Lot Six

by David Adjmi

  Even thought it was night, it was light outside, the tail end of summer. Thin spokes of yellow light poked through the shutters.

  The waiter brought over dessert for us to share. With the back of her spoon, my mother cracked the burnt-sugar crust of the crème brûlée. As she dug into the ceramic dish and scooped out some of the custard, I caught myself staring at the cuticle moons in her fingertips. The tops of her hands were knotted with pale blue veins, her fingernails sparkled with coral polish. She wore a clunking gold watch, some Cartier present my father gave her a hundred years ago, but it was too big and kept slipping over her wrist.

  “You want to take the rest of the steak or should I feed it to the cat?”

  “Huh?”

  “You want the steak or no?”

  “Give it to the cat,” I said.

  Where the hell was my sister? I worried she’d had a panic attack or passed out in the bathroom.

  “Did you hear anything about your play?” said my mother with a mouthful of crème brûlée. “Is it transferring to the bigger theatre?”

  “Charlayne has to go back to LA for a movie,” I said. “Lincoln Center only wants to move it if the entire cast can go.”

  “Why does she have to go to LA?”

  “She has an acting job.”

  “Can’t she just tell them ‘I’m in a hit play’?”

  “No, because she has a contract.”

  “Oh,” said my mother, enunciating the word so it broke into several syllables. She breathed a small sigh of despair. “Well,” she said, “you had a good run.”

  “We did.”

  “My son, the playwright!” she exclaimed, a little too loudly. “Some people aren’t going to like it, and it’s not their cup of tea. But you had a very good production. That main actress—what’s her name?”

  “Cristin.”

  “Very talented girl.” She poured herself another glass of wine, emptying the bottle. “Very intense play,” she said, sipping her wine. “A little depressing.” She swung her head heavily in my direction like it was a deadweight. “But, honey? You were always very different. You always had to put your own spin on things.” I could see her getting swept up by a wave of nostalgia probably occasioned by my father’s death; she seemed to feel the need to cap an era. “Remember when I used to take you to the theatre when you were little? You always loved the theatre. Remember when I took you to see Pippi Longstockings?”

  “No.”

  “Honey,” she loudly announced, so vehemently it caused her head to bob like a dinghy, “I took to you see Pippi Longstockings at the Trump Village. I took you to everything. You have no idea what I did for you. I schlepped you everywhere with me. What mother takes a five-year-old kid to all these Broadway plays? Remember when I took you to that Sweeney Todd?” She laughed in her raspy contralto. “I don’t know how I did it. He gave me no money, I had no one helping me. Thank God for me.”

  My mother held the glass by its tall stem with just the tips of her fingers. She swirled the wine for a moment, raised it to her lips, then set the glass back down on the table so the pale amber liquid slid back down the insides in reticulate veins. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “What’s that?”

  She turned to me and looked in my eyes. “Is your play about me?”

  “What?”

  “The girl in the play . . . is that me?”

  My mother’s face was obscurely lit by a single dim candle. She looked impossibly young, almost a child. She had the outsized, practically cartoonish features of a 1940s movie star: her cheeks were two raised aureoles, her eyes were too big for her face. Her expression was gauzy from all the Sauvignon Blanc but her skin was milky and perfect, smooth like a marble bust.

  When I was young she kept a tiny framed black-and-white photograph of herself near her bed—she couldn’t have been older than four or five. She was like an angel. She was in a field somewhere, her hair fell in loose ringlets—but she looked utterly lost, like no one in the world would ever know her, ever find her. When I asked, she told me she didn’t know who took the photograph, or where she was. Like so much of her life, the facts and details were gone: there was no family lore, no stories about what she endured; she blocked it all out.

  Her life wasn’t grand or important, which was why she couldn’t see those works of art in museums as having anything to do with her. Caryatids and weeping angels, boys with tangled curls and azure eyes: art was for someone else. Culture was there to commemorate lives that mattered. Because her life never mattered, she was a woman without a story.

  I was the inheritor of that nonstory. I believed my life was meaningless, that I was worthless in the eyes of the world. But maybe the task of my life was to make a story, so I could it give to her—like one of those sword-bearing travelers from mythology, returning back home bearing a gift. Or at least that was what I felt on that dreamy summer night, as my mother sat across from me, bathed in soft candlelight, eyes tucked inside sleepy lids, waiting with fragile expectation for my answer to her question: Is that me?

  Amor fati (Love your fate)

  —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

  Acknowledgments

  THANKS FIRST AND foremost to Paul Rusconi, who painstakingly went through every draft of every chapter of this book and had endless conversations with me about nearly everything I’d written—to the point that it was probably not entirely healthy. I don’t know that I would have gotten to the end of this book without him. My deepest thanks as well to Olivia Laing, who read all my early drafts and was so encouraging to me from the outset.

  I’m grateful to my agent, Susan Golomb, who helped me shape the tangled mess of my thoughts into a book. And to my theatre agent, Emma Feiwel, who read endless drafts of this thing, and worked tirelessly to support it.

  I am indebted to my early readers for their generosity and deep intelligence: Sheila Callaghan, Leland Cheuk, Melissa Febos, Madeleine George, Adam Greenfield, Nathan Heiges, Liana Liu, Alejandro Morales, Hanna Pylväinen, Suzanne Scanlon, Heidi Schreck, Victoria Stewart, Kathleen Tolan, Mindy Walder, and Ginny Wiehardt.

  Thanks to Mary Gaule and Hannah Wood and everyone at HarperCollins. Special thanks to Trina Hunn, my dauntless legal counsel. This book wouldn’t exist if not for Claire Wachtel, who approached me out of the blue to write it. Jonathan Burnham provided me with vital editorial guidance and explained to me what a book needed to do to call itself a book; I’m grateful for his patience and support.

  For their constancy and care over the course of the many years it took to write this, I want to thank Rachel Aedan, Ayad Akhtar, Karole Armitage, Daniel Aukin, Claudia Ballard, Robbie Baitz, Grace Baley, Renee Baley, Sarah Baley, Tanya Barfield, Sarah Benson, Art Borreca, Bella Brodzki, James Bundy, Will Butler, Hannah Cabell, Eddie Cahill, Zoe Caldwell, Gaby Calvocoressi, P. Carl, Tony Charuvastra, Diane Cook, Justin Craig, Marta Cullberg Weston, Michael Davis, Jon Dembrow, Gordon Dahlquist, Maria Dizzia, Christopher Durang, Kip Fagan, Philip Gates, Karl Gajdusek, Jackson Gay, Simon Green, Julia Greer, Jason Grote, Kirsten Greenidge, Jennifer Haley, Gerri Hanan, Corinne Hayoun, Ann Marie Healy, Laura Heisler, Riccardo Hernandez, Philip Himberg, Lucas Hnath, Naomi Iizuka, Marin Ireland, Morgan Jenness, Addie Johnson, Aditi Kapil, Sibyl Kempson, Jennifer Kiger, Joe Kraemer, Jo Lampert, Penney Leyshon, Todd London, Sarah Lunnie, Joy Meads, Geoffrey Macdonald, Alan MacVey, Carol MacVey, Kim Marra, Jim McCarthy, Sabrina Meglio, Cristin Milioti, Emily Morse, Donald Moss, Phyllis Nagy, Brett Neveu, Gloria Peterson, Larry Rand, Duncan Riddell, Joel Ruark, Jenny Schwartz, Angeline Shaka, Oliver Laks, Ruby Laks, Sophocles Papavasilopoulos, Sarah Ruhl, Ryan Rumery, Jennifer Scappettone, Howard Shalwitz, Mona Simpson, John Steber, Aaron Stone, Rebecca Taichman, Daniel Talbott, Alice Tolan-Mee, Sarah Tolan-Mee, Rachel Viola, Francine Volpe, Xuan Juliana Wang, Anne Washburn, Matt Wolf, Charlayne Woodard, Carmen Zilles, and Bob Zimmerman.

  Thanks to my parents and my siblings.

  Thanks to Patricia Masters for her foresight, acuity, and car
ing.

  The writing of this book was made possible in part with funding from the Mellon Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Soho Repertory Theatre, the Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, and the Whiting Foundation. I am deeply indebted to them, and grateful for their generosity. Major portions of this book were written at the American Academy in Rome, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Brown Foundation/Dora Maar House, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, New Dramatists, the Sundance Institute, and Yaddo.

  Fran Offenhauser and Michael Mekeel took great care of me during the process of writing this book. I could not have completed it without their support. Thanks as well to my generous pals Eric Anderson and Lizzie Simon, for offering me space and time to write. And finally, to the great Marian Seldes, whose spirit permeates every page of this book; thank you for teaching me what it means to be an artist.

  About the Author

  DAVID ADJMI was called “virtuosic” by the New York Times and was named one of the Top Ten in Culture by the New Yorker in 2011. His plays have been produced and developed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Soho Rep, Lincoln Center, Steppenwolf, and many others. His play Stereophonic will premiere on Broadway in the spring of 2021. He was awarded a Mellon Foundation grant, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Kesselring Prize for Drama, and the Steinberg Playwright Award (the “Mimi”), among others. He lives in Los Angeles.

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  Copyright

  LOT SIX. Copyright © 2020 by David Adjmi. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST EDITION

  Cover design by Caroline Johnson

  Cover photographs © Niall_Majury/iStock/Getty Images (boy); © 400tmax/iStock/Getty Images (marquee)

  Digital Edition JUNE 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-209701-9

  Version 05042020

  Print ISBN: 978-0-06-199094-6

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  * The literal definition of ajam is “one who is illiterate,” “silent,” or “mute”—a pejorative term used by Arabs conscious of their social and political superiority. Over time ajam evolved into the modern and more neutral definition of “stranger,” “foreigner”—those whom Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula denoted as non-Arab.

  * A few years later, through feats of electrical wizardry, the hole was turned into a functionable light switch—which worked out pretty well for us, as the kitchen hadn’t ever really been well lit.

  † SY slang for imbecile.

  * SY expression of revulsion.

  * In Nashville, he’d once repeatedly bashed a man’s head in a car door for flirting with my mother; he was known to be a hothead, but at this point he was in his late forties, he’d calmed down considerably.

  * Geraldine Jones was a character portrayed in drag by the comedian Flip Wilson on his 1970s variety show.

  * Poor thing.

  * The SY term for an Ashkenazi Jew.

  * Which aired on Friday nights, Shabbos, when television watching was forbidden.

  * A line that became one of Howie’s signature phrases when he fell into doing impersonations of my mother—he loved the archness of her cruelty.

  * Hebrew word for God.

  * An overweight person.

  * A sample of the lyrics: “I’ll give you black sensations up and down your spine / If you’re into evil / you’re a friend of mine . . .”

  * Daily Word was a Christian periodical that came delivered to our house, a small pamphlet with parables about Christ and Christian love. When I asked my mother why she read it, she said, “All paths lead to God.”

  * SY slang for “idiot.”

  * And sexuality was a continuum. I knew that from reading my sister’s copy of the Hite Report on Male Sexuality (I found it in the drawer near her bed when I was ten years old and became obsessed with it), which regaled me with stories of pubescent boys in the Midwest playing games called “milk the cow” and stories of married men who masturbated wearing their wives’ underwear. The men stayed married, the midwestern boys went on to later identify as fully heterosexual. Reading this book gave me the impression that sexuality was fluid and changeable.

  * A crazy person.

  * Robert Chambers, the infamous “Preppy Killer.”

  † A Manhattan rehab clinic that was popular in the prep school circuit.

  * Once I used his towel to dry off after a shower. I didn’t know anything about living on my own and harbored the stupid assumption that college roommates were supposed to share towels, and he chastised me in his sleepy surfer drawl: Dude. That’s not cool. This moment led to many unpleasant confrontations, and soon after my disruption of his beer-bong party and uncivilized use of his towel, Bolt and I were not on speaking terms.

  * The most blatant offense I witnessed was during senior year of high school, when I needed Dad to fill out financial aid forms. He had me come to his office, where I watched him use white-out to erase figures on his tax forms. He then typed in fake numbers on the electric typewriter, smiling and whistling some Gershwin tune. His casual perfidy seemed to go hand in hand with his religious beliefs and love of hashem—there was some logic in his head that tied it all together.

  * My mother was accustomed to vice. It was so common in the SY community. In 1987 the SEC discovered that her cousin Eddie Antar was skimming tens of millions of dollars in income from his Crazy Eddie electronics stores. He evaded taxes, lodged tons of false insurance claims. He was hiding unreported income in offshore bank accounts, in the ceilings of houses, in mattresses, in closets. He boarded airplanes with wads of cash strapped to his body, deposited the money in an Israeli bank, had it wired to Panama, and then laundered it back to New York—a scheme he called the “Panama Pump.” There were all sorts of elaborate cons with all sorts of names. In 1984, Eddie brought the company public, overstating income to help insiders dump stock at inflated prices. Once the SEC got wind of what was going on, Eddie’s father—who’d been estranged from his son and erstwhile partner in crime—paid off witnesses in an attempt to frame his son and evade culpability. His cousin Sam testified against Eddie, and Sam’s testimony sent him to prison. Eddie Antar became infamous as a symbol for white-collar crime in America. Years later, when he was released from prison, an embittered S
am confronted his cousin in a television interview. “You brought us up to be crooks,” Sam cried. “Everything I became I learned from you.”

  “No,” Eddie replied, “we both learned the culture.”

  * Stanwyck achieves the ne plus ultra of hard-boiled glamour in Baby Face, where she plays a barmaid in a sleazy joint adjured by a customer (reading from, of all things, Nietzsche’s Will to Power) to “use men . . . not let them use you! You must be a master, not a slave!” Inspired by the customer, Stanwyck proceeds, via a series of elaborate chess moves, to pimp herself to the top. She manipulates men. She procures for herself every material comfort a girl could want. When, at the end of the film, her rich husband goes broke, he asks her to make a sacrifice to help him, but she can’t. “I have to think of myself,” she tells him, “I’ve gone through a lot to get those things. My life has been bitter and hard. I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed. All I’ve got are those things. . . . Without them I’d be nothing.” This was the credo my mother instilled in me too.

  * Another way of describing a so-called short con, or one-time scam.

  * Earlier in their courtship, Stanwyck’s father tries to warn her against love. He tells her to keep her distance, to use people like Henry Fonda for what she could extract from him, because love, actual love, was dangerous. “I don’t mean for us,” he tells her, “I mean for your heart.” Watching the movie, I remember it being shocking hearing the father talk about any heart not on the face of a playing card. He was so venal, but—ironically—warning his daughter against love felt like the purest act of love in the film.