Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  I couldn’t save up money to rent my own place, so that year I needed to live with my mother—who’d gotten more rigid than I remembered. Her tics and habits were more pronounced, her behaviors engraved as if by stylus: I needed to keep everything spotless. I couldn’t leave a single utensil in the sink for fear of reprisals. And her routine was shockingly unvaried. Night after night she was transfixed to her giant-screen TV, reading glasses glued to her nose, shelling peanuts and watching her crazy kickboxing movies with the volume turned up. From my room upstairs I could hear the sound of blaring sirens and people being kicked and punched.

  I tried confiding in her about my situation at school, but she was terrible at dispensing advice, which generally consisted of either berating me for making bad decisions or launching into soliloquies of inflamed righteousness in which she lobbed threats and curses at the people who wronged me. She’d say things like, “How dare she treat you that way” and “Tell her, ‘I’m not your punching bag, Gloria!’” I knew she felt protective of me, but her diatribes left me feeling lonely and drained.

  Paul, a writer I’d met at some playwriting conference the previous year, moved to New York—he lived a few blocks from my mother’s house, and in my misery I clung to him. I took him on tours of the neighborhood. I showed him where Howie* lived, and Hildy Tasimowitz. I showed him the corner where Masha Bendikowski administered the punishment assignment and called us Disgusting Individuals. I traced for him the sites of all my old wounds and hurts as though it were a kind of negligible ruins. I pointed out SY girls when they passed. Over the years they’d proliferated in grim facsimile—hair-twirling, gum-chomping specters of denim and spandex. Paul became adept at spotting them on his own. “Ooh, is that one?” he’d ask, as though we were touring the Sinharaja with binoculars, looking for rare birds. It was fun, but I knew the fun was temporary, a diversion. I felt a queasy sensation in the pit of my stomach.

  The confidence I’d built at Iowa was gone now, a dream whose details disappeared with no remaining trace. I couldn’t write. I was depressed. I was flat broke. I wanted desperately to nap or sleep, but when I tried I just lay in bed, my joints tensed and swollen like crabbed knuckles. I’d already gained a bit of weight at Iowa, and now the pounds were piling on. I got very good at making macaroni and cheese, and anything with gooey cheese and carbs. My mother would chide me for wanting to cook because it entailed making “a mess” so I was forced to be nocturnal: I’d start my mise en place around one in the morning. For dessert, I’d usually polish off two pints of ice cream in one go.

  I hadn’t watched television in over a decade; now I needed its anodyne comforts. My mother’s television set took up a whole wall. It had an oppressive material presence, like the obelisk the chimps worshipped as a deity in Kubrick’s 2001. There were several remotes, each arrayed with innumerable buttons and consoles, none of which I could work (I figured out the channel changer and the volume buttons, that was enough). I had to keep the sound low or my mother might wake up. With my open pints of dulce de leche and pralines and cream I’d fall into a kind of trance, enveloped in the artificial warmth of the darkened room, lulled into a hypnotized state by the play of images on the screen. The scherzos of color and sudden irruptions of light during commercial breaks created an illusion of movement in the dark and made the room seem like a flickering twilight. I’d press the soft microfiber blanket to my chest and curl up in its silky chrysalis, dangling a foot over the edge of the sofa and tracing the cold Formica base of it with my heel as I slurped huge spoonfuls of ice cream. When I’d overeaten sufficiently and gorged myself to near numbness on marathon episodes of Friends and E! True Hollywood Story, I’d stagger up the creaking stairs to my room in a somewhat pleasant somnolent haze, but my dreams were nearly always plagued with horror: cataclysms I couldn’t stop or thwart, terrorists living in my basement, floods in the attic. Gloria was a terrorist, she worked at the yeshiva, she was trying to murder me. I’d wake in the middle of the night, heart exploding in my chest, shaking and tremoring until the sun came up. I was no longer a human being. I was a slave to my anxiety.

  That autumn, I had one small flicker of hope: the Royal Court Theatre called to commission a short play for their human rights festival. It was my first-ever commission, I was ecstatic—but my artistic compass was jiggered and thrown off. I wasn’t sure how or what to write. To counter what felt like an impending writer’s block, I ended up writing everything that came into my head. After a few weeks of this crazy graphomania, I culled ten pages I thought were good and brought them into class one week. In the frenzy of all that writing, I hadn’t thought to steel myself against Gloria’s criticisms, but as soon as we read the pages aloud it started again: she unflipped her cell phone, waggled her pen between her forefinger and thumb. She dug noisily into her handbag, pulled out candy, chewed peremptorily on some gummy worms. She checked her watch. She sighed helplessly—and actually left the room for several minutes. We finished reading, then sat around looking at one another, wondering what happened to Gloria. She eventually walked back in and sat in her chair. “Well!” she chirped perkily. “Since this play was an assignment, I think we should show David how to write an assignment.” She proceeded to go around the room, writer to writer, extracting possible plot scenarios, since apparently I couldn’t come up with my own.

  After class I shuffled despondently onto Broadway with the other playwrights—who seemed to genuinely pity me. They said nice things about my play, and gave me some ideas. Phil felt I should focus on the character of the older woman in the play, and Jenny agreed—she suggested I try expanding that character’s short monologue to a full ten minutes, and maybe I could give that to the Royal Court. With all the playwrights fussing over me, I started to feel a bit of hope. When I sat the next morning to rework that section into a monologue, something clicked immediately, and the play just came out whole-cloth. Like my Doll’s House adaptation, this felt prewritten, like I was transcribing a speech broadcast from some ether or other realm. The character had her own autonomous life, and I was taking dictation.

  But then my blessed state took a weird turn.

  My character began channeling Gloria.

  In a recent class, she’d spoken about an accident she had the previous year. She broke her foot and had to wear a cast. She couldn’t move—she was completely dependent on other people for her most basic needs—and this sent her into a crushing depression.

  “I was up late one night,” she said. “I was depressed and couldn’t sleep, and I was watching the Nature Channel, and there was this show on. They were showing these gazelles, and how when gazelles are hunted by predators, when some big terrifying creature is about to rush up and murder a gazelle, the gazelle doesn’t run away. The gazelle doesn’t panic. It doesn’t move. It just sort of . . . stands there, and it tilts its neck, like this . . .” She illustrated for us the way a gazelle might tilt its neck were it to submit to a predator. “As if it’s saying, yes,” she continued, “I’m going to die, and I accept that. I accept my own death.” There was something mesmerizing about how Gloria embodied the ecclesiastic gazelle. It was like the gazelle had entered the classroom and was standing before us. Gloria was like a Virgin Mary from some Renaissance painting. There was a salvific grace in her eyes. “I was like that,” she said. “I was one of those gazelles.” As Gloria spoke these words, some dormant feeling in me was violently slapped awake. I felt a sudden intimacy with her, as if her soul were momentarily exposed. There was something pained and despairing in the story of the gazelles, and through it, I felt an unexpected pang of love for Gloria. She wasn’t just tough and steely and self-made, she was like me: on the verge of immolation and surrender, broken by life. We were both artists, and this was the condition of all artists; it was this that connected me to her, not some goofy Broadway musical—but the pain of life.

  The story of the gazelles had burrowed deep in my unconscious mind—and as I was writing, I found my character invoking the exact language G
loria used that day, even going so far as to tilt her head to show the gazelle’s posture of submission to her predators. The play was in some sense my act of submission, a way my unconscious found to compromise with Gloria—but it also became about the act of submission. It was about losing oneself to a dominant force, an ideology so huge and overwhelming you don’t even know you’re lost. In it, the main character, Alice (a white, wealthy, Upper East Side doyenne) makes a glib and frightening argument for the use of political torture. But then she starts comparing herself to Gloria’s doomed gazelle, as though she herself were a victim. And she was, in a way. She’d been destroyed by a way of thinking.

  I couldn’t tell at the time that Alice was a self-portrait—that in some respect, I was writing a cautionary tale to myself. I was that gazelle, who would sacrifice what was fragile and beautiful in itself because it believed it was doomed, and wanted its struggle to be over. On some level, I simply wanted to merge with Gloria in a way that would make me unpunishable.

  I was running late to class that week, but managed to catch the elevator just as the doors were closing. When they opened again, there was Gloria. She was standing erect like a monarch and glaring at the lit display. “Hi, Gloria,” I said in an oddly girlish voice, but she didn’t respond. The mask of her face was pulled tight. The cords in her neck were tensed like unplucked strings in a cello. I could see the bluish pulse in her neck flickering under her skin. I could feel myself as a speck in her peripheral vision. I imagined us shot from an aerial view, the way they did in movies to foreshadow a murder. Why wasn’t she saying anything? I knew she hated me, but were we beyond simple pleasantries? Was she really going to ignore me when we were the only two people in a small enclosed space?

  I increasingly felt pressure to fill the silence in the elevator, and, out of nowhere, blurted, “Remember that thing you said about the gazelles?” Maybe I thought my mentioning gazelles might lull her back to the time when she felt vulnerable, when she had a big cast on her foot and needed care and love. Maybe if I offered myself as a receptacle, if I openly displayed my weakness and asked permission, she might take pity on me. I blathered on about how the gazelles just slipped into what I was writing, how the image was so arresting, how my character just started saying these things. Gloria glared mercilessly at the elevator doors, head jutting ever so slightly. “So anyway,” I continued in my slobbering panic, “I wanted to ask permission to . . . to get your okay with all that.”

  Gloria remained an obelisk, blank and unyielding. Then, the tiny muscles in her face began to shift, the glittering lips began to part, and I felt my entire being pulled toward her with anticipation, like she was a magnet. “Actually,” she said, her gaze transfixed to a series of wooden panels on the wall of the elevator, “that image is the centerpiece of my new article for O magazine.” Her tone and the brevity of her declaration conveyed both punishment and disinterest. I felt like a slick of slime left in the wake of some slug. And I was confused: was she saying I couldn’t use the image? What did O magazine have to do with anything? Did I have to cut the gazelles out of my play or not?

  Paul was adamant I keep them in.

  “But don’t you think it would be antagonistic?” I said, picking around my not very good biryani—after class that night we ate dinner at one of those cheapo restaurants on Sixth Street.

  “It’s your play,” said Paul.

  “Yes, but I already made that token gesture at getting her approval in the elevator.”

  “So?”

  “So isn’t that in itself an admission of guilt?”

  “Guilt over what? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  I emailed the play to Wally and he too said I hadn’t plagiarized Gloria. He said writers took things people said all the time and made these into plays and books. We were in the world, he said, and the world we lived in affected us, and our writing should reflect that. I told him I still felt uncomfortable bringing the play into class. In response, Wally asked if I would have dinner with him before class that week. It didn’t seem like a portent of anything bad, it was a sweet gesture, so I agreed to go.

  We met at Orloff’s, a Jewish deli across from Lincoln Center where the walls were festooned with posters from old, obscure Broadway plays like The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Cold Storage. “So I’m going to be honest,” he said, “I’m concerned about you.”

  “How come?” I asked, sipping my black cherry soda through a plastic straw.

  “I’m not sure what’s going on between you and Gloria,” he said. “It seems perhaps there’s some tension between you two.”

  Wally was raised Catholic and though he abjured all religion, he still had a Jesuitical reserve. He used endless qualifiers and often began sentences with “I feel somehow that . . .” or “It seems perhaps that . . .” so as not to be too pointed or direct. I could see him trying to delicately massage every word so as not to be inflammatory, but the more he made intimations, the more I wanted to share the true depth of my suffering, the more I needed to break through the façade. “Wally,” I said, practically shrieking, “I’m becoming blocked!”

  Wally’s eyes relaxed slightly, as if he’d been temporarily blinded.

  “Well,” he said, “I wonder if maybe it might be unproductive for you to continue to bring work into class.” He told me he’d discussed it with Gloria, and they’d come up with an idea: instead of my bringing in my work in five-page increments over the course of the semester, I could bring in a complete play at the end of the school year. I felt slightly insulted by this. None of the other writers needed a special arrangement. But I couldn’t help but feel relief at not having to deal with Gloria and her flip phone and gummy candies.

  I tried to cut my losses and focus on this new play I had to write. At first, I wanted to write something political. Then I decided to write a light comedy, something inoffensive. But I worried Gloria might think a light comedy was too flimsy, so I tried making it dramatic and august, like her plays. Then I began to resent the augustness—as though it was imposed upon me—so I tried to make the play more subversive and political. But then I flashed forward in my mind to the critique (the simpering disdain, the mastication of gummies) and felt paralyzed and overcome with proleptic terror. The play felt like a referendum on me as a writer. It had to be good, but I couldn’t tell what was good anymore. I didn’t know what to write or who to be.

  To calm my nerves I took frequent breaks. I went for long walks, ambiting the colonnades of Ocean Parkway, past Jewish girls who wore long Lycra skirts and silver bangles and chewed gum, and up Avenue J past Jewish bakeries, fruit stores crammed with customers hysterical about getting the best cantaloupe. I walked past the awful ketchuppy kosher pizza shops, the forlorn-looking wig shops for Hasidic women, the yeshiva—now gated like a citadel. When I sat back at the computer I’d stare blankly at the screen, my legs melting to rubber, heart crumpling in a systolic crush.

  I somehow managed to finish the play that spring—but I didn’t write it as much as assemble words that vaguely conformed to human logic. I’d been torn in my process between trying to make myself into the sort of writer Gloria might like and violently rebelling against her, so the tone flipped incomprehensibly between good-natured observation and perverse vitriol. It was misshapen and warped, a Frankenstein monster of all my neuroses. Rob cast the reading, as he did with all the plays, but it was held in a room I’d never been to: dim, musty with desuetude, maybe someone had been violently murdered there. There a was single fluorescent light fixture, and the concussing flickers of light cast the room in a washed-out, bluish pall. The playwright readings were generally lively tournaments teeming with young actors cheering and stomping, but in this case there were just the other playwrights, Gloria and Wallace. Gloria introduced the play and then sat down and looked through her purse for candy while the actors read their parts, and it all seemed to go on forever. The play was painfully unfunny, and tendered not a single truthful word or moment or observation. Afterward there was no
conversation, no critique, and as we filed out of the strange, unused, bluish-lit classroom my stomach burned with humiliation. I hated myself. I couldn’t imagine writing another play ever again.

  Just after the New Year, Elyse Dodgson from the Royal Court emailed. They wanted to program Elective Affinities (that’s what I called the monologue) for two nights in March in some festival for new writing. I tried retaining my newly awakened bitterness toward theatre, but it was no use—this was too exciting.

  I flew in for rehearsals the week before we opened. When I got to the theatre, Edith Vickery, my director, stood near the stage door, clad in black from head to toe. She had on dark sunglasses and walked with short, hieratic steps down the cobbled walkway.

  We knew each other a little. She’d directed the workshop of my Doll’s House play at the Royal Court the previous summer. She approached me with distracted aplomb like a movie star, and dispensed comme il faut kisses on both cheeks. “There’s coffee up in the room,” she said, “and Jane brought some crumbly British thing.” She walked me past the guard and up to the rehearsal room to meet Jane Asher, who, everyone kept explaining to me, was the British Martha Stewart. She was playing Alice: the charming, wealthy, and deliciously unlikeable woman in my play who advocates for political torture. The idea for the casting was Edith’s. That would be a sly bit of legerdemain, she said, to have this happy woman who baked cakes on telly turn on the audience and exhort them to torture and murder.