by Amy Sohn
“You know, I just did it at home, and then I did the shrimp and scallops on Rita’s stove.”
“How do you make it?”
“Oh, it’s super-easy. I took some shallots, garlic, parsley, basil, tarragon, and oh yeah, chili flakes. I don’t really work from recipes, I just make things up.” Karen hated it when cooks said this. It was like skinny people saying they could eat whatever they wanted. Karen was a recipe chef, a solid one but a recipe chef, and when she made something good, she made it the same way every time until she memorized it. “I put some white wine and canned tomato in the onion mix—and seafood stock. I let it simmer, added clams in the shell, slipped the seared fish in, and cooked it till the clams opened. I added the scallops and shrimp at the end.”
Susie took a bite of something on her own plate and said, “Oh my gosh, this is great! Who made it?”
Karen was surprised to see that it was her farro. “I did,” she said.
“You have to e-mail me the recipe!” A few others tried it, but though Ron said “Yummy,” no one besides Susie had anything effusive to say.
Karen went to the wine table to refill her cup. Though she spent the rest of the evening mingling, she could not recapture the upbeat mood she had been in when she arrived. Part of it was the salad incident, and part of it was the straight-man situation. There was only one reasonably cute straight man at the party. Ned. He was fortyish, short, and skinny, and he wore a button-down plaid shirt. He had come with his school-age son, Oliver. Karen knew from his postings on the message board that his wife, an entertainment lawyer, had left him for a stay-at-home dad she had met at a P.S. 321 auction-planning meeting. Ned seemed like a good father, but he had a defeated quality that unsettled her.
She was beginning to feel like she would never have sex again. The last time she and Matty had done it, it had been rote. They’d gone to the Italian restaurant on Fifth Avenue, al di là, and she had come home sleepy from the shared bottle of Valpolicella. In bed Matty had stabbed at her with his hard-on, and just as he was about to come, she started thinking about the restaurant bill, which she had seen upside down when he signed the credit card slip. It was $126 before tip, which seemed high for a bottle of wine, one appetizer, and two entrees. Maybe the waiter had made a mistake. She was carrying a three when Matty orgasmed with an asthmatic groan.
Many times over the past year, she had thought back to that night and wished she had mustered the energy to get on top of him and have an orgasm herself. But she’d had no idea then that one month later, Matty would be living in a Midtown rental with a chick with a dick.
Around eight she decided to take Darby home. She went to the buffet table to reclaim the salad Tupperware, which was still filled almost to the top. In front of the house, she turned to the row of strollers. Darby’s wasn’t there. She had to ring the bell again, and when Rita came out, Karen told her what had happened.
“Oh God,” Rita said. “I hope it’s not the stroller stealer.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was on that blog Fucked in Park Slope. They said a crazy person’s been taking strollers. It’s been going on all summer.”
Karen didn’t want to believe it. It was frightening. What kind of person would prey on parents, no matter how entitled? It seemed cruel. Why had he picked her ratty Techno XT and not one of the nicer ones, like a Phil & Ted?
“I feel responsible for leaving them out here,” Rita said. “I just didn’t want there to be gridlock in the hallway.”
Darby’s stroller had lasted six years, through the famous Maclaren recall. It had withstood rain, snowy sidewalks, dirt, and sleet. Karen was surprised at how emotional she felt. “You should file a police report so they can track it,” Rita said. “Maybe they can figure out who’s doing this. Or maybe someone took it by accident and won’t realize till they get home. I promise I’ll call you if anyone gets in touch. And I’ll post something on the board tonight.”
Amazingly, on the nine-block walk back to Carroll Street, Darby didn’t complain. Karen tried to look on the bright side: Now he would learn to walk longer distances. But as hard as she tried to believe it was a good thing, she went to sleep sad, as though something precious had ended.
As she made her way down Sixth Street on her way home from Key Food, Helene Buzzi spotted an entire row of them, glinting in the light of a streetlamp, shiny with promise. Sometimes they were locked with Kryptonite, but as she approached, she saw these were loose, lined up neatly against the wrought-iron gate of Rita Fisher’s brownstone.
Helene sweated, sensing opportunity. Half a dozen to choose from and just down the block from her own house. She could hear a party in Rita’s backyard and imagined a bunch of affluent lesbian mothers drinking wine and refusing to discipline their misbehaving kids.
The other day Helene had been staring at the window display of Community Bookstore when she saw a mother and her son by the train set in front of Little Things, the toy store next door. “What do you want for dinner tonight, Carter?” the mother asked. Carter! The names!
“Chicken tenders.”
“You know we don’t eat fried food during the week.” The mother asked him what else he wanted. He suggested hot dogs and pizza, and she rejected each with an organic or nutritional justification.
Helene finally grew so fed up that she rolled her eyes. The mother turned to her and said, “Excuse me, ma’am, do you have a problem with me?”
“You’re damn right I have a problem!” Helene said. “You don’t ask your child what he wants to eat! You tell him!”
“Don’t tell me what to do with my son!”
“Don’t ask if I have a problem if you don’t want to know the answer!” Helene replied, proud of herself for the speed of her comeback.
The mother grabbed the boy and walked briskly away. Helene was certain she heard her mutter, “Crazy bitch.” It stung, but only a little. Of course someone who had this temerity would call an older woman a bitch.
It was a strange feeling to live in a neighborhood you could no longer afford. You were the reason values had gone up, and yet you were invisible. In the eighties there were no lawyers or bankers in Park Slope; yuppies lived in Manhattan. Now the whole neighborhood was yuppies. And none of them had any sense of the past. They didn’t understand that Helene’s generation of Slopers had improved the schools, reduced crime, attracted small businesses, gotten banks to lend, started block associations, and increased property values—all the things that had turned the Slope into a destination. The old stores were gone, gone so long that the number of people who remembered them were themselves a disappearing minority. Al’s Toyland. Herzog Brothers, the German deli. Danny’s candy store. Irv’s stationery. One Smart Cookie. The Grecian Corner. A true New Yorker knew storefronts according to what used to be in them.
These young mothers didn’t care that anything or anyone had been in the neighborhood before they were. They were like vermin, they could not stop populating, the children were for their pleasure only, there was no consciousness of a greater society. They had conquered the streets in all stages of child rearing—flaunting their pregnancies, openly nursing their babies, taking up Seventh Avenue with their strollers. Half the time the strollers were unoccupied—the children were wandering the width of the sidewalk while the mothers pushed empty vessels. On one occasion, after saying “Excuse me” three times to an oblivious mother, Helene gave up and walked in the gutter. That story had gone over incredibly well at her book group. She had spent some time thinking about exactly how to tell it and had chosen the word “gutter” to portray the full humiliation.
When Helene was raising Seth and Lulu, there were no classes called “Baby and Me” or “Mommy and Me.” Mothers worked as teachers, social workers, or sculptors. Children played with pots and spoons, and they were happy.
An ESL teacher at a Lower East Side elementary school, Helene had lived on Sixth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues since 1978, when she and her now-ex-husba
nd, an artist she called The Bastard, bought the brownstone. It cost thirty-seven thousand dollars. Sometimes when they came home at night, they would find junkies on the stoop. They knew their names. Now she knew only a handful of names on the block. The junkies had been more polite than the yuppies.
She and The Bastard had waited to have kids—the luxury of marrying young. Seth came in 1987 and Lulu in 1990. In the early nineties, with two little ones underfoot and his career meandering, The Bastard lost his mind, the marriage crumbled, and he moved out.
Seth and Lulu had been born at home, back before home births were trendy. Helene had sent them to the private school, Berkeley Carroll, because P.S. 321 was only just becoming a shining star. She’d thought private school would provide them with structure. Now, at twenty-three and twenty, her children were floundering. Lulu had never gone to college and was living with her father in Greenpoint, working for a street-theater company. Seth had graduated from Bard and was living rent-free on the ground floor of Helene’s brownstone, working as a masseur. He saw clients in the apartment.
She pushed open the gate to Rita’s house. Rita and her now-ex-partner had paid $1.6 million for it in 2002. Helene remembered the prior occupants, Stan and Roz, two childless professors with a lot of cats. The lesbians had complained to Helene at a block party that it had taken ten coats of paint to get rid of the smell, although it still reeked when it rained.
She had to act quickly. She grabbed a gray Maclaren and walked briskly down the block. So heavy! They were all like that nowadays, unnecessarily clunky, for stability.
At her house, the ground floor was dark; Seth was out. She maneuvered the stroller inside with great difficulty and shut the gate behind her, perspiration pooling beneath her breasts. She carried the stroller down the hallway to the basement door, unlocked it, and plodded down the stairs. Turning on the light, she regarded her collection. They were all there, little orphans: Bugaboos, Maclarens, new umbrella versions, German joggers, a tandem, and two side-by-side doubles—the worst gridlock offenders of all. She parked the new one by the rest, and when she walked up the stairs, she felt lighter.
Melora
On the car ride to rehearsal, Melora was jumpy. They would be spending the day on the second act, a complicated, nearly hour-long continuous scene that involved all eight actors and would be her first chance to work on the final monologue since the break.
That wasn’t the only reason she was agitated. It had been four days since she left the message for Ray Hiss, and she had not heard from him. It had been easy finding his number. On the way home from JFK, she typed “Hiss artist” into her iPhone and learned that his first name was Ray. She called CAA and it only took a few minutes for the assistant to call her back with the number. A 718 area code. “This is Melora Leigh,” she said on her message, “please call me,” and gave him her home and cell.
On her laptop, she read his Wikipedia entry, which said he was Jewish and from middle-class Long Island. His mother was an alcoholic who had abandoned the family when Ray was a little boy. He had gone to CalArts in the early seventies and been a modernist before turning to figuration in the eighties and nineties.
His official website’s “new work” page featured tableaus of dysfunctional pairings and families. Women and men stood half-clothed in rooms charged with drama, bodies turned away from each other, faces distorted. A middle-aged naked man in a field wore a button-down shirt over spindly legs. Melora could see a hint of penis below the shirt, but it was articulated sloppily, and she got no sense of girth. On the “press” page, there were academic articles whose meanings she could not parse. One said, “Ray Hiss has always played the iconoclast with respect to his iconography.”
In the morning she’d had Rizzoli send over a book of Ray’s paintings, published by Art in America. Over the past few days she had been poring over it, bringing it to rehearsal. She tried to make sense of the opening essay but was tripped up by words like “glassine” and “programmatic.” She loved the paintings, though, and spent hours thumbing through them—topless middle-aged women gossiping on a beach, a boy rolling off a much older woman after sex. These women didn’t look anything like women in Hollywood. They were old, and their breasts and buttocks sagged. Their nipples were distended, and they all had overgrown pubic hair.
Inside the Bernard Jacobs Theater, Melora found her cast-mates gathered in the front rows, drinking iced coffees, reading the newspaper, and shmoozing. Ben Whishaw, the rising young British star who was playing Ken Talley’s lover, Jed, was chatting with Blythe Danner (Sally, Ken’s aunt) and Madison Fanning, the middle Fanning sister (Shirley, Ken’s niece). When she came in, Melora thought she saw Jon Hamm whisper into Allison Janney’s ear and cast a snide look at her. Allison was playing Ken’s sister, June.
“Morning,” Melora said. Jon wore a smirk, but he always had a bit of a smirk. “Is something funny?” she asked.
“Private joke,” he said.
Teddy Lombardo was conferring with the stage manager, Ruthie, a tall, slender single woman who compulsively exercised during downtime, using chairs and tables for dips. Teddy was tiny, five feet tall, and dark-skinned, with closely cropped black, shiny hair. He looked like a cross between Leopold and Loeb. Melora approached them gingerly and said to Teddy, “I believe we can find some middle ground on the monologue. I’ve been thinking about it some more.”
“Let’s just deal with it in the run-through,” he said tersely, turning back to Ruthie.
Teddy’s plan was to get through all of Act Two and fix the problems. Gwen didn’t enter until a few pages in, so in the wings, Melora thumbed through Ray Hiss: 1975–1995. A woman served pot roast to a man at a dinner table who had the head of a wolf. A Weimaraner slept on the floor, his balls dangling over his belly.
Alessandro Nivola arrived, as usual, fifteen minutes late. “What’s that?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said, shutting the book.
“I didn’t know you were interested in art,” he said. He flopped down on a folding chair and opened a New York Post to the box scores.
“You should really do something about your lateness problem,” she said. “I once had an acting teacher who said, ‘It’s hard to be on time. It’s easy to be early.’ ” He didn’t look up.
When it was time for her entrance, she walked onto the porch set in her character heels and said, “Oh, God, would you feel that fuckin’ sun?”
“Stop doing Swoosie,” Teddy said.
“I’m not doing Swoosie,” she said. “I’m doing Gwen.”
“Just play the truth of the moment.”
“The truth of the moment is that she’s very excited.”
“I’m not telling you not to be excited.” For the rest of the act, Teddy had only positive notes for Alessandro, Jon, and Chris Messina, who was playing Wesley, Gwen’s guitarist. The more irritated she got, the shriller she played Gwen until, finally, Teddy asked that they take a five-minute break.
Melora glanced at her cast-mates, wondering which one of them was responsible for the item that had run in the New York Post two days before.
SHIFT IN JULY
Michael Riedel
* * *
Broadway Matinee
Will Melora Leigh open in Teddy Lombardo’s revival of Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July in September? A source close to the production said the Oscar winner and siren of the screen has been fighting with Lombardo over creative differences related to her role, the fiery copper heiress Gwen Landis. “Teddy feels like he can’t get through to her,” said the source. “He feels like she won’t trust him to do what he was hired to do.” The source said Lombardo has already begun talks with other actresses—including Gwyneth Paltrow, whose mother, Blythe Danner, is in the cast—about taking over.
When Melora read the item in bed, unable to fall asleep, on a self-Google designed to distract from a Ray-Google, she was aghast. She knew better than to believe anything in the Post but couldn’t stand the fact that her cast-mates had be
en badmouthing her. Teddy had told her it wasn’t true, he wasn’t in talks with anyone. She was becoming more and more convinced Jon had done it, seeking to call positive attention to himself by denigrating her to the press in advance. There was also a possibility it had been Blythe, wanting to work with her daughter.
On the way out of the theater after rehearsal, Melora saw a bunch of the other actors headed down the block, to get a bite, she figured. Madison Fanning was among them, her mother, and Blythe, who had to be close to seventy. They had invited a twelve-year-old and an AARP-er but not Melora. Why did they hate her so? She hadn’t acted more famous or important than any of them or demanded special treatment. Maybe she was being paranoid. She would have to talk to her psychopharmacologist, Dr. Haber, about upping her Zoloft dose. (She had started seeing him after terminating with Michael Levine, so she could continue getting her drugs.)
Melora always had her driver, Piotr, meet her around the corner in the Highlander Hybrid, so her costars didn’t know she had a driver. He was a dashing Polish man with a huge neck who gave her a lot of privacy. She paid him well so she could have him on call. When she’d gotten together with Stuart, he had made her give up her private driver, saying it was excessive. As soon as they separated, she found Piotr. She hated taxis, hated the insecurity of not being able to get home quickly.
She gave Piotr an address in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, off of her phone. Vanessa had set up a meeting for her with a rising indie director who had done a lot of mumblecores. When Vanessa first mentioned the term “mumblecore” in her office in Century City, Melora had no idea what it meant. “Those movies where the lines aren’t really written,” Vanessa had said. “They usually involve young women and men in difficult relationships. They’re shot on hi-def, and you can see their acne. Anyway, this one guy is a client, and he’s very bright, and he mentioned that he’s always wanted to work with you. His name is Mitch Suderman.”
