“I’m not crying,” she protested, but I went and took her in my arms and held her against me like a brother maybe, a father; if fathers could be fathers, brothers friends.
“I sat down on the stoop, I was tired, and I knew why I’d let him do this last thing, why I’d let him do everything—because he was Crispins and the show on East Fourth, all of these wonderful things that had happened and weren’t happening anymore.”
THE VERY NEXT DAY, life being life and running according to its own schedule, not ours, I was shaving in the morning when Paul called. I walked into the living room and stood listening to him on the machine say, “Robert?” Pause. “It’s Paul, call the office.” Just say it, I thought, go ahead and say it. But that wasn’t his style.
I went back in the bathroom and finished shaving. “It’s okay one way or the other,” I said to myself. “I hate this, I fucking hate this.” I’d had a test for a part on a soap, it was down to two other actors and me, but I hadn’t told anyone about it.
I dressed and went to the phone thinking, my work was good, and there was nothing else I could do.
Paul picked up immediately, “Robert, okay! You got it!”
“God.”
He laughed, “Is that all you can say?”
“Oh God.”
“Two shows a week guaranteed, fifteen hundred a show to start, but in a year—” I had trouble listening. Someone from the show would call this afternoon and contracts would be ready the day after tomorrow. I’d start work on Monday; a messenger would drop by a script. We’d have to discuss my commercial conflicts.
“Are you there?” he said.
We agreed on lunch later in the day. I hung up and stood stockstill. Funny, my first reaction was concern about how long I’d be away from the theater. Then I came to and ripped out of the apartment, slamming at the elevator button and sprinting across the street in the middle of the block and down Fifth Avenue toward Washington Square to find Irene. I ran out of breath and slowed to a walk at Eighth Street. Me, I thought, they want me. Then I got to the arch and thought, how can I tell her? But then she came running around the corner from the south side of the park—she’d taken up jogging—in her tank top, her hair in a ponytail, and she saw me and smiled this huge smile, and waved.
I let her run to where I stood under the arch. “What?” she said, reaching me, stopping, “what?” She was smiling so broadly, I thought, I must be smiling. I really couldn’t feel it, my face felt numb.
“I—uh, got a part on a soap, I mean, uh—two years, a contractual role on—”
She screamed and jumped on me, wrapping her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist.
“Hot damn!” she yelled, “One out of three!” Leaves on the trees turning color in the park, people, cars in the street and that beautiful October light falling on everything.
“Irene,” I said laughing, “you’re sweating all over me.”
“Come on.”
She got down, taking my hand and pulling me back across the street.
“Where are we going?”
“To tell Patrick.”
“He’s at the gym.”
“We’ll have him paged, if we don’t he’ll never forgive us,” she said, so excited she tripped and fell down, then jumped up, laughing.
We walked and then ran back up Fifth Avenue, she kept patting and hugging me, doing these funny little skips and hops. For a few moments I just let myself be completely happy. Only once that whole day did I ever think anything negative, fear this might not augur as much as it seemed to, might not be the break that would bring about the others. I could even fuck up and get fired, I thought. But I didn’t think I would.
11 Success
My entire life changed just as that possibility had seemed most improbable. I started pulling in $20,000 a month, working long hours, adjusting to a different type of acting and much bigger stakes. Suddenly, I was there, it was finally real, and yet it seemed it could vanish again and never reappear. It seemed more than anything about belief, and keeping it together. There were no words to describe the degree to which I lived on my nerves.
My character was named Rad.
“As in radical?” said Irene.
“As in radish?” Patrick said.
Rad was short for Radley Rutherford, the bad boy son of a prominent family who’d fathered a child as a young lad and then promptly departed for the wide world; I was Rad six years later, when he returned to make amends. But he was still bad—thank God, I thought—and kept screwing up. When I relaxed I had fun with Rad Rutherford, though my mother was not amused by my premise that, basically, I was playing my father. In my first week on the show my storyline was expanded so that most days I was at the studio for twelve hours, then came staggering home to study the next day’s scenes. Irene was a memory machine. We sat together nights working on lines and by the third or fourth time through a script she would know the whole thing. Not me; I hated working in what felt like a vacuum. Whatever rehearsal I had occurred on the same day we shot it. Then too, I had been trained to mistrust the surface, to get under the words. As a consequence I wasted time looking for levels that in soaps simply didn’t exist. Unlike plays, in which entire lives were conjured in two or three hours, soap operas were slow, unfolding in long linear paths. In any scene hardly more than one thing would be going on; you just did that one thing to the hilt. It took Rad ten boring episodes just to get up the nerve to go see his kid.
Years ago I’d learned a technique called playing the opposite; where there is hate there is also love—whatever you are called upon to play, the other side must also come into it. Not so here. Colin, our director, had come out of the English theater and taught me to stretch it all out: if Rad was being bad I had to be bad. But don’t worry, he’d say; another scene would soon appear showing the other side. His voice would boom over the speakers—a disembodied voice from the control room, like God’s—“No, Robert, here he is confident through and through. But I assure you he will doubt himself a week after next.” The scenes weren’t written as they were in the theater: if you put too much into them they would grow muddy and collapse. In soaps there wasn’t any major overriding theme, they weren’t about “the success ethic” or “the immigrant’s dream.” They just took situations from contemporary American life and exaggerated them as far as they could. Soaps were soap operas, melodramas—about everything and nothing.
It used to be that a soap wasn’t an awfully hard job to land. But when Dallas hit prime time the rules changed, and I found myself in a prestigious position as a soap opera actor. It came down to this: I became known, which was more than any theater job had done for me.
And I was doing real acting. I was treated with respect. A month into the job I told Irene I would support her, that she couldn’t concentrate on acting while working full-time as a waitress. She accepted. Patrick had been siphoning cash to her since last spring, although the trust money he lived off when he wasn’t working wasn’t really very much, and expenses had risen. Our rent had burgeoned; and it seemed there was less and less work for serious actors.
Irene did another showcase in November, but despite being a splashy affair with a famous playwright, nothing came of it. Afterward she threw herself into the apartment, cooking and cleaning with a frantic displaced energy that reminded me of my mother. Irene seemed to think she needed to earn the money, I thought we had been friends long enough to be past such a shallow interpretation, and one night we got into a terrible fight.
“Look, it isn’t the money,” she said. “It’s how you weren’t there for me after what happened with the showcase. Whenever I mentioned it, you would sigh.”
“Irene, I feel—”
“Oh, don’t tell me how you feel, Robert, you don’t know what you feel half the time.”
“You know how much pressure I’m under,” I said.
“I guess so,” she answered. “That’s about all I ever hear from you.”
“I’m tired” I told her, �
�okay?” At least, I thought, while she was doing her showcase it was fun. All I ever did was sheer downright work, and I was the one who was supposed to be supportive. In moments like these she brought to mind the downsides of having a wife, without the main benefit.
December was better. I began to adjust to the soap. She got a part-time job as a hostess at a restaurant near Lincoln Center and it worked out better than the waitressing had, and made her feel less dependent on me. She spent Christmas with my parents and me in Fort Lee. Patrick had gone again to LA or San Francisco or somewhere, who knew? He had become more evasive than ever. I tended to steer clear of him. It took too much energy to comprehend what he was feeling or doing.
Irene and I sat up late Christmas night by the tree in the white living room—in the darkness by the lights of the tree and the lights in the distance of the city behind falling snow.
Standing, she dragged her hand across the window and it looked like the heat of her hand melted the snowflakes that flew against the glass: “I am trying to absorb this,” she said. She wore a thin gold sweater and I could see through it the shift of the delicate winglike bones in her back. “Patrick talks about it as though it’s a matter of being good,” she ran her hand high up the window, reaching. “Like you’re supposed to take whatever comes and be content. He even lectured me about kissing the cross, but this isn’t—I mean, it isn’t as if I’m sick or homeless or my country’s at war. I feel embarrassed for feeling so badly about any of it.
“How long can you keep doing something that nobody wants? I get so tired of essentially saying Please, like me.”
Toward the end of February I realized that she had stopped, that neither she nor Patrick had had an audition since the beginning of the year and that they had dropped out of the class they’d been taking.
PATRICK GOT A JOB as a bartender working afternoons at O’Toole’s, of all places, the Fifty-seventh Street brasserie where I had been a waiter last year.
“Why?” I asked.
“For something to do, and my liquid assets are not what they could be.”
Irene said as a bartender he had an audience, a following, which I said for someone of Patrick’s talent was too pathetic a speculation to even entertain.
“Well, he can’t audition anyway,” she snapped; his nerves were uncontrollable. Every Sunday he brushed his stiff hair and put on a suit and went to Mass at St. Patrick’s, or elsewhere—he did a revolving tour of New York City’s cathedrals. Nights he went out, often didn’t come home. He wasn’t with Bryan; Bryan had gotten married in January.
I could see that Patrick was depressed, and I tried to be sympathetic. But even beyond his evasions and masks, I had begun to perceive another facet in his behavior toward me: I suspected not that he envied me, but that he looked down on me for the soap. He saw my success as easy and cheap, not what he would have wanted—he saw it as proof of the impossibility of his dreams.
As it happened, I had become a minor celebrity. People recognized me in public. I did interviews, I went to LA to shoot a pilot. For the first time I saw a continuum to my career: Andre had led to Crisipins, Crispins had led to Bryan, Bryan led me to Paul, Paul got me the audition for the soap. There were connections, it did come together if you hung in there, and I wanted Irene and Patrick to believe this too. I thought my success should encourage them. Patrick had done especially well—from The Rehearsal on, once he had met Bryan’s agent: shows at the Goodman, the Guthrie, only Broadway or a hit at the Public Theater would have been better credits. Then there was Kentucky, although it fizzled. He auditioned for really superior jobs, and was almost always called back. But starting in the summer his auditions dropped off, as though Sidney had lost faith in him. I thought of the Guthrie, of his unhappiness there, and his abrupt departure. I thought of Kentucky, where he was fired. I called Paul and asked what he had heard about Patrick. “Who knows what happened?” he said. “It’s a freaky business.” I asked him to call his old agency, where Sidney worked, but all he said when he got back to me was that Patrick was difficult, and that the business was too overcrowded for actors who didn’t cooperate—people just didn’t have to contend with all that. He didn’t say this presumptively, but I still didn’t like it. And I didn’t buy it either. Everyone said Barbra Streisand was difficult and she was a star. In this business, you’d be an idiot not to be difficult.
One morning in Makeup with Suzie Glines, who played my mother on the soap, Suzie said, “Hey Holt, you’re supposed to be enjoying this.”
“I am,” I said. Suzie was my best friend on the show. Like Colin, she came out of the theater, but in her late-thirties she got her first soap and she’d been with them for twenty-two years; on our show for eighteen. She looked like an older, leaner version of my mother.
“You seem a little world-weary to me, and you shouldn’t be.”
“Suzie,” I said, “if you were me, what would you do? Would you stay with the show like you did, or go back to the theater?”
“You’ve acted long enough to know it’s pragmatic,” she answered. “You take what you can get.” She looked at me in the mirror. “But if I were a man? If I were young?” There were twice as many roles for men in the theater as for women; and twice as many actresses as actors. In commercials the quota was ten to one. Rotten odds.
“If I were you,” she told me, “I’d finish out your contract, take the money and the exposure and run. Do Macbeth, do Chekhov, wherever you can. Oh boy, had I been free”—she had four children—“what I would have done.”
She was sincere, though not bitter. Soaps had allowed her to do what she liked—act—and have a good, solid middle-class life. “Which it’s tough to do without,” she’d said, “if you’ve been raised in it.”
“Robert,” she said, “you have everything.” I wondered why I couldn’t feel it.
Outside the studio at the end of the day I walked to the subway. I hadn’t taken the subway in months. I relished the ride, the hard plastic benches, the puffs of heat from the vents warming on my legs. It was Patrick’s birthday, and I stopped off at a florist’s and bought him an enormous bunch of red roses and walked to O’Toole’s.
Herbert, Patrick’s extremely short friend from the Guthrie, sat at the bar drinking a Budweiser. Herbert was cheap. But at the sight of my roses he was mortified. “All I got him was a package of Famous Amos.”
“I like Famous Amos,” Patrick said graciously.
“He told me not to get anything,” said Herbert. “You liked what I got you last year,” he said to Patrick.
“Yes, I did,” Patrick said, “I like those Talking Heads.”
“Oh, well a tape,” said Herbert, “isn’t much either. I can never think of anything good enough.” Herbert had creases ironed down the sleeves of his jean jacket. The day was cold and sunny. Inside all the ceiling ferns and brass railings and the black-and-white tiles were lit up so cheerfully it was hard to believe it was winter. Patrick seemed happy, bustling about among his bottles, looking dapper in a big black bow tie.
“Hey hey hey hey,” said Jeffrey, the boss, walking by, “Mr. TV.”
“Hey Jeffre-ey,” I called, waving my bottle of Guinness at his back. “I can’t stand him,” I said to Herbert. I turned to Patrick, “Why you voluntarily submit yourself to Jeffrey’s managerial éclat I cannot understand.”
“Jeffrey’s jealous of you,” Herbert said to me.
“Only because he imagines that I have a wider access to women.”
“Don’t you?” said Herbert.
“No,” I said.
Alix finished her shift and joined us. She was also having it rough in the business. She had a new haircut; very short, very simple, very Alix; very nice. “You’re fetching,” I said, putting my arm around her and giving her a kiss.
“How’s Irene?” she asked me.
“I don’t know. Patrick, how is Irene?”
“In the ether,” he told Alix, “everywhere at once. For all we know she could be watching us now.”
“Irene?” Herbert said, peeking over the bar, “are you there?” Irene had taken a course on astrology at the Ansonia where she made friends with a medium who could purportedly communicate with Irene’s dead mother. Of late, Irene had been reciting a prayer that had to do with white light.
“How are you feeling?” I asked Alix.
“I have nothing to live for,” she said. “But I called Boston. I’ll take the train up and audition. I’m opposed, you know, to auditions.”
“A formality,” I told her, “you’ll knock ’em out of their chairs.”
“I hate auditions,” Herbert said. “I’d work for anyone who didn’t make me audition.”
Looking at Patrick more closely, I saw that beneath his veneer he didn’t look good. He filled orders for waiters and waitresses, shook a martini for a customer, then slid his rag along surfaces, glancing at us with disinterest. Surely this was a phase and it would pass. I wanted to tell him something profound and encouraging. Better yet, something clever and bracing. But we had established such a routine of speaking to each other indirectly that I really didn’t know how else to talk to him.
THE NEXT NIGHT Patrick and I went out to dinner. Coming home, he and I turned from Fifth onto Fourteenth and saw an ambulance and a snarl of traffic, heard a rise of voices above the regular din. As we entered the lobby they brought out a man on a gurney. I saw him beneath the bright lobby lights, being wheeled past Charles, the night doorman who must have been just coming on, and I had the absurd notion that Charles, a sad person already, should not have had to see this. His already ashy complexion approached dark gray and his expressive hands whirled at his sides.
Our intimate confrontation with the man on the gurney was so concentrated, and the man himself so brilliantly alive and wounded and prone there, stripped of his shirt amidst the lights and mirrors and running people in jackets and coats, it wasn’t easy to register anything else. He was younger than Patrick and me, a bottle of glucose was attached to a tube in his arm and held aloft by the man running beside him in a crouch. A sheet was pulled up to his chest and on his chest was a pad lit up with blood of a color so red it verged on orange, not the dark red of a cut finger. It was a mortal wound clearly; yet his complexion was healthy, pink, he was well nourished, his shoulders and arms heavily fleshed, and his hair, carefully styled into loose brown curls, was so much the hair of a living breathing person, I had the impression of it breathing itself, in how it shined, in its contrast along with the color of his skin to the much more vehement, unnatural, and victorious color of the wound.
A Company of Three Page 17
