by David Gates
When the reminiscences were over, and his daughter—a cabaret singer who’d come in from Chicago—had sung “Bridge over Troubled Water,” I went up to the star-is-born woman and said, “How many of us do you suppose there were?”
“I’m sorry?” she said. “Do we know each other?”
—
I live in the city now, where I’ve had the good luck to find a studio I could afford in the West Village, and every day I walk to the subway past a gated cul-de-sac where E. E. Cummings and Djuna Barnes and somebody else used to live. I work for a women’s magazine, in ad sales—at Newsweek we used to call it the business side, as if a business had any other side. I’m the assistant to the director, meaning that I make myself useful, answer the phone and the emails—one no longer says “Girl Friday.” I had the Yale degree, however many years out of date, I’d worked at Newsweek and so on, but mostly Andrea had interceded, and had told me how to finesse the lost years: everyone understands a failed marriage, as long as you don’t present yourself as a woman who’s belatedly ambitious. They let me write—without pay; what year do you think this is?—for the blog, about books and movies that wouldn’t make it into the magazine proper: my choice, as long as it’s something womansy. So I, too, have become a keeper-up-with. I’m known—not that I’m known—for being hard to please, and the editor of the blog, a young woman whose ambition isn’t yet belated, finds this “refreshing once in a while.” If I learned one thing from my husband, meaning my second husband, it was finicking. Yes, I see the wavy red line under that word, and no, I don’t mean being finicky, which is a habit of mind: he actually taught me to finick. As you see.
Andrea’s husband told her he was gay a year after they got married, but you must have known that, and so must she. She still sees the little boy, so there’s that. She’s been a better friend to me than I’ve been to her: she not only got me my job but let me stay with her when I needed someplace to go—not to diminish her generosity, but by that time she had room in her apartment. She’s set me up with men she knows, age appropriate—what else could I expect?—and not all of them grotesque. The now-ex-husband gets her theater tickets, and she’s always offering to take me to this or that, and I go sometimes to keep her company. I’ve become a person who’s seen Kinky Boots and The Book of Mormon.
As to my husband—it didn’t kill him, I’ll say that. He’s in his eighties, still in his house; he’s got some sort of nurse-companion. Which, after all, is what I would have been by now. He and I don’t speak, and why would we. The pianist he used to play with visits him from time to time, if you’re wondering where I get my news. I say “used to” because he’s got arthritis in his hands and sold his bass for enough money to buy him a few more months’ help; I suspect that the banker brother, who must now be retired, kicks in a little. Before leaving the house that day, I’d hunted up the card with his lawyer’s number, but it was a Sunday and I didn’t get around to making the call till Tuesday. He would never have disappeared for so long without letting me know he was all right. He would never have disappeared. Just add it to my total for when the reckoning comes. I told the lawyer only that I’d gone, wasn’t coming back and wanted nothing; he could deal with it from there.
She and I had agreed that no one should know we were together, not for now; I believe the word “hurtful” was used. And how could anyone find out? I would still be here on the East Coast, she would tell Madeleine she’d gone to visit friends in Seattle—they’d promised to back her up—and this would give us time to figure out how to explain to the principals that this was the right thing for all of us, and then when everybody was used to the situation, it might not be right away, but maybe someday we could actually all be together again and—well, God knows what. We probably thought we were innocent. It only took a few days for the knock at the door to come—we had credit cards, the Subaru had license plates—as we must have wanted it to.
—
We stayed together for six months. She was a child, as you’ve seen: moody, scattered her clothes all over the place, stopped washing her hair. She always had to have music—she said silence made her anxious, but what didn’t?—and she wouldn’t use earphones for some reason having to do with, I don’t know, the air in the room? She still had the copy of Rumours she’d appropriated, but most of her CDs were hand-lettered in marker pen: electronic noises, some with a beat, some without. I couldn’t read with that racket going, and she didn’t read, except on her laptop. We used it to play chess—click on Human vs. Human—and she complained that I wasn’t good enough to make it interesting. Of course she found out where to get heroin, and one night she laid out some for both of us—she gave me what she said was a safe amount for a newbie. I vomited while she held my hair away from the toilet, humming to herself. When she took off her fetching high-tops, her feet smelled.
Reader, she dumped me.
We rented a motel room by the week, a few blocks from a beach on the Outer Cape. “Now we really can be out,” she said. Her father’s daughter. We couldn’t think where else to go—you’re supposed to head west to start a new life, but west was where Portland was—and what did the place matter anyway? I’d add “as long as we were together,” but I don’t want to play the throbbing violin here. By November it had gotten cold, and we bought a ceramic space heater to plug in by the bed. She was young and perky enough to get a job at Starbucks in Hyannis—she could do perky when she had to—and took the Subaru six mornings a week. I worked at a drugstore in a strip mall that was close enough to walk to, just one more lady in a blue frock. Between the two of us, we made enough. I really could play the throbbing violin about those first couple of months, but it’s nobody’s business: only hers and mine. When she finally left, Madeleine wouldn’t take her back, and I could never have returned to the house on the hilltop. We both gave up our lives for nothing. Which sounds akin to some holy undertaking, like saints renouncing the world and moving toward the pure empty light, except I suppose that what we did to other people wasn’t so saintlike. But at some point isn’t that on them, how much they decide to suffer? Something else we’ll understand when we all see face-to-face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know, even as also I am known.
No, my brother hasn’t swooped in and body-snatched me, if that’s where you thought this was going, me with my little desperation prayer episodes and him with the Lord at the ready. He knows I’m a lost soul—I mean, we took acid together—and I think he secretly respects that. But when he heard I was living alone on Cape Cod, he emailed to invite me to Colorado for Christmas and asked if I needed money. The Lord, he said, had blessed them with a little extra this year, which was probably a lie. And he included a link to a passage that he said had been a comfort to him: 1 Corinthians 13, Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and so on. I thought it would be another sales pitch for Jesus, but He didn’t even get a mention—just general wisdom, and a little bleak at that. Apparently if you didn’t have love you weren’t shit, that’s what I took away from it: you weren’t shit and you didn’t have shit and you didn’t know shit and you get the rest of the picture when you’re dead—the glass darkly thing. Like, where do I sign up to be a servant leader?
Comforting as it may or may not be to know that this life is just a prologue, I feel like I’m living in an epilogue, and given my state of health (tip-top, thanks for asking), it could be a long one. When I’m out in public, at the theater, say, in the lobby at intermission, each handsome young man and lovely young woman seems to be lit with a spotlight, while I’m invisible. O for the tongues of men and angels, to dilate on the unfairness! The long-awaited diatribe from the author of 5 Blondes. Ah well. I just saw that my first husband has a piece in Outside magazine, about rock-climbing in the Shawangunks—I give him props for plugging away at the sweet futility—and the photo on the contributors’ page shows a man whose tanned face belies however many years it belies. He must be getting fan mail. From the girlies, and I hope from the boys too; I still think I
was right about him. And I wish him a few months of joy too, even a few minutes, whatever that might cost him. Or his new wife, no longer new. A first wife’s bad-fairy blessing.
—
In case you’re waiting for the where-are-they-now, she’s turned forty, not dead, not famous—a regular Everywoman. I gather you can find her on Facebook. I can’t imagine that she ever sees her father, having stolen his wife (or vice versa), but that was years ago, he’s old, and they loved each other and whatnot.
—
I don’t know what all this is supposed to add up to: it seems to be about damaged and selfish people, the waste of money that could have helped somebody, the waste of gifts that could have given somebody pleasure—am I leaving out anything? I’m sorry to end without some note of redemption. See you after the shitshow, I guess.
When we left the church, Andrea wanted to go for drinks with a couple of the Newsweek people, and we ended up at a bar on Lafayette Street, in a dark back room with upholstered chairs and dim lamps on little round tables. Outside, it was still the middle of the afternoon.
I remembered one of the women: she’d worked in the makeup department, and I used to sit with her fitting stories on the page after the writers had gone home. Cut a word to bring up a line, add a word to make a last line full, if need be put on tight bands—who even knows what tight bands are anymore? When the magazine offered its second round of buyouts, she’d gone back to school and was now teaching third and fourth grade in Newark. Often, she said, she had to buy her kids pencils. She said taking the buyout was the best decision she’d ever made. I drank two martinis, excused myself—Andrea was lining up another woman to write a piece for her about sex trafficking—and walked back, drunk, to the West Village in the afternoon sun, through crowds of young people. This was a day that offered every temptation to get maudlin, but I had a book to finish reading, and a piece to write about it. As I passed the gated cul-de-sac where the distinguished dead had lived, I saw a drunken young woman screeching at her drunken young man and trying to pull him up off the sidewalk. They were in a miserable moment of their lives, and it occurred to me to pray for them, but really, why these two out of the multitudes who were suffering?
My brother says he knows the moment when his old life ended and his new life began: when he heard his own voice asking What is God’s will for me? and yanked the piece of rubber tubing from around his arm. Fine: he’s constructed the narrative he needed. I won’t say he’s lucky, but if I’m going to bring my own story to an end—look how little of it is left—while making it seem to have some sort of shape, I’ll need to fasten on some more or less random moment and claim that right there was the point before which and after which. My plan had been to bring it around in a circle, back to that stagy little prayer in the shower, but how bogus would that have been? So let’s go with the day I packed up the rest of my stuff in that half town house where I’d left my first husband, to put it in storage while I made up my mind whether or not to move into the beautiful house I would share with the man who would be my second husband, the beautiful house we would leave for the more beautiful house, the house he’d wanted for himself, the house in which I would leave him: the maddest thing I’ve ever done, the most willful, the most necessary. Anyway, it was the morning of January 2, and my husband would be getting in from New Mexico at five o’clock. It had snowed the night before; they hadn’t yet plowed the parking lot or shoveled the walks, and I didn’t have my boots. I put clothes in suitcases, then went through the books one last time—that Dubliners had been mine, One Hundred Years of Solitude definitely his, Lolita probably mine but I could always get another copy. Then I remembered the print of van Gogh’s Starry Night. He’d said it was his favorite painting, and he’d given me the print for my birthday—oh, not some cheesy poster, but a “framed canvas art print”—and naturally I’d put on a show about how it was my favorite too, but my God. I’d had him hang it in the bedroom—better that than having it out where visitors could see it. I went in and looked at the thing: Could you imagine hanging this next to a Diebenkorn? So I left it for him, in all generosity. And there’s my moment, okay? Not that I could have turned back at that point.
So I carried the boxes and suitcases out, loaded them into the trunk and the backseat, put the note and key on the counter, let the door lock behind me, then drove fishtailing through the snow in my little car, with its bald tires, my feet wet, fiddling with the vents to blow warm air onto my hands, into the life to come.
—
Late one afternoon, when it was too cold to walk to the beach anymore, she and I drove there in the Subaru—I’d be putting it in the paper in another month, as soon as the lawyer could get the title from him—and parked in the lot that had cost a dollar an hour back during the summer. The gate was up, the booth was empty and there was only one other car. We walked down, through heavy sand, then over hard sand, to where shallow waves washed in from the bay—we couldn’t afford the ocean side. Far down the beach, a man with a dog; otherwise we were alone. She had her hands in the pouch of her sweatshirt, her hood up; strands of black hair blew around her chin. “Somehow this has lost its allure,” she said.
“We could go south,” I said.
“We are going south,” she said. “Ha ha.”
I saw a piece of dull green sea glass among the shells, dead crabs and Styrofoam cups. I squatted down and handed it to her. She held it up to the sky, then dropped it back in the sand.
“I’ve already got a lifetime supply of this. What are we even doing, you know?”
“Maybe we should think more about moving to Boston,” I said. “You said there was a music scene.”
“What would you do?”
“I don’t know. I’m just throwing it out as something.”
“You used to be this great writer,” she said.
“When was that?”
“It’s the first thing he said about you.”
Now that the man was closer, I could see he had on a nylon tracksuit, that his dog was a chocolate Lab. He kept stopping to toss a tennis ball into the waves and wipe his hand on his pants; the dog, wet all over, kept bringing it back, dropping it on the sand and dancing back from it.
“Your father lives in his own universe,” I said. “Are you worried that I’m going to be dead weight?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” She looked over at the dog. “This is amazing. Isn’t it going to get hypothermia or something?”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “They live for this.”
“I need to meet that dog.” She walked over to the man; I thought I’d better come along. “Is it a boy?”
“As you see,” the man said.
“Doesn’t he get cold?”
“Yeah, you’d think,” the man said. “He never seems to mind.”
“Can I pet him?” She put out her hand; the dog picked up the ball, dropped it and danced back.
“I’m afraid Joey’s a little obsessed right now.” He reached down and threw the ball into the waves; the dog leaped in after it.
“I wish I was that single-minded.” She turned to me. “I want to go back, okay?”
I started the car and turned on the heater, but it blew cold air and I turned it off again. She reached in her bag and brought out Rumours. “Here, this’ll cheer us up. We can drive around and get warm, do you want to?”
“You miss your life,” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t you miss yours?”
And I said, in old-timer voice, “Not yet.”
An Actor Prepares
Last summer, on a plane back from Frankfurt, I happened to look up at an overhead screen while trying to learn my lines in Twelfth Night, and for a second I thought I saw myself in a promotional video for Singapore Airlines, among a crowd at JFK two weeks earlier. They couldn’t possibly have produced this so fast, could they? But there was the distressed-leather jacket, the mirrored sunglasses, the gray hair—silver, let’s call it—and the Profile:
ah, still a handsome devil. (I’d been going to see a twenty-eight-year-old German woman I’d met in New York, who said if I came over she’d figure out something to tell her boyfriend.) Just this afternoon I told an old friend—someone I’ve known for years, at any rate—that this was the moment I knew I had to quit acting. I’d studied myself on tape however many hundreds of times and never had I been so convincing: Who wouldn’t cast this guy as the old lech on his last go-round?
My father was a film editor—to begin this at the beginning—who’d worked with Stanley Donen and William Wyler, and I really was a handsome devil when I was in my twenties; I might have made it as a B-list male ingénue, saved my money and lived on a beach the rest of my life. But when I was thirteen, my parents took me on a trip to the East Coast, where we saw Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet on Broadway. My father, to his credit, or not, never tried to talk me out of moving to New York; he even paid for my first year at the Circle in the Square Theatre School. I put in my time as Mortimer Brewster and Professor Harold Hill back in the days of dinner theaters, and I played Bernardos and Franciscos at this or that Shakespeare festival. One summer I was so broke I took the bus to Massachusetts to work as an “interpreter” at Plimoth Plantation, speaking Pilgrimese (“How are you faring this day?”) and affecting puzzlement when tourists—we were to refer to them as “strange visitors”—tried to get me to break character. I’m proud to say that I never appeared in The Fantasticks, either on the road or down on Sullivan Street, though I took TV work when I could get it: a blind date in an episode of Kate & Allie and a corrupt lawyer in Law & Order. I was understudy to the guy who played A Gent when they brought back The Cradle Will Rock; he never missed a night, so I never got to do that first-act number with Patti LuPone. Fifteen years ago, all this amounted to enough of a résumé to get a job at a SUNY branch, teaching what they were pleased to call theater arts; I took the train up to Westchester three mornings a week, a reverse commute among people who seemed to be domestic workers.
