Motherland

by Amy Sohn

  “What kind of work do you do?” she asked.

  “Portraits. Of women.”

  “Why were you in L.A.? Did you have a show?”

  “I was doing consulting work on a feature. A biopic about an artist.”

  “Which one?”

  “You ask too many questions. What about you? What were you doing out here?”

  “I took a couple of meetings. I’m in a play in New York, but I had a break.”

  “What are you in?”

  “Fifth of July by Lanford Wilson.”

  “I saw Swoosie Kurtz in that on Broadway,” he said. “I don’t know how anyone could do it better than she did. Richard Thomas was in it, wasn’t he? He never did get rid of that mole. I think I read about this revival. They’re saying it’s not going well? You’re fighting with the director?” There had been several items, in the Times and Post, about her creative differences with Teddy, but she didn’t know which cast member had leaked them.

  “They made it all up. Theater critics like it when Hollywood people fail. It allows them to feel superior for once, instead of lowly, underpaid, and irrelevant.”

  “Exactly. So what does it matter if you’re terrible? The number of Americans who care about theater is smaller than the number who call themselves Rastafarians.”

  “I know. I’m just worried they won’t give me a chance. It was a risk for me to take this part. My own backstory mirrors Gwen’s. That’s dangerous.”

  “What was the backstory?”

  “I got into some trouble a couple of years ago involving my ability to cope with day-to-day existence. And there was a divorce. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “I try not to,” he said. “Papers focus on fact, and I’m more interested in opinion and imagination.” This sounded like a line he used frequently. He seemed enamored of his own opinions. Why was it so easy for men to charm themselves? “I have to say,” he went on, “I don’t care much for your recent screen work. I saw you in something a long time ago. I thought you had promise.” Melora was dumbstruck. “I can’t remember. Yes, I can. It was about a bunch of teenage girls trying to have orgasms.”

  “Earthquakes,” she said. It had been directed by Richard Benjamin and had also featured Jennifer Connelly and Annabeth Gish.

  “Right. It was a good movie. They don’t make things like that for teenage girls anymore. It’s too bad. No more Splendor in the Grass.”

  The plane had taken off. She settled back in her seat and looked out the window, always happier to say goodbye to Los Angeles than hello. It was a town that revealed none of its sinister qualities from above. At the meetings, jobs had been floated her way, one a buddy comedy with Diane Lane and one a new version of The Women by Aline Brosh McKenna—but she had left the rooms feeling glum. The meetings were ceremonial. There was none of the electricity that she recalled from meetings after the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Poses, the biopic of experimental director Maya Deren that brought her a second Oscar and a comeback. Vanessa said it was a matter of finding the right scripts, but Melora knew the three stages for women in Hollywood: babe, D.A., and Selena Gomez’s mother.

  “So, are you married?” she asked Mr. Hiss.

  “Divorced.”

  “How long?”

  “Seventeen years. But she still haunts me. I wake up at night choking, dreaming that she’s trying to kill me. What happened with your husband?”

  “I realized he didn’t love me anymore,” she said. “He only used me to further his career.” Melora’s chemistry with Stuart, on and off the set of Poses, where they met, had been electric. Melora had played Deren, and Stuart had played Deren’s husband, a Polish Jew named Sasha. Soon Stuart was cheating on his Australian girlfriend, Natalie Sullivan, sleeping over at Melora’s Spring Street loft and getting to know her son, Orion, whom she had adopted on her own in Vietnam. In the early months of the relationship, she’d had all the power. He worshiped her, and she liked it. Back then she never anticipated that Stuart’s career would outpace hers. He was handsome but quirky, a character actor. She thought his roles would always be limited. Now she winced at her naïveté.

  They had gone through over a year—short by Hollywood standards—of divorce proceedings, and agreed to joint residential and decision-making custody of Orion, with Orion staying at Stuart’s half the time. She felt it was unfair, but her lawyer said that was the direction things were going these days, more and more fathers were getting joint, and it didn’t matter that she had adopted Orion before she knew Stuart, because he had become his father after they got together.

  The tabloids had had a field day with their post-breakup dating lives. It was true she had made out with Ryan Gosling at Anne Hathaway’s birthday party, and she’d had face-sucking sessions with Andy Samberg and Gerard Butler (though not on the same night), but she wasn’t “dating” anyone. After her name appeared in the magazines a few weeks in a row, her divorce lawyer, a tall, single-process Jewess named Mindy Lemberg, told her to “watch it.”

  “So?” said Mr. Hiss. “Everyone uses everyone. You went in with your eyes open.”

  “If I’d gone in with my eyes open, I would have asked for a prenup.”

  “I bet you’ve said that before,” he said.

  “You’re right, I have. I bet you’ve said you dream of your wife choking you.”

  “I change the verb. Sometimes she’s eating me, spearing me, shooting me.”

  Melora stared out the window, sensing Mr. Hiss looking at her. There was an old fellow named Hiss / Who leaned over to give her a kiss. She turned toward him. He opened his mouth as though about to say something. Light glinted on his pink tongue. He put his hand on her thigh and crept it under her white knee-length washed satin Marni skirt. He moved her underwear to the side, and as the tips of his fingers pushed open her pudenda, his eyes met hers.

  The plane rocked suddenly, the jolt knocking his fingers inside. A second later, his hand was back on his own lap, but the plane was still bumping.

  Melora, who hated flying and had downed two martinis in the Red Carpet Club before boarding, got a black feeling in her chest. This was not turbulence. They weren’t high enough for turbulence.

  She could hear shouts like “Tell us what’s going on!” and, a few minutes later, a woman wailing hysterically. Flight attendants passed three times, though they betrayed no sign of agitation. An Indian man across the aisle looked sweaty and despairing, and then asked, “Are you Melora Leigh?” after he noticed her.

  Mr. Hiss was placid, staring straight ahead. No one was giving information from the cockpit, which meant things weren’t all right. Since she was a child, Melora had anticipated an early death. She would dream that her parents were trying to kill her, that she could hear them plotting her murder through the door.

  “Folks,” the pilot said on the loudspeaker, “we’re having a bit of an issue with our wheels retracting, but we’re trying to get it on track.”

  It was always bad when your pilot said “Folks.” She thought of that JetBlue plane from Burbank to New York. The same thing had happened on that one, and the plane circled in the sky above Burbank to use up fuel. It had been broadcast on CNN, and the people on the plane were watching themselves in the sky via the onboard televisions. They had survived, but maybe they were lucky.

  A baby was crying. Melora thought of all the things she shouldn’t have done: let Stuart become Orion’s co-guardian, marry Stuart in the first place, accept the role in Yellow Rosie, introduce Stuart to Adam Epstein, who produced Atlantic Yards. Her life was a series of bad career moves. She hoped it wouldn’t hurt when they crashed. What if she got a brain injury and she hung on for years, Schiavo-style? She was glad she’d changed her will so Stuart wouldn’t get anything. Her temples were throbbing, and she felt like she was going to throw up.

  She gripped Hiss’s hand, the left one, the non-pussy hand. Had she imagined what had happened? She glanced at her skirt. It was rumpled where he had been, and her panties were wet.
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br />   She grabbed the vial of Ativan in her green and burgundy Ferragamo W bag and slipped two pills under her tongue so they would be absorbed quickly. The plane wasn’t shaking anymore. “Folks,” the pilot said, “we’ve resolved the issue with the landing gear. It’s going to be all right. I’ll let you know when we’ve reached cruising altitude.” People cheered behind her.

  When the flight attendant came later with more drinks, Melora got a champagne and then another. The alcohol combined with Ativan worked well. She glanced at Mr. Hiss and saw that he was sleeping. She rested her head on the seat, recalling an argument she’d had with Teddy Lombardo at the last rehearsal about a speech Gwen gives to Ken. She had wanted to cry during the monologue, but Teddy had encouraged her to play it very strong. They’d had a yelling match in front of everyone, so heated that a few of the actors left the stage in frustration. There were only three weeks until the first preview, and she suspected Teddy had allowed her to take this short rehearsal break so she and he could decompress from the tension of rehearsals.

  When she awakened hours later, she could see the lights of New York City out her window. The flight attendant was collecting cups, telling people to adjust their seat backs. Mr. Hiss handed Melora a warm washcloth. “I saved one for you,” he said. She was groggy and out of it and then remembered what he had done.

  “Thanks,” she said, blotting her face.

  “You snore,” Mr. Hiss said.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do. It’s not glottal, but it’s noticeable. Kind of a . . .” He made a heavy-breathing noise, lowered his head. She didn’t like that he had watched her sleep.

  “No one’s ever noticed it before,” she said.

  “Maybe they did but they never told you. Maybe they were embarrassed for you.”

  The plane touched down. A voice welcomed them to New York City or wherever their final destination might take them. The seat-belt light went off and everyone stood, went for their bags. In first class, you had to be quick; you would be first to deplane. She could not deHiss, didn’t want to deHiss. She practiced different questions in her head: “Where are you going now?” “Can I give you my number?” “Do you want a lift in my car?” They felt false and incapable of conveying the spiritual and no-bullshit aspect of their connection.

  The flight attendant was moving the curtains that hid the hanging coats and extra baggage. The aisle was filled with other members of the cabin. The cockpit door opened.

  Mr. Hiss slipped out of his seat with his shoulder bag, into the aisle. She moved where he had been. The seat was warm from his body. “Where are you going?” she asked, looking up at him, but her voice came out softly, and he didn’t seem to hear. She stood awkwardly in the space between his seat and the one in front and turned to him so her face was inches from his. “Where are you going now?” she said, louder this time. She put her hand on his shoulder.

  “That’s my business,” he said, removed her hand, and exited speedily past the pilots.

  Rebecca

  The children’s faces were bobbing up and down joyously on the trampoline behind Joanne and Andy’s rental on Ocean View Drive. The parents were watching from the porch. Theo and Marco were leaning over the rail to make sure nothing terrible happened, periodically mediating disputes or telling them not to jump so close to the edge. Rebecca was married to a man attentive enough to guard everyone’s kids, but instead of feeling pride, she felt mild irritation that he wasn’t sitting next to her, arm slung around her, eager to have a few moments with his wife. The children always took precedence, even after all these years, even though there were two kids and not one, and she had hoped he might mellow.

  On the car ride home from Dyer Pond, they had fought. “Would you have noticed if Benny had gone under instead of Harry?” he had asked.

  “Of course I would have. He’s my son.”

  “Sometimes I worry what would happen if I weren’t around.”

  She was furious that he seemed to blame her for the accident, though she blamed herself a little. “Stop being such a hero,” she had said. “He was fine. You’re making this into something way bigger than it is.”

  When it came to Theo, Rebecca tended to express the opposite of whatever he was looking for. He called it Asperger syndrome, she called it stubbornness. If she sensed his need for approbation, she withheld it. If she sniped at him unfairly and he called her on it, she said he was overreacting. She didn’t floss, though her dentist had said she had bone loss and recommended she see a periodontist. Theo, upon hearing this, became worried she would get heart disease, so every night he wrapped floss around her toothbrush and left it in the bathroom to remind her. She would unspool it and throw it in the trash, wondering how she could be so hostile to someone she had betrayed.

  Despite her betrayal, or perhaps because of it, there was a fundamental way in which she needed him, needed the conversation, the back-and-forth, the chatter over the heads of the whining children. After Abbie was born, he wouldn’t sleep with Rebecca. Sixteen months went by. They kissed and made out a little, but no sex. He claimed to be tired. As the months passed, she grew more and more resentful, and then she met Stuart Ashby in the Food Coop and everything changed.

  Now she worried that Theo would turn on her again. She needed to feel his body next to her at night, to roll over and press her front against his back, although he stayed asleep—she had never once at four A.M. been able to rouse him into sex. She loved going to stupid comedy movies with him, drinking beers afterward, and picking the plots apart. She loved date nights even if they talked about the kids the whole time, she loved the way it felt when he held her hand over the table. She loved this connection so much that when they were talking about her day at work or his and she had to pee, she left the door open in order to continue the conversation. Only when she was really angry with him did she close the bathroom door.

  Across from her at a square wooden table, Todd was shoveling blue corn chips into his mouth, washing them down with chardonnay. The Gottliebs had not arrived. They’d been fighting at the rental and hadn’t been ready to go when Rebecca and Theo left. She saw Marco glance over his shoulder at Todd, who was refilling his own glass. How could Todd drink like that when Marco was trying to stay sober?

  Todd was staring closely at Andy, next to him. “Do I know you from somewhere?” Todd asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Andy said carefully. He had a face that had been made for comedy. Scrunched up, constantly smirking, with bright blue eyes.

  “Have you ever worked in construction?” Todd asked.

  “Todd, he’s in those commercials for the cell phone,” Marco said.

  Todd’s face exploded with recognition. “Oh, fuck!” he cried, his eyes wide and excited. “I knew I knew you from somewhere! That’s crazy!” Marco shook his head in shame at Todd’s exuberance. “You’re so fucking funny!”

  “Thank you, kind sir,” said Andy.

  “You guys seem calm for a couple about to get a new baby,” Joanne said.

  “I have two sisters and a brother, so a big family isn’t a big deal to me,” Todd answered.

  “God bless you,” Joanne said. “I find one challenging, and you’re taking on two.”

  “It’s different for a gay couple,” he said. “The kids need company.” He glanced at Marco as though daring him to contradict that.

  “You know, I always thought our kids would be friends,” Theo said slowly, “but they play so independently. They are complete opposite personality types. Abbie was very easygoing. Benny had terrible colic and he clings.”

  “That’s just the age,” Rebecca said.

  “I don’t think so. He’s less adventurous and more internal. I had no idea blood relatives could be so different. I guess it’s a testament to nature over nurture.”

  Rebecca’s heart was beating very fast. She exchanged a look with Marco and steered the conversation to the upcoming adoption and drive back to New York, which led to a discussion of traffi
c on the Cape this summer versus previous summers. Conversation in Wellfleet was always metatextual, about being on vacation.

  “It’s never been this crowded here,” Joanne said. “I’m thinking next summer we’ll come in July, when it’s more Massachusetts. August is too New York, those Upper West Side shrinks on vacation. I can’t stand them.”

  “I saw a Beamer in the town hall parking lot this afternoon,” Andy said, “with a New York license plate that said JUNGSTER. And he was cutting off someone else.”

  “Of course he was,” Rebecca said. “He had a very strong animus.” Andy and Marco laughed, but no one else did.

  Rebecca stood up and poured what she was pretty sure was her third glass of Cabernet. Because of the nursing, she usually kept count for the first three and then stopped. Counting.

  Andy reached under the porch bench and pulled out a black box. “Pétanque, anyone?” He loved specialty cocktails and old-fashioned lawn games.

  “Not me,” Todd said.

  “You sure? It’s fun.”

  “The only balls I play with are Marco’s.” He laughed a loud, hacking laugh. Andy reddened slightly. “I’m just fucking with you. I’ll play. I see those guys playing in Carroll Park all the time.”

  “That’s bocce, not pétanque,” Andy said.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “That, my friend, is a long conversation. Marco? You in?”

  “I have to keep an eye on Stalin over here,” Marco said, indicating Enrique on the trampoline.

  “Theo?” he asked.

  “I should watch the kids.”

  “I’ll watch them,” Rebecca said. “They’re fine.”

  “Benny’s too little to be down here without an adult supervising.”

  “I’ll watch him,” Marco said. Theo hesitated and then headed off to the backyard with Todd and Andy.