Short People

by Joshua Furst

  But why am I going on like this? I’m obsessing, just like you do. It’s as if I’m trying to paint his portrait over and over again in my mind, and if I get it perfect, he’ll suddenly be here next to me.

  I didn’t do this before he disappeared to that artists’ colony in Vermont two months ago. When I told you about him before, I was really only interested in me, in the changes going on in me as I fell in love. I rambled childishly about the squirrelly feeling I got in my stomach every time he reached out to touch or kiss me. How safe and cozy I felt each time he stopped himself—conscious of the danger involved in flirting with the physical boundaries he’d placed on his desire—from caressing certain parts of my body. The look on your face while I talked was the happiest I’d seen you in months. The tension relaxed in your cheeks. You stroked the button of skin between your eyebrows, and your crow’s-feet came out. You actually focused—for a couple of hours you were listening to me, instead of off chopping at the brambles of your memories of Mom. You said he sounded “hip,” and that if I felt comfortable about it, you’d like to meet him, do the old father thing and size him up, maybe scare him a little, just to make sure he’d think twice about breaking my heart. It made me giggle and wince, Dad. I said, You couldn’t scare an eleven-year-old, much less a twenty-two-year-old, that you’re too much my pal to wield any real authority. “Well, then,” you said, “what if I took you two starving artists out to a rock concert. Or we could see a play? How ’bout it? What if I palled around with you guys some afternoon? We can . . . hang, or whatever the kids call it now.” For a moment I almost considered the prospect, but I could see from the way your face tightened in on itself that you were gone, returned to your darkness, brooding, I’m sure, about the thought of setting foot in a theater with everything that that connotes: Mom’s old friends, Mom’s old props, two hours trapped on her turf. “No, that’s okay,” I said softly. “I just wanted to tell you about him.”

  Now that he’s gone I’ve been flailing, bleary-eyed from my own loss of love, and overidentifying with you again.

  You seem different today, though. This morning, you began to work again. For the first time since Mom left, the red light was on over your darkroom door. After hours in there, you came out all wound up, the muscles in your neck and shoulders tense, and you held your head low like you were flexing your brain. You seemed preoccupied with thoughts that gave you energy instead of taking it away. I should be happy for you, but seeing you like this, so busy and vigorous, depressed me. It propelled me into a kind of self-chastisement. I thought, if Dad can recover his sense of direction, shouldn’t I be able to, as well? I tried to will myself into happiness, but instead got stuck and dug deeper and deeper into my sad, worthless self.

  What was your lowest point, Dad? The first few months after Mom left? A response to the initial shock of her absence? I bet not. You were still speaking twice a week or so. She’d only done the one movie then, that John Sayles thing, and you still thought she was going to come back from L.A. after pilot season. Remember how that first two weeks slowly stretched to a month, then to two months, then three? How many return tickets did she change before she finally told you she was staying out there indefinitely? And then it was just for the work, so she said, though she hadn’t landed a show yet. Her stuff was all here. She didn’t want a divorce. How many nights did you and I argue about her right to abandon us? You were the one who defended her, reciting her reasons and ignoring your own emotion. The air there, even with the smog, was somehow less oppressive; it was hopeful air in which anything seemed possible. She didn’t dread daylight and wasn’t sleeping until noon anymore. Unlike New York, where each day was just like the last except harder to live through, with L.A.’s sun and breeze and the hum of the industry, each day erased the last and she was accountable only to her dreams. She didn’t feel guilty about eating well and could rollerblade on Santa Monica Beach; she could be whoever she imagined herself to be, no longer trapped in the precedent of bad behavior, the downtown attitude, that, back here, had been both her draw and her downfall. She was happy, you could tell, and you weren’t selfish enough to put your own happiness ahead of what was best for her and her work.

  It’s called masochism, Dad.

  Look at what happened to you in the process. You wandered aimlessly through the Village, staring at pigeons and handing out smokes to the homeless. You used to have this passionate arrogance that showed up in everything you did. When you walked down the street with that slouching strut of yours, people thought you were famous and wondered why they didn’t recognize you. But when Mom left, you disappeared as well. Your body was still here, but your mind and your wit and your artistic vision were all packed away in her suitcase like t-shirts. You missed deadlines, turned down money jobs, stopped shooting photographs altogether. The world began to underwhelm you, or Mom overwhelmed your world, I’m not sure which, but either way you were no longer engaged with it in any real, vigorous way. You lived to send her things—it didn’t matter what—clothes she’d left behind, that mirror she adored so much, Central Park leaves in the fall.

  I can remember one night especially. Mom had been gone over a year. She’d just finished the five-week shoot for Say You Do, which was already getting enough buzz to put her in the collage of stars on the covers of the summer blockbuster issues of Entertainment Weekly and Us. Proclaimed a rising star, she was getting her own write-ups in Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. Mentions of you or me were carefully omitted from all the publicity, and despite your rationalizations, you were finally beginning to realize what had happened to your life. On the night I’m thinking of, she called, crying, to tell you her lawyers—she had lawyers now—had held a conference call demanding that she divorce you. For the good of her career. She’d already cut ten years off her age. Besides the fact that marriage had been seen as unattractive in focus groups, it was those thirty-six years they were most eager to hide. You and I were liabilities—a sixteen-year-old daughter, a seventeen-year-old marriage— the numbers just didn’t add up. And they wanted her to ask, what would it cost to keep you quiet? Do you remember your answer, Dad? Of course you do. Nada. You didn’t ask for a thing. You interpreted her blubbering histrionics as a confession of love, and the loss of your right to acknowledge your past, the heartbreaking price of stardom. But you didn’t fight for that love, and you never conceded the truth: that actors never stop acting. But you knew. Behind what you wanted to hear, you understood and trembled at what was actually being said. This was her choice, and her career and her lawyers were simply the easiest excuse.

  Listening in on the other extension—hearing her lie and you simper, both of you acting like children—I felt it was my duty to be the adult. Or maybe I just wanted to cause a scene, to hurl my anger in both of your faces. I told her she was full of shit, that her story had so many holes that it might as well be made of lace. Didn’t she know that the first rule of lying is to keep it simple, and the second to make sure it’s plausible? “Be straight with us,” I told her. “Show some respect.” If you were a sap who was willing to take her bullshit—I was attacking you, too—that’s all the more reason for her to be honest. Didn’t she know that with love comes the responsibility to have the courage to end it when you know it’s over, to make sure you don’t engender false hope, to allow the brokenhearted to begin getting over it as quickly as possible? She held to her story, still does, and maybe it really is true—I’ve heard of nastier things happening out there—but did you notice how quickly her tears stopped after I questioned her script? I was young and livid and I wanted everything to be stark and clear. If the truth was as cruel as I believed it was, I wanted the cruelty to be explicit, so we could all see what we’d stepped in. How was I supposed to have known that, even though this was the end of our family, you and I would still cling to what-ifs and how-comes?

  And why didn’t you reprimand me once we’d all hung up? Was it because this was the night that you walked down to Love’s and bought razor blades? Was t
he pain so fierce that killing it overwhelmed all other concerns?

  Or did you know I just wouldn’t listen, that I’d race off to the Continental to flirt with my own self-destructive impulses before you had the chance to say anything? Maybe knowing this released you, in your mind, from responsibility. I understand, Dad. I can imagine how abstract everything else must’ve seemed that night.

  What did you do with the blades, though, when you got home? Did you set the little yellow box out on the table by the window so you could feel their presence as you drank your whiskey and smoked one more joint and, for the last time, watched the she-males work Hudson Street? Did it calm you down just to have them within view? Maybe you did what I do: I lie on the floor of my bedroom with the door locked and the light off, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars you stuck to the ceiling back when I was little, then I light a few candles and arrange them in a half circle around my head so I can watch the wax pool and drip for a while. It takes some time before I’m ready to open the box and take out a blade. How long did it take you, Dad? Or didn’t you get that far? Did you chicken out, throw them down the incinerator shaft in horror and get drunk instead? You did, didn’t you? That’s okay, everyone does that the first time.

  I did go to the Continental that night, but they were carding, and by the time I got there, I didn’t really want to be anywhere anymore. I did what you do. I meandered around downtown, picking random destinations just so I’d have a direction to walk in, hoping that, maybe, I’d be ready to let myself be distracted by the time I arrived. First I headed for the Angelika, but halfway there I realized I couldn’t stomach sitting through a movie, movies and Mom being synonymous. I imagined myself sitting romantically alone at a corner table at Le Figaro, sipping cappuccino and writing my tortured thoughts down in bad verse on my napkin, looking like a fool, a tourist, and it made me want to throw up. Finally, I pushed through the metal bars closing off Washington Square Park and sat on a bench in the dark. “What about me?” I kept asking myself. “Who’s going to take care of me? Who’s going to love me?” I don’t know how long I sat there. It felt like a second, but must’ve been at least an hour. It was like I’d floated away. All that existed was me and my sad, massive loneliness. On the walk home, it occurred to me, Fuck it, why not get it over with and float away entirely. I stopped in at Love’s and bought razor blades—an impulse buy. But just like you, I didn’t use them this first time. I scratched lightly at my wrists, barely drawing blood, then panicked and threw them away.

  Even though I was in the midst of falling in love with Yegal, I almost bought a second box while Mom was in town to publicize Say You Do. I probably shouldn’t tell you that; she left a message on my cell and told me not to say anything. I was going to tell you anyway because I was sure you’d heard she was in town; but the more I thought about it, the more I realized you’d be tortured all week regardless of what I did. You wouldn’t sleep, just sit at your post by the window and watch the whores hopping in and out of cars, all the while hoping she’d disregard her worries about what might appear on Page Six, that you’d hear her feet shuffling in the hallway, keys rattling outside the door, and the door would swing open to reveal her, disheveled and distressed and needing you. The two of you would wander down to the Ear—your old haunt—for a drink and a couple hours of wistful remembrance of what it feels like to have soft, pliable hearts, a couple hours of memorizing each other’s faces all over again, this time with tears in your eyes. The more I thought about what you’d be going through, the more I realized that telling you she’d made contact with me would be sadistic and cruel. Mom doesn’t act on her feelings anymore, doesn’t let them show in front of her public (which now includes everyone except her agent, publicist and makeup artist); instead, she hides in hotel rooms until the feelings pass and she can walk, sealed off, iconic and correct, into the glare and assault of the visible world. She would never appear unannounced at our door, disheveled and needy, since the only need she’s willing to succumb to is the need for an audience. It’s not that the rest of her needs don’t exist, it’s just that they’ve been locked away for later, after her wrinkles and sags can no longer be hidden and her career sputters and falters and dies. I wanted to protect you from her. If I’d told you we were meeting, it would only have been a matter of days before you started pressing me for the details.

  Seeing her was horrible, Dad. We sat on a bench in the part of Riverside Park that goes over the street—right around Eighty-sixth, I think—with that flower garden. She was explaining how her time is budgeted down to the minute when she’s on the publicity junket like this. And when she’s not, when she’s on the set, it’s hours and hours of absolute boredom. There’s only so much time one can spend learning lines. She gets cranky and the old feistiness begins bouncing around in her stomach, preparing to burst out at directors and costume designers and bust up her hard-won, easy-to-work-with, nice-girl rep. She asked me to come out and join her in L.A. I could be her personal assistant, since she needs one anyway. It would be fun and the work would be easy, basically just keeping her company, making appointments, keeping track of little details like telling the caterers what she won’t eat, balancing her bank book, getting her coffee. Can you believe it? “The best thing,” she said, “is we could be together without anybody knowing how old I am.” I laid into her. “Is this for real?” I screamed. “Are you really saying this? Why do you think I’d want to give up my whole life— I’ve got one, too, Mom, and it’s not so bad anymore—just to move out to L.A. and be your baby-sitter—not even your fucking daughter, your baby-sitter! I’ll stick with Dad, he at least likes me. Do you realize we’ve been here forty-five minutes now and you haven’t asked a single thing about me, not even something asinine like what I’m going to do next year after I graduate? And maybe you were going to, but it’s too late now. If you do it’ll just be because I called you on it.” I laid it all out. “Mom, I don’t like you and I don’t respect you and I’m only here today because you’re my mother and I feel like I don’t have a choice.” The dumpy Upper West Siders— probably the only New Yorkers alive who wouldn’t recognize her— made a big show out of giving us space, leering as if we had no right to be in their book-chatty little flower garden, using up their refined air with our trashy, messy lives. Mom’s a real pro, now, though. She acted like I was some crazy person who’d randomly chosen her to rant at, and instead of engaging me, she did the dignified thing: she waited for me to stop screaming. Once I’d exhausted myself, she smiled sickly-sweet and said, “It was only a thought.”

  That’s when I stormed off to buy razor blades, but at the last minute I called Yegal instead. He took me out to Veselka for cold borscht. We sat in the back and I stabbed at the purple hard-boiled egg with my spoon. The egg spun and slipped, bobbed in the beet broth, bounced against the plastic edge of the bowl. Yegal ate slowly and watched me. I knew he was watching, and part of what I was doing was manipulative—playing the sullen teenager, dour and sour and dwelling on indescribable troubles, in order to make him feel helpless, to see if he’d get angry and frustrated, or earnestly pressure me to “open up,” or treat me like a child, or what. He did the perfect thing, though. Every time I glanced over, he’d say something innocuous. “You know, a beet is a tuber. How does that make you feel?” or “Okay, I was out at Coney Island last weekend, right, and did you know the old Puerto Rican guys who fish on the pier out there use spark plugs as sinkers? It struck me as somehow, I don’t know, real.” or “Stick out your tongue . . . see, it’s bright purple. Mine, too. That’s the best part. It’s like when you’re eight years old eating Now and Laters.” He kept saying silly things like this until he got me to smirk a little. Eventually, I felt so comfortable that I started babbling about what had happened with Mom. I showed him the faint scratches from the last time I’d bought razor blades. I went on and on about how much I hate her. I’d never told him who Mom was because I’d been afraid his demeanor would change when he found out, but he just listened, c
ool, unsurprised. He was so sympathetic. Not what I’d expected. I think I subconsciously believed that, by virtue of her fame, Mom was more justified in her negligence than I was in my anger; as if there was something horribly inappropriate, disgraceful even, about my rage when really—her being the star she was—I should be thankful she had time for me at all. But Yegal saw my side, and for the first time I thought, Wait a minute, I’m not the fucking problem, I don’t deserve this shit. He let me go on for probably forty-five minutes before he pointed at his empty bowl and said, “Soup is good food. Eat up.” I laughed and laughed and laughed. I couldn’t stop. “Who—” I tried to speak, but speaking made me gag. “Who—” I held up a finger and gulped for air. “Who do—” I doubled over and clutched my stomach—“you think you are—” Holding back laughter made me wheeze. “My mother?” He smirked out the side of his mouth. “No, just her understudy. Come on, let’s go look at the river. It’s cathartic.” He was absurd and perfect and he even paid.