by Amy Sohn
“Papa fell,” Todd said. “Papa had a bad drink and fell down.” Enrique reached for the bandage and Marco swatted him away. Then he turned to the window and squinted against the fall sun.
Rebecca
“I don’t want you to see me when I look this frightening,” Marco told Rebecca. He was gaunt and worn, as if he had aged years in weeks.
“You frightening is most people at their best,” she said.
“Stop lying.”
She was sitting on the edge of his bed. They hadn’t talked in a while, and then Todd had called to say what happened the night before, and she had closed the store and rushed over.
“How exactly did it happen?” she asked Marco, clutching his hand.
“You know how the trees have guards to keep the dogs from pissing on them? It’s Bloomberg’s fault. There were no guards around trees when I was living in Chelsea.” He told her about the past month, going off the Antabuse and his hookups, and the mean one with the roommate, and the scooter and the beautiful Puerto Rican nurse, Eduard. “You should have seen him. Oh my God, he was like Antonio Sabato, Jr.”
Jason wailed from the living room. Rebecca could hear Rosa and Todd tending to him. “When did you start drinking again?”
“Wellfleet. I thought I could handle it. I thought this time I could keep it under control.” He told her how he had gotten back into vodka, bought Poland Spring bottles to hide it.
“No one at school knows?” she asked.
“Not that I can tell. It shouldn’t be this easy. Todd says he didn’t know. I’m not sure I believe him.”
She should have suspected when Marco told her about Grindr that he was drinking. He was such a low talker that he slurred even when he was sober. But she should have known. How could you have casual sex with strangers and not drink and do drugs?
“Todd made me tell him where my stashes are,” he said. “He dumped everything. He even threw out all his own wine and liquor, which for him is a really big deal. Ohhh, I feel like my head’s exploding. I gotta get more Librium. I gotta call Dr. Haber. Todd!”
Todd came in. “Can you call Dr. Haber and have him phone in some Librium? Call him now.”
Todd nodded and disappeared. Rebecca had never seen him so amenable, so obedient. Maybe these two needed a crisis to bring them together.
She felt guilty for not being a better friend to Marco. She’d been too caught up in her own problems ever since seeing Stuart. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” she asked, running her finger down Marco’s cheek. “I could have helped you.”
“You would have gotten freaked out. I was up to a fifth of Absolut a day. You would have called Children’s Services. What kind of parent drinks that much?”
“I had somebody else’s baby and lied about it to my husband. How could you be a worse parent than I am?”
“I took care of my kids drunk. I did coke on the coffee table. Enrique walked in on us.” He leaned forward and whispered, “I fucked guys on our couch.”
“I’m glad you’re alive. You could have gotten killed. You could have gotten hit by a car on your scooter. It could have been so much worse.”
“Maybe that’s what I wanted. To get hit by a car.”
“You’re such a good person. How come you’re the only one who doesn’t know it?”
“I’m not. I’m a liar and a cheater and a drunk.”
“You can get help. You’ll join A.A.”
“I tried A.A. I hated it. It’s not for me.”
“It works for a lot of people.”
“I know, I know,” he said. “ ‘It works if you work it, so work it, you’re worth it.’ I know all the lines. I hate them.”
“What about Sex Addicts Anonymous? The steps are the same.”
“Ugh! If you stuck me in Gay SA, it would be like a candy store. All anyone does in those groups is fuck. They call it GSA—Get Some Ass.”
He didn’t seem to want to help himself. She leaned over and embraced him tightly. “I’m sorry you didn’t feel like you could trust me,” she said.
She was scared for him. He had hidden himself, and it meant that their friendship had been one-sided, all about her. It wasn’t too different from Marco’s contract with Todd, which was all about Todd. Marco allowed Rebecca to be the center of attention because that was who he was. The guy who let her go on about her problems for an hour at the playground without making her feel she was boring him was the same guy who needed to fuck strangers to feel like he was worth anything.
She thought about Theo and his pot habit and felt pity for him, too. What made people need these crutches? What made her need her white wine at six every evening, wine o’clock, which coincided with whine o’clock, when the children were harder than at any other time of the day?
“I love you,” he said. “You know that, right? You know how much I love you?”
“I love you, too. I’m never going to stop being your friend.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. But you gotta stop doing all this stuff that’s bad for you.”
“The stuff that’s bad for me makes me feel so good. I had Todd take my phone so I can’t go on Grindr again. He’s going to put a code on.”
“You can’t make Todd your babysitter.”
“I don’t think I want to talk about this right now,” he said. “I’m tired.”
“Okay,” she said. “Do you want me to go?”
“No, stay. I haven’t talked to you. How’s your movie star? Have you talked to him?”
“He found out about the baby. He met him. He wants me to move in.”
“You’re not going to, are you?”
“I think I am.” It was more than a week since she had seen Theo in David Keller’s backyard. She hadn’t told him about her spying. She was talking to Stuart on the phone, more and more convinced that moving in was the right thing for both of her children and for her. People wound up with partners who were wrong for them all the time—but the smart ones got out. Maybe someday Marco would leave Todd and be with a man who respected him, who liked to read, who treated him with tenderness.
Stuart treated her with tenderness, more tenderness than Theo had shown her even after the sex drought ended. Stuart would take care of her. Yes, he had a narcissistic, shallow side, but maybe his father’s death had made him more mature. They were already bonded through Benny; it was just a matter of choosing each other and spending enough time to get to know each other.
“He’s an actor,” Marco said.
“Yeah, but Theo’s got problems, too.” She told him about Theo turning out to be a pothead and hanging out with David Keller.
“So what? It’s a harmless drug. You can’t leave Theo for Stuart. Stuart’s a manipulator. It’s what he does for a living.”
“He wants us to be a family, he says.”
“He thinks he does. You gotta be careful. This isn’t just about you, it’s about your kids.”
“I know it is. Maybe Benny should know his real father.”
“My kids don’t know their real parents. Biology is overrated. Theo’s been a good father to Benny. If he doesn’t know then why change things?”
“What would you do if Ryan Gosling were calling you three times a day, saying he was in love with you and wanted to spend his life with you?”
“I guess I’d have to think about it.”
She lay down on the bed next to Marco, wedged her arm around his neck. “So where exactly is the cut?” she asked.
He made his fingers into a V, stuck it between his eyes on the bandage, and ran his hand down his face. “Like a frown?” she asked.
“Uh-huh. I’m going to have a frown all the time now. It’s not good to be a gay man with a frown.”
“Yeah, but it might make it easier to stop hooking up. Who’s going to want to sleep with an over-the-hill, alcoholic, frowning Park Slope father?”
“A lot of guys,” he said. “Haven’t you heard the expression? ‘You don’t fuck the face.’
”
Melora
Melora put the final touches on her Gwen face. She had worked with the makeup artist to come up with an over-the-top late-1970s look she could apply herself—too much rouge, gloss, teased hair. She wore short shorts and a halter top and was proud that, at least bodywise, she did not appear too old for the role. It was amazing how calm she was. Gwen’s first line on stage was “Oh, God! I have never been at such peace in my life!” No Method acting necessary.
She thought about Ray Hiss’s bathroom. When she was a child, she had understood her own worth, but she had spent the next thirty years forgetting it, and somehow, cleaning that floor, she had found it again. Found her focus.
She felt like she was about to end her second slump. All week the tabloids had been going crazy with the story of Jed Finger, the once promising comedic movie star who had put a childhood rival into a coma and was now considered dead in Hollywood. She felt for the guy. He probably had been having a bad night and lost his temper, and things had gotten out of hand. She didn’t usually feel sympathetic when men got themselves into trouble, but Jed had seemed like a truly talented actor. Maybe years from now he would be in this exact dressing room inside the Bernard Jacobs, getting ready to do a revival of American Buffalo, and would look back on the time when people said he’d never work again.
On the monitor she could hear the audience members taking their seats. There was a buzz, a hum of excitement and expectation that reminded her why she loved theater. It was alive! It was an exchange. This was why people paid $150 a seat to see it. She’d had an acting teacher who liked to say that theater was a series of gifts—from the playwright to the director, from the director to the actors, and in the end, from the actors to the audience. She was giving a gift tonight. They would be altered by what she gave them.
Teddy Lombardo didn’t know anything about how to play Gwen. She knew Gwen, she was Gwen, it wasn’t something that could be verbalized. She was going to do the show the way she wanted to, and if Teddy fired her—well, she couldn’t think about that now, not minutes before she had to go onstage.
She listened to the din. There were a few celebs in the house—publicists liked to pepper the crowd with them during previews to give more electricity to the show for the reviewers. Tonight they included Bryan Cranston, Meryl Streep, Cassie Trainor, Claire Danes, and Hugh Dancy. Ben Brantley was in the audience, too, plus the Post, the Voice, the Daily News, and Variety. Melora was anxious about Brantley and hadn’t asked the house manager to tell her where he was sitting because she didn’t want to play to him or jinx herself if that section of the audience wasn’t reacting to her jokes.
In the dressing room mirror, she saw Gwen looking back at her, vibrant and delusional, addled with coke. There was a knock on her door. “Come in!”
Ruthie, the stage manager. “Places,” she said.
Melora dabbed on some more gloss and went to the wings to wait. Alessandro was there. “Break legs,” he said. He seemed to mean it. She shouldn’t have given him a hard time about his tardiness; it wasn’t her job to tell him how to be professional. She was overcome by generosity, not only to Alessandro but to the crew guys and the lighting people and the old-lady ushers, everyone who worked so that they could put on a show. Theater was a dying art, and she was a part of it. She was a part of something historical and wonderful. This legacy was far more important to her than the legacy of her films, because pretty soon there wouldn’t be theater anymore; no one cared about it except old Jews with season subscriptions.
The announcement was coming on, telling people to turn off their cell phones. Theater had new challenges these days with the intrusion of digital devices. Cell phones were worse than stalkers, even.
The opening music, by a duo called Gaines who used found instruments to create sound, came up as the stage went to black. Jon Hamm, as Ken Talley, entered from the opposite wing on his crutches and took his seat at the desk. The lights rose on the family-room set. She could hear the opening sound cues—the firecrackers and dogs. Usually, the cues blurred together, but this time she could distinguish the different noises, and as the distant fake firecrackers popped, she wanted to celebrate, too.
Karen
Karen was looking forward to her date with Wesley. In the tub, she had been playing out various sexual fantasies involving him, her feet, and different rooms of her apartment. The week before, they had gone to The Vanderbilt for dinner, but afterward he said he had to get home to Ayo, and all she got was a hot kiss in the front seat of his car.
Tonight, in hopes that one of those fantasies might move from bathtub fodder to reality, she had sent Darby to her parents’ house. They were excited that she was dating someone new, but Karen hadn’t told them that Wesley was black. Her parents didn’t know the truth about why Matty had left, and she figured she would tell them that first to soften the blow. A black ex-con single dad wouldn’t look so bad next to a whore-loving Jewish tranny-chaser.
Even though the restaurant, al di là, was just a ten-minute walk from her apartment, Wesley insisted on picking her up in his car. They drove to al di là and parked on Fifth Avenue. When they went inside, there was a forty-five-minute wait, so they ducked around the corner to the wine bar, eating olives and drinking Barolo.
The whole time she and Wesley sat there, she debated whether to tell him about her massage business. Seth had booked twenty clients the past week and she had another two dozen booked so far for the following week—all through word of mouth (or foot in mouth). She’d made fourteen hundred dollars. As long as no one called the Department of Health to report them, this business could be a nest egg. An egg built on female pleasure. It could make up for the money that Valentina had stolen.
So that her apartment would be available for the maximum number of daytime hours, she had enrolled Darby in the after-school program at Garfield Temple. Though she’d felt slightly guilty about it, she rationalized that in the long run, she was providing for her son. When she told Darby, he was excited; he knew a bunch of kids in the program from when he had gone to nursery school there. It hadn’t occurred to her that there could be social advantages to increasing Darby’s child care.
She wondered what Wesley would think if he knew she was renting her apartment out to a toe-sucker. He was so earnest and hardworking. He would dump her in a second if he knew she was a pimp.
The hostess told them their table was ready, and they went around the corner to the restaurant. They were in the back, which Karen liked, because the one flaw of al di là was how loud it could get. The waiter brought menus and told them the specials. While they were thinking about what to order, Karen said, “This is so nice. Being here with you.”
“I feel like the lucky one,” he said.
“I have to tell you something. Matty called me last week,” she said. “The girl he was living with stole money from him, and he wants to work things out with me.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him it’s too late. Too little, too late.” She paused, not sure how much to tell him. “The girl Matty was living with,” she said.
“Yes?”
“She wasn’t a girl.” The truth came out like a flood—the entire story, from walking in on him at the computer, to his moving in with Valentina, to his reducing her monthly stipend, to her beginning divorce proceedings. “He says she wasn’t a prostitute, but she had an escort site, and I’m sure he was doing stuff with her and me at the same time. I had to get tested for HIV. I don’t have it.”
“I don’t have anything, either,” he said.
“You’re the only person who knows besides my lawyer. Even my mother doesn’t know. It’s so humiliating.”
“No, it’s not. Half the men in New York City are doing it with transsexual hookers.”
“How do you know?”
“I read the Voice.”
She couldn’t believe he was so sanguine. It made her think her problems might not be so uncommon. The waiter came back, asked if they were re
ady. She ordered a bottle of wine that she’d had before, a Morellino di Scansano, a Tuscan red. They hadn’t looked at the menus. “You know,” she said, after he left, “I always thought if Matty called and said he wanted to work things out, that I would take him back. But I didn’t want to. I actually feel like I should thank Matty for leaving me. If he hadn’t walked out on me, I wouldn’t have met you.” Wesley covered her hand with his. His palm was soft and warm. She looked up at him, wanted to dive into his dark brown eyes and swim there.
“I get it,” he said. “I get why it’s hard for you. It’s like, you were pre-operative, and now you’re about to become post-operative. But there comes a time when you gotta cut off the dick.”
“Stop it!” Karen said.
After dinner, she invited him up to her apartment. “Do you have any more of that pear pie?” he asked as they walked in.
“Not only do I have pear pie,” she said, “but I went out and bought something special today. I think you’re going to like it.” She had read an article in the Times Dining section about eiswein, a special type of dessert wine. The grapes were picked in the middle of the night, after they had frozen, and then fermented. Because the sugars didn’t freeze, it created a sweet, concentrated wine. She had never tried it, but she had gone to Big Nose Full Body for it.
She heated the pie and poured eiswein into two glasses from a set her parents had given for her fifth anniversary with Matty. They sat on the couch and clinked. Wesley took his first sip. “Zees vein is veddy icy,” he said.
“That’s awful. I’ve never heard a worse accent,” she said, giggling.
He noticed something in the den. “What’s that?” he asked.
“What?”
“That.” He meant the massage table. Seth had left it there after his last appointment.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m renting the room out to this friend of mine who does massage.”
“I didn’t know you had a friend who does massage.”
