by Tom Hanks
So why was New York, New York, making her cry? Her first night in the city, when Rebecca took her via the bus to see Lincoln Center, Sue had looked at all the locals along upper Broadway and actually asked, “Where is everyone going?” She now knew that everyone was going everywhere. This morning, she was going to the bank, the Manufacturers Hanover branch where she had opened an account five weeks before. From behind a Plexiglas (bulletproof) wall, a disinterested female teller slid a ten-dollar bill, a fiver, and five ones through a slot, leaving it to Sue to note that her savings were now down to exactly $564. She had spent more than $200 in New York City and had nothing to show for it but a five-buck umbrella, a blue one with a telescoping handle.
From the bank, Sue went to a donut shop for one plain cake—which was the least expensive—and a coffee with sugar and half-and-half. That was breakfast. She ate standing at a counter sticky from bits of sugar glaze and spilled java. Barely fortified, she walked to the office of Apartment Finders on Columbus Avenue, which was up a wide flight of stairs and above a Hunan Chinese restaurant. The posted listings on the wall had not changed since Saturday, but Sue searched the bulletin board anyway, for a diamond chipped off a ring, for an overlooked gem, for a place with her name on it. Apartment Finders had cost her fifty dollars a month, money she might as well have used to light candles. She would come back later in the day, when, supposedly, new listings were posted, but she already knew her hopes were sure to be dashed again.
Sue decided she was adapting to Gotham, because she turned on her heel and headed back over to Broadway with an agenda for the day. She would not blow time by idly walking in Central Park, with its weedy lawns and cracked benches, dirty sandlots and pathways littered with discarded coffee cups, spent condoms, and other trash. She would not filter through the record stores and bookstores without buying any of the titles. She would not spend money on the trade papers—Show Biz, Back Stage, or Daily Variety—looking for notices of Equity Principal Interviews or auditions for Non-Equity Showcases. Not today. Today, she was going to the Public Library, the famous building at Forty-Second and Fifth, the landmark building with the stone lions in front.
Two blocks from the Eighty-Sixth Street subway station, the rain started. Sue halted, reached for her umbrella, pushed the button on the telescoping handle, but the handle did not telescope. She pulled on the fabric of the thing, forcing it open, but in doing so bent some of the spokes. When she tried to slide the plastic knob up the shaft, the umbrella bent like the leg of a card table. She shook the umbrella and tried forcing the knob, but only half of the cover deployed. With the rain getting heavy, she recocked and again tried to get the umbrella open, but it inverted into a scoop and more of the spokes disconnected like severed ribs.
Giving up, she tried to jam the worthless skeleton into an overflowing trash bin at Broadway and Eighty-Eighth, but the umbrella seemed to fight back, refusing to go in with the other garbage. It took her four tries before it stayed put.
Sue hurried to the subway station. Her hair was dripping from the rain as she stood in line at the kiosk to purchase the two tokens she would need for the day’s travels.
The local trains were delayed. A flood on the uptown tracks. The crowd grew on the platform, large enough that Sue was edged ever closer to the yellow safety line. One bump and she could have fallen onto the tracks. Forty minutes later, she was standing in a subway car so crowded the riders were crammed against each other, their body heat making steam rise from their heavy, rain-soaked coats. The car was so stuffy and hot Sue began sweating. At Columbus Circle the car stopped and did not move for ten minutes, the doors jammed shut, preventing escape. Finally, at Times Square, Sue pushed herself out of the car and into the stream of people who had managed to find the stairs. She tramped up and up and through the turnstiles, then up more stairs and out into the chaos of the Crossroads of the World, where everybody was going everywhere.
Times Square was an exterior version of the station below—filthy, flooded, and overcharged with people. Sue had learned a primary lesson since her arrival in the city, to keep moving, to walk with purpose even when she had none, especially along Forty-Second Street, dodging the human debris that collected there for the drugs, the porn, and, in the rain, to peddle five-dollar umbrellas.
She’d navigated the area before, seeking appointments at the lesser talent agencies, those with offices close by the big X where Broadway crossed Seventh Avenue. She had been surprised to find normal people at normal desks doing normal business just floors above the hissing concrete of Times Square. She had no luck with any of the agents—she never made it past the outer offices—so was reduced to leaving her résumé with secretaries who would say, “Yeah, okay,” in a tone remarkably similar to her temporary cohost Shelley’s.
On this Monday, her agenda was her résumé.
During her last month in Scottsdale, Sue had done two TV commercials for Valley Home Furniture, sweeping her arms wide, exclaiming, “Every room, every style, every budget!” Then, for four weekends, she had acted at the Autumnal Renaissance Faire, quoting Shakespeare as a Lusty Wench for thirty dollars a day. She had added those credits to her résumé with a ballpoint pen, but she knew it looked, well, amateurish. So she was going to retype the whole thing, get an offset printer to make a hundred copies, then staple one each to the backs of her head shots, the photo that made her look like Cheryl Ladd from Charlie’s Angels but with real cleavage.
The problem was that she had no typewriter, nor did Rebecca. When Sue asked Shelley if she had a machine she could use, she didn’t say no but did tell her, “They rent them at the library.” That’s why Sue Gliebe was umbrellaless, navigating eastward on Forty-Second Street, passing a stoned-looking teenager who had pulled his penis out of his pants and was pissing as he stumbled along. Not a single person made note of the sight.
The exact moment Sue discovered that the Main Library was closed on Mondays, a flash of lightning bleached the scraped sky of Mid-Manhattan. She stood at the side entrance to the landmark building, its door locked, unable to comprehend the meaning of those three simple words: Closed on Mondays. Just as a roll of thunder outblared the honking horns of traffic, she lost the battle against tears, the collective disappointments simply too much: New York City roommates were not friendly soul sisters; Central Park was a place of naked trees, unusable benches, and spent rubbers; windows had security gates that locked rapists out and victims in; no cute sailors were waiting to meet a girl and get a kiss. No. In New York City real estate parlors took your money and lied to you, drug addicts relieved themselves in plain sight, and the Public Library was closed on Mondays.
Sue was crying, right there on Forty-Second Street between Fifth Avenue and Sixth or, according to the map, the Avenue of the Americas. Sobbing, gasping, tears, the big show. As many people as had made note of the stoned guy’s penis stopped to help or even look at the girl who was having so terrible a day that she was weeping aloud in public. Until…
“Sue Gliebe!” a man’s voice called out. “You little titmouse!”
Bob Roy was the only man in the world who called her a titmouse. Bob Roy had been the general business manager of the ACLO but lived in New York City. He was a Theater Professional contracted for the season and a homosexual. He had once been an actor on Broadway and he’d done commercials in the 1960s but went into theater management for steady work. Running the Civic Light Opera out west was a summer camp for him—he did it every year—and took his duties a little less seriously than he did laughing and gossiping. Bob Roy seemed to know everything about the Theater, and if you worked in his company, if he signed your paychecks, he either loved you or loathed you. Your treatment completely depended on which way his judgmental wind blew.
He loved Sue Gliebe from the moment he saw her at a dress rehearsal for Brigadoon in the summer of ’76. He delighted in her youth, her halo of honey-blond hair, her clear eyes full of good nature, and her conscientious work ethic. He adored her for showing up on time, knowin
g her lines, and having ideas for her onstage business. He was fascinated by her tanned body and firm boobs and her lack of self-consciousness, ego, and spite. Every straight man—all seven of them—at the ACLO wanted to fuck her, but she wasn’t that way. Most actresses craved such adoration and demanded the largest dressing room, but Sue Gliebe wanted nothing more than to be onstage. After three seasons, she had not changed a whit and Bob Roy loved her all the more.
He was in a taxi at the curb, the window rolled down with the rain falling between them. “Get in this cab right now!” he ordered.
He slid over to make room for her and the cab moved along. “I’d have bet on seeing Eva Gabor on Forty-Second Street before you. Are you crying?”
“No. Yes. Oh, Bobby!”
Sue explained: She had been in the city for two months, sleeping on Rebecca’s couch. Her savings were running out. No agents would give her the time of day. She saw a man pissing in the street. She was crying now, in particular, because the only movies that told the truth about New York City were about needle parks and taxi drivers on killing sprees. Bob Roy laughed out loud! “You’ve been in Noo Yawk for two months and haven’t called me? Naughty, Sue. Naughty, naughty.”
“I didn’t have your number.”
“What were you doing in Slime Square?”
“Going to the library.”
“To check out the latest Nancy Drew mystery? I’d have guessed you’d read them all by now.”
“They have typewriters. I need to create a new résumé.”
“Titmouse,” Bob said. “Start with a new you first. How about a cup of tea or hot Postum? Whatever soothed Baby Sue growing up in Indian Country.”
The taxi took them to Bob’s apartment downtown—to a terrible neighborhood where all the buildings were six-story tenements and the sidewalks were lined with beaten-up trash cans. He gave the driver six dollars and asked for no change. She followed him out into the rain, up the stoop, through the heavy main door, then four flights up a narrow, zigzagging stairway to apartment 4D. He needed keys for three different locks on the door.
From the dingy, dimly lit hallway, the walls more dirty gray than the original green, the floor a maze of broken and mismatched tiles, Sue stepped into a haven that smelled of candles and lemon-scented dish soap, a cabinet of curiosities, one of which was the bathtub smack dab in the middle of the small kitchen. Bob Roy’s railroad flat was four tight, connected rooms, each stuffed with koombies, knickknacks, doodads, furniture pieces of any style, shelves, books, photos in frames, trophies bought from flea markets, old records, small lamps, and calendars from decades before. “I know,” he said. “It looks like I sell magic potions in here, like I’m an animated badger from a Disney cartoon.” He lit a burner on the stove with a huge kitchen match, then filled a shiny, Olde English–style kettle with water from the tap. As he prepared cups on a tray he said, “Tea in minutes, titmouse. Make a home for yourself.”
The room off the kitchen was really a hallway, a narrow passage through treasures and castoffs. The sitting room featured three large chairs of different eras, one a La-Z-Boy, each covered with a colorful throw of some kind. A circular coffee table, nearly too large for the square space, was covered with stacks of books, a cigar box full of sharpened pencils, a vase with an artificial orchid, and two assembled toy bugs from the Cootie game, posed like they were either fighting or mating. The rain was still coming down hard outside, but window curtains that could have come from an antebellum mansion muffled the roar of the storm. The last room in the railroad flat was Bob’s bedroom, most of it taken up by a four-poster bed.
“I can never move out of this place, it would take me years to pack,” Bob called from the kitchen, only eight feet away. “Turn on the radio, would you?”
“If I can find it,” Sue said and heard his laugh in response. She had to focus out so much clutter, like she was in a Lost and Found Forgotten by Time, until she saw it. The radio was a blond-wood-paneled box as big as an ice chest, with circular knobs like thick poker chips and four lines of numbers for different frequencies. She turned the ON/OFF VOLUME until its satisfying kock was so loud Bob heard it from the kitchen.
“The tubes have to warm up,” he said.
“Does this get shortwave from the Soviet Union?”
“How’d you know?”
“My grandma had a radio like this.”
“So did mine! In fact, that’s it.”
Bob came in with a tray on which were two cups, a pitcher of milk, a sugar bowl with a painted honeybee on the lid, and a plate stacked with Oreo cookies. “Feel free to take off your coat, unless you like being damp.” Orchestral music came from the radio just as the teakettle sounded its harmonic toot.
Sweet tea with milk, three Oreos, and Bob Roy’s snug and cozy flat helped Sue breathe deeply for the first time in months. She let out a sigh as big as a cresting wave and leaned back into a chair so soft it put the z in cozy.
“Okay,” Bob said. “Tell me everything.”
She opened up about, well, everything, cued by Bob’s sympathy. He uttered his support at every story, every anecdote: New York was the only place for Sue to be! Shelley and her “yeah, okay” attitude were to be expected from such a see-you-next-Tuesday! The subway was survivable as long as you never made eye contact with anyone. You found an apartment by reading the Rental classifieds in the Times and The Village Voice, but you had to get them early, at seven in the morning, and then you had to hightail it to the apartments with a bag of donuts because the super would always open up for a pretty girl who shared her donuts. From there, they moved back in time, reminiscing about the summer seasons in Arizona, comparing the backstage gossip to that from the front office, the love affairs gone horrible, and how Sue thought Monty Hall was a solid professional. Bob spilled his tea, laughing.
“Have you had any lunch?”
“No. I was going to treat myself to a slice of pizza pie.” At half a dollar per wedge, pizza had become Sue’s standby meal at midday.
“Let me go out for deli. You strip out of that uniform of yours and take a hot bath. I’ll leave you a robe I stole from a spa in the desert, then we’ll eat like middle class Jews.”
In the kitchen, he removed a large butcher board that covered the bathtub. Why a tub was in the kitchen had something to do with the original plumbing of the old building. He turned on the water, so hot plumes of steam hazed the security-gated window, and laid the robe across a chair. A delicate wicker basket held scented soap, shampoo, conditioner, an organic sponge, and a pitcher to fill with water and rinse with.
“I’ll take my time. You soak.” Bob locked two of the front door locks behind him.
After the weak, abbreviated showers uptown, Sue relished the feel of hot water on her skin and the pouring of water over her head. It was funny, taking a bath in a kitchen like this, but she was alone, the bath was like the hot tub on the Gliebe family patio, and Sue scrubbed, rinsed, and soaked her way to being truly, wonderfully clean. She was still soaking when the front door locks were opened and Bob returned carrying a large bag of deli.
“Still naked, I see.” Bob didn’t bother averting his eyes, and Sue didn’t mind. If “backstage was no place for modesty,” as they said in the Theater, Bob Roy’s kitchen was no place for blushing.
Sue’s now pale limbs were swimming in the man-size terry-cloth robe as she sat at the coffee table, running a comb through her damp hair. Bob set down some half sandwiches, small cartons of soup, coleslaw, pickle wedges, and cans of what was called seltzer and, over lunch, they talked about movies and plays. Bob said he could get her free tickets to the lousy shows on Broadway and cheap seats for the hits, so there would be no more evenings in New York with nothing to do but be unpopular on Rebecca’s couch. He’d call around to his friends for tips on agents who could arrange a meeting or two, no promises beyond that. He knew a few rehearsal pianists who would help with her audition numbers, with sheet music, transposed for her key. “Okay, titmouse,” Bob said, cla
pping rye crumbs from his fingers. “Let me see this résumé of yours.”
Sue pulled the old version out of her purse as Bob grabbed a pencil. After a quick once-over, he drew a big X on the paper with a sigh. “Standard. So standard.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Sue was hurt. She had worked hard on the thing. Her stage career was on that piece of paper. All the plays she had done in high school, including the one-acts, asterisked with *Thespian Society Award*. Every performance she had ever given at the ACLO, from member of the chorus right up to last year’s turn as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific. Five seasons and eighteen musicals! The productions at the Gaslamp Playhouse Dinner Theater—Emily in Our Town and the Ensemble in Zoo Story. The Narration she did for the Diabetes Walk-a-thon public service message. Every performance Sue Gliebe had ever given was listed on that résumé.
