I Shudder

by Paul Rudnick

  After tea and pastries, most of the guests left, but I stayed and watched a PBS documentary with Mary Wood, a historical program that involved slavery and the antebellum era. “Slavery,” said Mary Wood, thoughtfully. “It was all really so very long ago, and no one really knows what happened. So at my school, with my sixth graders, I just don’t teach it.”

  I didn’t think that Mary Wood was being racist; she simply believed that any historical discussion should emphasize the more positive aspects of, for example, floggings and executions. As we talked, I realized that Mary Wood was no fool. This was a woman who, throughout her life and certainly her marriage, had known great challenges, and in each case she’d weighed her options and made a judgment call. Her family, I felt sure, was her main priority, followed by God, community service, and maintaining a pleasant tone of voice at all times. She’d made the best of things, she’d raised spectacular children, and during the summer months she got to wear a crown, tax the colonies, and maybe consider having certain people beheaded.

  Once William’s parents had gone, I told him, “Your father is really something.”

  “My father…,” said William, and he took a deep breath. “My father is a very difficult man. But I can’t hate him. And I won’t let anyone else hate him.”

  “Why not?”

  “You have to understand, my father’s family had a farm. And he left that farm and he worked in the theater. That was like—running away to join the circus.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, he wanted to be a playwright. And I know that in high school and at college, he wrote all sorts of plays, and the schools would put them on. He loved it.”

  “So why did he stop?”

  “I don’t know, he doesn’t talk about it. But there was the war, and he was in the army, and then he got married. He had a family. But he always told me and my brother that someday, he’d drive us all up north, and he’d let us see New York. But only the skyline. It was clear that we could see it, but we wouldn’t go into the city.”

  “But why not?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe he was scared, or maybe it just didn’t suit him. But that was a very different time.”

  I was suddenly ashamed. I’d been angry at William’s father, because he’d seemed like a bully, and because I didn’t think he understood his son. But just like me, Mr. Long had wanted to be a playwright. And maybe he’d moved on, to something more satisfying, or maybe he still wondered what might have been, if he’d checked into his own version of the Chelsea Hotel. Maybe he was jealous of William, or maybe he was rightfully concerned about his son’s life—what if, for William, New York went terribly wrong?

  “We had such a marvelous time with you all in NYC,” wrote Mary Wood, in her next letter, “and Billy, I’m certain that, in time, you are going to do so very well. Please give my best to all of your friends, and to that person who lives next door. Isn’t he something! Selah.” I wasn’t familiar with the word “selah,” with which Mary Wood closed all her letters, but it turned out to be derived from a difficult-to-translate Hebrew term, meaning something along the lines of “Amen.”

  5.

  One day, not long after his parents’ visit, William sent out invitations to a really joyous occasion: his twenty-one-year-old sister, Laura, was coming up for a visit, and William was throwing a birthday party for her, at the Chelsea. I hadn’t met Laura, but William had told me this: she was retarded.

  This was in the 1980s, before the word “retarded” was replaced with “developmentally disabled.” When William said that his sister was retarded, there was nothing belittling or derogatory in the term. William adored his sister, and he was very matter-of-fact about her life; as always, I was the one with the problem.

  At my elementary school in New Jersey there had been special classes for the retarded students, divided between the less highly functioning kids, called the Trainables, and the more adept kids, called the Educables. While some of these people had physical features that marked them as retarded, most of them looked just like the rest of us, meaning the kids who couldn’t be helped at all: public school students from New Jersey.

  I’d seen misguided TV movies about the retarded, and there was usually a male and a female, who would fall in love and yearn to be married, “like people.” The actors playing these roles would use ridiculous, mushmouthed vocal patterns, and the guys would wear baseball caps and baggy pants yanked to mid-chest, to expose their pasty, hairy shins and white tube socks, while the actresses went for shapeless housedresses and multiple barrettes. I was always thrown by the scientific designation “profoundly retarded,” because it sounded so bottomless and final, and I could hear a neurologist telling my parents, “Oh, Paul isn’t just run-of-the-mill. Oh no, Paul is profoundly retarded.” The only phrase that was anywhere near as upsetting was “morbidly obese,” which sounds like a Sherlock Holmes solution: “Evelyn was killed by her own enormous thighs. She was morbidly obese.”

  When I was in seventh grade, I got a job working as a counselor at a Headstart program, and the bus that picked me up also drove many retarded kids to a nearby day camp. These kids were all perfectly well-behaved, but they often sat next to me, and this was my fear: I became convinced that the bus driver would assume that I was retarded and force me to get off the bus at the day camp. I would protest, and offer to take an IQ test, but of course no one would believe me. “That’s what they all say,” the driver would chortle. My parents would either lose track of me in the system, or they’d refuse to identify me: “Maybe now you won’t be such a smart-ass. No, Officer, we’ve never seen him before in our lives. I mean, just look at him—he’s retarded.”

  I survived that summer, and I assumed that, once I was out of schools and colleges forever, I’d never mix with retarded people ever again; our social circles just wouldn’t overlap. And while I knew that William’s sister was retarded, I never thought there’d be actual contact. William, sensing my discomfort, said, “You don’t understand. This is my sister. I expect you to marry her.”

  William’s parents, he eventually explained, had been determined to offer Laura the most equal and loving upbringing. She was included in all family activities, and was encouraged to develop every possible talent. Her favorite book was Gone with the Wind, and she was not only a trained singer but had won a medal at the Special Olympics in horseback riding. She’d met with the governor of North Carolina, to discuss his programs for the handicapped, and she was a fan of the opera star Beverly Sills, who had a retarded son. The more I learned about Laura’s accomplishments, the more intimidated I became; now I wasn’t just scared, I was jealous.

  William wanted Laura’s visit to be perfect, so he became unbearably bossy. I should mention here that bossiness is one of William’s most finely honed traits, and that he had been expelled from kindergarten for threatening the other children, until they agreed to wear his homemade robes and burnooses and pose in biblical tableaux. I was told to buy Laura a birthday gift, only “Don’t get anything too complicated, or something that could break, or anything disgusting.”

  “What about a nice scarf?” I asked.

  “Fine, but not a square, it should be a rectangle, so she can tie it.”

  “What about a nice cream-colored rectangle?”

  “No, that could show stains, buy it in navy, and make sure it’s a hundred percent silk, so it can drape.”

  I did as I was told, and as I was wrapping the scarf, and writing a message on the gift card, William kept hounding me. “What are you writing?” he demanded. “Don’t write anything repulsive. I know you, and Laura is a proper young lady, so just write something sweet and decent. I can’t see what you’re doing, what are you writing?”

  “‘Get well soon.’”

  By the time Laura arrived, William and I were both nervous wrecks. She was being kept so occupied that I wouldn’t meet her until the birthday party itself. I dressed respectably and gathered with twenty of William’s friends in his parlor,
which had been made even more genteel for the occasion, with lace heirloom tablecloths, monogrammed linen napkins, tiered, pressed-glass serving pieces arranged with finger sandwiches, and a china tea service hand-painted with roses. Whatever William hadn’t inherited, he’d bought from thrift stores, so many of the monograms belonged to, as William put it, “very nice dead strangers.” Among the guests were Christopher, a sly and dashing set designer, and Candida, who was then in film school and supporting herself by working as an assistant to a hard-core pornographer. “I’m his right hand,” she liked to tell people.

  Laura was still out at a matinee, so we all sat balancing our tiny dessert plates on our knees, and sipping Earl Grey from doll-sized cups.

  “So, Billy’s sister, she’s, like, retarded, right?” asked Michael Neighbor.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, trying to sound blasé, as if I attended birthday parties for retarded girls every day.

  “Is she, like, totally retarded, like, is she gonna roll around?”

  “No, I think she’s…I don’t know, I think she’s…fine. She won a medal at the Special Olympics.”

  “I once had a cousin who was retarded,” Michael remembered, “but he was totally cool, he’d, like, pinch me, but then he’d hug me. He was so nice, he was always hugging everybody.”

  “Everybody,” said Candida, leering at me.

  “Shut up!” I told her.

  “Hello, hello, we’re late, we have no manners, we’re terrible, but we’re here!” William called out, from the front door. “Laura, look, it’s your party!”

  Laura entered, regally. She made one thing instantly clear: while her brother might be bossy, there was only one Guest of Honor. Her face had a certain roundness, and when she spoke she often rolled her eyes upward, but the real word for Laura Ann Long was ladylike. She had short, henna-tinted hair brushed into neat bangs, and she was wearing white button earrings, white cotton gloves, glossy black patent-leather pumps, and a sharply tailored aqua doubleknit shirtwaist dress with gold buttons; William later mentioned that “Only the elderly and the retarded are allowed to wear doubleknit, in case something spills.” Laura carried an oval, black patent-leather purse and immediately greeted her guests: “Hello, everybody, I’m Laura Ann Long, and I’d like to thank you all for coming to my party! Aren’t you sweet!”

  William escorted Laura to a central armchair, where she managed the true first lady technique of speaking to several people at once, and making everyone feel cared for. “Why, Ronnie,” she told a Broadway dancer whom she’d known when he was a teenager in Rock Hill, “I haven’t seen you in ages. You are looking very nice and skinny, I must say. I have put on a few pounds, and so has William.”

  “Laura!” William sputtered.

  “But we are trying to diet. And, everyone, this is Claire Mallory North, who took me to the Metropolitan Museum and showed me the most beautiful French paintings, you must all see them, although Claire told me that people who live in New York are lazy and never go to museums. Is that true? No, William, I do not need another cookie, and neither do you. And, Christopher, you were so kind to take me to the nicest dinner, and your red sweater is very becoming, but I don’t know if I approve of your mustache. But it does make you look very handsome.”

  Laura was not only by far the best-mannered person in the room, she was flirtatious. She spoke with a slight singsongy lilt, and I kept thinking about the opening, outdoor party in the movie of Gone with the Wind, where Scarlett O’Hara bewitches the Tarleton twins. All of the new faces were introduced to Laura one at a time, and finally I was presented. Because Laura was seated, and because she so thoroughly outclassed me, I knelt. “Laura, this is Paul Rudnick,” said William, as if he were peering at my calling card through a lorgnette.

  “Well, of course it is,” said Laura, “and I have heard just so much about you. My brother William says that you are very nice, for a Yankee.”

  “And a Jew,” Christopher whispered in my ear.

  “Laura, you look beautiful,” I said, because suddenly all I wanted was her approval, as if she could bestow knighthoods.

  “Why thank you, you are very kind. I bought this dress with my mother at the Galleria in Raleigh, and I have saved it for my very first visit to New York. Because it is a special occasion, and I do not like to wear slacks.”

  “Me neither,” Christopher whispered.

  “Now, Laura,” William prompted, “Paul has a birthday gift for you. Rudnick, give her your present.”

  “Why, thank you, I am just getting too many presents, although can a girl ever really have too many? Oh, isn’t this nice. It’s a scarf. William, should I wear it right now?”

  As William helped Laura to knot and arrange the scarf, it occurred to me that Laura had her own in-house designer and stylist. I later saw a snapshot of Laura wearing a costume William had recut for her; she was posed in her front yard in a cotillion-on-the-levee hoopskirt with a fringed shawl and a swooping picture hat. William believed in the curative power of clothing. As an undergraduate he’d earned money by looking after an ailing, local lady novelist. He’d kept her fed and clean as her Alzheimer’s had progressed. She liked parties, so William would dress her in a long velvet tunic and a wizard’s pointed hat, and push her wheelchair up to the punch bowl. “I loved her very much,” he’d told me. “But I had to watch her, because she’d take off her shoes and chew on them.”

  After the birthday cake was served, we all moved our chairs into a circle, for the concert portion of the party. Laura stood at the center of the group, and nodded to her brother Robert, who was three years younger than William, and who’d graduated from the Drama School himself, where he’d studied the actual design of theaters, the architecture and acoustics; “Man stuff,” William had sniffed, “plus he’s married, so my parents approve.” Robert was tall, trim, and owlish, with gleaming eyes and a neat, natty mustache, and he was remarkably good-natured about being the spawn of an unusual family.

  Years later, Robert became engaged to the woman who would become his second wife, but she was Danish, so the Longs became wildly suspicious, and considered hiring a private detective, or contacting the FBI. “We think she’s a Communist,” William knowingly told me.

  “But Denmark isn’t a Communist country,” I said, at a loss.

  “Oh, so you know everything,” William replied, haughtily.

  At Laura’s party, Robert held a fifteen-year-old tape recorder, patched together with duct tape. As he pressed play, we heard a halting but tuneful piano accompaniment, as supplied by Laura’s seventy-eight-year-old music teacher.

  Laura kept the beat by firmly nodding her head, and she sang in a small but perfectly pitched soprano, with a turn-of-the-century trill. She sang “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” and, as a novelty, “I Feel Pretty,” from West Side Story, for which she used a filigreed hand mirror as a prop, admiring her own reflection and smoothing her bangs. This could have seemed cruel, except Laura was pretty. As she sang, Candida whispered to me, “Take it off, baby.”

  I was sitting in between a male hustler and a no-holds-barred lesbian, in a room at the Chelsea Hotel, listening to a retarded girl gorgeously warble Stephen Foster. Laura had conquered New York. As her guests left, we gushed and kissed her hand and carried on; as always, William knew how to throw a party. Just before I left, I overheard Laura say to her brother, “William, they all seem very nice, but your friends are crazy.”

  A few days later, after Laura had returned home, I received a thank-you note, and while Laura’s wobbly block letters slanted into the corner of the card, her handwriting was still more legible than William’s. Back at the Chelsea, I complimented William on the party. “Did you really have a good time?” he asked. “Even with the singing and all?”

  “Are you insane? It was fantastic. Your sister is amazing. But I still do have one question.”

  “Yes?”

  “Is Laura retarded, or just southern?”

  “Shut up!”


  6.

  It’s July 2005. To celebrate William’s fiftieth Broadway show, the playwright Wendy Wasserstein, the director/choreographer Susan Stroman, and I are throwing him a party. Or, more accurately, because the party’s for William, we’re all just the official hosts, while he’s doing all the work; the official hosts aren’t being lazy, we just know William well enough to stay out of his way. I arrive at seven p.m. at the Boathouse in Central Park. This is a glassed-in pavilion, set on the lake in the breeze and the moonlight. The evening is clearly a collaboration between God and William, who by now pretty much rules Broadway; he’s won five Tony Awards and has shows like Chicago and Hairspray running all over the world.

  Tonight William and his staff—he now has a staff—have, as usual, outdone themselves. Custom-made mannequins are grouped around the Boathouse, arranged by theme, all wearing examples of William’s genius: in one corner a batch of neon checkerboard suits, from a smash revival of Guys and Dolls, face off with a bevy of preening chorus girls draped only in miles of shimmering pearls, from The Producers, who challenge the memorably torrid sex bomb from Nine, in her spike heels and second-skin black-lace bodysuit. It’s like touring William’s mind, where all of the neurons are popping with color and sex and joy.

  “Rudnick,” William asks, with a combination of nerves, anxious hope, and secret pride, “is it too much? Is it all right?”

  “It’s the best,” I tell him, but he’s already being dragged off by any of his several hundred closest friends. Everyone is being Polaroided, and their snapshots are then pinned to a beribboned peasant headdress William calls the Friendship Hat. William has been adding to this hat for years, so it now trails hundreds of giddy photographs; only William could figure out a way to wear his life.

  “Doesn’t everything look beautiful?” says Wendy. “Isn’t William amazing?”

  “William is out of his mind,” we agree, in unison.

  The evening is absurdly perfect, a dream of New York. This may be William’s truest gift: he can actually make the world behave, and glitter, at his command. At moments like this it’s hard to believe that he doesn’t own a wand, or some ancient book of spells, or a lifetime supply of the most powerful, forbidden hallucinogens.