by Jill Ciment
The first time she’d hidden in that small dark space after Vida had arrived home unexpectedly, the sensory depravation had come as a relief. No more having to affect bravery when all she felt was fear. She spent the first hour of her confinement eating chocolates from Vida’s stash, the only sound her lips sucking contentedly on the sugar. But when the chocolates were finished and she opened her eyes, all she saw was blackness. She reached to either side of her prone body: walls. The closet had been the length and breadth of a coffin. She panicked that she would suffocate alone in her dark grave. She went through her pockets and found a book of matches. Lighting one, she stared up at Vida’s hanging coats and dresses. The colors, so vibrant after the blackness, buoyed her spirits. Only when the flame singed her fingertips did she blow it out. By touch, she counted six more matches. Though she had always thought her mother a superstitious peasant, it had been her mother’s fire incantations that Anushka Sokolov had whispered in the dark. The next time she lit a match, she made an offering. She promised the flame everything she had in her red suitcase if only it wouldn’t go out. But out it went. She lit another and swore to the flame that she’d go back to Omsk, get married, and have babies, but the flame didn’t believe her. It hurried down the stick and burnt her fingers again. Finally, there were no more matches and nothing left to bargain with but her soul. That’s when she’d seen the ethereal glow emanating from the closet corner. She hadn’t been buried alive after all.
When Vida stepped onto the stage it wasn’t to bask in attention, it was to disappear.
To submit to another’s will and permit an alien soul to inhabit her body and control her expressions—all fifty-six facial muscles, and the coloration of her skin, and the tempo of her breathing, and her hair and teeth and cartilage and bones—was the deepest intimacy Vida knew. Acting gave her the only moments of respite she had from herself.
She had wanted to perform ever since she could remember, even after other children made it perfectly clear that her drama wasn’t necessarily playing in their heads. She spent hours at her mother’s vanity mirror, with its makeup pots and eyelash curler, reenacting scenes from television shows. By chance, she discovered that with a slight tensing of her forehead, she could make herself look Filipina like her mother, and with a loosening of that same brow appear Black Irish like her father. In high school, the assistant drama coach tried to discourage her from auditioning for Juliet by telling her that Asian faces were too enigmatic for the stage. She not only got the part, she won her first standing ovation. She arrived in Manhattan from Amityville, Long Island, in the early nineties, twenty years old, along with tens of thousands of other aspiring actors. She studied everything from classical voice training to Stanislavski, but the best book she ever read on the subject was Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. A teacher, an older man who had come to acting from stand-up comedy, had assigned it to her when she had been unable to relax during an improvisational skit. “Assuming the expression,” he had told her, “doesn’t just buy you time, it frees you.” Page after page, with objectivity and sly wit, Darwin deconstructed every possible configuration that a face might assume, every permutation of a smile, frown, wince, sneer, tick, and snarl, be it man’s or beast’s. The first time she had practiced an expression in front of the mirror as rigorously as Darwin had described it, it finally sank in—acting wasn’t about what you felt, it was about what you conveyed.
Take Darwin’s description of “horror.”
The raising of the eyebrows is necessary so the eyes open quickly and widely; this movement produces transverse wrinkles across the forehead. The degree to which the eyes and mouth are opened corresponds with the degree of horror felt; but these movements must be coordinated—a widely opened mouth with only slightly raised eyebrows results in a meaningless grimace.
Though outwardly Vida’s facial expression remained calm (she watched herself in the Manhattan-bound taxi’s rearview mirror), she could feel her eyebrows straining to rise, her eyes aching to pop open, whenever she thought of the mushroom. After checking into the Lohito Grand and taking a long, hot, necessary shower, she phoned her insurance company to find out what, exactly, her mold coverage was. During the hellish wait for a human voice, she caught her expression in one of the hotel room’s many mirrors. It was what Darwin described as “defiance”—a slight uncovering of the canine tooth on one side of the face. When a voice finally answered, she read off her policy number, longer than the national debt.
“Am I covered for mold?” Vida asked.
“Do you have a mold rider?”
“I have whatever you sold me.”
Vida heard nails clicking on keys.
“Your area is in an orange zone, no mold riders.”
“I must have some kind of mold coverage. I pay over eight thousand a year.”
“Do you have water damage?”
“My super says no.”
Again, the sharp clicking nails.
“What kind of mold is it?”
“The fire chief didn’t know.”
“The HAZMAT squad was called?”
Click, click, click, click.
“You’ll need to phone this number. It’s our mold rider division.”
“I thought you said I was in the orange zone.”
She didn’t call the mold division; she called Virginia, her manager and oldest friend in New York. They’d been roommates in their early twenties, splitting a railroad apartment over a booming gay bar in Alphabet City. They had painted the living room black. Vida had been Virginia’s first client, when Virginia defied her starchy judge father by not joining his old law practice and opening a theatrical agency instead. Lately, though, Vida heard mounting exasperation in Virginia’s tone whenever Vida demanded to know why Virginia wasn’t sending her out on auditions. Virginia had cautioned her as an agent and a friend that if Vida became the face of Ziberax she could damage her stage career. (“Desdemona on Ziberax might change the meaning of the play, don’t you think?”) But the renovations were costing a fortune, and Vida was tired of being poor.
After extracting a promise from Virginia that she’d call Vida’s insurance company and use her threatening lawyer-speak to find out what, exactly, was going to be covered, Vida poured herself a minibar Scotch and phoned her mother in the Philippines. Her mother had moved back to Lapu-Lapu City six years ago, after her father died. The sun would just be rising over the Cebu Sea. It was already tomorrow there.
When her mother answered, all Vida’s theatrics fell away, even her greatest role, the self-confident Vida, and she once again became wide-eyed, gap-mouthed Debbi.
She heard the news on an early-morning talk show while pouring herself a cup of room-service coffee: the actress playing Goneril in tonight’s King Lear at Shakespeare in the Park had fainted during yesterday’s steam-bath outdoor dress rehearsal and knocked out her front teeth. Vida immediately phoned the director, an old friend, to plead her case. She had just played Goneril last year with the ensemble, at the Stratford Festival, under his direction. It was exactly the sort of role that Vida was meant to play, and the director knew it. Why would he compromise with a mediocre understudy? The oldest daughter of King Lear, and one of Shakespeare’s most odious ladies, Goneril doesn’t especially have many memorable lines. How could she? She speaks only lies. Any actress who plays her must arrest the attention of the back row by her facial reactions to what others say in her presence, how she looks when her father says to her, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!” The director, with whom she’d had a tender but passionless affair, told her to come by at ten but promised nothing. During the initial casting, the producer had objected to Vida because of that asinine commercial.
Outside the Public Theater, a short walk from her hotel, Vida was about to turn off her cell when it vibrated. Virginia’s name appeared in the window. She let the phone shiver in her hand. She couldn’t risk becoming too distracted before the audition, tho
ugh the director had assured her that a reading wasn’t necessary, just a friendly chat with the producer. But not answering her phone proved even more distracting. “Am I covered?” she asked before Virginia’s call went to voicemail.
“The insurance agent assigned to your case is a snake,” Virginia said. “He wouldn’t give me a straight answer. In any case, nothing can be done or decided until the test results are in. Their people need to determine which kind of mold you have. Apparently, there are a million varieties. You can have your own experts examine the samples as well. Here’s the rub: some molds are covered by your policy while others are considered ‘acts of God,’ which essentially means your insurance company will refuse to pay.”
“How can they refuse? Aren’t all molds acts of God if you believe in Him, or not if you don’t? When did State Farm become religious?” asked Vida, trying to restrain her ire so that it didn’t taint the audition, though ire wouldn’t be such a ruinous thing to feel when reading for Goneril.
“Meantime, get your super to look around the basement for leaky pipes. If there’s a leak, it’s man-made, and that’s good. If there’s no leak, find out if your neighbors have mushrooms.”
There were still ten minutes before the audition. Normally, Vida would spend this lost time—what she called the waiting room of the imagination—walking around the block with great measure as if she were following her character, miming the way a queen might pull back her shoulders and tilt up her chin until her carriage looked puffed up with pride. But today, she called Frank instead.
“Frank, are there any leaks in the basement I don’t know about?”
“Place was dry last time I took out the garbage,” he said.
“Could you ask the neighbors if anyone else has mold, if anyone’s seen any mushrooms? They’re easy to spot. They glow in the dark.”
“I haven’t heard nothing about no glow, but Gladys found a mushroom growing out of her shower drain.”
“Where does Gladys live?”
“Right next door to you. She’s the lady with the cat hotel. She’s not admitting it now. Why would she? She don’t want to get kicked out of her house like you. Want to know what I think?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “It’s some kind of killer mold from when Hurricane Sandy mixed up with that old oil spill. It’s not just me thinking that either. It was on the internet.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Greenpoint oil spill, it was bigger than Valdez. Until the Gulf it was our biggest ever. It’s been leaking since 1940. Whenever the telephone company digs a hole for a pole, they strike oil.”
“I have to go, Frank, I have an audition.”
“What’s the part? You should make a movie about your life and call it Andromeda Strain II.”
Vida sat down before the director, a very thin, concave-chested man (no wonder the affair had been passionless), and the producer, a short man just shy of being a midget. The producer gave her the grin. She’d heard he was sleeping with the understudy.
Before either man could speak, Vida announced she would read from act one, Goneril’s groveling reply to the King’s petulant, vain question. The director fed her the cue lines: “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?… Goneril, our eldest born, speak first.”
Sir, I love you more than words can wield the matter;
Dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty;
Beyond what can be valued, rich or rare;
No less than life; with grace, health, beauty, honor;
As much as child e’er lov’d, or father found;
A love that makes breath poor and speech unable …
Vida paused. This pause was the make-or-break moment for any actress playing Goneril. In less than ten heartbeats, ruthlessness, wile, avarice, and betrayal must be conveyed in halted silence. But Vida wasn’t using the ten heartbeats to think about Goneril’s inheritance, she was thinking about the glowing mushrooms infesting her beloved home. Vida sensed her jaw muscles going slack and her eyes begin to open wide in horror. But the professional in her took charge, and only a rumble of fear crossed her features, intensifying the expression she was trying to achieve—icy calculation over molten treachery. When she spoke again, her tone was pure adoration and fidelity.
Beyond all manner of so much I love you.
She’d wiped that grin right off the producer’s face.
“Okay?” the director asked him.
He nodded in awed, capitulating silence.
Later, as she left the theater heady from the victory and still immersed in her performance, halfway between pre-Roman Britain and twenty-first-century Manhattan, she didn’t notice the opening salvos of a storm, or that the western sky was solid with purple and black thunderheads. Only when a cool wind stood her arm hairs on end was she aware that the temperature had dropped by degrees after three weeks of gelatinous humidity. The heavens were favoring her! What was Edmund’s line? Fools by heavenly compulsion. Minutes later, when the sky opened up and assaulted her with rubber-hard pellets of rain, she reveled in the beating.
“When God came to Noah and told him a great flood would come and cover the earth, Noah had forewarning according to tort law,” Edith used to tell the second-year law interns as she toured them around Price, Bloodworth’s library. “Did Noah take any actions to prevent the flood?” she would query their blank faces. “He never prayed for the wicked as Abraham did. He never warned his neighbors or business partners that if they didn’t amend their immoral, depraved conduct a deluge was imminent. He took no precautions to ensure the welfare of anyone else but himself and his own and his animals. Tort law is the calculus of negligence.”
She knew the interns didn’t really understand what a legal librarian did. They imagined it entailed filing away books after the lawyers were finished. They assumed the job required great organization but little imagination. To the contrary. The law wasn’t about ethics: it was about precedent and research. No lawyer billing six hundred an hour had the time or the inclination to truly grasp, as a good legal librarian did, the case-by-case, ruling-by-ruling, statute-by-statute, tome-by-tome law, which was, in Edith’s opinion, the very marrow of justice. To find precedent in that vast archive required something akin to inspiration. Edith would have a hunch and then unearth the facts until a precedent was exposed.
Here were the facts in the case she was building against Vida: Vida had been notified seven days previously about a foul odor and potential mold problem in the basement. Edith had left five additional voicemails in as many days notifying Vida about the dangerous infestation. She had also slipped a written complaint under Vida’s door, and mailed a certified copy of that letter, though she had no idea where it would be delivered now that the building had been condemned.
She was anxious about the archive. Each of the hundred-thousand-plus letters would need to be individually tested for spores, fumigated, and then retested. She could hardly ship them to the Smithsonian otherwise, risk infecting the National Archives. And could the oldest, most friable letters withstand whatever chemical bath they would be subjected to? How much would that cost?
She finally reached Vida the next morning. Vida must have been caught off guard, because Edith’s call didn’t transfer to voicemail like it had the previous ten times. Edith noted the hour: eleven sharp. She was keeping a log of her calls. She’d just gotten off the phone after seeking counsel from Stanley Flom, senior partner at Price, Bloodworth, the husband of Alice, Edith’s secret lover for twenty-two years.
“How dare you ignore my calls!” Edith’s voice detonated in pent-up rage when Vida answered. “My mother’s archives are being infested every minute you delay!”
“I know, I know. Can we talk a little later?” Vida said. “It’s pouring out and I didn’t bring an umbrella.”
Edith glanced out the hotel window for the first time that morning. The sky was swollen and violet, the expressway ablaze with headlights, but the streets looked dry.
“It’s not raining here
. Don’t you dare hang up on me, Vida. I need to know what’s going on and when we can safely go back. My mother’s archive is due at the Smithsonian by the end of next month. We’ll need to hire an archival conservator to work with the fumigators. What is your insurance policy going to cover?”
“The only thing I know for certain,” Vida shouted over the rumble of thunder, “is that my insurance company is trying to claim it’s an act of God and is threatening not to cover anything.”
The line went dead.
Edith didn’t believe for a second that a crack of lightning had interrupted the signal. Why would Vida employ that arcane term? Act of God. It was rarely used nowadays. It confused jurors, who might be awestruck by the concept of divine manifestation. “Act of Nature” was the popular term, though “act of God” remained the legal one. Vida must have already spoken to a real estate attorney, one with a savvy librarian, otherwise how would she have known that only an act of God could void their mother’s rent-controlled lease? Vida clearly intended to turn this temporary eviction into a permanent one.
After the disturbing call, Edith went to the window. Fistfuls of rain were now being thrown against the glass. She could no longer see the expressway, only red taillights, bleeding pinpricks in the downpour. Kat was out there somewhere. She’d slipped out while Edith was on the phone with Stanley. She’d taken the manuscript with her, the only letters Edith could be certain were safe, and now it was pouring out. She’d probably forgotten to take an umbrella.
Edith had nursed their mother during her protracted, pitiless illness with little assistance from Kat, except for the occasional, erratic visit from the West Coast, the airfare always paid for by Edith. She had tried to convince their mother to put Kat’s share of the inheritance, modest after the medical bills, into a trust that wouldn’t begin until Kat turned sixty-five, but their mother fell into a coma and then she died, and Kat had gone through her share in less than two years, saving nothing for old age.
