Thoughts While Having Sex

by Stephanie Lehmann

  "So what do you do for a money job?" I asked. I had no idea how he earned his living, or how he could finance this play for that matter.

  "Me? I live off the money I make producing plays."

  "You’re funny." Must have a trust fund, I thought.

  "The truth is, I'm living off some money I inherited when my mother died. When that runs out in the not so distant future, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do."

  "I'm sorry about your mother."

  "Yeah." He took a sip of beer.

  "How did she die?"

  "Lung cancer. And yes, she smoked."

  "So you inherited... Were your parents divorced?"

  "My father is dead too."

  "Oh."

  "He killed himself when I was sixteen."

  I breathed in sharply. Now I knew why he'd been drawn to my play.

  "You were so young. That must've been hard."

  "It's okay," he said. "He was a mean son-of-a-bitch."

  I waited for him to say "just kidding." But he didn't.

  "I think that makes it even harder," I said. "Because you have to deal with—you know—your feelings of hate."

  "Yeah. Like the character in your play." Peter looked at me and then looked away.

  I flinched, because I wanted to say I didn't hate my sister. But then I registered he was referring to Melanie, not me. But did Melanie hate her sister? Hate was such a hateful feeling.

  "And, like the character in your play," Peter said, "my last conversation with my father was an argument."

  I almost corrected him. My last conversation with my sister had not been a fight. Not really. I'd lost patience with her, and she didn't like that, but it wasn't a fight.

  But he was referring to Melanie.

  "What was the fight with your father about?"

  "Oh, it was stupid. Really stupid." His lips clamped shut, and I wasn't sure if he was going to tell me what stupid thing it was. "I'd borrowed one of his favorite ties for a production of a Noel Coward play we were doing in school. I was acting in it. Private Lives. Just a stupid high school production. Didn't ask him for it, just took it. And then we all went out to eat after a late rehearsal. I had this big pastrami sandwich. And mustard dripped out of it, onto the tie. And it stained the tie really bad. I showed it to him the next day. Offered to dry clean it and everything. He was pissed. Really pissed off. My mom said nothing would get that out. I guess it was an expensive tie. He yelled at me... I don't want you borrowing my fucking clothes again! That night he took the car out. Got drunk. Smashed into a concrete divider on the highway and that was it."

  I was silent for a few moments. Then I said, "You don't think of it as an accident."

  "If you drink as much as he drank that night and you get into a car and you're speeding like a maniac it's suicide."

  "Well, obviously the tie and his death—they didn't have anything to do with each other."

  "Of course not," Peter said, a bit too defensively. "Who knows what was going on inside his head? I'm sure it had very little to do with me. But when I read your play, I related to Melanie's guilt feelings. Irrational as it is, you can't help it."

  "Yeah."

  So that's what we were. Two guilty souls. That's what drew us together.

  "They say," Peter said, taking a sip of beer, "people take responsibility because at least that makes them feel like they have some control over what happened instead of feeling so out of control." His voice trailed off.

  "I know." I'd read all the books too. "I bet it was a long time before you ate another pastrami sandwich.”

  "Or mustard. Not even on hot dogs. And I used to love that stuff."

  "Yeah." I nodded, thinking of cheesecake.

  "Ironic thing is," Peter said, "I inherited all his clothes."

  Ironic thing is, I thought, I wrote the play. And got the production. And got to meet you.

  "Not that I can bring myself to wear any of it," he added.

  Not that anything would come of it, I thought.

  My parents were never the same after my sister died. For instance my mother used to leave cheerful outgoing messages on her answering machine. Like "Don't worry about tomorrow. In two days it will be yesterday, (beep)" And she'd record a new one every few months. But the day after my sister died she put a message on the machine that said, in this lost, helpless kind of voice, "She's dead." Then, after a few weeks, she changed it. "Please leave a message after the tone." Emotionless. Flat. It had been four years, and she still hadn't changed that message.

  My father, who had always struggled with depressions of his own, seemed more depressed. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that he always knew the world was a sad place and her death just confirmed what he already knew.

  But my mother seemed more done in. The death put her in a new place. The world was no longer amusing. The world was downright cruel.

  Nothing was ever the same for me either, of course. That day my mother called and told me to go down to Diana's apartment. I knew, even as I was going through it, that my life was changing before my very eyes. I was so tense I couldn't find the key to her place, which I always kept in my jewelry box. (I found it a month later right there in my jewelry box.) So I had to go without it, wondering how I was going to get in. My mother had said take a cab, and I was going to. But then for some reason I ended up in the subway. I wasn't sure why. I told myself it was faster. But I would still have to get across town by walking or taking a bus or getting in a cab after all, so it wasn't really. But my sister always rode the subway, so it seemed right. So the whole way down I was kicking myself for getting on the subway. When I got out on

  West 4th Street, I hailed a cab. And then I realized that maybe this was the fastest way after all, so why was I kicking myself? Maybe it was because I didn't really want to take the fastest way. Because I didn't want to find what I was going to find. Not that I thought that I was actually going to find what I was going to find. I mean, for all we knew, my sister had reconciled with Gerold. And they were in some hotel room making love, and Diana just hadn't bothered to phone anyone to say that life was wonderful again. And here I'd ruined a perfectly good evening because my mother was freaking out.

  When I got to her building and managed to get a neighbor to buzz me in, I knocked on her apartment door. No answer. I couldn't find the super, so I called a locksmith. He told me we couldn't get in without the police, so I had to call them too. While I waited for everyone to arrive, I called my parents collect on a pay phone down the street. "I'm waiting to get in," I said.

  "We'll be right here," my mother said. A half hour later no one had arrived yet. It was beginning to get dark. I went to the pay phone down the street.

  "Yes?" my mother answered. I could hear the panic in her voice.

  "I'm still waiting to get in. Just wanted to let you know."

  I knew my father was on the other line, but he stayed silent.

  "We're here," my mother said.

  When I finally called home from my sister's phone (which she'd decorated with glitter nail polish and a picture of Kurt Cobain) they picked up after one ring. My father was on one extension, my mother on the other. The policeman was standing somewhere behind me. Even now, my stomach sours at the memory.

  "I got into the apartment.” I paused. How do you tell your parents such a thing? "She's dead."

  "What?" my father said to my mother. "What did she say?"

  "She's dead," my mother said. As if she had known from the moment of my sister's last breath because she was so psychically connected, and I was just there to confirm her fears.

  "Are you sure?" my father asked, desperate.

  "Yes. The policeman is here."

  "Put him on the phone," my mother said.

  As if I wasn't telling the truth. As if I would be careless about getting my facts straight on this.

  I put the policeman on. He repeated the news. And then he said he was sorry to them. And then he said good-bye and hung up.

  "Did
n't they want to speak to me?" I asked.

  He looked back at the phone, then at me. "You want to call them back? I'd like to keep the line open—I'm expecting backup." Backup. As if a crime was in progress and the sharpshooters were on their way.

  "No, that's okay."

  I told myself it was okay that my parents didn’t ask to say good-bye to me. They were very upset right then, so they couldn't comfort their child. They had to comfort themselves, and each other. And they knew I was strong, and I could take care of myself, so I shouldn't take it personally.

  I sank down into my sister's easy chair, the one she liked to read in, and asked her how she could do this. How could you actually do this?

  I tried not to think of her face. The one I'd just seen. But I couldn't stop seeing it—her face was all I could see. Even in death, she seemed to be saying, "You think you have it bad? Don't flatter yourself. I'm the one who's suffering. Look at me."

  Chapter 6

  It's always a liberation for the actors to reach the point of having their lines memorized. A relief to put the scripts down and be able to walk around the stage with the words coming out of their mouths as if they were making them up that very moment. As if the lines were, in fact, their own thoughts.

  This was also an exciting stage in rehearsals for me. My play would suddenly become much more real. Something much more apart from myself. And it would transform from being a script, words on the page, to being the physical "spoken out loud by real walking and talking human beings" thing that it was always meant to be.

  Annie and Kelly had not reached that point yet. They were still chained down with the scripts, halfway between reading blocks of dialogue and remembering wisps of phrases. Since it was just the two of them in the play, they each had a lot of lines, and a lot of pressure.

  I knew they were trying to get together from time to time to run lines, but their schedules didn't seem to mesh very well and it was getting frustrating for everyone that they weren't off book yet. It was Kelly who called me and asked if I would come over to her place to run lines.

  "Annie was going to come, but she had to work, and I could use the help."

  "Sure," I said. I thought it would be fun.

  "I'll make you dinner," she offered.

  "You don't have to do that."

  "I insist. I love to have the chance to cook for someone."

  "Well. Okay," I said. As if I needed to be enticed.

  I was curious to see her place. Her life still seemed mysteriously full of unrevealed secrets. And I felt like, with the play and everything, she could piece together a lot about me, and that seemed like an unfair advantage. Especially because I'm someone who usually likes it the other way around. Kelly had managed to get around that. Unusual for an actress. They tend to blurt out everything that's bothering them. Maybe, I hoped, maybe tonight she'd be ready to blurt.

  Kelly lived in the East Village a few blocks from where my sister used to live. It was just a coincidence, but it seemed like fate. I rarely went to that neighborhood, avoided going near her apartment. My last memories were too painful. Loading Diana's bed and dresser onto the Salvation Army truck. Taking her cat to a friend's apartment. Returning her books to the library. Closing her bank account.

  As I walked down the familiar streets, I kept looking for her face in the crowd. My heart beat faster and I felt a twisting feeling in my stomach. Here was the hardware store where I'd helped her pick out a fan. Her favorite shop to buy used CDs. Veselka's, the Ukrainian coffee shop we used to go to for blintzes. We loved going there and ogling Max, one of the cooks, who didn't speak any English but had this beautiful surfer-boy blond hair.

  I purposefully avoided going by her building. As if I would find her there sitting on the stoop. It was odd enough that I was back in the neighborhood visiting the actress who would be playing her.

  Kelly lived in a walk-up over a greasy Chinese takeout. I suppose there's a certain glamour to grunge. It wasn't like I lived in a palace myself. But I was pretty disappointed to see how dreary it was. I wanted something better for her. Of course, I told myself even then, eventually this apartment would just become a colorful detail in the story of her rise to fame and glory. I did read in People recently that she bought a house with a swimming pool in the Hollywood Hills.

  She buzzed me in, and I walked up the creaky wooden steps. These buildings always had a certain smell to them. I don't know from what. Rusted pipes? Rat droppings? Sauerkraut? All of the above? There was a gigantic schmushed dead waterbug on the stairway.

  On the second-floor landing, I passed a very pale man with a shaved head and a bulging belly that made him look about seven months pregnant. He just stood in the doorway to his apartment watching me. Large black dogs behind him barked like crazy.

  Finally I reached her floor. She had her door propped open for me and I went on in. She was at a small stove stirring something in a pot and the apartment smelled cozy with tomato sauce.

  "Come in! Dinner is almost ready."

  Needless to say, she wasn't famous then, and she was in this crummy apartment, but I already felt totally flattered that she was cooking for me. As if someone famous was cooking for me, and why me, a total nobody. But the room, I saw as I came in, was depressing. She had a small studio somewhat like mine. But she'd done nothing to decorate it. There was nothing on the walls, no curtains. Just lots of books stacked in piles and on some shelves. It was as if she was camping out. Like she knew she wouldn't be there for long, so why bother. A loft bed was built into the dark end of the apartment, and a small round table and two chairs were by the two gated windows that looked out the back of the building.

  "I hate this apartment," she said. "But it's cheap, and it's all mine. I don't think I could bear to live with someone else."

  "Well, hopefully you won't have to live here for long."

  "That's right. We'll get such great reviews from Til Death Do Us Part, it'll move to Broadway and the rest will be history."

  "Yeah, well, I'll be happy if we get the reviewers to show up at all."

  "They say it's better to get bad reviews than no reviews," she said.

  That was a sentiment I couldn't really embrace.

  "But you won't get a bad review," she added.

  "Certainly you won't get a lousy review—that's unimaginable."

  "Thank you, that's very sweet of you. So listen. I was hoping we could run the lines first because after I eat and have some wine I won't be able to concentrate. So if you're not hungry—"

  "That's fine."

  "Good. I'm going to stand, but if you want to sit here at the table, or stand, it's up to you."

  I sat at the table and got out my script. "Where do you want to start?"

  "I thought we'd just begin with the beginning."

  "Whatever you want. This is for you."

  So we started.

  It was odd, reading my own lines out loud. I'd heard them a thousand times over in my head when I was writing, but I'd never spoken them out loud.

  Julia: "So how do you like your new apartment?"

  Melanie: "It's small. No view. The ceiling is low. It never gets a drop of sun. And I've already stepped on two cockroaches. It's the epitome of Hell's Kitchen—"

  Julia: "Glamour!"

  Melanie: "I was going to say grunge. I never thought I'd feel lucky to live in a place with bars on the windows."

  I put down my script. "This is weird. To be saying these lines. I feel so awkward."

  I was frustrating myself, because I was saying them very stiffly, and it made my own play sound stiff.

  "Don't worry about it," she reassured me. "We don't need to get the meaning, just run the lines."

  "I know, but when you say the lines they have meaning and when I say them they sound so awkward! You make it seem so effortless."

  "You want to run them again?" she asked.

  "Do you want to?"

  "No, I just get the feeling you want to."

  I laughed. "That would
be silly!"

  "Maybe it would feel good for you, to say them."

  "It's very strange. When I write it, I hear it exactly how I want it to sound. And here I'm trying to say it out loud. And I can't make it sound the way I want to."

  "You're afraid of the words."

  "The feelings behind the words."

  "But it was your feelings that came up with the words."

  "But I can't say them out loud."

  "Well, it's true," she said. "A confrontation that's totally imagined is different from confronting someone in real life."

  "But this isn't real life. I can't even pretend to confront."

  "Try again."

  We started from the beginning. I was better the second time. As we continued on, I managed to loosen up.

  Julia: "You really have to develop a thicker skin, Melanie, or people are just going to take advantage of you."

  Melanie: "I know."

  Julia: "And you have to think positively if you want to get anywhere in this world."

  Melanie: "You’re right. I know. Theoretically."

  This is the scene when Julia goes to the window, slides open the gate, raises the window and screams out. Kelly put down her script, went to her window, slid the gate open and raised the window. As she did, she continued with her lines. She seemed to know them all perfectly.

  Julia: "Now I want you to repeat after me."

  Kelly put her head out the window and screamed.

  Julia: "I am ambitious!"

  Melanie: "No."

  Julia: "Say it! Go ahead."

  She motioned to the window.

  Melanie: "This is idiotic."

  Julia: (yelling) "I am ambitious!"

  Kelly looked at me expectantly. I walked to the window.

  Melanie: "I am ambitious." I said with no spirit.

  Julia: (yelling) "And I deserve to succeed!"

  Melanie: "Do I have to?"

  Julia: (yelling) "I deserve to succeed!"

  Melanie: "I deserve to succeed. I suppose."

  Kelly broke from the script. "Let's do it again."

  "But you know the lines."