. She was his ideal listener, the perpetual loop of laugh track in his head. He’d once read an article about Lucille Ball which said that the actress’s mother was often in the audience at tapings of I Love Lucy, and that her laughter was so distinctive that Lucy could always single it out when she watched the show on television.
Years later, after her mother had died, Lucy had sat and watched the old shows just to hear her mother’s laughter.
Sara’s laugh had always rung out in Adam’s head, too, except it hadn’t been preserved in television amber, and now it was gone. The idea of being funny, of writing something that Melville Wolf would like, something that his willing matinee audiences would embrace, seemed impossible now. Instead, Adam imagined himself turning into a one-hit wonder; he saw himself teaching a theater class at a second-rate liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. He would be their playwright-in-residence, their faded coup in corduroy jackets and elbow patches, living by himself in a crumbling Victorian fixer-upper on the edge of campus, and none of his semiliterate students could have ever imagined that their vague and befuddled professor had ever been considered precocious. The youth would have drained from him, and would now belong only to them. But it was too painful to think that his career would end this way—the brightly flaming comet, its diminishing tail.
SHAWN HAD GONE outside in a useless rage. The heat was nauseatingly strong, making him wonder what he was doing out on the front lawn, and what was he even doing here at this house. He paced back and forth on the grass, waiting to see if Adam would follow him outside, but knowing somehow that he wouldn’t. Adam was in there with his producer; the word formed itself into an irrational snarl, something to be mocked, loathed—something unavailable to Shawn forever. Melville Wolf’s green Lexus sat in the driveway, incongruous beside the awful house. He walked over and placed both hands flat on the blazingly hot hood. Inside the car, on the passenger seat, Shawn could see a few Playbills: Waxworks, The Loss of Hannah, and that new imported British sex farce, Charmed, I’m Sure. Swiftly, barely giving it any thought, Shawn opened the car door. From within came the sounds of gentle chimes. He ducked into the car, slipped the cassette tape of his musical from his pants pocket, and placed it on top of the pile of Playbills. Then, using the pen he always carried, he dashed off a note on the cover of Charmed, I’m Sure.
“Mr. Wolf,” he wrote, “we met today at Adam’s. Here are a few songs from a musical I’m writing. Enjoy!” Then Shawn signed his name, stood up, and closed the car door, stunned by his own nerve, the way he had felt the day he’d sent a copy of this tape to Adam that first day. He’d had a lifetime of nervy acts, although each time he performed one, he felt breathlessly guilty. He had once masturbated discreetly beneath his desk during social studies, while the class was watching a filmstrip about the Industrial Revolution. He had saved his tiny moans for each time the film-strip emitted a loud beep, signaling the teacher to click over to the next frame. And throughout high school, he and a creepy, strangely silent friend named Roger Gladney had shoplifted constantly: magazines, clothing, watches, anything that appealed to them.
But he had never felt as criminal as in this moment; in his entire life he had never transgressed in as complete a way as he had just done. His songs now lay in the car of a Broadway producer; all Melville Wolf had to do was put the tape in his cassette player and let the music roll across him. Shawn could imagine the producer nodding gently as he listened to Spinsters! while driving. The music would seduce him, and Shawn’s life might be changed forever.
He walked back to the house now, his pocket empty, his heart beating more quickly, the terror within him playing over and over like the world’s catchiest Broadway tune.
11
Sara in the Sky
The mushrooms were furry and shriveled with age, like dried morels at the back of a shelf in a Korean market, left untouched behind some packages of instant MSG-filled ramen noodles for months or even years. “I brought these with me to the house,” Shawn announced as he carried a plate of them onto the deck, “and forgot all about them because of Sara and everything. But this morning I came across them in my bag and thought maybe this just might improve the morale of the troops.”
“God,” said Peter, “I don’t know, Shawn. We haven’t done them in years. Everything was different then.”
“I can’t do mushrooms,” said Maddy. “I have a baby here, remember? But I could babysit for the rest of you.” They looked from one to the other, shrugging, considering the offer. “By the way, where’s Natalie?” she asked. “She can’t be around for this.”
“She’s cleaning upstairs,” said Adam. “Totally occupied. I heard the Dustbuster going. And the Japanese language tape is on. She’ll be busy up there for hours.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind if we do this?” Peter asked Maddy. “You’ll be okay with Duncan?”
“I’ll be fine. Go right ahead,” she said. “Just go, all of you.” She shooed them off as though they were going on a fishing or hunting trip and she, the lone woman, was staying behind.
Back in their days of drug-taking, Adam had always been the one holdout, the hallucination chaperone for all the others. Sara had enjoyed taking the occasional drug; it wasn’t that she would ever deliberately seek it out, but if it was offered, she would ingest it happily, easily. Not Adam. It had taken him so long simply to create a self he could tolerate, that the idea of losing that self frightened him enormously. So over the years he had always sat and watched as everyone else swallowed whatever it was they were swallowing at the time: psilocybin mushrooms, or benign, white aspirin-like tablets of Ecstasy, or, for a brief stint after college, a flurry of cocaine, which as far as Adam could tell made everyone seem somehow more ambitious and focused than they really were, as though they had just spent a lengthy and rigorous session with a career counselor.
Now Peter and Shawn had begun to pull apart the black and gray barnacled mushrooms and put them in their mouths. “Mmm,” said Peter, tilting his head to the side like someone assessing a wine. “A subtle taste, fruity yet strong.”
“I sense a hint of elderberry,” said Shawn, “with an undercurrent of… currant.”
They laughed and chewed away on the rubbery mushrooms like two puppies gnawing on a shoe. Adam imagined them disappearing under the effects of the drug, and he saw himself as more al
one than ever, stranded here away from his friends, out of the loop, left to do childcare duties with Maddy. This was too much to take; more than anything now, he didn’t want to be alone.
There were two mushrooms left on the plate, curled and runty, and Adam picked one up between his fingers, like someone selecting a crudité, a soggy uncooked mushroom to dip into a pool of ranch dressing on someone’s summer patio. He watched his own hand lift the mushroom from the plate, and he was scared. His friends lifted being scared. They liked the plunge and ascension of roller coasters, while he liked kiddie cars, a simple and repetitive revolution that never took him from the earth. He didn’t try to talk himself out of it now, but simply lifted the spongy mushroom and deposited it in his mouth.
The mushroom tasted of hiking trails and bad cooking. His body told him to spit it out, but Adam chewed on diligently, with the effort you might expend eating calamari, and then he swallowed hard, feeling the toxins go down his throat, imagining the way they would disperse, entering his cells and changing them for a while. He had felt similarly the first time he had ever given a blow job. His heart had sped that time, telling him that this was all wrong, that he should stop right now. But then he had thought about how often he had imagined this moment when he was younger, how often he’d thought about doing exactly this to some of the boys he’d grown up with, and how, in his thoughts, it had seemed, amazingly, okay. It had seemed, in fact, to be a good match; there was a symmetry about it: a mouth on a penis, both men groaning in shared, connected happiness. The taste, he’d imagined, would be rubbery, flavorless, saline, human. Not unlike a mushroom. Now he chewed on and on, and then swallowed hard in an exaggerated, gulping way.
“How long does this take?” Adam asked, suddenly worried. “When will it kick in?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe,” said Maddy. “Just relax, Adam. You’ll like it; you’ll see.” But he felt his jaw going stiff, and he began to pace around the deck. Other than the jaw sensation, nothing happened; maybe this batch was so old that it had lost its powers. He was immediately relieved at the idea. Perhaps he would remain a mushroom virgin, and spend the rest of the day working on his unfunny new Watergate-summer comedy.
